Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  Suddenly, he uttered a cry of joy. He had just perceived, lying on the ground, unstoppered but still half full, a small bottle of belzevorine.

  He ordered that it be picked up and given to him; and his gaze remained, with a fixity full of dementia, on that tiny debris of an entire laborious existence.

  The doctor was carried to his bedroom, but he had no intention of being separated from the flask found in the rubble. He wanted it to be placed beside his bed, alongside the potions and remedies that a domestic had just brought, and he did not cease to contemplate it with an ecstatic gaze.

  The doctor seemed calmer; Monsieur Vernoy thought that he could quit him for a few moments in order to go to the Blue Room to make sure that Marcel’s slumber was still proceeding without a hitch.

  Scarcely had Monsieur Vernoy left, however, than the condition of the injured man worsened. As the physician had predicted, a crisis occurred. Monsieur Belzevor became delirious.

  At the risk of disturbing his dressings, he sat up in bed and pronounced inconsequential words and halting phrases, while gesticulating.

  The domestic that had replaced Monsieur Vernoy knew that at each crisis, as he had been instructed, it was necessary to administer a sedative potion to his master. He had been told that the sedative in question was in the largest bottle.

  The servant, well-intentioned but ignorant, did indeed look to see which was the largest bottle…and made the invalid drink all that remained of the belzevorine.

  The elixir’s effect was instantaneous. The injured man immediately calmed down; his fever disappeared, and he did not take long to fall into a profound sleep.

  He too was now en route for the realms of the future.

  IX. The Hall of Athletes and the Hall of the Muses

  The aeroscaph that was carrying Blas, Serge and Marcel came to alight gently on the platform of the school’s aerial station.

  The three friends were delighted with their excursion, and did not feel the slightest fatigue. Marcel observed privately, with admiration, that in the thirtieth century a journey from Paris to the Pole was executed much more comfortably, and much more rapidly, than an excursion from Paris to Saint-Cloud in olden times.

  The aeroscaph, as fast as lightning, comfortable and easy to handle, left far behind the steamers and the railways of times past, so slow, and of a mechanism that was both so rudimentary and so complicated.

  Marcel was increasingly getting a liking for the society and the conversation of his new comrades. When he compared, by means of memory, Blas and Serge with the schoolboys of the twentieth century, the latter seemed pitiful in every respect. Those noisy, idle pupils, full of faults and occupied with futilities, appeared to him to be feeble and ridiculous individuals. He wondered, with surprise, how he had once been able to take pleasure in their conversation and interest himself in petty individuals of such limited intelligence and such defective education.

  In reasoning thus, Marcel was committing the sin of vanity; he was taking no account of the fact that he had recently been no different from those he was now treating with so much disdain. The fact is that the frequentation of Blas and Serge, opening up new perfections on all questions, had caused him to measure the abyss of his own ignorance. Their mildness and their exquisite politeness had forced him to blush at his egotism, his sulking and his anger.

  In spite of the efforts that he made to maintain himself at the same conversational level as his comrades of the year 3000, he sensed continually how inferior he was to them, and the fraternal indulgence with which they treated him added further to his humiliation.

  What surprised him most about Blas and Serge was that they were entirely exempt from vanity. They did not seek, on any occasion, to put themselves forward, to shine. When they were wrong they admitted it, smiling, without showing any ill humor.

  Marcel was far from being so perfect. Of a slightly susceptible character, he sometimes found himself abominably vexed when Blas or Serge, with a simple remark, devoid or irony of bitterness, caused him to observe his lack of logic or his stupidity. In fact, they took infinite precautions to avoid wounding him.

  Thus, little by little, Marcel was touched to the depths of his heart by the amicable indulgence that his new friends testified to him. The sincere amity that he did not take long to feel for them had nothing in common with the affection he had experienced for his former comrades; it partook simultaneously of charm, respect and sympathy.

