The World of the Variants

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  I contemplated them with a sort of dread, and murmured: “Daniel, are they…?”

  “They’re children,” he affirmed. “Human children…exactly like the children of our ancestors of the Tertiary Ages, contemporaries of those mastodons that are drinking from the lake. And you can see how charming they are!”

  A roaring sound made us raise our heads. A predatory beast had arrived: a thickset animal with saber-like teeth and an orange hide spotted with mauve patches. It bounded forward. The “human children” stood still, magnetized and paralyzed. Another few bounds and the beast would reach them.

  With the same gesture, Daniel and I raised our rifles to our shoulders; a double gunshot resounded over the lacustrian waters and made the mastodons raise their heads. Struck in the head and the gap between its shoulder-blade and collar-bone, the beast spun around.

  Fearful that, in its death-throes, it might succeed in avenging its death on the children, we fired again. Then, running forward, I plunged my knife into the beast’s side. It released a raucous sigh and collapsed on to the ground. Then I turned toward the “human children” and spoke to them, smiling.

  It is the privilege of young creatures to pass without transition from fear to delight. They were laughing, full of boundless confidence, as if they had always known us. The children were already beside me, studying me curiously. I took the younger one in my arms; he allowed me to do so, showing his sparkling teeth in the ruddy light. The Sun set and, simultaneously, an immense Moon rose in the east. The mastodons had ceased drinking; they set off again, and the Earth trembled.

  Then a voice was raised, deep at first and then shrill. We turned round. It was the upright animal again, but adult: a fawn-colored human with hair like a mane, his face dull but illuminated and humanized by the same eyes as the children. In his hand he held a heavy staff—or, rather, a pike. Shortly afterwards, a second creature arrived, not so tall and rather thin, carrying an infant on her shoulder.

  “Our ancestors!” said Daniel, solemnly.

  Perhaps they had been frightened at first, but on seeing that their children were safe, they were reassured and broke into laughter, full of confidence.

  How can I depict the religious poetry of that scene? It awoke all the profound dreams of adolescence, all the aspirations that were stirring in my soul, beneath the roots of our native forests, satisfying the fervent need I had always had to go back in time, to relive a little of that primitive existence of which we retain a passionate memory in the depths of our instinct.

  Night fell after a brief twilight; the Cross of Cygnus shone in the background of the prehistoric landscape, while a silvery and nacreous Moon moved slowly amid the stars and traced a broad radiant causeway over the lake.

  We had lit our nocturnal fire; together, we ate the dried meat that we had brought with us. Our guests were as tranquil as if they had lived with us for a long time. They were innocent beings, even though the man had the strength of the great anthropoid apes and had the stature to measure himself against a Machairodus.

  I thought at first that they had no language. I was mistaken. Speech had already elevated them above other living creatures. They exchanged signs and a few interjections, adapted to the simplicity of their actions and impressions.

  In the beautiful night, in which the ruddy light of the fire mingled with the silvery light of the Moon, they were intensely joyful, like children, full of that delightful confidence that makes it easy to forget the future. I too was full of a supreme bliss. I had the sensation of having been rejuvenated in an inconceivable manner, for myself and for all my ancestors; I reunited the present and the entire past in my bosom.

  I remember that one of the children went to sleep in my arms; the slight sound of his breath mingled with the enchanted voice of the breeze and the faint rustle of a distant spring. Wild beasts passed by in the darkness; nocturnal birds were flying in the treetops; the intoxicating odor of the vegetation reached us in gusts—and I held that child against my breast with an infinite tenderness…

  Such was the most beautiful and exciting adventure of my life—and the one I most regret. I wanted to relive it. I went back to the Blue Hills, and found the cavern again—but the prehistoric land was no longer there! It had only required one quake, one feeble quiver of the terrestrial surface to swallow up the remains of a world more than 200,000 years old!

  THE TREASURE IN THE SNOW

  I.

