With the aim of communicating with my neighbor, I wrote Do you speak French? on a page of my notebook and showed it to him. He shook his head and went back to devouring his salad—but then another young man, very thin, who occupied the next cell along attracted my attention by his mimes. He replied to the question in my notebook by means of gestures, having neither paper nor a pencil. I thought I understood that he was a reporter and that he had been abducted in the vicinity of Culoz. He seemed to be afraid of something that I could not grasp.
An incident interrupted this conversation. To the north, I saw a black dot rising up from the Earth. Through the binoculars, I saw that it was a man. He looked as if he had been launched by a ballista. He stopped five kilometers away from us in the horizontal dimension, at the place where I had arrived the day before—the dock. We saw him lifted up by the crane, then shuttled along the side of our hill—perhaps through invisible streets and boulevards? My co-detainees studied him attentively. They seemed glad not to recognize him. He was hoisted up to my level, but he was not established as my immediate neighbor; a space about two cells wide was left between him and me along the façade. (This break in continuity is repeated on all the floors and marks the middle of the aerium on the side of the façade.) He was a bewildered ruddy-faced peasant in a smock. I noticed, at that moment, that a number of birds had arrived during the night: a barn-owl, a short-eared owl and an eagle-owl. The infernal humming trap has been busy since yesterday.
I continued scanning the crowd. This time, I discovered someone: Raflin, Fabienne d’Arvière’s rejected suitor: Raflin, in his dressing-gown, with a cotton night-cap.
Above the heads, right at the back, on the side of the first arrivals, is a larger head than the others: the head of a statue, a Watteau gardener42…and also a tall hat coiffing the head of a manikin. Ah! The statue from Anglefort and the scarecrow! What? With the humans?
At intervals, one of our cells is coated with frost, causing a resplendent cube to appear. The prisoner falls unconscious. One sees him come to after the thaw. It’s probably no more than a temporary breakdown in the functioning of the valve-flaps. The cold and dryness of the void that surrounds us are certainly frightful.
Thanks to a large slot made by the invisible sustaining wall in the checkered humus almost directly beneath me, I have been able to take advantage of a gap in the clouds to pinpoint my position. It wasn’t easy. The aerium must be a little to the south of Mirastel. With Monsieur Le Tellier’s telescope, one could see it…but what hazard might guide his curiosity to a place where there is nothing to attract astronomers? It is so barely credible that the missing persons are up in the air!
At about half past ten, the Sun emerged from the atmospheric ocean, which began to sparkle. It described its curve in the black sky, like a large orange scarcely furred by a flamboyant halo. The shadow of the aerium was projected on to the cloud layer. Then at half past one, the Sun re-entered the gaseous horizon.
A little later, the statue of the Watteau gardener and the manikin filed in front of me! They glided along inclined planes, one after the other, down to the first floor, the quarter of inanimate things. There, they were placed among the agricultural implements, the hands of a clock, a tricolor flag and a large yellow ball, all properly aligned. And a few minutes later, a golden cock waddled down from the bird floor, and went to join the two simulacra amid the bric-à-brac on the first floor. It’s perfectly evident that errors of classification are being corrected—but that leads one to think along strange lines…
6 p.m.. A monkey has arrived: a large ape of the orangutan family. Escaped from a menagerie, in all probability, and captured in the forest by the sarvants. They’ve put it next to the red-faced peasant, with the humans. In a few days, they’ll take it back down, like the statue, the manikin and the cock—but what can these individuals be, who can be mistaken in such matters? These humans so ignorant of humankind, so different from us—so evolved, probably—who botanize poplars, collect pebbles and treat their brothers below as livestock?
