The World of the Variants

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  How pleasant it would be to live here!

  I took a few steps toward Sabine’s hut, and was suddenly overwhelmed by amazement, horror and terror.

  The hut was empty!

  Part Two

  I. The Pursuit of the Dark People

  My fury woke up the Water-People, our friend first of all. I fell upon him like a tempest on oaks, and implored his aid in delirious desperation, pointing to Sabine’s empty bed with reckless gestures. A circle of men and women formed around me in the wan dawn light, and the carbuncle eyes with their broad and rigid pupils gazed at me with evident compassion.

  The mists rose with the Sun; the horizon, save for the orient and the occident, acquired a precise clarity, and I was able to see, far to the north, an imperceptibly moving speck, which I pointed out to my aquatic brother. He fixed the direction in his head, ran to the lake and dived in.

  I saw him beneath the crystalline veil, enlarged and deformed by a slight undulation, his head pointed northwards. I understood that his vast pupils were gathering slow and distant radiance under the water, and my impatience was complicated by a sensation of prodigy. Finally, he reappeared. His batrachian cry gave the news to his brethren, and he disappeared in a northerly direction with lightning rapidity. A hundred of his companions, armed with helical harpoons, threw themselves into his wake.

  The same raft on which I had installed myself with Sabine a short while before, during our excursions on the lake, was fitted out. I took my place therein, armed with my carbine and my knife, and I was soon being drawn along at a surprising speed—but no more considerable than that of the other raft that was fleeing in the distance, bearing my fearful fiancée.

  Even so, that speed, and the calmness of the wind and the water, soothed my anguish slightly. I examined the situation more coolly. From everything that I had seen, among the dark Water-People as much as the others, I could conclude with reasonable assurance that the young kidnapper would not use force to begin with. Had I not witnessed their patient adventures and their long courtships, and all the graceful cunning and gentle pleading employed by male lovers to obtain the favors of their chosen brides? Was it probable that the dark chief would behave otherwise with Sabine? Would not the very singularity of the adventure excite the tendencies of the race, which were more inclined toward charm than violence? Then again, mores are not easily infringed among primitive peoples. Even supposing that his tribe had granted him Sabine, the young chief would probably still be obliged to conduct himself according to custom. We were not yet at the new moon, the sole period of Choice—nearly two weeks still remained before then.9

  II. The Underwater Battle

  I could not tell whether or not we were gaining on the raft we were pursuing. I could still see it as a black dot on the horizon, but I feared that it would disappear at the first hint of mist. That happened toward midday. The sky was not entirely clear; large clouds were running across it, and the vapors were condensing.

  Still drawn along, without the speed relenting, I had slipped gradually into a reverie, and the vain imagination of fantastic means by which my fiancée might be recovered, when the batrachian cries of the Water-Men woke me up. I raised my head. The raft was 300 meters from a low-lying island, where poplars rose up in a luminous swarm of foliage. Between the widely-spaced trunks I saw the raft again, still a mere black patch, but much closer, since it was visible in spite of the mist.

  My gaze, immediately focused on that point, was soon distracted by the splashing appeals of my crew. They were pointing to the right of the isle, beyond which there was a bed of tall reeds, around which the water was furiously agitated. The raft came to a halt. I raised my weapon, both barrels of which were loaded, and waited for the attack.

  The seething around the reed-bed moved on, heading toward us. Then, suddenly, there was an absolute calm. The limpid waters displayed the tops of tall plants in their depths, like a submerged forest, and the divine light descended everywhere upon the arabesques of stems and the lacework of foliage, casting iridescent shadows, and air-bubbles clung to the foliage like globules of mercury. The mud had an indecisive color, somewhere between the leaden gray of clay and the gold of sand. At the slightest ripple, silvery napkins spread out, blue edged with orange, and these pleats in the light rippled through the immersed forest like a supple fabric.

