Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  A feverish activity, similar to that which had invented cathedrals, planted in Paris the foundations of an aerial city. Monstrous arches bestrode the old houses; further arches were grafted on to those; to the deafening din of iron being riveted, a metallic brushwood gripped the suddenly-obscured city, a brushwood whose highest branches sprang forth disengaged and free into the open sky, swollen at the tips, blossoming and finally sustaining in the air. Like huge fruits, houses with large windows; little flying autos were thus able to hook on to the balconies of vestibules in order to repose.

  Those thirsty for air even wanted every room of their houses to have windows in its four walls open to the air; the house was obliged to explode like a ripe pomegranate, to fragment into a cluster in which each seed was a room; vertiginous, long and supple footbridges, like bridges of tremulous lianas above rapids, where launched from one room to another, reuniting the grapes of the cluster.

  Municipal regulations prescribed an order of alignment for those aerial fruits. The Town Hall and the ministries consented to abandon darkened Paris in order to rise up to new Paris.

  The beautiful fantastic city, of which Scheherazade had not dreamed, launched its blue streets following the three dimensions of space, horizontal streets like the good horse-roads of our ancestors, but superimposed at different heights, cut by vertical and oblique streets. Maps of the city, difficult to draw, had to become numerous, in accordance with different imaginary cross-sections of that monstrous vibrant hive.

  The principal street was vertical; the horizontal streets, which extended from it like the spokes of a wheel from a central hub, poured forth a multitude of helicopters; those changed direction, rose and descended in the large well of light, rapid bizarre elevators sliding without shocks along invisible cords in a cage of air.

  At the top, the vertical avenue was terminated by a triumphant crown, for such arches in the Roman mode had no longer been fashioned at ground level for a long time, but immense crowns hung outside the city like round portals to the sky. Men erected them as a homage to their own genius; it was their cry of victory, finer than the meager olive branch that the Ancients planted on top of their houses when they had terminated the paltry construction. The sheaf of gliders and helicopters rising up the avenue passed through the eye of the needle and then dissipated and spread out into the plains of the sky.

  Gradually, old Paris was submerged, inundated by the foundations of the new city. The poor stone houses were abandoned to workers; then only the wretchedly poor accepted to live in them; and it was there, in a perpetual demi-obscurity, that a crawling population began to swarm like vermin, progressively buried far from life, like Pompeii beneath its ash or the city of Ys under the waters.

  In the evening, the living city lit up, and the abundantly windowed houses were suspended like enormous lanterns between the black void below—old, dead Paris—and the black void above, the sky punctured in streaks by the headlights of flying autos.

  In 2009 there was a centenarian old woman still alive in Paris who had spent her early childhood in houses on the ground. Paralyzed and confined to a chair, she surrounded herself with screens in order not to see, through the large glass windows of the room, the bizarre vehicles passing in all directions. She could thus forget that she was not reposing on the ground; but sometimes, raising her head, she saw above the screens, running over the wall, the fleeting and disorderly shadows coming from the street; then she thought that she felt the house oscillating in the wind and its framework creaking, and she closed her eyes because she had vertigo.

  At the start of the race, when Henri Dumont realized that he was being carried away by the wind, he tried to struggle against it with forceful thrusts of the helices, but he then perceived that one of his wings was hanging, broken at the root; it was necessary to land as soon as possible.

  The glider was making desperate efforts not to capsize, and it fluttered like a huge butterfly. An abrupt gust of wind tried to tear the aeronaut from his seat and project him into the abyss. Dumont only just had time to cling on to the steering wheel like the pilot of a doomed ship clinging on to the tiller; and, without even trying to steer his fall, hunched up, with his head sunk between his shoulders, he awaited the impact that was about to crush him on the hard ground.

