Vaguely, he thought that it was some artistic surprise of Doctor Belzevor. What confirmed him in that supposition was that perfumed breaths reached him in gusts, odors that were vaguely reminiscent of mimosa and wild lemons, but much more refined, much more delicate and much more ethereal.
Meanwhile, the music continued mutedly, decrescendo, as if the invisible orchestra were slowly drawing away.
Marcel rubbed his eyes and sat up abruptly. He almost uttered a cry of surprise, and his gaze wandered with alarm over the décor that surrounded him.
He found himself in the middle of a vast round room, the cupola of which was formed by thick glass bricks of very bright colors, which scintillated like precious stones in the first rays of the sun.
The walls, of a hue that was infinitely relaxing to the gaze, appeared to Marcel to be sandstone or porcelain. They offered sparkling glints of crimson, amethyst and saffron.
The bed on which the schoolboy was lying did not resemble any that it had been given to him to see thus far. It was a sort of conch of gracious form, but not presenting any spiral, angle or ornament. The bed was made of stone, like the walls of the room.
In spite of his astonishment, Marcel was not at all afraid, for the benevolent harmonies were still whispering in his ear in a fashion almost as clear as speech, holding him under its charm, without leaving any room in his mind for fear.
It seemed to him that he was having a pleasant dream, and he was apprehensive that it might end.
In order to convince himself of the reality of what he saw, he palpated the bedclothes by which he was enveloped.
“This soft and shiny fabric certainly isn’t borrowed from the animal or vegetable realm,” he said. “Only might think they were made of asbestos or glass fiber...”
Marcel got out of bed and got dressed; for he had perceived his garments, carefully folded, which an unknown hand had deposited on a broad tabletop close at hand.
At intervals, the walls were ornament with iridium plaques, violet with shifting reflections.
The young man was wondering what the utility of those metal plates might be when a curtain was abruptly drawn, allowing the columns of a circular gallery to be seen.
Adolescents draped in brilliant fabrics surrounded the surprised and nonplussed Marcel Vernoy. He had never been in the presence of beings so beautiful; he would never have imagined that their like existed.
His comrades at school with pale or excessively colored complexions, narrow chests and knock-knees, would have seemed monsters or invalids compared with this humanity, which had attained the optimum of physiological harmony. The gestures of the young people, all admirably proportioned, were full of ease and nobility. The pure lines of their profiles did not evoke any animal resemblance. There was no grimacing face among them, or any rendered ridiculous by the exaggerated development of one part of the physiognomy: a hooked nose, a jutting chin or an overly fleshy mouth. Their complexion, of the same very delicate pink, revealed the vigor of health. There was no chlorotic pallor or congested redness to be seen in any of them.
The expression of their faces was imprinted with such serenity that one divined that they neither laughed not wept in bursts. Only a smile was designed on their lips from time to time.
Their hands, very slender, were not charged with any jewelry. They were casually draped in brightly colored chlamydes, which a single precious stone retained on the right shoulder, in such a way as to leave the arms fee.
At the sight of Marcel, the young people, a dozen of whom had come in, manifested a great deal of astonishment. They had approached him, and palpated curiously the cloth of his jacket and the silk of his cravat.
At certain details of that costume, although it had emerged from the establishment of a good Parisian tailor, they smiled ironically—by which Marcel felt quite mortified.
They were speaking to one another in a language that appeared to the young man to be similar to Latin, of which he understood a few fragmentary phrases, without being able to grasp the integral meaning of any remark.
Nonplussed, Marcel had beaten a retreat to the back of the room. A certain anguish was mingled with the embarrassment that he felt.
The young men perceived his emotion. One of the tallest advanced toward Marcel, took him by the hand, and in a very pure French with musical intonations, he said: “You’re wearing the costume of the twentieth century, I believe? Doubtless you know the old French of that distant epoch? Our professors’ lessons permit us to speak it correctly enough.”
