Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  A capricious and sulky schoolboy had gone into the Château de Montbarzy a few days before; he had emerged as a man.

  Marcel had recounted to his parents all the phases of his vision of the year 3000, and they had listened to his story with admiration. They dared not call into doubt what their son said. His dream appeared to them as a mysterious problem, which they did not want to solve. Modestly, with a little respectful anxiety, they contented themselves with applauding the astonishing transformation that had taken place in their son. A sentiment of deference and terror was involuntarily mingled with their affection.

  Twice a day, Marcel and his parents went to the Château de Montbarzy to see Doctor Belzevor.

  To their great astonishment, the condition of the injured man was unmodified. His wounds, it is true, slowly scarred over, but he did not wake up from the placid and smiling slumber into which the absorption of belzevorine had plunged him.

  The domestics and the physicians were chagrined, not knowing what to do. In order to awaken the doctor they had employed the most energetic revulsives, in vain. Acids, electricity and the tips of hot needles had not returned his sensibility. The ecstatic smile that seemed to be fixed on his lips remained immutable.

  Fearing to compromise themselves, the local physicians ceased their futile attempts. After having conferred, they declared unanimously that Dr. Belzevor was plunged in a catalepsy of a particular kind, not previously catalogued, and that it was indispensable to submit his case to expert specialists.

  The end of the vacation arrived without the doctor having woken up. His wounds were completely scarred over, his pulse was perfectly regular, and his physiognomy was still smiling.

  Monsieur Belzevor’s colleagues in the Académie des Sciences were informed of the strange case. They all knew the doctor and thought highly of him. They sent a delegation to the Château de Montbarzy. A scrupulous investigation was decided.

  The savant academicians were unanimous in concluding that, in order to awaken their colleague, it would have been necessary to make him absorb a little of the special elixir that counterbalanced or annulled the effects of belzevorine after the dose had been taken. Unfortunately, the elixir and the antidote had been annihilated along with the laboratory.

  The delegates of the Académie des Sciences searched the ruins, and studied the slightest fragments of paper that had escaped the conflagration, without obtaining any result. Dr. Belzevor’s methods were so original, and so personal, that there was no chance of recovering by analogy the principle of his discoveries.

  The delegates of the Académie found themselves in a great embarrassment, all the more so because Monsieur Belzevor had no family, no relatives that could make a decision in his regard.

  After a series of discussions, it was agreed that the competent tribunals would be asked to appoint a judiciary counsel to supervise the administration of Dr. Belzevor’s property temporarily, and that he would be transported to a sanitarium near Paris, where his colleagues and friends could visit him frequently, and where no effort would be spared to obtain his cure.

  The strange circumstances of Dr. Belzevor’s malady had excited public opinion. Periodicals and newspapers published his biography and listed his discoveries. His photograph took its place among those of celebrated individuals. The doctor had never enjoyed such renown before he went to sleep.

  Gradually, the fuss died down. Dr, Belzevor still did not wake up.

  With the aid of esophageal probes, the physicians at the sanitarium where he was being cared for enabled him to absorb meat extract, beef tea and albumin. The cataleptic condition was unmodified.

  His face was still smiling, his pulse regular, and his limbs relaxed. The specialists were bewildered, and ventured a thousand audacious hypotheses, with no result.

  Marcel had resumed the course of his studies. He now provoked the admiration of his professors and his comrades, as much by his ardor for work as his mildness, his cheerfulness, his kindness and his politeness. He was loved by everyone, and no jealous person or enemy could be found to denigrate him.

  Monsieur and Madame Vernoy, at the peak of happiness, only pronounced the name of Dr. Belzevor with gratitude.

  Every week, Marcel and his parents went piously to visit their friend, the prolongation of whose cataleptic slumber Monsieur and Madame Vernoy did not see without sadness. Marcel, on the contrary, did not seem at all worried by his benefactor’s malady.

