Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  Thanks to the transparency of the walls Marcel admired the submarine landscapes that filed before him.

  Inside the submersible there was a delightful sensation of freshness and silence.

  “This,” said the architect, “is my preferred work space. When I have some serious task to execute, or when I want to reflect without being disturbed, I retire within these crystal walls. I’ve spent the finest afternoons of labor here, in the cool and the silence of the submarine depths.”

  To Marcel’s great surprise, the bed of the sea did not resemble any image that had been made of it in olden days. He saw before him clumps of white and pink coral, beds of large blue and green flowers, arbors of lianas, and giant seaweeds spreading out thousands of lacy and vibrant sheets; but the idea of disorder seemed to have been banished from the entire region, The clumps of coral and the forests of algae were interrupted by avenues and clearings carpeted with fine sand.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Marcel. “I didn’t think submarine nature was so rich, fecund and harmonious One might think that the perspectives we’re traversing had been disposed by gardeners of genius, but their beauty owes nothing to human labor, does it?”

  “You’re mistaken,” Blas replied. “This superb flora is due to skillful horticulturalists. In a little while you’ll see the golden helmets of their diving suits shining. This requires a few explanations, however. The great depths of the ocean were an inaccessible domain, closed to human kind for a long time, until the invention of submarines, and progress in chemistry, which finally permitted the manufacture of respirable air at will, gave us the means of exploring those mysterious depths.”

  “In the twentieth century,” Marcel put in, “people were already beginning to construct diving suits and submersible vessels.”

  “Yes,” Blas replied, “but in your epoch, the submarines only descended to feeble depths and were only used to place torpedoes loaded with explosives beneath enemy ships. In the following centuries, however, it was understood that better use could be made of them. Societies were formed for the exploitation of the riches of the ocean. The carcasses of sunken ships were fished up, mines were exploited, and the inexhaustible forests of algae and lichens were utilized as fodder. Chemical factories manufactured, on a large scale, iodine, chlorine and all the other substances that the waters and the sea-bed contain. The wellbeing of humankind was considerably increased thereby. Pisciculture, aided by scientific methods, took on an enormous extent. Dearth and famine were banished from the world forever. Science also obtained great profit from those explorations. Natural history and geology were completed. It was possible to explain the evolution of our planet with the aid of broader and more accurate theories.”

  “And now?” asked Marcel.

  “Nowadays, the relatively recent discovery—since it only goes back a hundred and fifty years—of a substance unique in chemistry, has simplified the production of wealth further. The exploitation of submarine mines and fields of algae has been abandoned as too tiresome and too complicated. Except for the neighborhood of the coasts, the ocean depths have returned to their solitude. For humans they’re no longer anything but a vast promenade, a goal of excursions and a subject of study.”

  “Those promenades can’t be free of danger,” Marcel objected. “How, for instance, do you defend yourselves against sharks, giant cephalopods, narwhals, and whales, not to mention poisonous or electric fish such as electric eels and Moray eels.”

  “For a long time,” replied Blas’ father, “those species have only existed as museum exhibits. All harmful animals have disappeared from the ocean, as they have been exterminated on the land surface.”

  “However, Father,” Blas corrected, “one can’t say that those dangers have entirely disappeared. Last year, a crab of such enormous dimensions and strength that one of its claws could crush a man’s thigh was discovered in a cavern in the Indian Ocean, An encounter with such an animal would certainly be dangerous.” Addressing Marcel, he added: “But I hasten to assure you that that’s very exceptional.” Then, pointing at a wooden cane terminated by a metal tip suspended in a corner of the vessel, he said: “In addition, we have the electric lance. If we have a whim to put on a diving suit and take a walk in the shade of these fine arbors of algae with crimson and gold foliage, we’ll take that lance with us. Whatever the size of any animal that decided to attack us, it would be sufficient to touch it with the tip for it to be killed by the electric current.”

  “That reassures me,” Marcel replied, smiling. “However, I confess that I regret the sharks slightly, and all the monsters that served in my day as a pretext for such dramatic stories.”

  Meanwhile, the submarine had surpassed the zone of the cultivated depths. Now the landscape was harsher and wilder. The forests of algae became inextricable. Shoals of fish. the color of nacre, frightened by the passage of the vessel, rose up from blonde meadows of wrack, like flocks of skylarks rising from a field of wheat at the approach of a hunter.

  Blas, who was holding the wheel of the tiller, had slowed their speed. The crystal hull passed slowly underneath vaults of lianas florid with brilliant corollas, which resembled human eyes opening among green tresses. Jellyfish swung their bells, ornamented with all the colors of the prism. Marcel saw large turtles lying idly on the sand.

  They continued to advance. The landscape was abruptly modified. They passed over a bare plain strewn with ruddy blocks, alternating with black needles of basalt. In the center was the debris of a vaulted construction, the round domes of which, almost at ground level, were reminiscent of bunkers.

  “What are those ruins?” Marcel asked.

  “Similar ones are encountered quite frequently in the submarine solitudes,” Blas replied. “That’s all that remains of the mining exploitations of the societies of old. Those barracks served to lodge the personnel. Abandoned now, they’ve become a favorite abode of fish and crustaceans.