July 5. I couldn’t continue writing yesterday; my valve-flaps stopped. I was obliged to use up my reserve supply of oxygen, but I fainted all the same, numbed by cold in a cube of ice. I only recovered consciousness at night, during which I reflected. These are my conclusions:
This invisible ground that supports us is not an island. It’s not an island in the atmospheric sea—for then it would be a floating island, a sort of errant buoy. But it’s fixed; we must, therefore, be on an invisible continent that envelops the entire Earth, letting the light and heat of the Sun pass through: a continent in a single block, like a thin hollow sphere englobing the Earth and its atmosphere, upon which its rests; a continent in a single block, but doubtless ragged, perforated by holes where, in spite of the laws of our human science, the 50-kilometer-deep atmospheric sea is in free and direct contact with the aerial void, with the imperfect ether of the upper atmosphere.
Yes, it can only be a world concentric to the Earth, a kind of spherical continental raft, a thin membrane on the surface of the Air, as the Earth’s crust is, according to some, only a thin membrane on the surface of the interior fire. It’s a light globe surrounding the planet; gravity, acting on all its points at the same time, maintains it at an equal distance from the Earth, and the centrifugal force released by terrestrial rotation doubles that effect by acting in the opposite direction. Each molecule of the invisible continent is solicited by two opposite forces, each of which tends to immobilize it relative to the center of the Earth. Thus, it is as if the invisible world were riveted to the visible one.
An invisible world! Like the planets that science has anticipated—and, like them, inhabited by an invisible population! A very light world, to be sure—all the lighter because it is a long way from the Earth. Here, things must have the same relationship with the air as things down below have with water. This region is an Earth for which the void serves as an atmosphere, so to speak, and in which air plays the role of the sea. The aerial sea bathes its coasts. Perhaps there is only one sea, one single hole pierced in the invisible world. Yes! Yes, that’s it! That’s why the superaerian beings, the so-called sarvants, dare not venture anywhere else in their machine but Bugey: the Bugey that is evidently directly beneath that unique sea; the Bugey that is the bottom of their lake! They’re afraid of getting lost, rising up again underneath their continent and choking for want of vacuum—they, for whom the void is as indispensable as air is to humans and water to fish!
For these people have invented a sort of diving-bell—or, rather, a sort of submarine. Eh? That’s the word: a SUBAERIAN! It permits them to go prospecting at the bottom of their sea and to visit unknown plains. They’re doing oceanography, after their fashion. Perhaps they’re governed by an invisible Prince Albert, and perhaps it’s him who has set up a pretty little museum of oceanography, with creatures from the great depths, in imitation of Monaco!
The cylinder that I have seen white with frost, as it rose up, is the well of air in which the netted fish are placed; it’s merely a part of that subaerian, which is itself formed like a cigar, as our own submersibles are, and also our dirigibles! That’s what Maxime saw in the fog; or, at least, it was the space that the strange balloon-boat displaced in the fig, and which appeared so confusedly that one could see things through it—which Maxime attributed to its speed! It was the subaerian, too, that we saw in the cloud, and for the same reason, on the day when we thought we were seeing its motionless shadow!
I’ve got it! I’ve got it! This boat is ‘full of void,’ if one might express it thus. That’s why it floats so well in the air, as a boat filled with air does in the water. It’s equipped with ‘air ballast’ instead of ‘water ballast’, in order to descend or ascend within the void—which is to say that it’s the lightest thing in the world, the zero of weight, when air weighs 1.3 grams per cubic meter and hydrogen 0.07! The void, which all aeronauts would employ instead of hydrogen if they were able to have envelopes both solid en
ough and imponderable enough to resist the pressure of the ambient air without their own weight canceling out the ascensional force of the void.
Truly, though, all that is glaringly simple! Water and air! They’re two twin elements, governed by the same essential principles. Hydrostatics is the twin sister of pneumatics! The aquatic sea and the atmospheric sea—how many times has one been compared to the other? In fact, neither one of them is terminated abruptly by a precise surface. The water of the sea extends into the air by means of briny vapors that we cannot see; in the same way, the atmospheric sea extends into the aerial void by means of degraded effluvia that I wouldn’t be able to perceive! They both have their lunar tides, and the gaseous ocean even has its solar tides. They have their whirlpools! Here, however, the birds take the place of the superior fish, and we humans, creatures of the deeps to which our heaviness attaches us, are the poor crustaceans that drag themselves along wretchedly!
