Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  A superb pike was attached to the last of them. Pulled out of the water, it was still thrashing in the grass.

  “Damn! A fine fish,” said Monsieur Belzevor, in a complimentary tone.

  Marcel picked up the fish, still quivering, and presented it to the doctor. “It belongs to you, Monsieur,” he said.

  “Not at all. You can eat it as penance…personally, I don’t like that fish.” And he added: “Now that you know the way, there’s no need for me to guide you again.”

  Monsieur Belzevor had already disappeared behind a clump of bushes while Marcel, his cap in one hand and his lines and the pike in the other, was still in the same place, downcast and utterly nonplussed.

  He hastened to leave the park and return to Montbarzy, where he arrived, contrary to his habit, well before the time for the morning meal.

  Monsieur Vernoy, who was far from suspecting what had happened, congratulated his son on his fortunate fishing expedition. Marcel gave his father’s compliments a very poor welcome. He was simultaneously repentant and vexed. So, when the fish had been confided to the skillful Madame Blancheron and the young man found himself alone with his parents, he could not help recounting his misadventure in an abrupt fit of frankness.

  “That’s very bad, what you did!” exclaimed Monsieur Vernoy. And he explained to his son at length that there is no small sin; that the person who steals the property of another, for the first time, for a trivial reason, will be disposed to recommence on a more important occasion.

  “I believe,” added Madame Vernoy, turning to her husband, “that it would be as well for you to go and present your apologies to Monsieur Belzevor with regard to Marcel’s conduct.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” he replied. “But me, a poor employee, a subaltern functionary, presenting myself at the home of that great scientist, that millionaire château owner…do you think so?”

  “The step is entirely indicated, though,” replied Madame Vernoy, softly. “If this Monsieur Belzevor had been malevolent, or simply severe, he could have caused Marcel and us serious problems. In such cases, thanks and apologies, are necessary.”

  After a few hesitations, Monsieur Vernoy followed his wife’s advice. That same evening, ceremoniously clad in his newest bureaucratic frock coat, he went to ring the bell at the gate of the Château de Montbarzy.

  It was six o’clock in the evening.

  “Your timing is good,” said the domestic to whom he addressed himself. “Monsieur has just got up. He’ll doubtless be able to see you shortly.”

  After a quarter of an hour waiting in a magnificent drawing room in the modern style, with bright cedar paneling and pale green silk hangings, Monsieur Vernoy was introduced into the presence of Dr. Belzevor, in a study that surpassed in luxury anything that the honest archivist had been able to admire at official receptions.

  Monsieur Vernoy was immediately sympathetic to Dr. Belzevor, who stopped him in the middle of his excuses. After five minutes, the archivist had lost his initial ceremonious stiffness, and they chatted about science, literature and erudition, touching one a thousand various subjects without any prior decision.

  By the end of that first visit, Dr. Belzevor had taken Monsieur Vernoy in amity. He had even promised to confide to him certain research on a lost manuscript of Bombastus Paracelsus, which Monsieur Vernoy, by virtue of his official functions in the Archives, was in a position to complete.

  Dr. Belzevor had imagination and science; Monsieur Vernoy possessed erudition. The two men complemented one another admirably.

  In response to the invitation that had been extended to him, Monsieur Vernoy returned to the château on a daily basis, where he spent an hour or two, extremely agreeably, in discussion with his new friend.

  Incidentally, he mentioned to him the anxieties that Marcel was causing him.

  “You see everything in black,” the doctor replied, cheerfully. “The young man—poaching apart—pleases me greatly. Why not bring him with you?”

  “I dare not…and he professes a salutary terror in your regard himself.”

  “It’s true that I made fun of him a little cruelly...but if he comes tomorrow evening, I’ll study him. We’ll see whether there isn’t a means of curing him.”

  III. Belzevorine

  The following day, Marcel Vernoy was introduced by his father to Monsieur Belzevor, and did not take long to become one of the friends of the château. The slightly fantastic personality of the doctor impressed the young man. He felt very small in confrontation with the ideas of manifest genius and the impeccable logic of the aged scientist.