  “That’s erroneous!” retorted my host. “The last mammoth was not contemporary with the one whose remains were discovered in the Siberian ice and which lived about 10,000 years ago. The last mammoth died on May 19, 1899, precisely. I speak with certainty because I saw it die—and I owe my fortune to it!”

  My host displayed a peremptory gravity; I did not doubt his good faith at all.

  “Moreover, it was not the only animal of primitive times that survived into our own time, since I also encountered, in one of my voyages, the lion-tiger, and a sort of primitive man. The reasons I had for keeping quiet will be set out in my book on The Double Origin of Man. I’m talking about it to you today under the influence of an instinctive sympathy, and also because it’s getting late.”

  At the time, I was wandering around miserably in the polar regions, at the mercy of polar bears, cold and collapses. My companions had perished. I had nothing left but a cracked sled, two dogs, a few furs and a supply of pemmican. My exhaustion was extreme; I expected to quit the world within 40 hours. I kept going in a southerly direction, though; my last chance was an encounter with Eskimos.

  The Sun was beginning to retrace its steps when one of the dogs lay down in the snow, uttered a few whimpers and then a long gurgle, and died. The other dog continued to drag me through the terrific wilderness. I was in a mixed mental state that was neither entirely wakefulness nor entirely sleep, when I saw three yellow-tinted shapes emerge on the horizon. The dog uttered a howl of fright, and I, woken up with a start, took the rifle from beneath the blankets in which it was wrapped.

  We fled for a good quarter of an hour. The yellow-tinted brutes, which would have seemed white against a brown or green background, hastened in pursuit with a sort of guileful stubbornness. They were bears of the most powerful stature, a male and two females; the male would have slaughtered a lion. Terror doubled the energy of my poor dog, but even so, we were losing several meters of ground per minute.

  When the brutes were 100 meters from the sled, I put my rifle to my shoulder and fired two shots—in vain. Fatigue had eroded my skill. The only result I obtained was a slight deceleration of the pursuit. Then the damned beasts began to eat into our lead again. With difficulty, I reloaded my weapon and fired again, with no better luck. The excitement that had sustained the dog faded away. It was losing speed by the minute; soon, it began to stagger. I took the only possible course; I got off the sled and started fleeing on my own. I had not gone 200 meters when I heard the agonized cries of my pitiful companion.

  How long did I keep going? Perhaps an hour, perhaps two. At any rate, the moment came when, on turning round, I saw that the white brutes had resumed the hunt, and were following me at a distance of about 1000 meters. I should have shivered in horror, but fatigue, disgust and the habit of expecting death allowed me to envisage the situation in a phlegmatic sort of way. I was fleeing out of duty, to such a degree that preoccupation with the peril didn’t prevent me from forming a vague hypothesis about the bizarre locale through which I was moving. It seemed to me to be the result of an earthquake, but that wasn’t what surprised me most, for at intervals I perceived the covered debris of grass and tree-stumps.

  Impossible, I thought, that all this can be native here. One way or another, that vegetation has come from a lower latitude…

  While I was indulging in these reflections, I found myself confronted by an immense wall of ice.

  Conclusively cooked! I said to myself.

  Worn out with fatigue, I was about to make a gift of my carcass to my pursuers when I saw a deep
crevasse that formed a corridor. The terrain was slippery and full of holes; nevertheless, as the bears had hesitated to follow me, I immediately gained a fairly good lead. My luck didn’t hold for very long. In a few minutes, the carnivores were on my heels again. Every time I looked back, I could see their pale silhouettes more clearly, in spite of the semi-darkness of the place.

  Meanwhile, there was an increasing glimmer of light at the end of the corridor; it hypnotized me and gave me a measure of hope. Then an exit appeared, toward which I limped as fast as I could go. The breath of the bears was now very close. When I was a couple of strides from the exit, a claw grazed my coat, and I had resigned myself to being devoured more-or-less alive when a strange and strident noise became audible and I caught a glimpse of a colossal form, which was rendered even more mysterious by a hairy trunk and two curved tusks.

  The bears leapt backwards, growling. The fantastic beast advanced its granite head, shook its hairy trunk, and trumpeted stridently—a sound as intolerable as that of 100 saws cutting through stone.

