The World of the Variants

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  Eventually, he fell silent. What he had tried to say remained as mysterious as the impressions of a batrachian or a reptile. No movement of that phantasmagorical physiognomy resembled the movements of human faces. It seemed, however, that neither he nor any of his companions, male or female—for there might perhaps have been women in the horde—had a menacing attitude. What did they want? Why had they abducted her instead of killing her?

  For some time, in Suzanne’s hypnotized brain, the external world only appeared in flashes; then her vision cleared, and she saw four bound men lying beside one of the fires. They were natives, perhaps some of those who had laid siege to van den Bosch’s camp. They were not moving; they were waiting, with the patience and stoicism of men of their race.

  At length, the number of watchers diminished. One after another, they lay down on the ground next to the fire. Soon, there were no more than four men standing, in addition to the one that Suzanne assumed to be the chief. They had set about assembling foliage and long tufts of a silver-colored lichen, whose form was reminiscent of hairy lichen. When they had constructed a sort of mattress, the chief came back to Suzanne; the primitive bed was intended for her. These creatures had some notion of the habits of a humankind other than their own.

  In spite of her terror, she was almost grateful for their effort, and because she felt as powerless as a hind beneath the claws of a leopard, she sat down on the green mattress.

  Ominous minutes went by. Suzanne was in the same state of mind as someone awaiting the executioner, but nothing happened. One by one, the last wakeful individuals went to lie down.

  For a long time she stayed there, sometimes in a hypnotic trance, sometimes gripped by a horror that racked her entrails. The constellations passed slowly between the branches: the Southern Cross marked eternal time over the pole; the snoring of men and the crackle of the fire blended with the sounds of the wilderness, and Suzanne felt as weak, as abandoned and as wretched as a puny animal before large carnivores, until she sank into the quotidian death: the salutary respite that obscure forces have accorded to miserable creatures.

  At first light, when she woke up, the fire was reddening. The Boar Men were still asleep. She perceived that while she was asleep, someone had covered her with an animal skin—which surprised her profoundly. As consciousness penetrated the torpid regions of the self, her astonishment increased. These men had done her no harm; not only had they let her sleep peacefully, but they had shielded her from the cold.

  She was not reassured at all; she continued to fear death and torture, but in a less terrified fashion. Plunged in a somber dream, through which remembered dawns and dusks passed, she dimly perceived the formidable mystery of the world, in the bosom of energies that create and destroy, which distil joy and spread suffering. She had lived happily in that terrible world; her foresight only extended over a feeble distance; she had had no fear of the future, accepting without anguish the fragile security of the present. Death had seemed to her as distant as the nebulae lost behind the stars. Her capacity for sadness had been suppressed by dazzling fables, by her ability to enjoy herself, and by an imagination in which joyful flames quickly chased away the phantoms that perpetually invade our souls…

  In the carnivorous forest, the memories were reborn one after another, posing momentarily in bright light and returning to the darkness. She thought most of all about Lodewyk. Although he was older than her, she felt a maternal sentiment for him, because he had an unstable consciousness, lacking in foresight. The idea that she would never see him again was almost as unbearable as the idea of death itself.

  She went to sleep and woke up again several times, until the light of day impregnated the forest. The Boar Men set the quarters of a deer to roast. When it was cooked, the chief removed the meat and sliced it up with a knife made of nephrite—a stone almost as hard as steel. Then, the portions having been spread out on the deer-skin, each man came to take his own and set about devouring it. They ate like wolves, sometimes burying their faces in the flesh, abundantly smeared with blood and grease.

  The chief had set aside two portions. He brought the smaller one to Suzanne, growling dully and making enigmatic signs; then he joined the feast, with the same crudity as the others.

  At first, Suzanne did not touch the piece of warm meat that the chief had deposited beside her. She was astonished not to be disgusted, but inflexible nature constrained her to hunger and made that coarse nourishment into an appetizing dish. She did not want to touch it and believed that she would not touch it—but then she thought that it was better to give herself as much strength as possible; the precarious possibility of a rescue would be even more precarious if she were debilitated. That argument, more than the temptation, made up her mind.