  One day, Monsieur Vernoy addressed a few slight reproaches to him on that subject. “Your attitude toward Monsieur Belzevor,” he told him, “chagrins me all the more as I have no reproach to address to you in other regards. Have you a desiccated heart? Do you lack gratitude? One might think that you were almost rejoicing to see the man of genius who saved you remaining in a slumber that isolates him from the rest of humankind, and makes him an unconscious and vegetal being.”

  “Pardon me, Father,” Marcel replied, gravely. “I’m as sensible as you are to what you describe as Doctor Belzevor’s misfortune. If I thought he were prey to any suffering, however minimal, you would see me utterly afflicted. But I confess to you frankly that if I’m not more emotional, it’s because I believe the doctor to be completely happy.”

  “Why is that?” asked Monsieur Vernoy, surprised.

  “Has not Dr. Belzevor absorbed the miraculous elixir that permits the mysterious river of Future Ages to be surpassed on the wing of unknown forces? At the present moment, Doctor Belzevor is doubtless strolling, as I have strolled myself, in magical palaces and enchanted parks. He is the respected guest of scientists who will be born ten centuries from now. Clad in gilded armor, he is exploring the submarine depths. He is flying through the air in crystal aeroscaphs. He is enjoying the beauty and the wisdom of a more perfect world. My dear Father, Doctor Belzevor certainly has nothing of which to complain. Let him sleep for a long time yet. He is so happy in his beautiful dream!”

  Pierre Grasset: The Discovery of the Earth in 2009

  (1909)

  Lying back in the cushions of his aeroplane, his eyes half-closed and veiled by a kind of vertigo, whipped by the wind of his course, Henri Dumont could hardly see the extended, sparkling white wings of his flying machine and the silhouette of his chauffeur, sitting beside him at the helm; the entire world was nothing but blue, a uniform blue, bright and fresh, in the midst of which he was floating, his body and mind delectably light.

  The soft and monotonous song of the motor, the incessantly even and excessively bright color of the sky, and the regular flow of the air over his cheeks, caused him to lie back further and would soon have sent him to asleep; he decided to wake himself up, and with a nervous movement of his body he sat up, opened his eyes and grasped reality again.

  “I’ll take the helm,” he said.

  He gets up, and while the standing chauffeur kept one hand on the steering wheel, he takes his place. Without any interruption to its progress, the nacelle oscillates, pitching like a frail boat in the ocean of the sky, ready to capsize.

  Dumont reviews the controls of the engine with a glance; in his memory he operates them all: there is the one of the right helix, the one of the left helix, and the governor of altitude...

  Well awake now, having become the mind of the great soaring bird, leaning forward, his eyes scanning more rapidly, he senses the living vehicle vibrate beneath him at the order of his fingers, hesitate, and finally fly like an arrow when the bowstring is released with a click. The mechanisms, the helices and the white wings are an extension of himself; it is his beating heart that is sending his blood into the supple machine, and it is really his weak muscles and his tensed muscles with which he his cutting through the sky, cleaving and possessing it.

  A small helicopter, all its helices vibrating, overtook him effortlessly. Dumont then caught up with an aerobus, which was purring heavily on the spot, like a maladroit bumble-bee, He brushed it with the tip of his wing, with a precise flight that nevertheless trembled slightly in the wake of the huge m
achine. With the solemn racket of an official vehicle a Cook Agency flying wagon went past and fled, carrying away its lined-up Englishmen.

  Helicopters were multiplying now and populating the joyful sky; no longer able to pierce the air in a straight line, they were making abrupt detours, readjusting their course, and swerving again with the harmonious movements of supple fish in a Hokusai print. It was evident by the light sureness of their evolutions that they had no consciousness of being heavy bodies—or, rather, that they had only kept, of the ancient notion of weight, that which is necessary to experience the voluptuous sensation of vanquishing it continuously.

  Gliders slid between them, wings open. They were becoming rare in the year 2009, for machines with helices, easier to control, defying the wind more easily, were beginning to replace them. A few sportsmen continued to maneuver them even so, because they loved their grace and the skill that they had had the opportunity to develop.