  As Marcel, in the company of Blas and Serge, quit the elevator and set foot in the circular gallery of the school, the three young men encountered two of their comrades, Fritz and Lucius.

  Serge saluted them from a distance. Fritz and Lucius, on recognizing Marcel, whom they had seen arrive in such a marvelous fashion, hastened toward him.

  They asked him courteously whether he was experiencing much difficulty in forsaking his habits and tastes, and how he appreciated the system of education in vigor in the thirtieth century.

  “You seem to be exactly similar to us, now,” said Fritz. “No one would suspect, on seeing and hearing you, that you’ve arrived from the epoch of locomotives.”

  “It isn’t too obvious, then,” replied Marcel, flattered, “that I’m a barbarian?”

  Everyone protested.

  “Certainly,” said Blas, “you still lack a little muscle and brain. In your epoch, people didn’t know how to exercise their organs appropriately. With the rational methods of training that we possess, though, you’ll quickly catch us up...”

  Marcel had once been a fervent lover of croquet, tennis and football. The word muscle awoke an entire series of ideas in him. “I’m curious,” he said, “to know what physical exercises you indulge in for preference, and in what fashion you perform gymnastics.”

  “We’ll satisfy your curiosity shortly,” said Serge. “We’ll take you to the Hall of Athletes. But you’re forgetting that we haven’t eaten...”

  “Nor have we,” said Lucius. “We’ll dine together, if you like.”

  Still following the circular gallery, now inundated with light by electric lamps encased in the capitals, the five young men headed for the room in which Marcel had taken the morning meal.

  From the same urns and the same diamond ewers, they savored the same azure jam and drank the same reparative elixir.

  After the meal, which was expedited in a matter of minutes, they went down a onyx stairway that gave access to the central garden via gentle flights of steps.

  One might have thought that the foliage was illuminated by thousands of glow-worms, so cleverly had the light been managed and graduated. In the clumps of bushes and the arbors there was a sort of phosphorescent penumbra, which was not at all offensive or brutal to the eyesight.

  In the pathways, young men were strolling in groups, nobly draped in their bright chlamydes. They were walking slowly.

  Marcel overheard a few snatches of conversation in passing. Like Plato’s disciples in the gardens of the Academy, the young strollers were discussing animatedly the highest problems of art, philosophy and morality.

  “People work hard here, night and day,” Marcel observed.

  “The comrades you’ve just encountered,” Serge replied, “Aren’t working at the moment. They’re simply relaxing, by means of cheerful conversations about subjects that interest them.

  Meanwhile, they arrived on a part of the garden that was much more brightly illuminated. Columns of porphyry bore powerful lamps at their summit. Their radiance intersected to form a veritable luminous veil composed of a succession of bright bands in various colors. It was like walking under the vault of a cathedral made of rainbows. Those lights, although bright, had nothing reminiscent of the raw and ferocious glare that characterized the electric arcs and incandescent filaments of the twentieth century, the cause of so many opthalmias.

  At the extremity of that avenue of radiance, a monumental fountain poured forth luminous waves that changed their form continually.

  “That fountain,” said Bla
s, “is due to the collaboration of celebrated scientists and artists. It’s so skillfully contrived that it sometimes represents a flower bed from which cascades of corollas are falling, and sometimes a mythological scene. Chimeras vomit flames, and then give way to a swarm of winged spirits that soar toward the sky with fiery wings...”

  Marcel remained in front of the luminous fountain for some time, in admiration. His friends were obliged to extract him from his contemplation.

  “You’re forgetting,” Blas said to him, mildly, “that we were going to the Hall of Athletes, The evening’s advancing, and we won’t have enough time to see everything...”

  Regretfully, Marcel turned his back on the marvels of the enchanted garden. Still accompanied by his friends, he went into the Hall of Athletes.

  It was an enormous circular hall, with an arena in the center sprinkled with mica dust. All around the arena, which was surmounted by an enormously high dome, rooms opened that were each devoted to a different exercise.