  They had soon surpassed the ruins. Again they were moving under the bleak vaults of the submarine forest.

  “I believe,” said Blas, “that we’d do well to accelerate our speed somewhat. The lianas and weed are much less dense hereabouts. We can go forward without any risk.” While speaking, he had given the wheel a turn.

  The submarine moved on with such rapidity that the landscapes seemed to be fleeing abruptly to the right and left. Marcel hardly had time to glimpse them before they were replaced.

  Suddenly, the passengers felt a slight shock.

  “Clumsy fellow!” cried Blas’ father. “The crystal keel touched the bottom!”

  He had scarcely finished speaking when there was a muffled detonation.

  Some distance behind the submarine, a flash of white light had sprung forth, and the vessel spun, caught by a terrible eddy. Under the impulsion of a formidable shock, the submarine had capsized. The passengers had tumbled, bumping into one another, uttering cries of fright.

  Blas had released the wheel and fallen backwards. He and his father were the first to recover their composure. Although bruised, they succeeded in getting to the helm. By leaning on the direction levers with all their force, they were able to restore the submarine’s equilibrium.

  They examined the engines, which had not suffered any damage.

  “It’s fortunate,” the architect declared, gravely, “that that accident, whose cause I can’t explain as yet, didn’t occur in the vicinity of a rock. The pressure produced by the explosion was so violent that our crystal hull would have been shattered into a thousand fragments.”

  Hyla and her mother only had slight bruises. They were quickly reassured. As for Marcel, he had gone as pale as a corpse. His fear had been so great that he remained in his corner, incapable of saying a word.

  Blas approached him and tried to comfort him. “It’s nothing,” he said. “The danger’s over now. We’ll return to the house at low speed, taking all sorts of precautions.” He added, sharply: “But you’re wounded! You’re bleeding!”

  He had take
n Marcel’s hand, which did indeed have a slight scratch, which the young man had sustained in falling against the latch of the metal door.

  “Don’t worry,” he replied to his friend, with an effort. “It’s not serious. I was more frightened than hurt. But please, tell me how that terrible explosion was produced, which nearly cost us our lives.”

  “I confess that I have no idea.”

  The father reflected. “I believe,” he said, after a few moments of silence, “that there’s only one plausible means of explaining that accident. You know that one of the most frequently employed engines of war in olden days were torpedoes. Some were constructed that were so advanced that, in order to activate their detonator, it only required a slight impact, a mere brush, sometimes even a ray of light. I believed that we just touched one such engine with our keel, abandoned centuries ago.”

  “How is it,” Blas asked, “that after so much time, the powders and fulminates have been able to conserve their explosive power?”

  “That’s not surprising. Sheltered from contact with the air, powders aren’t modified significantly. And the sea, by depositing around the torpedo a thick layer of calcareous incrustations, must have contributed to their conservation.”

  “We were lucky not to have been annihilated.”

  “That has two causes,” the architect replied. “Firstly, the extreme speed with which we were traveling. In the short interval before the detonation was produced, we had already had time to gain a little ground. If we’d been traveling more slowly, our doom would have been certain.”

  “And the second reason?”

  “Well, I believe—but I’m giving you this explanation for what it might be worth—that the thick layer of petrifaction that covered the detonator must have delayed its effect, perhaps by a few tenths of a second. That small space of time undoubtedly permitted us to get out of the danger zone.”

  During this conversation the submarine, this time steered by Blas’ father, was moving cautiously between the cliffs of a kind of ravine covered with quivering foliage, between which myriads of fish were playing.

  Ten minutes later they were back on the edge of the magnificent submarine arbors that Marcel had admired at the beginning of the voyage. He felt completely reassured.

  “Now,” said Blas, “all peril has disappeared. In any case, if we’ve sustained any damage, the horticulturalist divers who are numerous in this region will come to our aid.”

  “To what class of society do those divers belong?” Marcel asked. “Are they outcasts as in the city of Artika?”

  “No, they’re men like any others, whom their work or their personal tastes bring to submarine culture.”

  A few moments later, the submersible arrived opposite its graving-dock.

  After disembarking, the travelers headed for the house. In spite of the marvelous spectacles that he had contemplated in the course of his excursion, it was not without a veritable sentiment of pleasure that Marcel found himself back on solid ground.

  The wound on his hand was no longer bleeding, but it was causing him some pain. Hyla and Blas poured a few drops of a strongly-perfumed balm on the cut, applied a drop of collodion, and told the young man that in a matter of hours it would no longer be visible.

  The submarine excursion had awakened a host of ideas in Marcel’s mind. He could not get used to the thought that blue whales, sperm whales, sharks and even sea-lions had disappeared. He could not help questioning Blas, whose complaisance in answering him remained indefatigable.

  “Why, then,” he asked him, “haven’t I perceived any animals during the journeys we’ve made together on land?”

  “For the excellent reason,” said Blas, “that except for those we conserve in our zoological gardens, the majority of the wild and domestic animals of your era have disappeared.”

  “Really?” exclaimed Marcel. “I would never have believed that!”

