“Tell me, tell me what it is...”
“But Monsieur…a balloon…which travels at the will of the two men who were in the nacelle.”
The king did not understand at all. He opened his eyes wide and asked, again: “It was the two men who were underneath…who were directing it?”
“Undoubtedly, Monsieur. They’re the ones who built it. A long time ago now…at least two years.8 There are bigger ones. Many have been made since. And there are airplanes...”
The king knew enough. He knew that he could not understand. He could not ask that man—for he could see in daylight his stupid, coarse and unenlightened face—by what succession of ages and events humans had succeeded in directing the thing that hung in the air and moved there freely...
He became calm again. He told himself that he would give himself time to understand, and would no longer be frightened by anything, and would be ready for anything, even to see the valet in front of him suddenly dissolve into the atmosphere...
“Is Monsieur not hungry?” the bellboy asked. “Would Monsieur like a cup of tea?”
“Yes,” the king replied.
The bellboy went to a shiny little wooden box attached to the wall, which had two steel handles, to which two items of apparatus were attached, each made of a wooden stem surmounted by a round flat head. He unhooked one of the stems, but the box to his lips and said; “Hello?” He waited for a moment, and then added: “A cup of tea to room fifty.”
“Have you put me to sleep next to the kitchens?” the king asked, frowning.
“Monsieur?”
“Is this room next to the kitchens?” the king repeated.
“But Monsieur,” said the confused bellboy, “the kitchens are in the basement, two feet underground, at least fifteen meters in distance and depths from the room where Monsieur has slept.”
“Why, in that case, did you approach the wall to make yourself heard there, as if they were on the other side?”
“But Monsieur, I communicated with the kitchens by means of the apparatus.” Slightly fearful, the bellboy added: “Has Monsieur never seen a telephone?”
“I’ve told you that I’ve come from far away,” said the king, striving to remain impassive
At that moment, someone knocked on the door. The valet opened it. A chambermaid brought in the king’s breakfast.
“Does Monsieur need anything else?” asked the valet.
“No.”
The valet and the maid withdrew.
The king advanced toward the little box, but he did not dare to touch it, because he did not know how one made use of it, and what might be inside, behind and around it…
He was full of trouble, and pleasure.
He ate, got dressed, and went down into the lobby of the hotel.
There was a great movement of people, travelers and valets, in a vast gallery with brightly-colored walls at which the stairways and corridors ended. People were going out into the street or coming into the hotel, going up and down the stairs, busy and in haste; other, calmer, were moving back and forth, chatting; others still were sitting in armchairs, reading or smoking. He recognized among the travelers a group of three people he had seen in the carriage that he had boarded in Traese and had made the journey with him. He sat down some distance away.
At one moment, a young servant clad in a tight red waistcoat with golden buttons, with black leather gaiters, coifed with a round cap as red as the waistcoat, with a gilded chinstrap, received a piece of blue paper from a dignified man sitting behind a counter and brought it to the group near to whom the king had sat down. There were two men and a woman. One of the men took the piece of paper and said: “Here’s news from Traese!” The king heard.
The man opened the piece of paper, unfolded it and said again, with a deep happy sigh. “God be praised! Our daughter gave birth this morning to a healthy boy!”
“Praise God!” said the other two.
The king, amazed, wondered whether he had misunderstood, but the exact phrase was still running in his ears.
Go on! These travelers had, like him, and in his sight, spent two days coming from Traese without stopping, or very nearly, behind the fulgurant machine, and now they were informed this morning of something that had happened in Traese that same morning? By what extraordinary route had the messenger…or the message…come? What must its speed have been if it covered in a few hours what had taken the king, bewildered by the inconceivable velocity, two days?
He was on the point of going to the travelers to question them, but he thought, recalling the bellboy’s alarm the previous evening, of the emotion he might cause by asking a question about a matter entirely natural to those people, only insoluble for a man arriving in the world after an interval of six centuries.
He got up and went out into the street. A beautiful ray of sunlight enveloped him entirely as soon as he crossed the threshold. He paused momentarily in the lovely gilded caress, and then set forth, at random, straight ahead.
At first he was only struck by the inextricable swarm of people and things on the roads. Vehicles of every form, men of the people carrying burdens, shouting at each other in loud voices; other enormous vehicles filled with passengers, moving without horses, powered by an invisible mechanism, passing by with a noise that made the ground shake, making the ground shiver under their wheels, filling the ears with a diabolical racket, absorbing all other sounds; ambulant vendors pushing barrows in front of them full of vegetables and fruits, shouting, proclaiming the excellence of their merchandise, very similar to Galadian market gardeners.
He succeeded, not without a certain jostling here and there, in reaching a wider road, just as inextricably pullulating. He wondered vaguely what could be occupying so many people in such a hurry, but, to tell the truth, he was not wondering anything very precisely, gazing with all his attention.
