The Conqueror of Death, page 11
And all sorts of fantastic forms swim within it: bearded mushrooms like blocks of gelatin, nacreous, polychromatic and transparent, which are jellyfish; long silky ribbons, which are algae; then schools of fish of all sizes and colors. There are black ones, white ones, pink ones, blue ones and iridescent ones. There are yellow ones, which the wizened old scientist recognized, and named in Latin as they passed by. There are some that look as if they were made of gold, others of silver or copper. Some—rays, for example—resemble the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals. Is it possible that there are so many differences between the free ray, seen as if at home, and the black butter ray?18
The boat doesn’t seem to frighten the animals. On the contrary, they follow it, and flock toward it from all parts of the depths, like moths attracted by a candle. A few came to bump their noses into the windows, as if asking to come in. Doubtless we interest them as much as they interest us. The wizened old scientist was delighted—me too. Only Papa was pinching his lips, but I suppose that was to stop an exclamation of admiration slipping out.
When one looks up, through the glass in the ceiling, one perceives a large luminous circle through which one divines, rather than distinguishing, the sky and its clouds, as if one were at the bottom of an enormous funnel-shaped well. It makes a clear path, the moving borders of which are cut up by the splashing of the swell, and there the rays of sunlight dissolve, fragmented and tremulous, as if they were passing through lowered Venetian blinds.
When one looks down, through the glass in the seal-pool, one sees the sea bed fleeing underfoot. One might think that it’s vast flat carpet, unrolled by invisible hands, without creases or fissures, and with no relief.
As I was marveling in astonished at that unexpected uniformity the captain suddenly said: “Don’t be deceived, Mademoiselle, That’s only an optical illusion, which arises from the fact that all the visible parts receive equal illumination, so that there are no shadows cast. In reality, the ground that seems uniform to you is bristling with bizarre protrusions and clefts, some of which are very deep.
“Furthermore, nothing is easier than to demonstrate the fact. The spectacle’s worth the trouble. We’re just at the deepest point of the Channel. I’m going to stop the boat for a moment and go down fifty meters or so, almost to the bottom—you’ll see!”
At this point Papa, who had been surreptitiously chewing his handkerchief for several minutes, could not contain himself any longer. “Are you mad?” he cried. “You want to stop the boat and go down fifty meters? But we’ll no sooner have stopped than the boat will rise up—fffrrritt!—like a de-ballasted balloon. It won’t be too soon, moreover. If you think I’m here for my pleasure…!”
“I beg your pardon,” replied Claudius Bouget. “I’m going to stop Le Désiré, and, instead of rising up to the surface, it will not only descend fifty meters but remain there, stationary, without deviating from the horizontal, for as long as Mademoiselle pleases.”
“Get away!” said Papa furiously. “That’s contrary to all the laws of physics!”
“Monsieur,” the captain riposted. “I never argue—I prove. Please pay attention.”
Then, putting his mouth to the mouthpiece of the telephone, he gave his orders. Immediately, the purr of the engine stopped, while the gurgle of the water changed pitch, becoming higher and higher, and the darkness thickened around us, as if Le Désiré were sinking into a sea of ink.
“You haven’t felt anything, Mademoiselle?” Monsieur Bouget went on. “Nevertheless, we’ve descended from ten meters to fifty-five—which is to say that we’ve fallen from the height of two six-story houses. Now, look!”
Abruptly, a powerful electric light lit up beneath the boat, illuminating the “landscape” all around. We were at the bottom of a submarine gorge, a kind of drowned street between two rows of high hills, bizarrely sculpted, velveted from top to bottom with giant fronds of wrack. In the midst of that chaos swarmed a host of monsters, to which the caprices of refraction and the blinking of the searchlight lent fabulous forms and implausible colorations, while down below, on the tormented floor, strewn with precipices and projections, were heaps of unidentifiable debris: broken pieces of wood half-buried in the mud, pieces of broken masts, rusty old cannons, twisted and broken anchors, and so on, like a demolition yard.