  Terrified, the white brutes fled.

  As for me, I stood there motionless, exhausted, stunned and considerably perplexed. What should I do? In the direction the bears had taken there was no other possible outcome than imminent death. In the direction of the Other, there was a grim enigma. With a single blow of its trunk, it could knock me down; by pressing down with its foot it could reduce me to shreds. I didn’t hesitate for more than three or four minutes; my means, if I might put it thus, didn’t permit me to! Risking everything, I headed slowly for the exit.

  The giant beast placidly stood aside; by that gesture alone, I judged that it was granting me mercy.

  We stood facing one another, perhaps equally astonished. It reminded me of the description one of our contemporaries has made of an ancestral mammoth: “Its body was a hillock and its feet trees; it displayed tusks ten meters long, capable of transpiercing oak-trees; its trunk resembled a black python, its head a rock; it moved within a hide as thick as the bark of old elm-trees.”

  The more I studied it, the more sure I was that I wasn’t in any danger. Quite the reverse—it reassured me with its tranquil and positively benevolent gaze. And when after having stared for a while, it moved off, I followed it, carried away by an invincible instinct.

  As I went, I was overtaken by another surprise. The locale that extended in front of us was no longer a field of ice, frost or snow. Fantastically green, it displayed itself, all the way to the horizon, as a savannah scattered with trees. Instead of the intolerable temperature of the polar plains I savored the warmth of the month of May in my beautiful native region of Touraine.

  A mystical confidence overwhelmed me, to the very depths of my inner being. My fatigue disappeared, as if some hand had wiped it away. I opened the little bag in which I was carrying my pemmican and, having eaten a few mouthfuls, felt renewal infiltrating my feverish veins.

  The mammoth had stopped. It was grazing the long grass, tearing up young plants; I felt that an obscure, innocent and profound communion was being established between us.

  II.

  I remained sitting down for a good hour, plunged into a dream and savoring the warmth, so gentle after the glacial trials that I had just undergone. Besides, I was worn out by fatigue; I could literally no longer feel my limbs, and if I didn’t fall sleep, it was because a fever of anxiety still persisted deep within me. All around the strange place in which I had found refuge, the polar desert extended—a desert that had become as immense for me as for our humblest ancestors.

  White humankind, for whom the planet has become so small and whose ferocious power has subjugated almost all of three continents, became a distant entity, which I could only rejoin by a miracle. In the region I had reached, undoubtedly, not only had no white man ever set foot, but no Eskimo either. Thus, I was implacably alone, having for my sole resources a revolver, a rifle, a few cartridges, a sturdy knife, a chronometer and a marine telescope. It’s impossible for you to imagine my state of mind, unless you’ve been in an analogous situation; it resembled a kind of death…something like the misery of the last man, at the end of time.

  I had not lost sight of my mammoth. It continued to graze the grass and devour the shoots; it was gradually drawing away and seemed to have forgotten me. Because it had unwittingly saved my life, I instinctively considered it as a companion and protector. From its own viewpoint, though, I was only a scarcely redoubtable animal, with which it was no more concerned than any other creature that did not threaten its security or compete with it for food. When it was 300 or 400 meters away, I did not stay there any longer. It seemed to me that the perils I had just escaped were about to be reborn, and I stood up, painfully, my joints cracking, in order to go after it.

  Birds were moving through the grass, while others were chirping in the boughs of an ash-tree, and I could see a herd of hinds in the distance. Then a boundless astonishment filled my entire being. What was this extraordinary territory into which chance had led me? How had it maintained its individuality in the bosom of the Arctic wilderness? How, above all, had it been maintained for thousands of years—for the mammoth’s presence could only be explained by the long persistence of its ancestral climate. Undoubtedly, that climate had passed through fluctuations, through colder periods and perhaps warmer ones too—if only because of the precession of the equinoxes—but it could never have been rigorously polar, for, although the mammoth had been adapted to resist harsh winters, it must be reckoned highly improbable that it had adapted to the same extent as polar bears. Most importantly, where could it have found its nourishment?