  The Boar Men extinguished their fires very carefully, anxious to avoid a forest fire. Then the troop got under way.

  Suzanne was free in her movements; her limbs were not hobbled. When they set off, she had a surge of rebellion, but, considering that she would gain nothing by being tied up, decided to accompany her disgusting kidnappers.

  They moved forward without haste. From time to time men detached themselves from the horde and disappeared into the undergrowth; a few came back with small game, and three hunters even brought back the corpse of a deer.

  They were well-armed, with primitive weapons: pikes, the points of which were as hard as iron; wooden clubs; green stone axes; bows; javelins of a sort; and harpoons. She could have believed that she had gone back to a time even more remote than that evoked by the Indians of the American plains.

  Sometimes, Suzanne’s consciousness seemed to dissolve in the forest; everything became vague, distant and animal; then a surge of terror, astonishment and rebellion woke the captive up again. Was it really her, a daughter of low-lying meadows and plaintive polders, where carillons of bells awoke insect songs in the most placid of atmospheres, who was following these men with the muzzles of swine?

  Stunned by anguish, she thought of killing herself, but then the love of life rose up within her young flesh, made for joy, and she devoted herself to hoping for an adventure as astonishingly bright as this adventure was somber.

  Meanwhile, they went on. The flesh of the deer was finished off at midday and Suzanne took part in the feast with an appetite of which she was ashamed. The meal was followed by a siesta during which no one troubled the young woman’s relative solitude. She could almost have believed that she had been forgotten, but whenever she turned round she always ended up discovering eyes watching her from the shade—and even if she had not been watched, these men had the senses of wolves, which would immediately have detected any attempt at flight. At least she was free in her movements, while the indigenous prisoners were still tied up; the Boar Men’s instincts perceived that the latter were endowed with both animal and human cunning.

  The shadows were lengthening when the Boar Men resumed their march.

  They marched for several days, and then reached a formidable terrain—a region of marshes, black and red rocks, and sinister plants, punctuated by islets from which enormous reptiles surged forth, or swarming with primitive beasts.

  The horde stopped in a megalithic circle, in which men dead for millennia had accumulated strange formations: upright blocks, funerary slabs, rocky alleyways, the sketches of roofless sanctuaries, which were vaguely reminiscent of Angkor Wat or the columns of Karnak.

  Women, children and old men who had stayed in the camp—the oldest of whom seemed hewn from the surrounding stones—came to meet the Boar Men, with raucous shouts and bestial howls—cries of elementary joy unaccompanied by any caress. Then silence fell. An old man stood up and spoke in a singsong fashion; the Forest Chief spoke thereafter in a deep and proud voice; more shouting echoed from the rocks and the waters. A great fire was lit in the center of the circle.

  The prisoners were taken to the center, escorted by six men holding jade daggers in their hands. The old man proffered raucous and rhythmic sounds, raising his
arms, while the captives were laid out on the ground. Amid the acclamations of the horde, the jade knives cut into the flesh of their torsos, on the left side; red hands reappeared, holding bloody hearts. The old man resumed his chant in a louder voice.

  Terror froze Suzanne’s vertebrae as she tried to turn her dilated eyes away from the corpses, but an implacable force condemned her to look at them. That was how she would die. Her youth trembled pitifully; her legs would no longer support her; her heart was like an internal executioner.

  Further fires were lit, in which the victims’ flesh was roasted; the crowd waited with ardent covetousness. Every time a man approached her, Suzanne thought that the inexorable moment had come, but she was soon left alone, without anyone seeming to be aware of her presence.

  Little by little, saturated by terror, she fell into a trance, in which she continued uncomprehendingly to see the flames, the vile meal and the shadows of the forest, streaked with coppery gleams.