  Apart from a few mysterious reptilian slitherings, nothing revealed the presence of the men. They must have been buried in the mud, engaging in a bizarre contest of immobility: the ultimate challenge of their reciprocal skill and speed. A little cloud, however, masked the displacement of a body. Then a helical harpoon flew, tracing a wake, and struck home. I saw a corpse floating up toward me. I deduced therefrom the positions of the rival camps. The Lights were slightly in advance of my raft, the others further away, with their backs to the reed-bed.

  In response to the deadly dart that had just killed one of our men, 20 others responded, and I saw, with a sort of ferocious joy, two dark corpses rising to the surface. Then the waiting game was resumed. The clouds of mud dissipated; I was able to see the leaden gray and gold of the lake-bed again, the iridescent shadows and the quicksilver globules, and all the tremulous crystal of the waves.

  I understood then that attack was as dangerous as defense, that it was necessary not to emerge from cover for an instant—but how could that tactic be prolonged? I reflected on the subject and clarified the matter. I perceived that the two camps, before having recourse to a battle, were disputing a strategic position, and that the position in question would depend on their ability to remain underwater. Those who found it necessary to breathe would be obliged to rise to the surface, thus revealing themselves. Anxiously, I waited for the critical moment, sometimes turning my eyes toward Sabine’s raft, motionless like my own in the far distance.

  Fans of fine ripples extended from the reed-bed toward the east and the west, but the battlefield remained sheltered, to the extent that, as my gaze plunged into the frail vegetation, I could see thousands of metallic glints among the large leaves of the multibranchial plants, like silver and gold coins in flight. Then, as the crystalline waves, the silvery naps, the globules of mercury, and everything else quivered and vacillated, innumerable schools of fish invaded the battlefield, and I distinguished a distant music—to which another music immediately responded.

  I think that the Darks were trying to put that living rampart between them and the Lights, with the intention of drawing breath behind its shield. For some reason—a pact, a law of battle, or simple respect for animals that offer themselves voluntarily but which violence would render rebellious?—the lives of the fish seemed to be sacred.

  This was a gripping episode in the drama, full of grace and wonder. As I watched them maneuvering, discoid or tapered, with their delicately-ringed eyes and their rounded mouths open, the mute play of their gill-flaps, scattering and reassembling, with dark bands on their backs and light dots on their flanks, whirling around to the thin voice of reeds, darting as straight as rays of light through branches, or trembling like leaves in a tempest, they seemed to be the visible notes of a prodigious orchestra, in which the eyes took over all the oral pleasures of rhythm and harmony.

  When the fish disappeared, the camp of the Darks showed signs of fatigue. A few of those who had attempted to reach the surface during the deployment of the fish were now floating, with darts in their hearts. Three others were rising up in spite of the danger, and were killed. Then the harpoons of the Darks were launched in hundreds, like migrating swallows, and buried themselves among the plants, lifting slight eddies of mud. Our men did not move, except that two wounded men floated upwards—and, before any riposte was possible, the Darks stirred up a thick curtain of turbulence, behind which they came to the surface to breathe.

  Already, the Lights were going through that curtain, taking up positions beneath the enemy. Defeated, their munitions used up, the Darks took flight. Many of them succeeded in getting away, but a large number were kil
led, and many others taken prisoner. I saw that pursuit would be futile, the rear-guard of the runaways separating themselves from pursuers with immense veils of mud.

  The prisoners and the dead, taken back to the huts under escort, had been gone for some time when I saw half a dozen light men surface, carrying a dark child, which they deposited on the raft. They signaled to me to look after him, and, as I heard him uttering groans, they pointed compassionately to his left arm. I felt the arm. The shoulder was dislocated, but I paid little heed to it, for at that moment Sabine’s raft disappeared into the mist.

