The World of the Variants

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  We walked for some time. The causeway stopped; we were moving into difficult territory. Soon we found ourselves on the edge of the river, and I was just about to turn back when Huriel shouted: “A bridge.”

  To tell the truth, what he called by that name was an erratic series of immense blocks of stone, but very close to one another—so close that one could often pass from one to the next.

  “The arches of a bridge, rather,” I replied.

  Without making any reply, the colossus cut down a young poplar on the river-bank with an axe. “Here’s the decking!”

  I hesitated for some time before deciding on the adventure, and when I had finally decided, I had a sort of evil presentiment.

  We passed over the river. Our dogs, accustomed to leaping over minor obstacles, followed us without difficulty. If necessary, the robust animals could have swum across the river.

  At first, we were walking through a sort of meadow, then it became a woodland, but one in which the trees were quite distant from one another. Eventually, a forest extended to our right, while the wooded grassland came to an end, giving way to ground the color of ash. There were occasional pine-trees growing on hillocks, and islets of giant ferns, but little grass, dry, harsh and discolored. A great sadness emanated from it.

  “This place is redoubtable…” Huriel began.

  I saw concern on Malveraz’s face—but an ardent curiosity impelled me to advance, contrary to all prudence.

  “There’s nothing to fear from the darkness,” I said. “The sky’s clear. In an hour, the Moon will be marvelously bright, and provided that we return before midnight…”

  Darkness had almost fallen. A reddish light trailed over the crowns of the forest and the solitary pines. The landscape became less sinister after we had skirted a marsh where giant frogs were croaking. Grasses reappeared, thicker and greener, on the savannah. Only confused shapes were distinguishable in the faint pale starlight. We walked for another half-hour; then an enormous copper-colored Moon appeared over the treetops of the forest.

  “A trick!” said Huriel.

  A granite mass loomed up in front of us, in which a kind of giant doorway yawned. At first we thought we were looking into a cave, but we stopped after having taken the first few steps.

  “That’s odd!” said Malveraz. “I could have sworn that…”

  He had set his hand against the rock. Then, a singular vibration became audible, as if a violin-bow were being drawn over the edge of a bronze plate.

  “It’s a door!” Malveraz finished.

  We saw an enormous block of stone turn on its axis, without Malveraz appearing to have done any more than push a light door, and the shadow of a cave appeared.

  “How bizarre!” I exclaimed—and I went into the cave. Malveraz followed me in, while Huriel, with one of my men—by the name of Chabe—marched in the direction of the forest. By the light of my little electric torch, we examined the place. It gave the strange impression of having been constructed, without our being able to tell whether or not the cavern served as a habitation for some creature.

  We had been there for some time when we heard the dogs barking violently.

  “Some danger!” Malveraz remarked.

  We left the cave. Huriel and Chabe were coming back toward us. Almost simultaneously, there was a strange roar, which had something in it of the voice of the lion, and that of the tiger, the apparition of a monstrous bounding silhouette, and Huriel’s and Chabe’s rifle-shots. Then there was a terrible scream. The mysterious beast had just fallen on Huriel and carried him off as a lynx carries off a hare.

  I ran forward. I caught a glimpse of Huriel’s arm, which rose up clutching a knife, and the animal—struck in the heart, as we later discovered—collapsed.

  I was continuing to run toward Huriel when Malveraz shouted in a thunderous voice: “Everyone into the cave! Don’t lose a second!”

  In spite of the excitement of the moment, we obeyed, so habituated were we to putting our trust in Malveraz’s instincts and senses. Huriel, Chabe, the two dogs and the eagle owl came in at almost exactly the same time as us.

  “Rotate the stone,” said Malveraz.

  The colossal stone shook with its strange vibration. We found ourselves in pitch darkness, but only for a few seconds—the time it took to light two small battery-operated torches. Then I interrogated Malveraz. “Why did you call out to us?”

  He bent down and picked up a large stone. It fitted almost exactly into a gap between the rock and our cyclopean door. Before he had replied, roars burst forth.

