Certainly, neither party was acting solely in the confidence of their own strength. To attack the government of the metropolis they had to believe themselves supported. The Cubans had that of the United States. Having reached Manila, I commenced enquiries. I immediately had reason to think that the political megalomania of Japan was not abstaining from encouragements in favor of the insurgents.
I convinced myself, however, that that influence was not the principal one; for if Japan is thinking of conquering the large islands of the Indian and Pacific Ocean and creating an insular power analogous to that of Britain, its diplomats are not unaware of the difficulties of such a task. To despoil Spain and Holland of their Malaysian possessions today would not be easy. Europe, whose federative union is being sealed by recent events, would rise up against young Asia. In brief, it was important to discover another efficient cause. I shall spare you the summary of the steps I took.
Several of the senior functionaries in Manila entertained me, on disembarkation, with a fable much in credit among the people. For ten years, European aeronauts had been arriving from the sky in the interior cities of the colony. On many occasions, these travelers would enter into communication with our indigenes, and some colonists. They would exchange watches, tools and gold ingots for several kinds of seeds, pigs and sheep. I was shown one of these ingots: a perfect little rectangle bearing the stamp of a heraldic escutcheon whose origin is certainly Byzantine.
On traveling along the coasts in the Novio, the Malay pilot drew my attention to a distant projection of the central plateau in the insular mountains of Mindoro, and to a kind of lattice-work column thereon, quite similar to your Eiffel Tower, which, constructed by those mysterious explorers, served as a landing-stage for their aerial ships. Others were pointed out to me, perceptible from the coast, on the peaks of the central massif, on the large island of Mindanao, and on the isles of Iebu and Negros. All those stations are situated at the top of summits rendered inaccessible by the mountainous nature of the terrain, the impenetrability of virgin forests, the pestilence of marshes and our general ignorance of the topography of the region. You know that in Borneo, the Celebes and the Philippines, Europeans occupy a few coastal provinces; they affirm a nominal protectorate over the populations of the almost-unknown interior.
Now, Borneo is two hundred square kilometers larger than France, and the other groups of islands, including Luzon, Mindanao, Sumatra and Java, are collectively immense. My compatriots in Manila suppose that in the center of these little continents, energetic Occidentals might have established a secret civilization attested by the passage of these aerial ships, which have the form of large birds with vast wings, and carrying a sail analogous to that of our sloops.
A few prisoners of the insurrection were interrogated in my presence. They were asked about the provenance of printed papers found on them. Those documents established their allegiance to the flags of revolt. They seemed to be formulae, in Spanish, of a revolutionary diploma. Something that struck me was that the exergue represented a crowing cock perched on the helmet of a lector carrying his ax. I remembered having seen identical emblems in Paris on French stamps produced in 1849. Dare I believe, my dear friend, that you are beginning to excuse the length of this missive? Does that interest you, specious French anarchist? It is your brethren who are exciting our Malaysian subjects against the old Castilian monarchy.
I’ll go on, because this will please you. For ten years all the governors of the Philippines have been addressing occasional reports to Madrid on these indications. They develop therein the logical hypothesis of a center of French “aerial pirates” developing on the inaccessible high plateaux of the large islands. The ineffable assurance of our ministers criticized these reports. Their authors were told to cease making jokes scarcely compatible with the character of their functions. One obstinate individual was subjected to disgrace; his successors maintained a silence favorable to their future glory.
One, however, wanted, without metropolitan authorization, to clarify the matter. A detachment of marines sent to the island of Mindanao attempted to reach one of those tall lattice-work columns. It was necessary to fray a path through the jungle, carve out a path, blow up rocks, shoot tigers and crocodiles. Of the entire expedition, only three men returned. They related that when they had almost reached the top of the mountain, terrible explosions had annihilated the detachment. The tower was defended by a ring of torpedoes hidden underground.
As you can imagine, the governor did not breathe a word about his audacity. He reported that the marines had been massacred in an ambush by natives, and then sent the three survivors to an unhealthy post where fever and death sealed their lips.