  She did not hear a man approaching, and when the Forest Chief stood in front of her she hardly shivered. The enormous face loomed over her momentarily, and then a hairy hand seized her by the arm and lifted her up. Consciousness returned, but misty and indefinite; thinking that her time had come, she put up no resistance.

  He did not take her toward the horde; he dragged her through the ancestral stones until they had arrived in an enclosure formed by four blocks of granite. As had been done with the captives, he threw her brusquely to the ground. An immense terror dissipated the mists. Suzanne knew that she was about to die and screamed loudly.

  She was transpierced by a sudden pain, immediately followed by a release, and then by strange, inconceivable sensations, which accelerated, and her terror was confused by an intoxication…

  Darkness. Branches, through which scraps of constellations filtered, enveloped Suzanne. Death had not come. For her ignorant imagination, something had happened in which terror, repugnance, astonishment and the strangest exaltation had been amalgamated. She distinctly remembered the hideous brute, breathing in his bestial odor, feeling herself gripped by pitiless hands—and while she had expected only pain and death, that unexpected event had occurred.

  The Dutch girl, brought up by scrupulous and narrow-minded Calvinists, had had no inkling of the surprising act that perpetuates the human race. Its verbal revelation had filled her with stupor and had appeared to her to be both disgusting and grotesque—as, all things considered, it is for beings who, having emerged from primitive vileness, have created poetry, the arts, purity and propriety.

  Lassitude ended up dragging Suzanne into sleep.

  The phantasmagoric scene recommenced on a daily basis. The monstrous savage, groaning and uttering unknown words, suddenly appeared and threw Suzanne down. Every time, the poor girl experienced an incomprehensible exaltation in association with the brutal act. She did not seek to understand; she lived in a kind of bewilderment from which, by virtue of the repetition of the same things—the origin of all animal and human security—fear was now banished. At times when consciousness rose up forcefully, she experienced a profound disgust, and a homicidal nostalgia. Then, dreams rose from the depths of ages which, had we not been informed of their proximity, would have appeared as distant as ages lost for millennia. She bore within her an eternity that incessantly became the present moment…

  A Dutch city surged forth on low-lying land: agricultural land stolen from the Ocean, which the Ocean, with a single bound, might fill again with its fecund waves. A placid discipline regulated time and human beings. Behind the little pools of windows one could see, through the spioens,21 humans moving about monotonously; periodically, the patter of feet and the brazen voice of a child punctuated the slow adventure. In those days, everything was delightful. Like omnipotent gods, Jan and Anna van den Bosch watched over the wealthy child for whom miracles never ceased to be accomplished. Everything seemed immortal. Jan and Anna had always existed and would always endure. The child became a jufvrouw full of dreams, so content with life that her dreams did not even require much hope.

  As to the essential event of adult life no one had ever given her any precision. Love was only a word, very familiar and bizarrely distant. The jufvrouw saw it surge forth from colorless histories, devoid of taste, devoid of odor, only presented as an adventure as calm as warm bedrooms or well-scrubbed sidewalks.

  Thus, her vile misfortune evoked nothing that connected with Suzanne’s memories, ideas or dreams, and if she felt shame, it was because it was associated with regions whose very function rendered them vile. Any connection between her adventure and the mysterious, beautiful or touching thing that love became in sanitized periodicals or books would have seemed fabulous to the larval mind of the Dutchwoman. She was not far from believing it to be a kind of witchcraft, evocative of incoherent fairy-tales in which hideous creatures strangely combined good and evil.

  She thought unrelentingly about running away, but the enterprise seemed superhuman. How could she get out of that fantastic and terrifying world? Even if she contrived to elude the Boar Men’s vigilance, how could she get through the pitiless jungle? She wanted to, though. When she thought about returning to the human world, her entire being throbbed like a heart.

  Simple cunning guided her. Since her movements remained free, she began taking short walks, which grew a little longer every time. She was allowed to do it. She sometimes thought she was really alone, shielded from all gazes, and, involuntarily, walked faster. Eyes shining within a bush, a face, limbs, or part of a torso would then appear, and she knew that she was being watched.