  While we looked at one another, the old servant said: “It’s a herd of wild beasts. I saw them appear at the edge of the forest. You had your backs to them, and the dogs; agitation didn’t warn you, to judge by what just happened.”

  The roars redoubled, sometimes deep and hoarse, sometimes as explosive as fanfares. None of us was in any doubt as to their significance; it was anger—the anger of a race confronted with the cadaver of the tiger-lion felled by our bullets and Huriel’s knife. That demonstrated once again the strangeness of the region. Was it not a vestige of very ancient times, when the big cats—the biggest cats of all—had possessed the herd instinct, now extinct in the lions of the Atlas Mountains as well as the tigers of India.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked Huriel.

  “There’s nothing to fear for the moment,” the colossus replied. “We can hold council at our ease, like the defenders of a fortress. Any that get this far will surely perish.”

  “Can’t we wipe them out?”

  “We’d need a loophole, for opening the door by a crack would lead to an invasion—these giant beasts would enlarge the opening very rapidly…” He interrupted himself. The impact of paws clawing at the entrance was audible. “You see!” Huriel added.

  “Yes,” I replied. “I can see that it’s necessary to leave our fort as it is for the time being. But hazard might perhaps give us an opportunity to do something to help ourselves. Let’s search…”

  We searched, aided by the dogs and the eagle owl. Outside, the roars became less frequent, but I had a strong feeling that the danger was undiminished. Our minds were full of anxiety and curiosity. The terrible beasts were causing me more interest than annoyance. I felt no anger against them, nor, especially, any inclination to hunt them. I would greatly have preferred not to kill any of them, and to let such admirably vigorous creatures live. Wonderstruck, I remembered the magnificent bound of the tiger-lion that Chabe and Huriel had killed, its great stature and the formidable ease with which it had carried off the giant Huriel.

  As I was thinking about these things, Malveraz cried: “There’s a fissure in the door itself! But we can only maneuver the rifles up and down; the cleft is too narrow for any sideways movement.”

  At that moment, Huriel released an exclamation: “We’re doomed!”

  “What?” I said.

  “The cartridges! In the struggle with the lion-tiger, the cartridge-pouch was torn away.”

  “In that case,” I said, “We have exactly ten shots left to fire—and I imagine that there are a good 60 animals out there.”

  Malveraz, who had climbed on to a block of stone and stuck his eye to the fissure, replied: “There are nearly 100.”

  We looked at one another silently. It seemed to us that we were in one of those terrible epochs when humans, so small and wretched, wandered over the plains and through the forests and marshes. Were we not at this moment—we, the sons of old Europe—in spite of our weapons, our machines and our intelligence, no different from some poor family of ape-men hiding in their cave on the edge of a lake or a river, while the powerful Machairodus with dagger-like claws passed by in the darkness?

  Huriel, who was thinking the same thing, exclaimed: “It’s a prodigious adventure, though! And if we escape, we won’t regret it at all. What a souvenir of the energies of the world! What a communion with the Earth’s immense past!”

  I hoisted myself up to the slit. Huriel’s
words reached my ears at the same time as an extraordinary spectacle presented itself to my eyes. There they were, in the westward-slanting light of a huge red Moon: 100 monsters with phosphorescent eyes, and beautiful bodies built for warfare and murder. They could be seen crouching down, standing up in profile, or leaping, and I had a clear consciousness of them, entirely sure that the murderers of their kin were in the cave.

  Each of their movements gave evidence of an intelligence much superior to that of our wretched, fallen wild beasts, and a kind of understanding: the ability to act in concert to attain an objective. And their present objective was vengeance. The race did not want one of its individuals to perish in vain. They had decided to wait until the punishment could be carried out.

  That certainty caused a long shiver to pass down my spine. What hope could there be of escaping such adversaries? Like the ancient warrior, I saw once again my Argos,12 the pleasant land left for the wake of wanderlust, and a funereal melancholy penetrated my soul. All the same, I could not succeed in regretting the escapade completely; a certain joy remained; the passionate pleasure of exploration.

