The Givreuse Enigma

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  The young woman never thought about death and hardly ever of the future; she lived according to her intuition, but that intuition was vast and numerous, containing hardly any fictions, no lies, and no other mysticism than that which muted the profundities of life. Honest, she did not disdain trickery when dealing with an enemy. Thus constructed, formidable and seductive, she was elevated to a superior level in any human or animal order.

  Her forefathers had left her vast lands; she considered them as an extension of her personality. Having been brought up to it since childhood, she knew how to make plantations prosper, whether of coffee, tea, sugar-cane, tobacco, saffron, camphor or cinnamon. The domain was a fatherland of perfumes, which filled the nights and days with incense. Louise de Gavres could not imagine any severance between herself and that fecund earth; her wealth was as natural to her as her sin.

  Li-Wang, with a face of stone, finished setting the table. He knew how to laugh, like a child, but in front of his mistress and strangers he never lost control of his face any more than Louise lost control of hers. The habits of mastery had been ingrained in her by ten generations; she maintained all its disciplines by means of her own self-discipline, and the individuals under her sway, Chinese, Malays and Hindus, obeyed with the precision of well-designed clocks.

  She esteemed Li-Wang for his prodigious silence, the agile sureness of his actions and his phantom footsteps. The Chinese man’s respect for his immutable mistress was seasoned with a little love and a little hatred.

  Three dogs came to lie down around the table, one as black as soot, the others as red as foxes. Their gestures revealed, to anyone who knew animals, that their primary perception of the universe arrived via their nostrils.

  The Grafina ate heartily of the bread, the butter and the honey, in the stimulating atmosphere of the coffee. All her nerves and all her senses participated in the meal. As happy as her senses of taste and smell, her sight devoured the garden and her hearing rejoiced in the delicate sounds of the hour.

  In the depths of the sky an eagle appeared, which frightened the small birds, and caused the parrots to fall silent in the palms and the fowl on the lawns. Louise, thinking about Jan, the mastiffs and the pigeons, enjoyed the trenchant flight and the soaring relaxation of the raptor.

  Then her expression darkened. “My carbine!” she ordered.

  Li-Wang’s eyes, between the narrow curtains of their lids, were as piercing as the Grafina’s. He too had seen the pigeons appear in the gap between the hills. He disappeared like a puff of smoke, and, a few seconds later, brought the long-barreled carbine.

  The eagle was soaring at 1000 meters and, gripped by terror, the pigeons flew lower. Had they been wild, they would have hidden in the grass or the bushes, but the dovecot attracted them like a magnetic pole, and they arrived almost at ground level.

  The eagle plummeted like an aerolith; the pigeons were flying frantically, and for 30 seconds their fate was undecided. Then the eagle got so close that, in the natural order of things, at least one of the fugitives would have perished. Three thrusts of the pointed wings, and it was all over! But the woman had what was needed to surpass that sovereign velocity. The large carbine was only immobilized for a second; scarcely had it thundered when the eagle fell, wings and all, its head shattered.

  “Go fetch it!” said the Grafina.

  Li-Wang brought the magnificent raptor back. Millennia of endeavor were concentrated in the immense wings; the Grafina understood fully that all perfect adaptation is genius.

  “It’s beautiful!” she said, regretfully. But it is vain to regret that which is necessary, and she went in search of the pigeons that had gone into the dovecot. They too were beautiful, agile offspring of nature and serfs selected by humans.

  Mademoiselle de Gavres detached the messages.

  Jan Cats had written, without emphasis: The dogs have killed a tiger to save Hendrik de Ridder and two white travelers. Leeuw is dead. Duyvel has a ripped abdomen. There are two more tigers. I shall remain in the Black Valley Refuge until 2 p.m.

  “Leeuw must have led the attack,” murmured the Grafina. “Two more tigers?”

  Her heart grew heavy. She loved her dogs. Then, having put back her weapon and released the pigeons, she finished her meal without haste—for everything had to be done in its own time.