  In the central arena, a troop of young men clad in simple leotards were performing leaps. A graduated mat permitted them to compare the heights attained. Marcel’s eyes widened in surprise when he saw that the young men were jumping to heights of seven or eight meters, almost without effort.

  “How are they able to jump like that?” he asked Blas. “I confess that I don’t understand.”

  “A few of my comrades,” Blas replied, “have very elastic muscles. They can’t jump as well without the special shoes that they’re wearing. As you can see, the shoes have double soles and are fitted with powerful springs. A light impulsion is sufficient for the jumper to rebound like a veritable rubber ball. It’s by virtue of those shoes that we’re able, whenever we please, to leap to the top of a tower in a single bound, or cross a wide stream. Thanks to them, the weight of the human body is considerably diminished.”

  Marcel gave himself the pleasure of putting on a pair of those shoes and executing a series of leaps that would have rendered the most agile acrobats and best trained gymnasts of his time jealous. One detail was, however, humiliating; in spite of all his efforts, he did not succeed in jumping half as high as Blas, Serge or any of those who surrounded him.

  “I’m truly too inferior,” he said, trying to conceal his discontentment.

  “That’s not surprising,” replied Serge. “Look at our muscles and compare them with yours.”

  “In fact,” Marcel observed, examining his companions’ formidable biceps, “you all have a musculature that would make Milo of Crotona envious.” And he considered his thin arms and beanpole legs, those of an anemic Parisian. “I performed honorably in all the contests at school,” he remarked, with chagrin, “but compared with you, I perceive that I’m a very paltry fellow.”

  “It’s necessary not to be afflicted by that,” said Blas. “In your time, the art of making muscles grow artificially and conserving their solidity by means of appropriate exercises was unknown “

  “What! You can make muscles grow artificially! I confess that I don’t understand...”

  “And yet, thinking about it, it’s a discovery that goes back to the twentieth century. An American doctor, by electrifying the arm of a young woman afflicted by rheumatism, perceived that by the end of the experiment, the biceps had almost doubled in volume. Since that epoch, the primitive discovery has been greatly improved. Nowadays, everyone has biceps as large as he pleases.”

  “Why is it so important to you to have such vigorous muscles?” Marcel asked.

  “Our brains being considerably hypertrophied, if we weren’t extremely well-muscled, the equilibrium would be broken. We’d still be as intelligent as we are but condemned to neurasthenia and neurosis; we’d always be ill. Whereas, as you’ve been able to see, we’re as healthy in body as we are in mind.”

  At that moment Marcel heard a noise above his head. He looked up.

  Through a wide open panel in the glazed dome he saw a singular being penetrate it, with heavy wing-beats: a sort of human bat, who came to alight gently in the arena. Marcel immediately demanded explanation.

  “You’re simply seeing an aerial cyclist,” Serge told him, “returning from a nocturnal excursion over the gardens.”

  “I would have thought,” sad Marcel, “that with aeroscaphs as improved as those you have, such an apparatus would be unnecessary.”

  “So we only conserve them as instruments of sport. The aerial cycle is a rather complicated machine. It has something of the balloon, the kite and the parachute about it. It can only carry one person, who puts the propeller in motion with the aid of pedals. A sail-parachute ensures the direction of the apparatus and permits the avoidance of accidents. The aerocycle is especially employed in excursions of short duration, or for brief pleasure-trips. You’ll see us, for example, leaving the school on our aerocycles on certain days to go and collect botanical specimens.”

  “And accidents never happen with such fragile machines?”

  “Never. The worst that can happen is that a clumsy individual who can’t steer his aerocycle, or an unfortunate whose apparatus has broken down, floats gently to the ground, borne without a shock by the sail-parachute. It’s necessary to be exceedingly unlucky, in such as case, to collide with the spire of an edifice or to touch an electricity tower. So far as I know, that has never occurred.”