In spite of the objections of the central government, I resolved to pursue the investigation. My first telegraphic report only mentioned the Japanese intrigues. But it happened that a young Batavian insurgent betrayed the adventure in order to avoid the death penalty passed on him by the court martial. The arms, munitions and money came from Borneo; he confessed that. Malays skillful in slipping through the jungle, knowing secret paths, reached the base of the columns, where one of these pirates gave them the necessary instructions and gold. Junks then went forth by night in quest on some islet out at sea, of crates deposited there by the aerial ships shortly before the time prescribed in the letters.
Pushed to the limit, even subjected to a kind of instruction that our ancestors the Inquisitors excelled in rendering useful, my Batavian ended up confessing the existence of a little harbor in a creek on the island of Borneo, hidden by reefs. Very narrow, the passage was never attempted by the captains of European vessels, uninspired, in addition, by the abrupt and deserted appearance of the cliff. From a distance, all that was perceptible was lines of breakers and a sea whitened by the surf of submerged rocks.
To persuade the Batavian to identify an indigenous pilot capable of guiding the Novio through the pass, it was necessary to employ all the genres of coercion. You, a Frenchman and a humanitarian, attach an excessive value to human existence. Personally, I think that the interests of an entire nation are worth many lives of imbeciles. My Batavian, a kind of merchant who poisons the indigenes by means of ignoble alcohols and sells them the caresses of syphilitic girls, was of scant interest to us. He had joined the revolt after the police had shut down his dive after a murder committed before his eyes. I extracted profitable information from that vile matter, by forceful means.
I learned that on two or three occasions, the junks of the insurrection had received, in the little harbor of a city hidden in the bosom of the cliffs, their cargoes of rifles and several artillery pieces. It was necessary for me to be taken there. Without losing any time, a pilot was discovered, arrested and skillfully interviewed in prison by a traitor in our service, who asked for a plan of the pass, wanting, he said, in order to fulfill in the detainee’s place the dangerous insurrectional duty during his incarceration. He, he assured him, would be released that evening for lack of evidence. He was.
The Novio put to sea immediately, under the double plume of its funnels.
With great difficulty, we found the pass on the south-east coast of Borneo. Several times in the night, we saw immense shadows soaring above our heads, at incalculable heights, while the beam of an electric searchlight suddenly illuminated the deck of the ship, the furious white water, the sounders’ launch prudently going ahead of our prow through the reefs. I dreaded the fall of a torpedo that might have smashed the ship to smithereens. The Novio’s captain shared that apprehension.
I can assure you that we lived twenty-four joyless hours in that sinister region. Several times, a hail of grapeshot landed on the deck, as if the aerials wanted to alert us to the precision of their aim and were thus inviting us to retreat—but I am a descendant of conquistadors. That bravado simply enraged me, and I threw a negro stoker who manifested too much fear into the sea. He was fished out again.
The day before yesterday, at dawn, we finally crossed the last line of b
reakers and penetrated into more placid waters.
Immediately, above the height of the cliffs and between the tips of the summits, five aerostats appeared. We could observe them at our ease because they were circling slowly, at a good height, around a center that was the zenith of the Novio.
Two wings of between a hundred and fifty and two hundred meters sustained each of them in the air. They seemed to be thick. We thought that they formed two flat envelopes containing gas, that they assisted them, most of all, to glide. It was rare that any movement agitated them. At the extremities of an axle subjacent to the ship, two enormous helices, one at the prow and the other at the stern, were spinning horizontally in the air. Between them was a deck where mechanics and observers were moving. We followed their movements. They were photographing the Novio. Born of the gyration of the helices, a wind was making their clothing flap. They were fastened to the rails of the gangway.
Three meters above them the framework of an oblong terrace pierced by a trap-door received a minuscule stairway. The terrace seemed no thicker than a solid plank. It supported a mast and the sail of a sloop, serving to steer the ship. The immense thick wings were attached and articulated to its flanks. We succeeded in distinguishing light, subtle machines on the oval of that terrace, the wheel of a dynamo, a tent, and a crew consisting of eight men at the most. We also saw that the mast was maintained by numerous complex stays anchored to the edges. The flight of the ship differs little from that of buzzards, eagle-owls and other birds of prey.