  Blas went on: “The disappearance of living species took place in a gradual and, so to speak, methodical fashion. After the extinction of prehistoric races annihilated by geological upheavals and abrupt shifts in temperature, the carnivores became extinct in their turn, incessantly hunted by humans and driven from solitude to solitude by the ever-increasing expansion of cultivated and inhabited land. Already, in your epoch, there were no more wolves in the Auvergne, and the Emperor of Russia was the only person still to possess aurochs, in a park surrounded by a solid wall. As the intertropical forests were felled, lions, tigers and snakes became rarer.”

  “In fact, in the twentieth century, the English and French governments were already paying bounties for the destruction of wild beasts and poisonous reptiles. Attempts were even made to transplant mongooses, diehard enemies of snakes, into many colonies. I can understand the destruction of harmful animals easily enough, but what became of the others?”

  “Domestic animals were only tolerated because of the services they rendered to humans. The extension of railways and the progress of automobilism, and then aerial and submarine navigation, suppressed all beasts of traction, from the elephant to the donkey. Horses became so rare that they were only seen in museums. The animals that were only reared because their flesh was edible, such as pigs, cattle and sheep, were dethroned in their turn by the chemical fabrication of nutritive substances. Game disappeared when humans renounced the barbaric pleasure of hunting, and no one any longer took the trouble to preserve it at great expense.”

  “What about the birds? And the insects?” asked Marcel, with a hint of sadness. “Did they also disappear before the omnipotence of your civilization?”

  “Yes, the birds were gradually destroyed. The powerful electric currents that we employ for long distance communication by wireless telephony or telegraphy were mortal to them. Those that didn’t break their skulls against the glass of our electric globes, the blinding light of which hypnotized them, were killed or paralyzed by the currents. Like all the other animals they were relegated to scientific collections. As for insects, parasites or vehicles of microbes, we ended up getting rid of those too. Electric plowing, by destroying their larvae and eggs, once made a considerable contribution to that; powerful insecticides did the rest. Flies, mosquitoes, woodlice and fleas are only a memory.

  “I know full well,” Blas continued, “that the world must seem to you to be a trifle depoeticized, thus deprived of creatures like the dog and the horse, which had animated it at the beginning of its evolution, but when you’ve been living among us a little longer, you’ll see that in our society, poetry still subsists. It’s different; it has been subject to the law of progress, but it remains. Our birds are our aeroscaphs!”

  However, it was getting late. After taking his leave of Blas’ family, Marcel climbed back into the aeroscaph in the company of his friend, and they set a course for the distant towers of the school, to the enclosure of which they had to return before nine o’clock.

  XIV. The Palace of Art and History

  Marcel now knew the majority of the usages and customs of the society of the year 3000. Nothing astonished him any longer. He no longer experienced the wonder and the amazement of the first day.

  As the species of vertigo that the novelty of objects and the bizarrerie of his situation had produced in him dissipated, however, and he put more order into his ideas, the memory of the old world haunted him. The image of his saddened parents cast a kind of melancholy veil between his gaze and the marvels that surrounded him.

  The world of the thirtieth century was splendid, admirable, almost perfect; but when Marcel looked into himself he could not help admitting that he would gladly separate himself from all that magnificence in order to rejoin Monsieur and Madame Vernoy, to see them again and embrace them.

  What caused him the most chagrin was not so much being separated from his parents as thinking that they were doubtless mourning his death, or at least his disappearance.

  I’ve never been anything for them, he reflected, but a cause of cares and anxieties. I haven’t proc
ured them the satisfactions that they had a right to expect of me...

  And Marcel reproached himself bitterly for his bad conduct, his sullenness and his idleness. Oh, if it had only been possible for him, at that moment, to retrace the course of the centuries, to rediscover the smoke-blackened landscapes, and the men bizarrely clad in dark suits and cardboard hats, of the old Paris of his childhood, how he would have worked, how happy he would have been, and what satisfaction he would have given to his dear parents!

  Fundamentally, his new friends, Blas, Serge and Lucius, were so perfect, so impeccable in their thoughts and their conduct, that Marcel, involuntarily, experienced far more admiration for them than real camaraderie.

  Since getting up, Marcel had been rolling those ideas around his head, and in spite of the desire he had to show a good face to Blas, who had come to wake him up, he felt his heart gripped by an implacable sadness.

  Entirely given over to his thoughts, he listened distractedly to the explanations that his friend furnished of the manufacture of glass and porcelain in electric furnaces.

  Blas eventually noticed that Marcel was not involved in the conversation.

  “You’re distracted, it seems to me,” he said. “You appear quite melancholy. Perhaps you regret the cherished individuals you left in the past. It is, I fear, materially impossible for me to procure you a means of rejoining them. Since you’re among us, resign yourself to your fate, and make a virtue of the necessity.”

  Blas reflected momentarily, and then went on: “I anticipated that we would start serious work today, but, given the sadness that is overwhelming you, I believe that it’s preferable, in the interests of your mental health, to grant ourselves—both of us—one more day of leave. I’ll do everything possible to offer you interesting distractions. Perhaps you’ll forget, in the end, the old world that holds you so forcefully by the heart.”