He perceived, a few paces away, a small light wrought iron balustrade surrounding three quarters of an opening in the ground, into which a stairway plunged. A crowd was plunging into the opening and going down the stairs, which he followed curiously and which led him into a strange and picturesque corridor illuminated by a hundred little lamps fairly similar to the one in his room, which the white porcelain titles of the vaults reflected innumerably. At the two extremities of the corridor in which where the crowd accumulated two mouths opened, full of darkness, as if swallowing four slender lines of steel that ran along the ground beneath the two sidewalks.
He was unable to see any more because, in a shower of pink-tinted sparks and with a frightful din, a long file of carriages, similar but less ornamented that those that had brought him from Traese to Paris, passed in front of him, causing him to leap backwards.
In front of these, however, there was no monstrous directive machine, merely a young man dressed in blue sitting placidly in front of a thick iron box, his fingers placed on two or three short copper levers, who appeared to be the conductor and animator of the noisy cortege.
The crowd precipitated forward, jostling one another, into the carriages, and as the king had noticed that the majority were dressed in such a way that one could not imagine that they were departing for a long voyage, he allowed himself to be pushed and guided by the jostling and his present destiny into one of the carriages, and, fearlessly this time, felt himself dragged toward the somber mouth, which swallowed him up with all the travelers and all the carriages.
He was in a long and spacious corridor illuminated here and there by little lamps. Wires ran and snaked along the walls. After a short interval the cortege stopped. Some people got out, others came aboard. The king waited. Only a few minutes had gone by, and several short stops had take place, when, at a new stop, a man dressed in a uniform shouted in an imperious voice: “All change!”
Everyone got out, the king doing what everyone else did. He went up a staircase and found himself in daylight. He was at the gates of a wood: a very neatly divided wood, trimmed and cut through by wide avenues, furrowed with placid s
trollers, children playing and shiny carriages. A wood or a park? It was hard to imagine that deer and wolves could be residing in those well-ordered thickets, but the absence of flowers and the extent was hardly that of a park.
The king went along one of the beautiful avenues, breathing delightedly, quite satisfied by no longer being underground. Even though he had been very astonished and amused to go at his ease, comfortably seated and in bright light through a part of the world reserved in Galade for moles and roots.
He had turned into a quiet path where he intended to put a little method into his reflections when he came upon another lateral path where men and women were running, their faces ardent, toward a goal that he could not see, toward which he ran with the crowd as gaily as anything in the world, wondering what extraordinary event awaited him.
The whole movement stopped at the edge of an immense lawn, in the middle of which a black group surrounded a kind of large white palpitation spread on the ground, which could only be glimpsed through the gestures of the group.
He was about to advance when a prodigious spectacle nailed him to the spot.
The black group had abruptly divided and dispersed, drawing away from the while palpitation, and that, which was a vast and svelte canvas bird, in the middle of which two men were sitting, had risen from the ground, and without beating its wings, simply, nobly, without jerks, as if breathed in by the sunlight, climbed into the air toward the blue sky, went forward, turned right, the left, then around, and then descended again toward the ground, and climbed back toward the sky with the most perfect and surest ease, in the midst of the applause of the group and the enthusiastic clamors of the crowd.
It was not the enormous and monstrous birds that the king had seen that morning passing over the roofs; it was a frail and charming construction, which a gust of wind, one might have thought, would have knocked over, torn apart and destroyed, but which, gracefully, went at the caprice of its conductors, purring softly in the bright light.
After a time, it came to settle slowly on to the lawn, and one of the travelers descended, so that another could replace him. It rose up again then, recommenced its supple flights, came directly over the crowd, whose heads were titled back and eyes bulging with pleasure, and as a thousand voices acclaimed the wingers voyagers, one of them saluted the crowd with a casual hand gesture, as calm and smiling, suspended and moving freely in the void, as if he had been standing on his feet on the customary ground.9
When the king was sated with that vision, and as the bird has descended near a hangar, the doors of which were opened for it, he resumed his stroll, and soon found himself mingling with the crowd again, in the place where he had returned to the sunlight emerging from his subterranean voyage.
He was hungry. He ate lunch. Then, once again, setting forth at hazard and spotting one of the enormous vehicles he had seen that morning going past with hellish din, half full of passengers, he went into it and allowed it to carry him away.
Sitting facing him in the large vehicle was a young man with clear and regular features, whose gaze seduced him. That gaze, as if indifferent to the surrounding forms, seemed to be contemplating, fixed upon and caressing a delightful spectacle. And as the king, having turned round, had seen that the vehicle was moving too quickly for the young man to be looking at anything through the windows with such fixity, he was convinced that it was a happy thought from which the latter was extracting al the illumination of his gaze. The serenity of the visage affirmed the nobility of the reverie.
The king envied the young man. How many subjects of meditation might be offered to a thinking being in a world in which he, having only been in it for a few hours, had seen so many astonishing things: the obedient light, distance annihilated, the winged men, the earth penetrated…! Howe many other domains, inaccessible or even unknown in Galade, were doubtless wide open realms to men here, freely accessible, with their edifices, their secrets and their florescences…?