All day long the squadron hovered, describing circles around our center. At certain moments we perceived the noise of the helices, a formidable throbbing, if one of the vessels tilted toward us. The crewmen presented the sail to the air current, steering by that means. They seemed to be admirable topmen.
In the middle of their circles, we were like a poor grouse watching a flock of voracious hawks. It was necessary for me to rally the courage of our men. Incessantly in the shadow of the ships gliding over our decks, we nevertheless headed into the creek. It commences a kind of shallow fjord, hollowed out between two sheer mountainous rock faces bristling with brushwood and firs.
Toward midday we perceived, after having doubled a little interior cape, the whiteness of the city named Amphitrite.
The semaphore signaled to us to stop, announcing a boat and a message. We obeyed.
The city is nicely installed in stages on the flank of the mountain. The low quays do not seem to be designed to welcome large ships. That is explicable, aerostats replacing the navy. Electric beacons border a boulevard. The low houses have stone arcades, under which a crowd circulates, in costumes in the French style of the seventeenth century. Its members examined us from a distance, without surpassing a kind of ideal limit, even though no police agent appeared to me to be holding them back. We saw several large automobile carriages. A delightful carillon preceded the chiming of the hour. The rising sun revealed the gilded or silvered facades of the houses, and porticoes in blue faience, under which jets of water danced, springing from fountains. Trees and vegetation screened much of the view.
A launch emerged from a dock. It advanced, moved by a covert but powerful force; its astonishing rapidity surprised us. On the prow, the figure of a chimera cleaved the water with its breast of green faience scales. We scarcely had time to hoist the Spanish flag. A large shadow veiled the sky above our heads, and we saw an aerostat descending between the walls of the fjord, brushing them with its enormous wings. From the inferior deck, hanging over us on the end of a chain, was a monstrous torpedo. The copper tip of its detonator was gleaming.
It was under that sword of Damocles that I received the magistrate of the launch at the gangway port.
He climbed the stairway briskly in spite of the seventy or eighty winters that had blanched his short trimmed side-whiskers. A small, thin old man with shaven lips, he saluted me with his musketeer’s hat rather impertinently, allowing a momentary glimpse of the snowy toupet surmounting silky hair swept back from the temples before covering himself again. Behind him, five men surged forth in royal blue uniforms, hoisting several ensigns, one of which was a golden cockerel with extended wings, another the Byzantine arms already inscribed on the rectangular ingots of their money, and a third two hands, one gold and one iron, interlaced between two palms. They terminated scarlet poles.
I considered my minuscule interlocutor, his ample Louis XIV coat in gray silk, is broad culottes disappearing under his white-dotted waistcoat, his little legs impatient in tawny morocco gaiters buttoned up to the knees.
“Monsieur,” he said to me in French, “You are doubtless unaware of whose abode you are in. For fifty-three years no European has been admitted to this bay. For you, the torpedoes that reinforce the line of breakers were neutralized. The time seemed to have come to make known to someone the dispositions of our colony. This little book that I am giving you will instruct you regarding the origins of our work.
“We are Frenchmen who expatriated ourselves to flee a regime of iniquity and tyranny. Disciples of Fourier and Saint-Simon, and friends of Proudhon and Cabet—I hope those illustrious names are not unknown to you—we wanted to realize here an existence in conformity with sound phalansterian logic. What Cabet attempted in Icaria, we tried out in this fertile country. Monsieur, the mild Virgil has said: ‘O fortunatos nimium sua si bona norint Agrocolas!’ We have therefore resolved to know our happiness.