  Huriel interrupted my reflections. “I’m hungry,” he said. “We mustn’t forget, because these infernal beasts are besieging us, to keep up our strength.”

  It was one of our rules, even when we were only leaving the rest of the expedition for a few hours, to take nourishment with us. Chabe, Malveraz and Mandar had brought slices of roast meat, cold coffee and biscuits. Huriel had pemmican, and I had a sort of dried mincemeat that was very nutritious. We ate as heartily as if we had been in the shelter of our oaken carts. As usual, Huriel devoured two kilograms of meat and innumerable biscuits. Then he said: “We’ll ration ourselves later. If things don’t take a turn for the better, Castor and Pollux”—they were our two dogs—“will furnish us with food for a few days, and even drink.”

  “I’d prefer to ration myself!” I said. “Besides, we still have two days’ food. Only drink…”

  “There’s a little trickle of water running over the rock,” said Malveraz. “We won’t die of thirst.”

  That reassured me more than anything else. “There’s a strong possibility that the accursed beasts will get discouraged,” I said, “or forget why they’ve assembled here. If we could only warn our companions not to go forward, and to notify the camp well, I’d feel quite tranquil, all things considered.”

  “Yes, but how can we warn them?” said Huriel.

  Malveraz looked up, his face impassive. “I’ll take care of that,” he said. “The owl will certainly fly back to the expedition. What it has done many times before it can certainly do again—and the darkness won’t inconvenience it!”

  “We’re stupid!” Huriel added. “That should have been our first thought.”

  “I thought of it,” Chabe interjected, “but it’s a futile idea. We’d need to be able to get the bird out, and if we so much as open the door by a foot, the watchful beasts will be on us.”

  There was no need for him to remind us of that. With every passing minute one or other of the lion-tigers hurled itself against the invincible granite. If the ground had not been so hard, we might have been able to dig a hole under the door, but we could not even think of doing so with our knives.

  Malveraz, who had listened to us without saying anything, got to his feet. He went to the back of the cave, where we heard him moving around. He came back after a few moments, seemingly tranquil. “It’s possible that there’s a small exit back there,” he said. Above the trickle of water I can make out a glimmer of light in a kind of natural chimney, which might be moonlight. The chimney is slanting. Our owl can easily get through it. If you’d care to write a note, Monsieur Villars…”

  As I looked at him, interrogatively, he added: “Oh, I’ll make Nox”—that was the owl’s name—“understand what we expect from him.”

  “Let’s try it, then!” I exclaimed.

  I wrote a short but explicit letter. Malveraz attached it carefully to Nox’s neck, then walked toward the trickle of water. We followed him. When we got there, we switched off the torches momentarily and looked up. As our eyes adjusted to the gloom, we distinguished quite clearly a sort of pale gleam.

  In the meantime, Malveraz addressed himself to the owl in a singsong voice. The raptor’s eyes sparkled in the darkness. We were too well aware of the power our old servant had over animals not to be far closer to faith than doubt.

  Finally, there was a slight noise. Nox went into the opening. We heard him rise up gradually. Chabe, whose hearing was extraordinary, cried: “He’s found the exit! He’s gone!”

  “As long as he arrives in time,” murmured Huriel.

  “He’ll follow exactly the same route that we did,” said Malveraz. “As that’s also the route that anyone coming to our rescue will take, you don’t have to worry about the fate of the message.”

  “By the grace of God!”

  For about three hours we continued chatting, making escape plans or imagining the actions of our terrible besiegers. Then Huriel said: “Since our friends haven’t arrived, it’s more than probable that they’ve received the message. Let’s get some rest, then. That’s the first requirement of war. Who’ll take the first watch?”

  “Me,” I said.

  My companions lay down, and I remained in the darkness, pensive, all the more emotional and anxious for being alone with my thoughts. I could hear our adversaries growling and roaring. I studied them occasionally through the fissure; I felt a black sensuality in knowing that I was both so near to and so far away from the most frightful peril. Nothing but that granite door, 50 centimeters thick! But that, however, was sufficient to render us as tranquil as if ten leagues separated us from the wild beasts.