“Where am I, then?” exclaimed Marcel, alarmed. “And who are you?”
His interlocutor appeared very astonished by that question.
“At this moment, you’re in one of the sleeping rooms of the Lycée de Paris. It’s eight o’clock in the morning, and we’re in the month of July in the year 3000.”
“Excuse me,” replied Marcel, dazedly, putting his hand to his forehead. “I can’t succeed in recalling the sequence of events by which I was brought here, and how, without being conscious of it, I’ve been able to traverse so many centuries.”
“Our amazement equals yours. We’ve only seen individuals dressed like you in museums of retrospective anthropology and cinematographic albums dating back a thousand years.”
On hearing those words, Marcel’s emotion reached its peak. He did not think for a single instant of the perils that he might be running among the people of the year 3000. He felt the same profound and almost religious fervor that Christopher Columbus must have felt on setting foot for the first time on the soil of the New World.
Christopher Columbus had encountered savages and ferocious beasts; more fortunate than him, Marcel had fallen into the midst of an admirable civilization. He found himself in the presence of people who were welcoming him with sympathy and who were capable of speaking the same language as him.
He had a sort of vertigo; he believed for a moment that he had gone mad. Thoughts crowded so numerously in his brain that he remained silent for some time, reflecting on the fantastic implausibility of the situation in which he found himself. He was trembling with emotion.
One of the young men misunderstood, and thought that because he was shivering he was cold; he hastened to press a porcelain button.
Immediately, the oval plates of iridium embedded in the wall turned red. The temperature of the room increased by several degrees.
“What have you done?” Marcel asked.
“As you seemed cold, I made the atmosphere a little warmer.”
“I confess that I don’t understand how you achieved that result.”
The adolescent raised his arms skywards with surprise.
“Oh, that’s true!” he said, smiling. “I forgot, stupidly, that in your era barbaric and complicated apparatus was employed for heating, which exhaled poisonous gases like carbon monoxide, and into which it was necessary to throw tree trunks or lumps of coal continually.”
“Truly,” exclaimed another, turning toward Marcel, “you had scarcely made more progress than the African savages who, according to what I’ve read, were reduced to rubbing two sticks together in order to light a fire...”
“But in sum,” said Marcel, wounded in his self-esteem of an anthropopithecus of the twentieth century, “all that doesn’t explain to me how your heating apparatus works.”
“In a very simple fashion,” replied the one who had spoken first. “First of all, you should know that, thanks to certain meteorological apparatus that we can show you, we’ve been able to regulate the seasons, so to speak. Glacial cold and torrid heat have been banished from the climate of the year 3000. The temperature, even outside, never surpasses a certain median range. In apartments, we obtain the precise degree of warmth we desire thanks to the simple apparatus you see here. It consists of thick plaques of iridium linked to powerful electrical machines. It’s sufficient to turn the button of a commutator with a dial, as you’ve just seen, for the plaques to turn red, giving off the exact quantity of heat indicated by the figure at which the
needle stops. I’ll add that iridium heating has been used for some nine hundred years.”
That explanation, which his interlocutor had furnished with perfect good grace, left Marcel torn, between stupor and admiration. What he had learned thus far about life and science was seething in his mind with everything that he could now see and hear. The past and the present were confused within him a sort of chaos from which he had difficulty emerging. He was extracted from his reflections by a question.
“What is your name?”
“Marcel Vernoy…and yours?”
“Blas.” The young man added, introducing his comrades: “These are my friends and study companions: Lucius, Harry, Fritz, Serge, Alcantor… I hope that a perfect entente can be established between them and you. However, from the outset, you can count on the amity of Blas.”
Blushing with pleasure and emotion, Marcel shook the hands that were extended toward him all round. He experienced an inexpressible happiness on observing that, in spite of the paltry views of pessimists, humanity had ended up being orientated toward mildness, fraternity and concord. And he felt, right away, very much at ease with these young men, of whom, in accordance with the normal laws of nature, he might be the historical ancestor. The anguish that he had experienced to begin with had disappeared entirely.