In truth, my dear, it’s a cemetery of ships! How many unfortunate men are sleeping eternally there? In one gutted carcass caught between two spurs of rock as if between the jaws of a vice, almost entirely covered with parasitic vegetation, I could make out vague letters by the light of the diabolical reflector.
“The Salut,” murmured the steward, at my side, “out of Saint-Malo. Twenty-five crewmen. It was returning from Norway, ten years ago, on a foggy night when it was rammed, holed and sunk by an English steamer. All hands lost.”
The Salut! The homicidal fatality of these ironies! And there are perhaps a hundred in the same state, at the bottom of the Channel alone—one imperceptible point in the midst of the immensity of the oceans.
Le Désiré moved around slowly by means of its oars—for it’s necessary to tell you that it can be moved by oars as well as electricity—scarcely a meter above that necropolis, almost touching the tips of masts, turning the corners of rocks, rising and falling in turn, sometimes pivoting on itself like a dog trying to catch its tail, or even coming to a dead stop.
“Are you convinced?” the captain asked Papa, abruptly. “Has this proof reckoned with your prejudices?”
Papa is obviously too honest to deny evidence, but he doesn’t like being proved wrong…in public. He didn’t reply, but, turning his back on Monsieur Bouget, and frowning, he went to drum his fingers on the windows while he watched dabs going by. Monsieur Bouget simply shrugged his shoulders, with a broad smile.
“Let’s go back up,” I said. “This hurts my heart and makes me feel ill.”
“A la disposicion de usted, señorita,” the captain replied, switching off the searchlight. He speaks very good Castilian.
We arrived at the surface in one bound, in the splendor of the external light. We saw the sky again, the sun, the liquid plain, the vast horizon, limited in the distance to the north by a dark line—that was the English coast.
A few cables away from Le Désiré, to our right, was a little steamship displaying the French flag, coming straight for us at top speed.
“Why,” said the captain, “it’s the customs yacht from Calais. Why the devil is she traveling so fast? Do they take us for smugglers? He ha! We’ll play a little game of hide and seek, Messieurs!”
And he made Le Désiré dive again.
“Aargh!” one of the Englishmen, suddenly, throwing away his cards. “What’s that?”
“Aargh!” repeated the other, like an echo. “What is it?”
It was a shock, as you can well imagine. Those frightful islanders hadn’t opened their mouths since we set off, except to pour in that colorless liquid that smelled like turpentine—so completely that I took them for deaf-mutes. To get them excited, something seriously extraordinary had to be happening.
Oh, my dear, what a fright you’d have had! Imagine a chimerical beast, the size of a man, a kind of octopus with a swollen skin, as if varnished, with a metallic gleam, full of big creases; four unequal tentacles like sacks, arranged like arms and legs; a huge round head with enormous bulging eyes as skinny as balls of glass; and a kind of spike, slender and pointed like an épée, sixty centimeters long, at the end of one of its twitching arms; lop-sided and thrashing around, pirouetting and tumbling in eccentric contortions, very close to us, tapping insistently on the window of the salon—which rendered a crystalline sound under its assaults.
“It’s a swordfish!” cried the suspicious Italian.
“Never in this life,” riposted the old scientist, adjusting his spectacles. “The swordfish doesn’t carry its spur on the end of its flipper but on its nose. We are, Mesdames et Messieurs, in the presence of an unknown animal of which no zoologist has spoken thus far, and which, in consequence, we have the right to baptize, without anyone being able to say any different. It’s evidently an unknown variety of cephalopod of colossal dimensions. I therefore propose to call it Polypus quadrupes giganteus, or simple Polypus desirati, in honor of the submarine boat that first discovered it. What luck, and what glory! That cephalopod will be the crowning glory of my life...”
“You might just as well baptize it Polypus tricolor,” Papa interjected. “Look at that red, white and blue girdle of sorts around its torso. One might think that it’s the sash of a Commissaire of Police.”
“Commissaire of Police!” exclaimed Monsieur de Maltoti, in a changed voice. “Who said Commissaire of Police?”