  In the morning, it seemed that our enemies had not renounced their vengeance in the slightest. In truth, not all of them were outside the cave, any more than they had been during the night; they were taking turns to go hunting—but there were more than 30 of them asleep next to carcasses that had been devoured to a greater or lesser extent.

  We spent a terribly monotonous day. Our anguish increased as it wore on. From time to time, we tried to find some secret exit from the cave, but there was evidently only the one through which we had entered.

  Evening came, then night—and still the immense pack of lion-tigers lay in wait.

  “This is getting serious,” Huriel murmured, as we ate supper. “It’s necessary not to count overmuch on the discouragement of these abominable beasts. They’re damnably vigilant!”

  “The life of our prehistoric ancestors could not have been idyllic in the midst of such ancestors,” Chabe replied.

  “If the Earth nurtured many monsters of that sort,” I said in my turn, “I can’t even understand how they were able to survive.”

  The supper was dismal. I lay down soon afterwards, my watch being set for midnight this time. I slept badly, agitated by nightmares.

  I saw again the vast park where I had spent the greater part of my childhood. I ran through the woods, through the mysterious half-light, attentive to the petty dramas of life insects, fledglings, field-mice, wild rabbits…

  All of a sudden, something unnamable, a sort of hairy hand as large as the boughs of an oak swooped down and took hold of me. I was mad with fear for a moment, motionless in that immense warm hand…and then I woke up, covered in sweat.

  During one of the awakenings I saw Malveraz up at the slit, his little lantern in his hand, while the tiger-lions were roaring mightily outside.

  “What is it?” I said, getting up.

  “Something bizarre is happening,” said the old peasant. “The beasts have been gripped by a sort of fear, such as I’ve seen in mountain chamois, ibex and oxen before an avalanche.”

  I climbed up to the opening and looked out. The large beasts were, indeed, in a state of extreme agitation. They were bounding back and forth, seemingly abusing one another, when they suddenly became still—all of them at once—with their heads turn
ed in the same direction.

  “Yes, that’s very odd,” I murmured. “Evidently, something is approaching, of which they’re afraid. A fire? A flood?”

  “Listen!” said Malveraz.

  I have keen ears, but nothing like Malveraz’s. I heard nothing.

  “It’s a herd of living creatures,” the peasant continued. At that moment, our dogs started barking. Malveraz added: “They’re heavy creatures…a herd of buffalo, perhaps?”

  “That wouldn’t explain the anxiety of the lion-tigers.”

  “Who can tell?” said Malveraz, thoughtfully. “Perhaps there are buffaloes in this strange land that can face up to the big cats, by virtue of their number and their courage, and chase them away?”

  I began to make out a confused rumor; then there was a vast trampling sound, which made the Earth tremble; and finally, a bizarre vibrant clamor that we both recognized.

  “Elephants!” I exclaimed.

  The dogs, almost indifferent throughout the day and the night, showed great agitation, while the tiger-lions filled the air with their roaring. Chabe, Huriel and Mandar woke up in succession.

  “Perhaps this is the fortunate turn of events that will save us!” Chabe exclaimed.

  “Or doom us!” Huriel retorted.

  Abruptly, with common accord, the tiger-lions hurled themselves in the direction of the forest. They remained motionless on the edge for a little while, surely hesitating between flight and combat, but their indecision did not last long. In response to further trumpeting, this time repeated by 50 trunks, they slowly withdrew into the woodland.

  “The way is clear,” said Huriel.

  “For five minutes,” Malveraz replied.

  He was right. Five minutes had not elapsed when we saw 20 elephants appear. They came on solely, swinging their huge trunks and their gleaming tusks. I recognized neither the Asian elephant nor that of Africa. Larger than either of those varieties, they evidently belonged to an extinct type. They were not mammoths either, but they must have been equally formidable, and we understood why the tiger-lions had fled when others passed by after the first group, and then others—perhaps 300 or 400 altogether; our position was too disadvantageous to allow us to count them.