The atmosphere!—which weighs upon the Earth as much as a layer of water ten meters deep, enveloping it completely would weigh upon it. The atmospheric sea, in which the mountains are the shallows! Shallows more accessible to the sarvants because they are closer to the surface; because, to reach them, they do not need to let as much air into their ballast tanks—which explains why they go fishing there so preferentially!
For we have been caught, hooked and netted! Then they place us in their receptacles, in these tanks—which must be transparent even to the sarvants—before the eyes of an indiscreet public, in this display-hall, this monumental museum, doubtless in the middle of a large city on the shore of the sea!
And we have never divined its existence! Deceived by the invisibility of this universe, which does not inhibit telescopic vision at all—which the bolides falling on the Earth go through as a rifle-bullet goes through the bark of a tree, and shooting stars leave far beneath them—we never guessed that that a world vaster than our own, having a radius fifty kilometers larger, was set above us, turning on the same axis as the terrestrial mass. And we would never have suspected that an active population was laboring there, that, in all probability, it was thinking, inventing and manufacturing, that it was launching increasingly-improved boats on to the atmospheric sea, that it was undertaking—blindly, I believe—maritime soundings, and that it would eventually arrive that that rightly fêted, glorified and acclaimed prowess: the construction of a subaerian.
It’s more than probable that the first one to be launched suffered a serious accident. Ineptly navigated by apprentices, carried far away by the wind, as if by a submarine whirlwind, it was, I believe that aeroscaph that caused the celebrated collision in the month of March. First it must have collided with the French steamer, then, a second later, the German destroyer, or vice versa. That day, the invisible matelots had a lucky escape, having been dragged so far, and the subaerian must have sustained heavy damage, whose repair explains the time that elapsed between that accident and their depredations in Seyssel. Prudence enabled them to gain experience.
Perhaps they’ve been watching us for centuries through the sky; perhaps they’ve been waiting impatiently and avidly for the moment when their progress would allow them to descend as far as human beings and study them; perhaps the subaerian is only a copy of our dirigibles, espied through the sarvants’ telescopes—but I don’t believe that. Their errors of classification suggest to me, rather, that they had not yet observed the ground on which we live. I would wager that the air, in its considerable thickness, is for them a non-transparent substance, as the sea is for us; that their ground, invisible to us, is opaque to them, and that they cannot distinguish through it, beneath them, either the ocean of air that supports it or the terrestrial depths of that ocean. I would even wager that they have no eyes. What use would eyes be to them in an invisible world? No, no eyes—so that all that I have just said applies to the sense that, for them, replaces sight. No, no eyes! Light and darkness have no more influence on their perception of the external world than the presence or absence of odor has on ours. Indeed, on the one hand, they don’t possess any artificial light to illuminate the darkness—any such thing would have made them known to humanity a long time ago, and I didn’t see the slightest glimmer last night—and on the other hand, they navigate admirably in the depths of their sea in our deepest darkness, which proves that our obscurity is not theirs, and is not obscure at all to them.
If one considers that their misdeeds are accomplished more frequently by night, it’s even possible to suppose that that their perception is improved in darkness, that it’s at night that their means are most powerful, and that obscurity is as favorable to their sense of direction as light is to our sight. What fools we are, poor creatures submerged in the ocean of gas, who believe that we are masters of the Earth! We don’t suspect that another humankind, more considerable than ours, exists above it, knowing little or nothing about us, attributing to us the intelligence that we attribute to crabs! Another humankind, which evidently believes itself the sole monarch of the planet! Another race, on a world exterior to ours, which the astronomers of Mars and Venus might well take for the true Earth, if our atmosphere is not transparent to them and if, on the contrary, they can see that which our eyes are powerless to distinguish. Didn’t we, the astronomers of Earth, for a long time, mistake the photosphere—the dazzling atmosphere of the Sun—for the surface of that heavenly body?