  In the kennels there were six more dogs, ready to die in battle, all armed with jaws of granite and sturdy muscles. The Grafina’s stable comprised six saddle-horses and eight carriage-horses. She selected two animals with velvety chestnut coats, slaves possessed of fire and courage, always ready to make the supreme effort. When they felt their mistress’s hands on their rumps, they shivered wildly.

  “Saddle them up quickly,” said the young woman to the grooms. “Full nosebags…we’ve got a long way to go.”

  She took a change of clothing, twin carbines, a large cutlass, two dogs—not fighting dogs but expert trackers and hunters. Man or animal, any suspicious prowler would be revealed.

  Half an hour later, the horsewoman passed into the wilderness. Brush, forest, savannah and heath were as familiar to her as to the panther, the orangutan or the wild boar. She had roamed around them while still a child, in the hollows of old trees, on the rivers, in the bushes and the caves. As primitive as she was civilized, she knew how to light a fire with flints and, in every circumstance, to do what the aboriginal inhabitants of the forest did.

  Proud, generous and passionate, benevolent to the weak, she was pitiless when the necessity arose. At rest, she had as much indulgence for the tiger as for the deer, for the eagle as for the sparrow. She did not judge nature, and never thought that the immense genesis and immense destruction might be criticized, or desired any change in the cruel order of things.

  An indestructible sense of hierarchy brought the chain of being into conformity with her instinct; she had never been able to imagine that Jan Cats was not superior to Li-Wang, or Louise de Gavres superior to Jan Cats. She was a redoubtable mistress, with whom those who accepted their function could live in a profound security, but who despised rebels and expelled them from her domain. The basis of her hierarchy was not immutable, though. If Jan had shown himself to be as intelligent as his mistress, she would have recognized it; as things were, she valued and respected him as a great animal-handler.

  She would probably have shown more reluctance in admitting that a yellow man, a Malay, or even a Hindu, might ever be worth as much as the sons of men from Western Europe. She did not consider them as entirely human, but she never offended the dignity of any of them; she measured out the portion of servitude to which it was necessary for them to submit and the portion of freedom to which they had the right. When they had as much character as Jan, she liked them, and when, like Li-Wang, they mingled hatred with their attachment, she did not despise them.

  In the forest, the dogs ceased to describe ellipses. They watched the horses’ surroundings, extending through space the subtle and almost infallible net of their sense of smell.

  For centuries, a bridle-path had been maintained with picks and axes, but the frightful vegetation was ceaselessly renewed and recreated obstacles; in a matter of days, it expanded its green foliage, its menacing flowers and its sly serpentine roots. The Grafina’s agile eyes, nourished by images as well as instincts, detected the signs of peril without difficulty, by courtesy of constant vigilance.

  Nourished by humus and water, life streamed forth from every terrestrial pore: the bamboos were the grasses of giant meadows; the “traveler’s palms,” whose leaves served as tiles for poor people’s homes, extended their arches; the patriarchal banyans, the teaks, the iron-trees, the ebonies, the palaquiums,22 the rasamalas, the phantasmagoric orchids, the ferns as tall as oak-trees and the perfidious population of lianas fought with a sacred fury, an energy sharpened by hundreds of thousands of years of vegetal warfare.

  The Grafina loved to be enveloped by that force, in which every living thing exterminated another; the memories streamed thr
ough her mind, with a violence all the more intoxicating for being mingled with the gallop of horses.

  At about 9 a.m. she stopped to let the animals rest and drink. They had covered 30 kilometers, but, being creatures of fortitude and valor, they gave no evidence of tiredness. Stroking their velvet noses, she studied their fine heads, sharp little ears and red-tinted eyes affectionately.

  Panting with jealousy, the ardent dogs awaited their caress.

  The place had been a landmark for centuries. In times unknown, the forest-dwellers had accumulated variously-sized blocks of stone there, which framed a vast doorway; made with trunks of ebony and ironwood, it would have withstood the assault of 50 elephants. A spring emerged from the stones, from which the young woman, the dogs and the horses drank.

  That wild place, eaten into by the forest, overlooked a lake-shore, frightfully beautiful and vivacious: the leaves were flowers, the flowers fabulous creatures, vases of splendor and perdition, tabernacles of light, grace and death, beds of frantic amour, poisonous incense-burners whose every oscillation exhaled intoxication, sensuality or fever.