  Besides, the herd of hinds that I perceived on the horizon amply confirmed the relative, but persistent, mildness of the climate.

  “So,” I murmured, as I dragged myself away in order to catch up with the mammoth, “for between 7000 and 10,000 years there has been a fabulous place in which a part of prehistoric life has persisted…”

  Even so, the only certain vestige was the mammoth, for the hinds belonged to the same species as our ordinary deer—the red deer, which had also lived alongside the humans of the Magdalenian and Lacustrian eras.

  As I reasoned thus, the stag—a fine ten-pointer—appeared around the side of a small hill, and I observed that it was not appreciably different from the deer of our forests. Then the herd moved off at top speed, and the mammoth, ceasing to graze momentarily, raised its trunk. I had the sensation of a presence; I moved closer to the colossus as quickly as I could—but everything became calm once again.

  I lay down in the grass again. Two or three times I saw hares go by—the hares of my native land. I became drowsy. I had the impression that dusk had arrived—an absurd impression, since I was not unaware of the fact that the daylight would last for another three months.

  Suddenly, I started. Some way off, between a small hill and the smaller one around which the stag had come, a slim vertical shape had just passed, as to the nature of which I could not be mistaken. It was a man or a woman.

  My heart was beating frantically. The presence of my own kind might be the most precious of good things, but there was also a chance that it might be the worst possibility of all. I inspected the surroundings fearfully. Everything seemed peaceful, and the mammoth was grazing imperturbably. Perhaps, after all, I had been the victim of a hallucination, due to fatigue and drowsiness.

  Time went by. The mammoth started to move away again, and I made the decision to stay with it. It was going in the direction of the hillock; I overtook it, climbed the slope and found myself on a small stony platform, which made a fairly comfortable observatory. From there, I scrutinized the landscape minutely with the aid of my telescope, and observed that it was surrounded by a chain of high hills, save for the direction from which I had come. It could not be very vast, not in excess of fifteen million hectares.

  For some time my vigilance was extreme. Little by little, it eased. Fatigue was numbing my senses and my brain. I arrived at the vegetative st
ate in which the worst dangers come to seem negligible. After a brief struggle, I suddenly lost consciousness of things, as if I had fainted.

  When I woke up, the Sun was higher over the horizon; I must have been asleep for about four hours. The mammoth had disappeared. I decided to go in search of it, and I was getting ready to get down from the hillock when I shuddered; some distance away, a silhouette had just reared up behind a bush. This time, there could be no doubt about it; it was definitely a human being!

  A head was sticking out—a gray head, whose features I could scarcely make out, but which belonged, incontestably, to an old man. He was not hiding—or, rather, he was no longer hiding—but staring at me fixedly. The point of a weapon was visible level with his jaw.

  I adjusted my marine telescope and examined the individual. His appearance was perfectly original. He bore no resemblance to the Eskimos and was different from all of the human races that I had encountered in the course of my travels. The type he resembled most closely was the pure Basque type—except that his jaw was squarer and his lips thicker. As for his skin color, it was indefinable: a sort of pale violet, which deepened in his cheeks and became almost blue at the temples. His eyes, between their slack lids, retained a great vivacity. What I could see of his upper body was suggestive of a certain vigor.

  Thanks to my telescope, I did not take long to make out a second human creature huddled behind a block of stone, who was imperfectly hidden—and then a third, further away than the other two, lying in the long grass, effectively enough for me to be unable to detect any structural details. I was surrounded; I naturally supposed that other watchers must be distributed at a distance; even so, in spite of an attentive investigation, I made no further discoveries.

  What should I do? In theory, I could have shot the indigenes, for I was a good marksman—but what then? Others might come who would want to avenge their kin and would be able to vanquish me by cunning or by force. What if I were to succeed in forging an alliance? Nine times out of ten—as I am not the only person to have remarked—one can reach an understanding with savages; the brutality almost always comes from the side of the white man.