  The latter, who judged him to be very intelligent, was amused by his astonishment. He never wearied of making him admire his vast hothouses, where the gilded light of Edison lamps outlined the disquieting profiles of tropical orchids, creepers and nightshades.

  What struck Marcel most of all was that Monsieur Belzevor did not possess any “luxury plants,” so to speak. He only attached importance to vegetables whose active principle could have a powerful effect on the human organism. Datura stramonium, Saint Ignatius’ beans, the lianas that produce curare and Ouabaia strophantus had pride of place in his collections.23 Those poisonous planted were the ones that the doctor pampered the most, surrounding them with the most scrupulous care.

  Another particularity that struck Marcel was the reverence that Dr. Belzevor professed for perfumes, and the magisterial science with which he dosed essences. Each of the rooms in the château was embalmed with a particular odor, from the rose and myrtle dear to antiquity to the most modern perfumes: ylang-ylang, chypre, patchouli and syringa.

  The doctor cherished above all the ultra-modern odors that are, in the art of perfumery, what “modern style” is in furnishing: discreet and subtle odors like that of Tilia, the linden tree, the lily-of-the-valley and Corylopsis, or fragrant winter hazel. Whenever Monsieur Belzevor went into a room, there was a marvelous expansion of delectable fragrances.

  Apart from his immoderate and slightly ridiculous liking for perfumes, Dr. Belzevor was also fervent about gems and precious stones of all kinds. His left hand was ornamented by five gold rings, exact similar in form, but whose bezels were each ornamented by a different stone. On the index finger there was a topaz, on the middle finger a ruby, on the ring finger a black diamond, and on the little finger a uvarovite.

  Marcel never wearied of questioning the doctor about the most diverse subjects. The latter took advantage of that to study him surreptitiously, passing him through the sieve of his pitiless analysis.

  “Your son,” he said one day to Monsieur Vernoy, “is precociously ambitious. Like the majority of young men raised in Paris, he suffers from a considerable intellectual overload. Too much disparate knowledge has been stored in his brain. Like certain hothouse plants, he’s been overheated. What is the result of that? It’s that he possesses, with the soul of an adolescent, the ambition and cupidity of a mature man.”

  “You’re frightening me,” replied Monsieur Vernoy.

  “It’s necessary not to attach more importance to the observations I’ve made than they really have. Marcel is, like many others, the victim of a defective method of education, but he has pride, imagination and, which is the essential thing, a lot of good will and sincerity. With that, we’ll save him.”

  “But how?”

  “I’m convinced that if Marcel could contemplate, if only for a few hours, the marvelous progress that the future will accomplish, of which contemporary discoveries only give us a feeble idea, he would lose forever the jealousy and egotism that he owes to bad acquaintances or reading beyond his scope.”

  “How do you expect my son,” interjected Monsieur Vernoy, discouraged, “to be able to take account of the marvelous progress to which you allude?”

  “That might be less difficult than you think.”

  “You’re joking, Doctor.”

  “Not at all.”

  Monsieur Belzevor and his guest were sitting in comfortable porcelain ar
mchairs, warm in winter and cool in summer. It was already several years since the doctor had sent to Canton for those chairs, extremely practical, which have been in use in China and throughout the Far East for thousands of years.

  The doctor got up and, pushing the armchair back with a gesture that caused it to glide on its rubber castors, he said to Monsieur Vernoy: “Follow me to my laboratory, I beg you...”

  Dr. Belzevor’s laboratory did not resemble those of the majority of scientists. One only saw there a gigantic dynamogenic apparatus, a few oak cupboards filled with books and enormous sandstone jars full of tropical flowers with heady perfumes.

  The doctor approached a glass case and showed Monsieur Vernoy a flask at the back containing a white mud. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

  “It says absolute alcohol on the label.”

  “The deposit you can see in the bottom is copper sulfate, which becomes blue instead of white under the influence of water. If that alcohol ceases to be absolutely pure, the blue color of the copper sulfate will inform me of it.”