  We landed on the island. Our troops rested there, without any joy in the victory, but rather with disgust and sadness, accompanied by sudden fits of indignation and violent outbursts of anger. While they were cooking some fish, I wandered around the island. I covered some two-thirds of its breadth. Immense grasses grew there, and I recalled, in the midst of my meditation, having noticed a sort of furrow in which the grass was flattened—but it was one of those observations that did not register, only returning later, as sketchy ideas return in sleep. A few steps further on, the terrain collapsed in a funnel strewn with sharp stones, at the bottom of which was a dark and vertiginous hole.

  I leaned over that sepulcher, comparing it to my empty and gaping soul, and I experienced a hallucination. It seemed to me that a plaint was coming from it—a plaint unlike any that could have come from the larynx of a Water-Man, with none of that characteristic moist, batrachian croak, but an entirely terrestrial voice, dry and vibrant, like the voice of a European.

  “Sabine!” I shouted.

  Was I mad? Sabine was fleeing over the waters. I listened nevertheless. I cocked an ear that was capable of perceiving the flight of a moth in the woods—but I only heard the rumor of dead things, which groans in every cave with the faint cracking of stone and the obscure ticks of the clock of substance.

  Then, very thoughtfully, I returned to the camp. The delay was not long, for as soon as the fish had been grilled, we carried them off. They would be eaten underwater, as I had often seen before. I ate my own share on the raft. I offered some of it to my traveling companion, but he refused. In the anguish that I was enduring, his suffering left me indifferent at first, but that refusal of food, his continual thirst and the cries he was uttering finally attracted my attention. Using all my strength, I succeeded in restoring the proper articulation of his arm.

  While I was leaning over him to conclude the operation, my attention was drawn to a peculiarity. Without the slightest doubt, the eyes of the invalid did not have the same characteristics as the eyes of the other Water-People. The whites were more obvious, and they were more pronounced in their curvature; the irises, although tending to redness, had no precise color. More than one European possesses similar eyes. Very surprised, I examined the other parts of his body. I realized that the skin, the hair and the tapering of the fingers were not comparable those of the aquatic people among whom he lived.

  In the midst of my anxieties, hypotheses and conjectures excited me irresistibly. Had I discovered a mixed race, a hybrid of terrestrial humans and Water-People? Or was this individual, by some phenomenon of heredity, a throwback to terrestrial stock? Was it necessary to suppose that the transformation of terrestrial humans into aquatic humans had taken place so rapidly that a few centuries had sufficed? Scraps of memories of things I had read reminded me of the affirmations of ancient authors regarding the extraordinary ability of some individuals to live under water. An experiment carried out on kittens had demonstrated that, if immersed in warm milk immediately after birth, they could remain alive therein for hours. Might not our existence, entirely aquatic before the first emergence into the daylight, be gradually accommodated to an amphibious state?

  The kidnappers took care to multiply the obstacles in our path, disturbing the waters over vast extents, and my companions were only able to follow their trail by means of skilled searches. Imagine my joy, therefore, when, at about 2 p.m., the mist on the horizon lifted before the efforts of the Sun and I saw Sabine’s raft again.

  From that moment on, my finger pointed toward the moving patch, and we slid through the water at an increased speed.

  We were visibly gaining. As each quarter of an hour went by, Sabine’s raft became more distinct, and I uttered a cry of supreme delight on seeing the blurred silhouette of a woman outlined against the sky—but anguish bit into my heart at the same moment. Rather than abandon Sabine to us, would not the young chief drag her down into the depths of the lake?

  Oh! Let her not be dragged into the heavy sheets of moisture: that poor body softer than the body of a bird; that airy being with the beauty of a creature made to populate the fragile gardens of the West!

  At even closer range, the adorable silhouette became sufficiently distinct for me to recognize Sabine’s little winged cloak. I was standing up; my heart no longer seemed to be within my breast but expanded through space. I no longer had any but the merest impression of the sunlight on the lake, the gentle breeze, and the exclamations of my friends; among these things my body felt like a tree in a forest, while my entire soul precipitated itself toward the raft, from which scarcely 500 meters now separated us—and that distance was decreasing constantly.