  The captive apparatus, shaken by the victorious wind, spun like a dead leaf, and then fell vertically; the man was conscious of no longer being anything but a thrown pebble that nothing can arrest, and he closed his eyes in the vertiginous rush of the air through which he was lunging, making a hole, like a lead bullet through water. Suddenly, he felt himself borne up softly, carried by a supple cushion of air; the wounded seagull, rediscovering some strength, soared on one wing. But again the aeroplane spun in the ocean of the sky, like a thin sheet of paper spiraling madly as it falls. And finally, he landed on his clumsy wing, which folded up and broke—and Dumont, bewildered to be still breathing and able to move his intact limbs, stood up and detached himself from the poor injured plaything.

  What a strange country! A village with very low roofs, as they were made a century before: not a single aerial house, not a single helicopter in the sky. Oh, he had really fallen on to the vulgar ground, resistant to the feet. It was no longer the sky, in the impalpable matter of which one swims in all directions, with no other limit than one’s whim. He had descended to the base earth beneath the free sky, the earth as flat as the bosom of an old woman, the little earth whose horizon one could touch with an extended hand. Lifting his head toward the space that he could no longer attain in his broken glider, his breast unquiet and lacking air, his leaden feet riveted to the ground, he had the impression of being at the bottom of a well.

  Henri Dumont was, in fact, a true Parisian scarcely living anywhere but the Paris of aerial houses. His excursions in gliders or helicopters brought him back every evening to dine in the city, and if he changed his roof on certain fixed dates of the year, he chose for holiday destinations the towns that had replaced such destinations as the Nice and Trouville of the nineteenth century; he found the houses, the people and the habits of Paris there. One could therefore say that he had hardly ever emerged from the great aerial city.

  He had landed in a village set close to a wood not far from Versailles. Civilization, which flows very rapidly, had doubtless passed over this village with a flap of its wings, disdaining to pause so close to Paris, for it appeared to be lagging a century behind the rest of the world. The great lines of flying machines were several kilometers away, and in order to go to the nearest station there was only one service per day of an old auto furnished with a petrol engine!

  The auto had just left; Dumont was therefore obliged to wait until the following day. A hotel by the roadside opened its door at ground level; that house, similar to its neighbors, seemed small and dark to the man fallen from the sky, more like a rabbit warren than a habitation for humans, but it was necessary to settle for it.

  Throughout the long and sad night, he could not sleep. He was troubled, disorientated, even anguished. How could he not have been? Until that day he had only lived in the sky. He knew all the winds, the great fixed currents and those that changed in accordance with the seasons; he knew their names, their direction, their strength, their manias and their caprices, and even their colored form. He had read the poems of contemporary authors who chose their metaphors and images from the things of the air. He had traveled in all its regions and knew them well, a region being a certain atmosphere, bright or transparent or heavy and misty, with, underneath, very low and almost futile, a mosaic or an Oriental carpet whose arabesques and colors hardly changed. And now, an accident had nailed him to it, paralyzed, in a corner of that extended carpet, that smooth mosaic, devoid of beauty.

  Morning illuminated Dumont’s room with its paltry light. He went out, exhausted by a feverish insomnia, and began to revive as soon as he had swallowed large draughts of the matinal freshness.

  Not far away, a poplar raised up its petty height
in the sunlight like a silvery flower that would like to be plucked. Dumont directed his stroll toward it, for no reason, simply in order to kill time; but the tree seemed to recoil as the man marched toward it. Then he became interested in the pursuit.

  The landscape changed its form; the poplar disappeared behind a fold in the terrain and reappeared even larger; the aeronaut had not reached it. He persisted, stubbornly, heading toward the tree, which grew. Now he experienced difficulty lifting his heavy feet, as if he were emerging from a plowed field. Was it by virtue of a mischievous game that the little earth was growing under his feet?

  That day, he allowed the auto that was due to take him back to Paris to depart. The next day, and the days that followed, accepting with delight to be dominated by a mysterious force that retained him in the lost village, he did not leave. He was astonished to sense born and growing within him a strange, perhaps unhealthy, amour for the paths and roads of the earth: the morning road that comes toward you and greets you; the road of the day that invites you to stroll and continues to flow when one stops, weary, on its edge; the long evening road whose terminus flees endlessly. He loved the grassy clay on which the foot slips, the round pebbles that roll and the sharp ones that claw the sole; the dry earth of the path across the plain, the moist earth of the path through the woods, the white dust of the highway, the russet cushion of dead leaves.