  Having sheltered the animals in the ancient cyclopean structure, Louise opened the door with ebony hinges and bolts of teak. She had often stayed here, through magical mornings and avid nights; she studied the site with the nostalgic gaze of the past, on the lookout for animals. Through them, she had known her empire and the incomparable palpitations of peril.

  The first one to emerge, baroque, derisory and dull-witted, had the rudimentary trunk of a tapir. It was a kind of rhinoceros, a tapir with a black back, shoulders and head, whose thick muscles would have been able to give battle, but which, flustered by the smallest adversary, could only preserve itself by cunning prudence. Some disturbance must have chased it from its lair; it was sniffing the ground and the water in a ridiculous manner.

  The approach of some carabaos caused it to flee through the undergrowth. In their coarse beauty, rich in warrior vitality, ready to take on a tiger and throw a panther ten yards, the carabao buffaloes advance on to a promontory.

  Dried mud coated their bellies; their heavy wild eyes blindly menaced the enemies that surged from all the fissures of the world—and yet, they stopped at the sight of a living creature more solid than themselves, for which the biggest cats would have been mere playthings. It could defy any moving creature, even an elephant. Covered with a hide more impenetrable than the shell of a tortoise, hideous and caricaturish, with its facial horn and its nasal horn, it lived in a morose security, punctuated by obtuse fits of wrath. Although there were six of them, the buffaloes gave way and the colossal brute plunged into the lake. It only stayed there briefly, crushing a few roots in its muscular jaws, and emerged heavily.

  That was the moment when the Grafina was about to leave. If her horses had been able to get under way, the rhinoceros would be negligible; although it had a rapid trot and plenty of stamina, the impetuous beast would have outrun it without difficulty. It was, however, climbing the slope toward the cyclopean enclosure; Louise no longer had time to open the door and mount a horse; it was necessary to wait and see what the monster would do.

  It did not come in; it stopped, moved by a caprice or a memory. Its myopic eyes could scarcely see in the gloom, but its sense of smell announced the presence of several creatures. Advancing its formless muzzle, gripped by impatience and anger, it poked the ironwood planks.

  The Grafina studied it, irritatedly. In its immeasurable stupidity, the brute, thinking it was threatening lives, risked its own existence. With a single gesture, it could have crushed the young woman, but that gesture was impossible—and it was she, without armor or claws, who could annihilate the immense organism with a single movement. She took aim at one of its eyes, as sure of hitting it as she was of reaching the rump of a horse with her hand—but she did not fire. She was reluctant to deliver the colossus to the hyenas, jackals and vultures.

  “Go away, beast more stupid than the serpent, the tapir or the tortoise!” she muttered. “I need to get past.”

  An absurd symbol of prideful power, eternally self-destructive, the rhinoceros snorted and uttered a ridiculous whistling sound.

  I can wait another few minutes, the Grafina said to herself.

  She did not have to wait. The brute started circling around the enclosure. Swiftly opening the door, Louise rapidly mounted the horse that had not yet carried a burden and spurred the beast away. With a noisy gallop the rhinoceros retraced its steps and started its charge, heavy and redoubtable. The Grafina and Rulf formed but a single creature, and the other horse, unladen, had an excess of energy.

  It took 30 seconds for them to reach top speed, and the young woman started to laugh: the heavy mass was defeated. Moved by an opaque obstinacy, however, it continued the vain pursuit.

  “Hup, Rulf! Hup, César!” There was an intoxication in guiding these agile machines. The Grafina laughed with pleasure; periodically, she turned her head to the colossus, which was beginning to shrink. Come on! There would be no battle.

  Moving into a basalt corridor between two black walls, the young woman began to slow down. At a turning, she shivered: a tree had fallen there, its roots on the path, blocking the exit.

  If the monster had not given up, the adventure would be turned around. Louise’s thoughts combined with quick instinct; already, she had turned round and was making Rulf and César retrace their steps.