  “That’s very ingenious,” replied Monsieur Vernoy, who only had a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry, “But where are you trying to get to?”

  “Patience. Listen to me carefully. Alcohol is one of the substances most fatal to the organism. In our epoch, as you know, alcoholism has become a veritable disease, a scourge in the face of which governments remained unarmed. But let’s pass on. I simply want to tell you that inveterate alcoholics, drunkards afflicted with delirium tremens, always see identical objects and beings in their hallucinations.”

  “Yes, I’ve read that,” relied Monsieur Vernoy, surprised by the turn that the conversation was taking. “They believe themselves to be tormented by rats, toads and serpents.”

  “Well,” the doctor continued, excitedly, “exactly where I wanted to get to is that all alcoholics, whatever their age, sex and social condition, have exactly the same hallucinations. They never get away from rats, toads and reptiles.”

  “What does that prove?”

  “The importance of that observation is enormous, from the scientific viewpoint. It proves that each stupefying agent acts on a distinct and well-defined part of the brain. Hashish initially leads to wordplay and gaiety, and in the second period of intoxication it inspires the mania of grandeur. The man who has taken hashish believes himself to be an emperor or a god. The effects of opium are even more characteristic. That maleficent drug, which is presently poisoning more than a hundred million human beings, has the effect of displacing notions of time and space in a strange fashion. In order to convince yourself, read the memoirs of the Englishman Thomas De Quincey, which are as remarkable for their literary form as they are from a scientific viewpoint.

  “The eater or smoker of opium loses the notion of time and that of space. He perceives in his dreams, without any perspective, cities, seas, rivers, forests and immense countries, distinguishing the background as clearly as the foreground. His superhuman contemplations leave him with a weakened eyesight and brain. When he emerges from his orgies, he is almost an idiot and almost blind. With regard to time, the effect is similar. Thomas De Quincey relates that he experienced, in a few minutes, the sensation of living for several centuries, and that, in the midst of abominable suffering, he saw filing before him, in the same minute, Roman legions, the crusaders of Peter the Hermit and the Roundheads of the English Revolution. He emerged from those morbid hallucinations absolutely exhausted in body and soul.”

  “What you’re telling me is strange. So there really are substances that act of certain mysterious regions of our brain and not on others?”

  “More than that,” the doctor continued, becoming animated. “Among the rocks and glacial mosses of the Antarctic Pole, a paltry variety of hemlock grows, the essential principles and juices of which contain, in a sense, the soul of prehistoric eras.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Monsieur Vernoy, looking at the doctor fearfully.

  “I’ll explain. The person who has taken a decoction of that mildly poisonous hemlock falls into a comatose state for twenty-four hours, and his dreams invariably retrace for him scenes and landscapes from the early ages of the globe. He sees—and I have seen myself—the plesiosaur agitating its serpentine neck, fifteen or twenty meters long, above a body as large as the hull of one of our transatlantic liners; he sees the mammoth, under the envelope of its long coarse hair, breaking with its giant tusks the horsetails and ferns blooming in the not damp vapor of the infancy of the earth. He sees—and I have seen—pterodactyls extend their large membranous wings above hundred-meter coconut palms, and catching monstrous insects in flight with their crocodilian mouths. He sees turtles with enormous and bulbous carapaces dragging themselves slowly through the mud of the first ages. Animality alone lived then, in all its grandeur and liberated brutality. Thought was still slumbering....”

  “So substances exist capable of transporting us into the past, of enabling us to live the marvelous life of vanished eras?”

  “They exist. I can affirm that to you on my honor as a scientist…as I can affirm to you that future things are no more hidden from our gaze than past things. I have discovered plants and substances that conceal within them the decors of the future. Is not the future in seed in the present, and is not the present itself born of the past? Divination and memory are, fundamentally, the unique manifestation of a similar law. The poet resuscitates disappeared eras and predicts future discoveries; the philosopher and the historian announce events that will not occur until long after their deaths... And I have discovered the elixir that can transport us into the future. I hold the key to future worlds. I can cause to appear, at will, civilizations and peoples that are not yet born.”