  That very day, in fact, the aero-club had organized an aeroplane race. That contest between the sailing ships of the air, in an era of helicopters would doubtless by comparable to the regattas of past centuries, which played on the sea with sailing boats in spite of the definitive triumph of steamboats.

  Dumont had to speed up.

  He could already perceive a black mass on the horizon, motionless in the air, which began to quiver and flicker, became a flying ant-hill, and appeared to run toward him, growing strangely, soon showing that it was formed of a multitude of vehicles pressed tightly together. The black mass elongated and split, and Dumont, who was heading toward it at top speed, was able to distinguish the vehicles clearly, arranged in two parallel long black serpents to either side of a blue ribbon of sky, an immense fictitious floor on which the race was about to be disputed.

  He was obliged to slow down; the air thickened around him in every direction, and he had difficulty maintaining level flight in that buzzing hive. They were aggregated so closely, one was so far from the habitual sensations of free space, that one might have thought that one had descended to earth in the midst of a stifling crowd. Impatiently, he let himself fall to a lower altitude, disengaged from that swarm of huge importunate flies, found the sky again underneath, passed under a roof of quivering helices and rose up again into the highway of light that was the racecourse.

  A cable retained at its extremities by two strong helicopters traversed the broad blue road. Dumont came to hook himself on to it alongside his competitors, switched off his engine and waited; he was to the last to depart.

  One by one, the gliders hanging above the abyss released their mooring at a given signal; the long hulls were seen to fall, their great awkward wings inert, into the gulf of the sky, but soon, supported by the air, they were redressed, acquired a soul, rose up and fled, soaring like giant seagulls or fantastic dragonflies.

  There was a disturbance, and anxious cries; one of the gliders, number 5, was carried away by the wind; it was soon no more, above the heads looking up into the dazzling sky, than a small dot which changed course abruptly, heading southwards.

  “That’s Henri Dumont...”

  “Dumont of the Aero-Club?”

  He race is over; the ribbon trembles and breaks; all the vehicles scatter like a swarm of bees whose hive has been tipped over.

  Soon, the movement is organized in the direction of Paris, and, at low speed, aviators cluster, overtake one another, salute one another with their hats and amiable words; chauffeurs link their flight and then separate again. “Pay attention, you!” Meanwhile, slightly apart, and even between the strollers, a few lunatics traveling at high speed go whistling past and disappear.

  A long time before that, the Earth was immense. The sea was something imprecise and terrible, on which people embarked, uncertain of the return, resolved to risk death in the tempest, to land after a long voyage in a promised land.

  Journeys over land took as long as journeys over the sea. Old engravings show the arrival of diligences in the main square of towns. The innkeeper, his bonnet in his hand, welcomes the travelers who emerge from their box marveling at having escaped thieves and precipices, finally able to breathe freely. The houses do not look like the houses of today, the people and the costumes are new; it is another air, another world.

  Railways striped the old world with their shining double lines; trains emerged from stations whistling, in the midst of signals of all colors; they pulled the towns toward one another and began to mingle countries. Ships brought winter visitors from Paris to Egypt, who had departed for Nice in previous years.

  The locomotives, weary of marching along tightropes, emerged from the rails to speed along the roads; automobiles, gliding, raring and bellowing, hurled clouds of dust in the faces of those who still made use of horses, or even their feet, to travel.

  Auto routes and railways did not waste their time, like the roads of old, running over plains, scaling hills and making detours in order to go through mountains by choosing passes; they bestrode valleys on gigantic bridges and excavated long tunnels through the mountains.

  That trellis of routes brought al the continents of the earth closer together, filled in vales, flattened mountains; in tightening its mesh, it reduced and leveled the earth.