But no one replied to the antipathetic foreigner, who collapsed like a wet rag on the divan, his eyes haggard and his mouth convulsed. The crowning glory of the decrepit scientist’s life ended up hanging on to the starboard fin and trying to drive its sword into the joint of the hatchway.
“He’s going to make us take on water, your accursed Polypus!” the captain cried, suddenly, in a tone of inexpressible fury. “Wait a minute, wretched cephalopod—we’ll see if you like dynamite!”
And, opening a drawer, he took out a small cartridge as thick as a stick of asparagus, to which he hastened to fit a detonator, while explaining his hurried words to Papa what he was proposing to do.
“Look under that porthole,” he said, “at that bronze conch. Two symmetrical tubes…same system as my doors…without a single drop of water being able to ooze through, I can put anything through it…a dispatch, a signal, a petard…I could out a man through if the hold were big enough. This cartridge of dynamite, one electric spark…and the monster’s thunderstruck!”
But there was no need to have recourse to that desperate means. Don’t forget that we were still sinking. Suddenly, the Polypus gianteus let go of the fin, its body swelling up strangely, as if some mysterious ventilator had blown air between its hide and its flesh; it rotated on its axis momentarily and then, its flippers widespread, it rose up abruptly, head down, like a corpse being fished out with a rope. In the blink of an eye it had disappeared.
It was just as well! We had all—including the captain, who gave the impression of being inaccessible to terror—had five minutes of intense anguish: the kind of anguish of which one can die. Perhaps I would have died if the heady interior atmosphere of the submarine boat hadn’t given me courage, tone and resilience. It’s not ordinary air, in fact, that one breathes therein, but compressed oxygen…and that has an effect on you—oh, what an effect!—like two fingers of Roederer. Do you remember that story by Jules Verne, Le Docteur Ox, I think, that we read together at Cauterets last summer? You remember—it’s the story of an Eiffel Tower that revolutionizes an entire town because the air one breathes at the top is so pure, so oxygenated, that everyone who goes up it feels cheered up, overexcited, galvanized, overflowing with energy, strength, courage, ardor and passion, while torpor and somnolence reign down below. Well, aboard Le Désiré, still thanks to oxygen, it’s the same thing. How brave one feels inside! How much vigor, energy, faith and hope one feels—noble sentiments, hectic desires to embrace some holy cause...
But my letter is taking on the dimensions of a quarto volume. It’s time I decided to get to the end...
We had been traveling all the while, so rapidly that we had reached Dover. Someone shouted: “Land!” in the forward chamber. A shadow fell across the windows, like the blurred profile of an immense scaffold. It was a boom, and a jetty. We came up, brushing the pillars; we were at the quay, level with the staircase to the wharf, where an enormous crowd had gathered, even denser than in Calais, howling “Hip, hip, hurray!” at the top of their voices.
I was nearly mad—mad with pride and joy…or, rather, as if I were drunk, drunk on intensive oxygen. Then I saw red. It appears that when one emerges from a green environment, it’s a fatal effect. It’s the law of complementary colors, formulated by the illustrious Chevreul.19 Such, at least, was the explanation given gratis to Papa by the wrinkled scientist.
But what’s all this tumult? The customs yacht that we saw at sea lands at the same time as us. A strange creature comes out of it, dragging his lead-soled feet painfully, dressed in waxed canvas, with a glass helmet tipped over his back, a tricolor belt around his waist and a bayonet in his fist—in brief, our Polypus quadrupes giganteus desirati in person, but with salt-and-pepper hair, long curled-up russet moustaches and the piercing eyes of Monsieur Marigron, the head of the Sûreté!
While the English mob carries Claudius Bouget away in triumph, Monsieur Marigron pounces on il marchese Maltoti. “You’re the murderer of the Rue Vivienne!” Tramp, tramp, go the gendarmes, marking time with their big boots. “I arrest you in the name of the law!”