  Standing on my raft, surrounded by strong and handsome swimmers, in the wind, on the sparkling lake, amid the waves on which a world of light capsized and the hectic song of my Water-Men, was a vertiginous experience. Hope and impatience contested in my breast like cavalry regiments in the thick of a battle. I saw Sabine, but she could not see me; her head was turned to face the open water. How were they forcing her to do that? Why was her adored gaze not seeking mine?

  The vague preoccupations of a lover, puerile in the heart of a drama.

  When we came within 300 meters, my free swimmers launched themselves in the direction of the raft. At the same moment, a man stood up beside Sabine. My heart gripped by fear, I saw him seize the young woman around the waist. She resisted, fighting him. He tried to drag her sideways.

  Oh, I retain the trace of those minutes in my flesh; for years, my heart weakens tremulously at the thought, and several gray hairs have been mingled with my own ever since.

  The accursed act was completed before my eyes. Sabine was flung into the waves. The force of distress tore through my being; in veils of obscurity, amid the fall—it seemed—of immense fragments of the world, I threw myself into the lake. Heavy, slow, as impotent as a fly in amber, I swam toward my beloved.

  I understood almost immediately the futility of the effort—the futility of any effort on that wretched terrain—and, ceasing to struggle, I let myself sink into the depths.

  III. The Water-Child

  I recovered consciousness on the raft. It was motionless, and I was alone there. My injured companion had disappeared; I searched in vain for my swimmers. The lake, quite clear, was continuing its great splashing life in the sunlight, transporting gleaming fish in every direction, toward the horizon or towards me, according to the breeze. Luminous trails encircled heavy plates, as shiny and hump-backed as bottle-glass, like the overlapping scales of a pangolin, blue networks bordered with orange alternating with little waves like crystal bells, with ripples so slender and so pale that one might have thought them floating sea-biscuits with luminous stairways climbing sunwards, and silken irises placed flat on the water.

  I occupied myself with these things in a sinister bewilderment, the recent drama now relegated to the utmost depths of my being. An interminable time went by, and then my gaze became aware of the presence of someone in the lake. I saw him confusedly, for he was swimming at a considerable depth; he was not moving with the usual speed of his kin, but rather in a prudent and unhurried fashion.

  He surfaced. By his trailing arm, swathed in linen, I recognized the child captured in the reed-bed. In his usable hand he held a shiny object—my knife, of which he had gone in search at the bottom of the lake. I helped him to take his place beside me again, but all these occurrences h
ad reawakened the atrocious memory, and, my heart tormented by a terrible certainty, I fell into a wordless despair.

  I came out of it in response to a pressure on my shoulder. The injured boy was standing up, with a compassionate expression, making signs of negation to me with a singular insistence, accompanied by a mime whose meaning escaped me. That went on for some time, then he seemed to get discouraged and stopped—but he retained an expression of anxious reflection. Finally, with a curt gesture, he grabbed the knife and detached five pieces of wood from our planks.

  There was a certain mischief in his face while he presented the following curious little performance to me. First, holding one of the pieces of wood to his breast, he lavished signs of the most avid tenderness upon it; he even obliged me to do the same, and I wondered what fetishistic ceremony he was trying to signify thus. The second piece of wood he placed on the water, simulating a vessel—but while the first piece of wood was laid down beside me, the third ran toward it, took possession of it, and carried it to the raft.

  My interest was awakened, for it became clear that the poor child was telling me the story of Sabine. He observed my attention, and his faced expressed consolation and hope again, while he continued.

  Now, this was the moving scene that I witnessed. The raft bore Sabine away, then landed on an island. Sabine got off, conducted by the black chief…and the fourth piece of wood took Sabine’s place on the raft.

  I experienced a flash of enlightenment. The injured child laughed, and continued his story, now followed with a more feverish excitement than any Shakespearean drama. While Sabine and the chief remained on the island; the fourth piece of wood continued its journey on the raft—and then the fifth piece of wood surged forth, seized the fourth, and precipitated itself into the lake along with it!