Henceforth, he no longer wanted to take the trouble to reflect. He gave himself entirely to the pleasure of conversing with his new friends. He was avid to learn everything, to know everything, about the mysterious world in which he had just landed.
“It seems to me,” he said to Blas, that yours is a Spanish name. Among your friends, I noticed some that had an English, Russian or German appearance. How does that come about?”
“You’re making a slight error,” replied Blas. “My name isn’t Spanish, it’s neo-Latin.”
“Neo-Latin?”
“Yes. At present, throughout the surface of the globe, only two languages are spoken, neo-Latin and neo-Saxon. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and the colonial dialects of each nation, by virtue of the force of things, thanks to the diffusion of ideas and the rapidity of communications, have melted into a single language, neo-Latin. That language is so clear simple and facile that you’ll understand it very rapidly.
“And neo-Saxon?” Marcel asked.
“By virtue of an entirely natural evolution, neo-Saxon formed in the same way a neo-Latin. It’s the resultant of German, English, Danish and Dutch.”
“Since you’ve reached that point, why two languages instead of one?”
“Thus far, the unification of the human language, which will surely happen one day, hasn’t yielded practical results, in spite of serious attempts. Volapük, Esperanto, and Bolak, the blue language, in spite of the good will of their inventors, failed pitifully. Neo-Latin and neo-Saxon subsist because, thanks to them, one can understand all the masterpieces of the human mind. One is literary, the other scientific. Between the two of them, they symbolize the word in its full essence.”
“What about Arabic and Chinese? And the idioms of the Orient and the Far East?”
“They’ve passed to the ranks of scholarly languages. They’re no longer spoken. The dialects employed by the negroes of Central Africa disappeared first. Our libraries conserve the lexicons of Malagasy and Dahomeyan piously. Then it was the turn of Arabic, Armenian, Persian and Chinese, as well as Japanese. The increasing complexity of ideas in the human brain, and the formidable power of the Latin and Saxon nations, caused the Oriental languages to fall into desuetude quite naturally.”
“How can neo-Saxons and neo-Latins comprehend one another, then?”
“All the habitants of the globe speak both languages. Thanks to our simplified methods, there are even a few students who understand five or six dead languages, such as Sanskrit, Egyptian, French and English.”
“I’ll find myself very ignorant in your midst,” sighed Marcel.
“Not at all!” exclaimed Blas, with a cordial smile. “Thanks to our logical methods and our multilingual phonographs, you’ll soon have caught up with us, believe me.”
“It’s necessary, in any case,” Harry put in, “to inform the director of the school, Monsieur Futural, of the arrival of our new comrade.”
“But what will he say about my presence?” asked Marcel, with a certain anxiety. “I’ve arrived in such strange conditions...”
“Have no fear,” replied Serge. “You’ll be welcomed with open arms.”
“However, the disconcerting fashion in which I find myself among you...”
“Don’t worry about that,” replied Blas. “Your presence here must be a phenomenon of a purely natural order. Our scientists will take charge of explaining it, Have no doubt about that—they’ve explained many others.” Turning toward one of his comrades, Blas added: “Lucius, would you be kind enough to go and find Monsieur Futural?”
“With pleasure,” the young man replied, and went away.
In spite of his neat attire, Marcel felt poorly dressed and unkempt by comparison with his new companions. He darted a glance at his hands, and blushed in confusion on perceiving that they were not irreproachably clean.
“Where can I wash my hands, if you please?” he asked, in a discreet tone.
“What?” replied Blas, in surprise. “You haven’t made your electrical ablutions?”
“No,” replied Marcel, confused.
Blas took pity on his new comrade’s embarrassment, and, indicating a sandstone pedestal near the bed he said: “Climb on that. Don’t be afraid.”