Well, yes, my dear Hélène, it was very simple. On the quay in Calais Monsieur Marigron was laying in wait for the murderer, knowing that he hadn’t been able to catch the ferry Empress Victoria, which was too closely watched. That was why he hadn’t greeted us more courteously, so keen was he to maintain his incognito until the last moment. When his prey, slightly by my fault—now I’m abetting the flight of malefactors!—had escaped him, he’s jumped aboard the customs yacht in pursuit. Having perceived Le Désiré en route, he’d been unable to contain his impatience and, at the risk of his life he’d made a descent in a diving-suit. He was the unknown cephalopod that had tried to break in through our window, at the risk of sinking us, with his sash and his saber...borrowed from a gendarme. Except that, inexperienced in the diving business, once he arrived at a certain depth, disorientated by the excessive pressure, he hadn’t been able to regulate the flow of air, which, blowing up his diving-suit excessively, had brought him back to the surface unexpectedly, feet first.
But he wasn’t to be discouraged by such trivia, and we found him again at Dover, still in submarine costume, ready to do his duty no matter what the cost.
That audacity ought to reconcile me with him. How can one bear a grudge against a hero?
But you see, little Jeannette is something of one herself—a heroine, that is.
She could tell you a host of other things no less interesting, but it’s necessary to know when to stop. I’ll leave that for another time.
A thousand kisses.
Jeanne de G***
P.S. I can’t, however, dispense with telling you that I’m getting married. I’m marrying the captain of Le Désiré. Papa is doubtless definitively converted to the cause of submarine navigation. How could it be otherwise?
Your Jeanne.
Camille Debans: Fire Island
(1893)
The little fort of Salem, in Brazil, is situated on the right bank of the river Amazon, almost directly opposite Para, a few leagues from the sea. It is the most boring place in the world, if you believe travelers’ tales, and Dom Luiz Vagaërt had became the most splenetic officer in the Brazilian army since had been the deputy governor there.
The garrison comprised less than a hundred soldiers. Beneath the walls of the citadel vegetated a poor village sheltering a hundred negroes of both sexes, with whom a few Indians, former cannibals, came to mingle from time to time, in order to sell the produce of their hunting. There was not an intelligent face in the entire colony, and not a single white woman for five leagues around. The governor was married, it is true, but he was a Platonic governor who administered at a distance, because he lived in Bahia.
Dom Luiz Vagaërt therefore found himself the absolute master of the fort. In addition to his functions as deputy governor, he fulfilled those of magistrate, and rendered justice without appeal. Moreover, he was considered as an officer of the civil estate, and the local priest had asked him more than once to ring the bells and assist him at mass, to which he lent himself with a very good grace.
To combat the boredom Dom Luiz had, in the early days, devoted all his spare time to hunting. When he had a carpet in his bedroom made from the skins of twenty jaguars that he had killed, however, the poor deputy governor was obliged to admit that wild animals, dead or alive, no longer amused him. He went after caimans instead, but the caimans could not succeed in relieving the tedium.
Then he imagined that hunting snakes might procure him the distraction he needed, and, arming himself with a flask of ammonia, he went in search of rattlesnakes, vine snakes and all sorts of dangerous reptiles. He built up a fine collection. It was even said that a terrarium could be seen in his study in which fifty special flowers served as a residence for fifty living coral snakes. The coral snake is the most charming reptile in the world. Bright red, about as long as the penholder I have in my fingers at present, it lives in the calices of flowers, from which it gladly leaps out at humans, to whom its bite is fatal in less time than it takes a scientist to collect a prize.20
One day, Pedro Baçao, a simple soldier, and João, a sergeant, formulated a plan to go and see for themselves whether what was said was true. They climbed into the famous study through the window and searched for the terrarium with their eyes. It was set against the wall facing the door. The two soldiers approached, Pedro trembling and João negligently waving a little segment of a liana that he was holding.
It was an admirable spectacle that they beheld. In almost every flower, a coral snake was coiled up, seemingly nourishing itself on perfumes. Four or five hummingbirds were fluttering around the terrarium, and at intervals, one of the reptiles, weary of the sound of its wings, would brace itself and leap at a bird, which it never reached.