  Every path that one discovers is different; and even a single path, the shortest and the narrowest, changes its face so often with the hours of the day that a lifetime would not be long enough to travel it from one end to the other.

  As his eyes became accustomed to the terrestrial scale, they remembered having had a similar focus in Dumont’s ancestors. Dazzled, he witnessed a renaissance of the world. The smooth mosaic, the extended Oriental carpet, that he had once perceived from his glider was agitated by a secret, violent and patient life that changed it completely. For him alone, valleys stretched and hollowed out, and hills swelled up and sprang forth. The Earth was a withered fruit that a miracle had caused to ripen again; it became immense and mysterious.

  One evening, a cool wood opened before and closed again on the man fallen from the sky. The sun had scarcely disappeared, but two stars were already twinkling in the bright sky; watching them brighten while the sky darkened, he did not experience any desire to detach himself from the earth that retained him amorously. Hugging him against it like a prodigal son or a lover returning to all its paths of the plain and mountains, he was not far from believing that the sky is only a round and hard vault to which the stars are nailed.

  The wood had closed upon him. In the silence, the colors faded away in somber spectra, while the odors of moist plants rise in shriller and more forceful scales.

  At a bend in a path, a forgotten shred of light hung between the trees. He stopped in order to gaze at it. He thought he saw it move. He saw the whiteness move, and perceived distinctly a rustle of foliage. Emotion suspended his respiration in his breast. A faun and a nymph came forth and fled between the trees.

  Transported by enthusiasm, Dumont launched himself in their pursuit. He could not see them any longer, but he heard the rustle of dead leaves under their feet and the whiplash of branches violently bent in passing; sometimes the branches broke. Then he no longer heard anything.

  A long avenue opened up, the trees of which combined their beautiful foliage in a vault. That silent gallery appeared to end at a high portal, gaping under the pale nocturnal light. He crossed its threshold.

  A pool of water was lying ideally flat and smooth, and it reflected, while enlivening it, a luminosity of limbo, which filled pure space all the way to the delicate stars. Dumont had just entered the park of Versailles.

  Alone in the midst of the magnificent deployment of pathways, fountains and statues, he was gripped by such an emotion that he thought he might sink into the sand, and he leaned on a marble pedestal. He shivered with anxiety, awaiting I know not what supernatural punishment. At the same time, he was uplifted and swelled with pride at sensing himself at the center of such a beautiful landscape. The park was as pathetic as a corpse with open eyes; however, it was not dead, for a living odor of trees, grass and moist earth rose therefrom. And Dumont thought: I cannot know whether I am dreaming.

  Then he perceived the faun, sitting on the rim of a fountain. The nymph had disappeared. The face of the faun expressed a discreet satisfaction that was not lacking in elegance.

  Dumont saluted it, with the casual lightness and easy familiarity that one has in dreams toward the noblest individuals.

  At that moment, a helicopter landed at the end of the avenue, as brutal as a bird of prey; then it rose up, quivering, bearing into the night the man who was maneuvering it.

  “Those who come from the sky,” exclaimed the faun, “are not worthy to enter here!”

  The faun was cultured, for it continued to speak with a certain pedantry. I imagine that the King’s gardeners, in the days when they had mapped out the park of Versailles, would not have been frightened by it. It had doubtless remained in the wood that had been transformed into a garden. And while the trees submitted joyfully to human intelligence and allowed themselves to be disposed and sculpted in accordance with the rules of art, he too had been modified and his mind had learned to organize his thoughts.