An adolescent has just arrived among us. He’s next to the ape. We watched him advancing without movement, in that extraordinary progression, suspended in space. A woman of a certain age began to cry, holding her arms out to him…
Maxime Le Tellier has recognized me. He is signaling to me from afar.
My hypothesis of the raft-continent explains why the noise of loud explosions is heard, on Earth, at seemingly-improbable distances—a phenomenon that meteorologists have only been able to explain by mean of some sort of ‘sonic mirror,’ by admitting ‘a reflection of sound in the upper atmosphere’ at the limit of two zones of different density, and hence of very different composition. That limit is not a gaseous vault but a solid one, constituted by the superaerian would.
My hypothesis will also facilitate the explanation of crepuscular red lights. It will also explain why bolides that do not arrive perpendicularly to the Earth always ricochet from something that was believed until now to be an atmospheric cushion, and are then lost in space…
In truth, it seemed that this final sentence, relating to bolides, had never been read by the Duc d’Agnès, for, at the moment he began it, an unanswerable instinct made him and Monsieur Le Tellier leap forward, taking them away from the invisible mass against which they were both leaning.
That mass, silent until now, had just produced and unpleasant scraping sound directly behind Monsieur Le Tellier’s back.
“Go on!” said Monsieur Le Tellier. “Go on reading the journal! It’s urgent—most urgent!”
But it was necessary to expect further delays.
While the contents of the red notebook were being read, the audience had been swollen by firemen, municipal guards, scientists, civil servants and—most numerous of all, unfortunately—by steel-workers who were working at that time at the rear of the Grand Palais in the Avenue d’Antin. They had been attracted by curiosity and had not understood anything of the journal, of whose first part they were ignorant. The brave steel-workers imagined—God knows how or why—that there were prisoners of their species inside the invisible mass. When the scraping sounds began, one of them—a journeyman named Virachol, nicknamed Gargantua because of his giant stature and obesity—proclaimed that it was “a bloody shame” to “leave those men inside.” And he started swinging an enormous crowbar, with which he wanted to break open the invisible object.
Virachol was restrained—but every time the scraping sound started again, Virachol started again too, with the result that we cannot reproduce all the interruptions that disturbed the conclusion of this public reading without composing an indecipherable rant.
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XIII. The Conclusion of the Journal
July 6. These indications must be forwarded to someone who can save us—but by what means can they be forwarded? By what means? Escaping? How? And then, it would be a frightful death. Here in our cells, it’s warm, we breathe sufficiently moist air, and our bodies are subject to the normal pressure of 15,500 kilos43 that they need—but outside! All the same, these sarvants must be quite clever, to have calculated all the elements necessary to our life, and to have grouped them together…
This morning, there were new inmates of every sort. It’s definitely by night that the sarvants prefer to operate. Is that for the reasons set out above, or is it simply because they know that darkness weakens us?
From time to time, there are people who hurl themselves head first against the invisible walls. One sees them hurt themselves.
The more I reflect on what I’ve discovered relative to the world where I am, the more convinced I am that I’m right. I’ve discovered something else: I think I know why the aerium contains so many representatives of the human species and so few, proportionally, of each animal family. It’s because the sarvants imagine that clothing is a pelt, which marks as many varieties in the species as occur naturally. One fact corroborates this: that is the great quantity and great diversity here of animals of the same sort but with different patterns of fur or plumage, like rabbits, ducks and so on. The sarvants—aristocrats, in their fashion—believe that frock-coats and blouses are different breeds. That’s what justified the system I devised of dressing like one of the missing persons in order to escape the Blue Peril, Madame Le Tellier was disdained by the sarvants for no other reason than that. Under the hornbeams, they remembered that they already possessed a black-bodied and yellow-haired specimen of the inferior-adherent-pawed subclass of the vertical class—and they released her, instead of carrying her off with Maxime and the calf that they had just confiscated in the vicinity…
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