The vehicle had stopped, and the young man with the beautiful gaze had stood up and was preparing to get off. The king imitated him and followed him. They were a short distance from a tall monument of stone, before which were assembled numerous young men, chatting to one another tranquilly; others were climbing the steps of the monument and going in. His traveling companion joined one of the groups.
The clock of a nearby church having gravely sounded several strokes, the crowd headed toward the monument, and the king mingled with them
After having traversed a vast antechamber of stone and marble, and a rather dark corridor, in which several small doors opened, the king suddenly found himself in an immense hall, filled with terraces covered with spectators, facing a platform on which there was nothing but a table, a chair and a large screen of white canvas.
The king compared that hall with his stage in the festival hall of the palace of Gyzir, and the stage where the svelte ballerinas danced. What ballet, or what comedy, was going to be performed before these spectators?
A man appeared on the platform. Complete silence fell in the audience, which had been abuzz a moment before.
“Messieurs,” said the man, standing up, rather small on the large empty stage, to the silent audience. “Before speaking to you about the movement of atoms, I can offer you the cinematographic vision of an ordinary drop of water. No one is now unaware of the quantity of living and singularly constituted beings that a drop of water can contain; the spectacle of that phenomenon, magnified and animated, will be a pleasant preamble to what I want to demonstrate to you.”10
He finished. The hall was suddenly plunged into darkness. No sound was audible, except for a kind of little sizzling, which soon became a luminous beam, departing from an apparatus placed on the upper steps, opposite the stage, and ending, enlarged, on the canvas screen. On that screen a circle was designed, in which a host of terrifying forms were swarming.
“This is the drop of water,” the little man repeated, whose hand alone was visible in the jet of light. “Soon,” he added, “I hope to be able to isolate on that screen one of the infinitesimal members of that populace, and show you, as visible as at present, its modes of irritability and nutrition.”
The bewildered king looked at the moving image. Stupefied by the forms that were agitating there, he was even more so by the thought that, if he had understood correctly, he was no looking at a pond, a puddle or a sea but a drop of water. A drop of water? Water that he was accustomed to drink? What! Was he swallowing at the same time those monsters with complicated tentacles, arms without bodies, prolonged by a kind of feather, the extremity of which strand formed a living mouth, aspiring and sucking…? The most insane imagination could not have created anything approaching it...
Everything vanished. The light surged forth again. The screen was as blank and clear as it had been before. No trace of the movement of the beasts in their liquid abode. What was all this phantasmagoria? Had the streak of light transported it, deposited it on the canvas and then returned, once again to enclose that fantastic world in its fluid rays within the little sizzling apparatus?
But darkness fell again within the hall, and a sphere appeared on the screen, the surface of which was a strange mass of blisters and ravines, which one might have thought a cluster of pustule.
“A part of the Moon,” said the orator, “the Mare Tenebrosum, surrounded by mountains and valleys, and”—another image followed that one on the screen—“the planet Mars, with what are believed to be its canals and its pains.”
The images dissipated. Light filled the hall again and the crowd. The orator, imperturbable, his back turned to the inert screen, continued:
“The drop of water, the heavenly body, the star…what a universe! The gilded dot shining in the sky, a world a hundred thousand times larger than the entire earth...the imperceptible drop of water, an empire in which an innumerable population lives!
“The drop of water and the star, Messieurs! What infinities! But the time is already far behind us when humans lear
ned, for the first time, about their immensities!
“At present, it is before the atom, the ultimate constituent of all forms, that humans are directing their vanquishing apparatus. We are penetrating the ultimate secret of matter, grasping it in its ultimate mode.
“The pavement on which our feet tread, the air that our throats breathe in, plants, animals and humans, everything has delivered its ultimate basis, behind which nothing any longer lies but the immaterial unknown.
“The infinitely small is a positive center around which negative corpuscles gravitate. Every molecule of a substance palpitates and lives in the fashion of the stars, moves like the Earth in space, like the entire solar system around the sun, in the infinite...”
Here the orator employed terms absolutely incomprehensible to the poor king: electric bulb, cathode, electrode, ion, electron...
So many extravagant thoughts were colliding in his head that he was no longer listening, no longer able to hear, would have liked to get out of the hall in order to breathe in a good mouthful of air and walk, with long strides.
The orator finally stopped speaking; the audience stood up; the hall emptied. The king found himself outside again.
Some of the young people dispersed, others, remaining together in two or threes, turned the corner of the street in which the monument was situated, and followed a broad road that slanted slightly upwards.
The king walked behind them. The road was quite different from the pullulating streets through which he had passed that morning on emerging from the hotel. The majority of faces he passed were not men of the people weighed down by burdens, but young men with keen and enthusiastic gazes, and joyful women. At the end of the wide street was a garden whose gates were open. He went in and was charmed by the grace of the flowers, the majesty of the pathways, and the healthy joy that rose into the air, of running children, attentive mothers, and numerous seated or slowly strolling groups of young men and women with faces animated by the pleasure of conversation.
The Ark Page 9