  Monsieur Vernoy put his hands together with a sort of religious fear. He was torn between admiration and stupor.

  “So,” he stammered, “I believe I understand that you want to transport my son into the future, in a dream, for a few hours…that you want to enable him to see what the future existence of humans will be.”

  “Precisely. You’ve divined correctly. That long preamble has only led to me asking you to attempt an experiment on your son, harmless in truth, after which Marcel will come back to you cured, enthusiastic and disinterested.”

  “He really wouldn’t be running any danger?”

  “That I can affirm to you. Marcel will go to sleep for a few hours, peacefully, and he’ll wake up as healthy in body and mind as he was before.

  Monsieur Vernoy remained silent momentarily.

  “All right,” he said, with an abrupt gesture. “I have absolute confidence in you, Doctor. I’ll bring you Marcel.”

  “And take note, my dear Monsieur,” Dr. Belzevor went on, with a decision that put an end to Monsieur Vernoy’s last hesitations, “that this is not, in truth, a matter of an experiment, but of a cure. I’ll answer for the success.”

  The following day, in fact, Monsieur Vernoy, who was not unaware of the doctor’s eccentric habits, presented himself at the château at the usually hour when he got up, at six o’clock in the evening. He was accompanied by Marcel and Madame Vernoy.

  In conformity with the doctor’s instructions, Monsieur Vernoy had not warned his son about the little conspiracy fomented against him. Only Madame Vernoy was in on the secret.

  In spite of the good reasons that her husband gave her, she could not help trembling for her dear Marcel. The good humor and enthusiasm of Dr. Belzevor reassured her.

  As usual, after dinner, they took tea on the veranda, which overlooked the forest.

  The gold and crimson of a splendid sunset were trailing over a horizon of infinite summits.

  The conversation languished.

  Dr. Belzevor had lit a Havana cigar, the perfume of which filled the whole room. Modestly, Monsieur Vernoy was holding his meerschaum pipe, and Marcel had obtained permission to light a cigarette of Oriental tobacco.

  A domestic, as silent as a grave as a master of requests
at the Council of State, brought liqueurs. Monsieur and Madame Vernoy accepted a few drops of the pink kirsch that is only found in the Vosges. Marcel was about to follow his parents’ example when the doctor made a gesture.

  “No, no,” he said, in a tone that did not admit any reply. “Taste this one for me instead. It’s a liqueur that I recommend to you, and of which you can give me news. It’s Belzevorine. You’ll search for it in vain in commerce.”

  The doctor took a Bohemian crystal carafe with topaz reflections and poured a few drops of glaucous liquid into the schoolboy’s glass. After first tasting the unknown liqueur, Marcel drank it all.

  “You elixir is delicious, Monsieur le Docteur,” he said. “One might think it an extract of wild flowers.”

  “Yes,” sniggered Monsieur Belzevor, “It’s most agreeable to taste.”

  Very anxious, Monsieur and Madame Vernoy alternated their gazes between Marcel and the doctor.

  Suddenly, the young man closed his eyes. His head slumped on to the table.

  “He’s asleep,” exclaimed Dr. Belzevor, rapidly. And with his foot, he pressed the button of an electric bell hidden in the parquet. Two domestics appeared.

  “Carry Monsieur Marcel Vernoy into the Blue Room,” he ordered, “and lie him down on the bed...”

  IV. In the Year 3000

  Marcel Vernoy woke up to the sounds of an infinitely soft and harmonious music, which seemed to be whispering a thousand benevolent but confused thoughts in his ear.

  Without opening his eyes, plunged in the torpor that follows sleep, he tried to divine what instruments were being played. He could not succeed in that.

  The mysterious melody possessed simultaneously the heart-rending eloquence of violins, the angelic sweetness of harps, the imperious vibrations of brass instruments and the sonorous profundity of organs.

  “It isn’t an orchestra I can hear,” he murmured. “It’s music itself.