“Long enough and too long we have been able to experiment the sic vos non vobis of the swan of Mantua, and we murmur with the Latin: quandoque, o rus, te aspiciam! Here, we finally enjoy nature. Be welcome to this land of fraternity, Monsieur. You will undoubtedly soon be able to enumerate its felicities to your compatriots, when you have returned to the lares of your ancestors. And perhaps you will say then, like the eloquent Chrysostom, Mataïotes, mataïotélôn, kaï, panta mataïotes; vanity of vanities, all is vanity, when veritable amour does not preside over the destinies of great peoples.
“In this envelope, Monsieur, you will read the conditions that our government imposes in case the desire to visit our cities and fields solicits you. As to the diplomatic affair of which you will stir up the grave problem, it is only in our capital, before the council of the Dictatorship, that you will be able to obtain a solution. For myself, Monsieur, I am only a humble servant of our people, the seneschal of this province. I am glad, Monsieur, to have been the first of our nation to salute here the envoy of a noble land.”
I tried to reply, but the dried-up little old man turned his back on me and descended precipitately into the launch with his flag-bearers. As rapidly as it had come, the boat departed.
I read the opuscule and the papers handed to me by the seneschal of Amphitrite. They confirmed the hypothesis of the government of Manila. A colony of Saint-Simonians and Fourierists, disembarked here in 1843, had prospered clandestinely on the high summits of the interior where it was initially necessary to take refuge as a precaution against the ferocity of the autochthonous populations. Gradually, the territory had extended, after a long and hard period of wars. Now it occupies, in the interior of Borneo, an area a third as large as France. In spite of the singular conditions imposed on travelers by the official communiqué of the Council of Dictatorship, I shall penetrate into the country. My diplomatic mission, in any case, constrains me to do so.
I thought, my dear friend, that I might obtain forgiveness, in writing to you these curious reasons, for the rudeness of my abrupt departure from Saint-Sébastien. Will you excuse me?
I am your very devoted...
LETTER II
Minerve, September 1896
Palais des Voyageurs.
My dear friend,
I expected that news of my incursion into this land would have reached you by way of the newspapers. Official correspondence has reached me from Manila that indicates the designs of my government. They oppose the revelation of the discovery. As you know, the interests of the State coming before all else, it might be that so
me misfortune deprives our contemporaries of my presence when I return to friendly territory. The example of a community that has prospered thanks to the entire abolition of the family, capital, competition, amour—and liberty—might be fatal to the prestige of the Powers of Europe.
Do you recall that evening in Biarritz when we imagined the future tyranny of Marxism imposing on millions of agriculturalists, scientists and artists laws only to the liking of the minority of workers? The most rigorous of our predictions have been surpassed here. Now, as the lure of liberty sanctifies the entire European system, I’ll wager that the monarchs and demagogues will make alliance to put a lid of silence on my story, perhaps even before I have succeeded in publishing it. This, I am making you the depositary of my secret, in order that its immediate divulgence, even though partial, might render the measures of force futile.
This explains to you the sending of several manuscripts. I beg you to forgive me.
I would certainly have liked to use, for that, the means of correspondence that satisfies the people of this nation, but, taking into consideration all the trouble you would have in finding a phonograph in Paris, the sums it would be necessary to disburse to acquire one, and the probable defects of the apparatus, I would rather make use of ink.
In the Palais des Voyageurs in this city of Minerve, every room possesses its phonograph, its electric lamps and its taps of hot and cold water. Several iron plaques embedded in the wall redden if one turns a switch that dispenses powerful electric currents. The heat expands in proportion to the number of turns of the switch, and a thermometer indicates the sum of the degrees obtained by that manipulation.
The room in which I am writing to you has walls of orange faience, a floor of opaque glass, a stucco cupola, and an arched window overlooking the perspectives of the great curve of the streets. I can see the city, and its houses: blue, crimson, yellow, gilded, silvered or the color of iron. It’s raining. The water from the sky is making the enamel of the facades glisten. Trams are gliding vertiginously under the light footbridges that pedestrians hooded in gray rubber are crossing. No sounds of hammering, no songs and no hoofbeats trouble the uniform murmur of pedestrians shod in muffled soles, who are borne along by moving sidewalks rolling alongside the ground floors.
The Humanisphere Page 27