  The brute had not given up! It was running on at its granite trot; it must have reached the entrance at the same time as the Grafina. Because it was pitching like a boat, its head oscillating, even Louise de Gavres might miss its vulnerable spots. It would have been necessary to dismount from the horse, and hoist herself up on a rock—but the horsewoman did not want to sacrifice her horses. Concentrating hard, silent and determined, she continued traveling at top speed—the greatest speed, perhaps, of which humans had made use for 1000 years. No Numidian cavalier, no desert Arab, had ever raced more rapidly. Three seconds! Gain three seconds!

  When the Jufvrouw was no more than ten strides from the exit, the rhinoceros arrived…

  The Grafina shouted: “Up! Up! Honden! Taïaut!”23

  The dogs launched themselves forward. Lithe and cunning, they feigned an attack on the colossus—then, moved by a subtle instinct, barking loudly, they stood aside while the other swerved.

  That was the moment when the Grafina reached the exit. Taking a strong hold of the bit, and squeezing with her knees, she turned sharply, putting her soul into the muscles of the horse.

  The immense muzzle, and the horns that could pierce the belly of an elephant, were very close…one single leap would make the difference between mortal impact and deliverance…

  The monster charged, but Rulf and César had bounded away—and again the horsewoman headed into open space.

  Luckily, there was a clearing here; the horses and dogs made light of the pursuit, and the centauress turned, saw the wrong-footed rhinoceros, whose enormous mass was beginning to decrease, whirling around.

  The threat had been averted. Louise de Gavres tasted the rude joy of peril braved; her voice stroked the dogs and horses alike.

  The Grafina soon recovered the millennia-old track. Rulf and César bounded over the equivocal but supple ground. The air was beginning to vibrate as insects multiplied their unwelcome and unvanquished legions. There, even where humans have purged the land of carnivorous cats, annihilated the bears, wolves and hyenas, the devouring insects defeat them. Winged, or leaping on steely feet, or crawling in the darkness, or hidden in hair as if in a jungle, the insects attack us as they did in the earliest times.

  Poisonous clouds enveloped Rulf, César and Mademoiselle de Gavres. She paid them no heed; she seemed invulnerable. The joy of being alive was accompanied by a vertigo in the balance of her organs. In another hour, she would arrive at the Refuge; she would see these beings descended from those who had exiled her ancestors, and the dogs that had defeated the tiger.

  She thought herself
mistress of the moment.

  “Hup, fine beasts! We’ll rest when we’re there!”

  Scarcely had she said it when her certainty crumbled. Victorious nature had extended its traps—the route was not clear. The cataclysm having excavated ravines, the water, which no issue leaves inert, had formed a lake between the forest, which had become dense again—where the horses could not pass—and marshy ground.

  Open-mouthed, the Grafina contemplated the obstacle.

  “It’s 11 a.m.!” said Jan Cats, taking out a fat watch. “If she’s going to come, the mistress won’t be long now.”

  The heat of the Sun seemed almost sinister to the two Europeans. Without water, that heat would have been deadly; where there was water, it accumulated frightening and ferocious life.

  Corisande and Frédéric were waiting without impatience. On leaving Europe, they had said farewell to the past. It was in this unknown land, to which they had never given a thought before, that they would find their destiny. It would doubtless take more than one season, so what did one day matter? But the sort of self-recrimination that had arisen in Frédéric the day before persisted, and tormented him. Humiliated by an impotence that stemmed from such feeble causes, he thought almost with malevolence about the woman who was going to arrive and would be the protectress of five armed men—men as well-armed as she was herself.

  The restlessness of the dogs testified to the proximity of the tigers; they would be out there in the brush, sleeping lightly. Were they hungry or satiated? Two or three days sometimes passed before a tiger could eat, a victim of its overly strong odor and the subtle senses of its prey.

  “Can’t we set a trap?” Frédéric asked.

  “We’ve thought of that,” said Hendrik, “but tigers aren’t so stupid. They must be suspicious of the Refuge. In any case, we’re going to cover the cart: the driver and the Sumatran know how to do it. We have plenty of wood here. It’s also necessary to protect the horses.”