  Heavy boats, strengthened by powerful engines, removed the frisson of danger from the longest crossings. The Mediterranean ceased to be the marvelous country of Ulysses; the great chocolatiers of the nineteenth century no longer encountered in their cruises either Circe or the Cyclops. The Mediterranean, which Herodotus called a sea, became a lake; the Ocean opened up and then closed again, vanquished in its turn. The dragnets of Oceanographers did not catch sirens, and submarines, having explored the forests of the sea-bed, emptied them of all their mystery; and thus the abysses were filled in

  Already, people were striving to extract themselves from the small, flat earth in order to find space to cross, air to breathe. They took old balloons from which the impatient had long hung down enclosed in little baskets, and were then confided to the winds; those old balloons were stretched and elongated, their nacelles fitted with helices, which, until that day, had only beaten water but learned quickly to support themselves on air.

  Aeroplanes bounded and fell back, breaking a wing. Then, one day, those dragonflies with open wings, immobilized in level flight, glided gently between two layers of air. The motors had become more powerful, the useless wings were broken; helices purred all around the nacelle and the helicopter entered into the air, and rose above it, corskscrewing its mass with its spinning helices.

  Were they not the autos of old, increasingly bold, that had taken off like that? The racing autos with trenchant prows had been seen elongating into speedy beasts, bounding to the right and left when they were given the signal to depart, and it was necessary to hold the steering wheel with a firm hand in order to oblige them to follow the thread of the road. Finally victorious, they had reared up with a vigorous thrust of the back, and set a course for the sky, breaking in their passage the roof of leafy branches of the plane-trees of the highway.

  It is said that Pythagoras was the first to teach that the Earth is round. Before him, the earth was flat; it stretched forever and ever, promising terrestrial paradises to discover, and, in the end, was confounded with the sky. Can you see that demiurge seizing the earth in his two giant hands, lifting that disk laden with men and women, howling with hatred or amour, and twisting that plate with a magnificent effort, bending it and fashioning it into a ball? And then, much later, Galileo took that little ball and hurled it, with all his strength, into the fantastic system of worlds. Meanwhile the inhabitants of the Earth did not perceive it, and, having heard what those two madmen said, unfolded the world in their imagination, spread it out again and fixed it at the center of the world. Bent over it, without raising their eyes toward the heavens, they applied themselves to knowing at and loving it, all the way to its smallest corners.

  But when there were no more lands left to discover, when the auto races ha
d made a tour of the world, when the ice of the Poles and the populations of Africa could be visited by Cook’s tours, when India and Japan were no longer anything but picturesque museums appended to the lines of circular voyages, it was necessary to agree that Pythagoras and Galileo were right, the Earth is round, and it is tiny.

  The face of the Earth appeared utterly contracted, as withered and wrinkled as the face of an old woman, with toothless jaws, hollow cheeks and gummy eyes, irremediably sad.

  People straightened up then; a fine effort of escape enfevered them. Paris, first, constructed iron towers above its roofs, whose upper platforms were points of departure for the sky; the little flying machines pushed back with their feet in order to launch themselves upwards.

  From the street one saw, on looking up, frameworks of iron, spring up more numerously every day, forming the uprights of an immense loom, between which innumerable shuttles flew: helicopters, weaving interminably a pattern that was continually unraveled. And those who were still walking on the pavement sensed that they were one stage below normal life; between the walls of the houses they thought they were at the bottom of a ditch, in the bed of a river emptied of its water.

  When one descended from an aerial vehicle, one stifled in houses attached to the ground; the rooms were too narrow, with windows opening too low; the lungs were habituated to more air and the eyes to more space. Then some people wanted to detach their houses from the old earth and suspend them above the city.

  Driven by a new need, architecture, which had become slightly dormant, woke up. Two centuries before, in the nineteenth, the Gallery of Machines and the Eiffel Tower had shown what can be constructed with iron, making use of the old technical discoveries of the Roman vault and the Gothic arch, and there had been a giant step between the Greek temple and the Gallery of Machines of 1889. In the twenty-first century, an even greater one was made.