  While this conversation was taking place, more aerocyclists were entering and exiting.

  Marcel was very interested in the manner in which they took off. They were all wearing spring shoes, and with an energetic thrust of the heels they rose into the air with their apparatus; then they started the propeller in motion and did not take long to disappear.

  With a great deal of pleasure, Marcel visited the halls of trapezes, fixed bars, parallel bars and dumb-bells. He paused for a few moments on the edge of the swimming pool. Afterwards, Blas showed him a dynamometric machine that measured human strength exactly, in kilograms, and permitted the pupils to render an exact account, day by day, of their progress in gymnastics.

  As they were about to leave the room that contained the dynamometer they encountered Monsieur Futural, who was heading for the Hall of Athletes, accompanied by his wife.

  Monsieur Futural approached Marcel and asked him benevolently whether he was content.

  “I have nothing but praise for my comrades,” he replied. “They’re been charming.” He added, smiling: “Oh course, I’m very vexed to have observed my muscular inferiority.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” replied Monsieur Futural. “With us, you’ll quickly be able to put on muscle. Vigor, like intelligence, depends greatly on hygiene.”

  “Since you don’t seem to be taking pleasure in these corporeal exercises,” Madame Futural put in, “perhaps you’d be more interested in artistic recreations.”

  “Certainly,” her husband approved. He turned toward Blas and added: “Take Marcel, I beg you, to the Hall of the Muses. It will be an excellent way for him, and for you, to conclude the evening.”

  Monsieur Futural had spoken more in the tone of a friend giving advice than that of a master intimating an order. And after a slight salute to the young men surrounding Marcel, he went into the Hall of Athletes.

  After having taken their leave to Serge, Fritz and Lucius, therefore, Marcel and Blas headed for the Hall of the Muses.

  It was an elegant construction in green and white porcelain, situated in the center of a clump of oleanders and rhododendrons. The walls were decorated with bas-reliefs, the subjects of which had been taken from the history of art and letters. Homer could be seen there reciting his Iliad, surrounded by attentive heroes; Shakespeare was holding the horses of noblemen outside the door of the Globe Theater; Victor Hugo was contemplating the sea pensively from the island of Guernsey; and the musician Arachnus was composing his universally renowned cantata Redemptive Science.

  A large number of other bas-reliefs, taken from the history of painting, sculpture and illustrious musicians, decorated the polychro
matic façade.

  Without wasting any time asking Blas for explanations, Marcel followed his guide into the vestibule of the Hall of the Muses. In the first room they went into, four young men were just finishing the execution of a quartet.

  Marcel, who had often attended great Sunday concerts in the company of his father, remarked that they played with purity of taste accuracy and exquisite sentiment.

  “Those are great artistes!” he could not help exclaiming.

  “You’re exaggerating. They’re simply students distracting themselves after the day’s studies by making a little music. You can see, however, that they’re not bad.”

  Marcel would have liked to listen to another piece, but Blas remarked that it was getting late, and they went into the next room, where a young man was modeling a bust of one of his comrades. Marcel was able to observe that over the centuries the chisels and various other instruments of sculpture had only been slightly modified. He said so to Blas.

  “However,” the latter replied, “We have made progress; we now make clever use of machinery to complete the process.” And he pointed to an assemblage of sharp rods in a corner, connected by screws that permitted their separation to be modified.

  “We also posses sculpting machines,” he added, “the mechanical chisels of which, armed with diamond tips, carve statues in the hardest granite. Needless to say, those machines haven’t replaced artists. They merely facilitated the reproduction of masterpieces.”

  When they went into the next room, Marcel experienced a profound emotion. As he went in, a loud voice was declaiming two lines from Corneille:

  The obscure clarity that falls from the stars

  With the tide, enables us to see thirty sails...26

  Until then, Marcel had only heard neo-Latin. The sounds of his mother tongue, purely emitted, struck his ear delightfully.