Marcel obeyed, not without a secret apprehension. He feared that an unexpected showed might douse him, and contracted his muscles instinctively. He was very agreeably surprised, therefore, to feel himself traversed, from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair, by beneficent electric effluvia. He experienced a sensation of wellbeing and lightness, which he had never felt after a bath.
His garments, including his shoes, were rid, as if by magic, of their traces of grease and dust, which fused into impalpable powder in the form of gray smoke. Not only did Marcel feel admirably refreshed and washed, but his cuffs and collar had recovered all their whiteness and brilliance.
Blas enjoyed his friend’s astonishment. “However,” he said, after a moment’s reflection, “you ought not to be surprised by the fashion in which we operate our toilette. The electrical oscillation apparatus that you see is already more than a thousand years old. It’s due to one of your contemporaries, the engineer Tesla, who statue you’ll soon be able to admire.”
V. Elixir and Jam
Marcel had just completed his toilette. He was still under the impact of the impression of wonderment caused by that rapid and complete fashion of proceeding with his ablutions when Monsieur and Madame Futural made their entrance.
The director of the school was tall. His green chlamys was draped in broad pleats over his shoulders, where it was retained by an emerald. His beard and his hair were going gray. His physiognomy, perfectly regular, respired a majestic mildness. His dark eyes were sparkling with intelligence.
He was accompanied by Madame Futural, clad in a long blue tunic. Marcel noticed, with surprise, that she was not wearing any jewelry, nor a frilly hat. Her abundant blonde hair was simply retained by a silver ribbon. His figure was not barbarically compressed by a corset with an armature of steel or whalebone. Hygiene and good taste had done justice to those instruments of torture, as they had also caused earrings, rings and bracelets to disappear.
Later, Marcel saw in a museum the jewels and trinkets of an elegant woman if the twentieth century. They were exhibited in a glass case, alongside the golden ornaments of a Gaulish chief, not far from the necklaces of seeds and seashells of the indigenes of Oceania and Central Africa.
Monsieur and Madame Futural gave Marcel the most sympathetic welcome. They had perceived his timidity, so, in order to reassure him, they heaped him with attentions. They assured him that he would be cordially received by his new comrades.
&n
bsp; “Your arrival among us,” said Monsieur Futural, “which seems extraordinary and disconcerting at first, will not be inexplicable for our scientists. In any case, that detail is of no importance. You’re now one of ours; I’m delighted by that. Thanks to you, we shall be able to elucidate some obscure points of the history of the twentieth century.”
Graciously, Madame Futural added: “We’ll try to make sure that you won’t have to repent having left your century for ours. You won’t take long, I hope, to perceive that the year 3000 has a lot to recommend it.”
“Evidently,” said Monsieur Futural, smiling, “it will produce a great change in your habits. You certainly only have a faint idea of the state of simplification at which we’ve arrived in all things, principally regarding education.”
“I’ll try, Monsieur,” Marcel replied, modestly, “to conform as exactly as I can to the discipline of the school into which you’ve been kind enough to welcome me.”
Monsieur Futural smiled. “Our discipline is very mild,” he explained. “The epoch in which adolescents were imprisoned in schools as if in jail and deprived of their liberty came to an end long ago. Cruel and grotesque punishments no longer exist here, and the deplorable habit of making the memory of pupils toil to the detriment of their other faculties has been abandoned once and for all.
“Here,” Monsieur Futural emphasized, “you can work in the fashion that you please, and go anywhere you wish. You’ll understand quickly that you’ll have as much interest as pleasure in following the extremely simple and well-designed plan of study that will be submitted to you. You won’t be bored for a minute, I can guarantee that.”
Marcel lowered his head, stammering a few words of thanks. He was veritably confused by the warm welcome that he had received, and the simple and cordial generosity testified to him.
Henceforth, he felt, so to speak, entirely at home.
“I hope,” Monsieur Futural added, “that everything will go as smoothly as possible. At any rate, I’ll confide you to the care of young Blas, since you’re already on the best of terms with him.
Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions Page 17