  However, as she always returned to the dwelling, the surveillance relaxed, to the extent that she thought she was safe. There was more than one occasion when she had gone into the forest and nothing had betrayed the presence of a Boar Man. Then she resolved to test her luck to the limit.

  She had been walking for an indeterminate time when she perceived muffled footfalls—human footfalls, which she had learned not to confuse with animal footfalls.

  She pretended not to have heard anything, continued to wander for a few more minutes, and then returned to the abominable enclosure. Half way, the Forest Chief emerged, growled—as was his habit—and threw her on the ground.

  She did not give up. Every day, she recommenced her excursions, moved more by instinct than by lucid will. She became strangely strong and resilient, as if the forest air had transmitted its millennial energy to her. She developed a subtle sense of smell: animal sense that allowed her to perceive invisible presences. She knew thereby that the moment had not come, and sometimes despaired that it would ever come—but youth was within her, which forbade resignation.

  One afternoon, she arrived beside a river similar, in the rapidity of its flow, to the river on whose bank van den Bosch’s men had camped. She had marked her path on hard stones. To reach the water it was necessary to descend through the rocks. Suzanne walked for a long time, her eyes and ears alert. Suddenly, a hope full of dread rose within her heart; in a sort of creek she had just perceived a primitive raft—which must have been there for a long time, since water-plants had grown through its interstices.

  Suzanne realized that a chance had been offered to her within the inextricable tangle of events. All around her the forest was open, arrested by a ground of Archean rock that scarcely nourished a few paltry lichens, with the occasional fern whose roots descended into a fissure. The individual or individuals who were watching her had to be several hundred meters away, among the trees and bushes.

  She had no thought for anything but the present. The perils to come were not manifest in her imagination, and she set about descending through the rocks. When she got close to the creek she raised her head, but saw nothing. Then she pulled out the raft, whose mooring had rotted away long ago.

  The raft carried the woman on to the homicidal waves. In the torrential flow, menaced by the sharp rocks of the bank, clinging desperately to the damp wood that threatened to tip her into the abyss, Suzanne was o
nly afraid of the man or men who were pursuing her.

  A silhouette appeared among the rocks; a bestial face remained momentarily motionless, turned toward the fugitive. Then, bellowing like a buffalo, the man started to run down. He appeared and disappeared in the interstices. He was no more than 10 or 15 feet from the bank when he lost his footing. Then he fell, his arms extended, rolled on the hard rock and remained still, dead or unconscious…

  For a long time, the fear of men remained greater than the fear of the waters. In the rapids and whirlpools Suzanne felt continually menaced by elementary life, the life of objects and energies that menaces the structure of perishable animals.

  Finally, however, her raft was thrown rudely against a little promontory, and she disembarked. She was worn out by fatigue, her clothes as wet as if she had emerged from a bath. Her mind was in such disarray and she was so miserable that she no longer had the courage to fight. She climbed painfully on to a flat rock, exposed to the yellow Sun that precedes the red Sun, and remained as inert as a reptile. She was undoubtedly asleep, because she was unaware of the approach of night.

  When she sat up again, her clothes were dry, but the red Sun was level with the river. Dazedly, she watched it disappear into a cleft in the rocks, and felt the immense solitude that descended upon her with the darkness. She was nothing. To destroy her, it only required a tiger, a bear, or even a panther—a wolf would suffice. She was not astonished; her faculty of astonishment was extinct. She searched instinctively for shelter. Night had arrived with its stars; the excessively pure sky drank the warmth, and the wind freshened.

  Discouraged, Suzanne lay down between two blocks of stone, stammered a prayer, and sank into unconsciousness.

  She awoke beneath scintillating constellations, amid the water, the branches and furtive beasts, knowing full well that living creatures were searching for living creatures in order to devour them. Fragile, without weapons and without instinct, she was a feeble prey—but she was no longer aware of any ardent fear, fear full of images of civilized life; primitive resignation was already within her, and a brutishness that quickly sent her to sleep again.