  “Those who come from the sky,” he repeated, “are not worthy to enter here; they cannot enter here. Those whose eyes are not habituated to terrestrial equilibria; those who can cross the park of Versailles by taking off in their flying machines, with a single stride of their seven league boots, cannot penetrate its beauty. If they have not descended the staircase whose steps have been carved with genius for human feet, if they have not gone astray in the boscage, this garden is enchanted for them; they cannot see it.”

  The faun laughed, and he added: “In any case, they no more possess the heavens than they do the Earth. They believed that they were detaching themselves from the earth, but they have not emerged from the atmospheric peel that surrounds it. In traveling through that transparent bark made of winds, mists and clouds they have only discovered new terrestrial regions. When a man flies, in his lightest helicopter, it is still the earth to which he remains fixed, as his seat.

  “Once, Icarus burned his wings in the sun and fell. Humans have believed that they were Icarus resuscitated, but in spite of themselves, the force of the earth inclines them toward her and forbids them to leap any higher than the limit of her respirable air, holding them, as it were, by a thread. The jump a little higher, for a little longer, than the little girl dancing on a rope, but like her, they fall back after every bound. Little Icaruses, your wings of wax are melting again!

  “Who among you would have the courage to leap outside the earth. to hurl himself, infinitely small, into the system of worlds? Which of you, in good health, would dare to anticipate the death that is the only thing, thus far, that can cause someone to vanish before our eyes and forever from the earth that gave us birth?”

  He had become agitated; he calmed down.

  “It is necessary to love the earth, from which one cannot escape,” he said, by way of conclusion. “It is necessary to love that which one cannot prevent. That is the secret of joy and power.”

  Dumont, however, was pensive. A strange desire was forming within him: that of discovering the Earth, Why had he not gone, at once, to explore the old Paris that must be buried beneath a forest of iron, in the midst of the foundations of aerial Paris? Perhaps one could, with the methods of the archeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth century who had discovered Greek and Roman status under the ground, recover in the year 2009, between the mesh of an iron felt, the little church of Notre-Dame and the Palais de l’Élysée.

  The faun stood up and drew away, not without having saluted the pious human. Dumont saw then that it was holding a book; with its hairy hand it caressed the spine and the boards bound in leather stamped with gold. By the uncertain light of the stars, the title was deciph
erable; it was a volume of the works of Racine, doubtless forgotten there, which the faun had picked up.

  Pierre Billaume and Pierre Hégine: Journey to the Isles of Atlantis

  (1914)

  The centuries led then to the inevitable day, the disastrous night, when, in an earthquake, amid floods, all our warriors were dragged into the abyss, and the isle of Atlantis was covered again forever by the waves... That, Socrates, is the story that old Critias heard Solon tell.

  Plato, Timaeus.

  Part One

  I. The Tempest

  “Captain,” I cried, “are we doomed?”

  “Go to the devil!” replied the mariner, coldly.

  “Alas,” I said, “we’re going.”

  The ocean swelled and seethed, seemingly wanting to mingle with the sky, to renew the ancient confusion of chaos. To the obscurity of the night was added the opacity of the atmosphere charged with compact mists. The heaviness of the air scarcely permitted respiration. When the wind chased away the fog, flashes of lightning showed my bewildered eyes livid clouds like immense rocks suspended above the waves.

  Our wretched ship was spinning in the eddies. It descended into the hollows of colossal waves, and then, lifted in to their crests, seemed to quit the sea momentarily. It creaked and groaned beneath the thunderous breakers. The squall whinnied horribly in the rigging. Surges of sea-water swept the entire deck. Sometimes the bow plunged into the water, sometimes the stern. Then the vessel almost lay on its side. I heard the howls of those close by who disappeared. The mariners ran around; the captain shouted into his loud-hailer; and the rest of us, desperate travelers, hung on to ropes with both hands, to the rails, and to all the asperities of the deck.

  It was the third and most terrible night of the tempest, the mighty breath of which had been driving us for sixty hours. Until that moment I had conserved hope, but it finally appeared to me that black destiny was about to be accomplished and that we were going to sink.