Pan's Flute

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  They went down toward the bank of the river, pensively.

  “What did Somnius say to you?” asked the young woman.

  He shuddered. A tragic shadow was in his soul. He forced himself to reply

  “It’s necessary not to believe that old man. He roams the roads, he seizes words at hazard from passers-by and old women. He knows something about everyone, but he knows it poorly.”

  He spoke thus in order to dissipate his malaise, for, deep down, he feared the diviner’s art.

  Anxious at first, she rediscovered her youth, the vivid gleam of her joy. She drew her friend toward the Volturne. Children were searching for insects and frogs there; others, among the stones of the bank, were catching fish. Some were bathing in the fresh water or drying themselves in the grass. Dehva picked up a flat stone and tried to make it ricochet. The stone sank.

  “If I miss the ricochet three times,” she said, “it will be a bad omen.”

  She threw again, and the stone did not reappear. Dionys went pale. He agreed with himself that it would be the decree of Zeus, and that he would leave the village if Tarao’s daughter failed again. He waited, frightened.

  Dehva picked up a small, very flat stone, and, tilting her brilliant head, took careful aim.

  Dionys murmured in a low voice: “It will be your will, Zeus, and yours, Diana Etrusca; I shall submit to it.”

  The stone departed. It skipped three times over the current. An extraordinary delight penetrated the Syracusan. He took his companion’s arm and drew her into the shade.

  “I was going to leave, Dehva, if the presage was unfavorable.”

  She looked at him, stupefied. “You were thinking of going away...of leaving?”

  “But not now, dear hostess. Fate is surer when it is consulted by an innocent soul...”

  “She repeated, plaintively: “Leaving...” That word caused all the unknown of her soul to rise within her. Her eyes filled with tears. She threw herself impetuously against the Sicilian and said to him in a penetrating voice: “I don’t want that! You shan’t quit our home...”

  He had not yet felt that beautiful flesh so close, and so vibrant. He was conscious of its warmth, the semi-nudity through the light stola. And the somber voluptuous bush of her hair collapsed upon his breast.

  In a low voice, he said: “I swear it.”

  She uttered a sigh of joy. She put her arms around her friend’s neck. It seemed that an imperious soul emerged from her grip, which bound Dionys, attaching an invincible cable to him.

  V. The Festival of the Manes

  It was the festival of the Manes. Among the old Etruscans it coincided, every twenty years or so, with the festival of the veiled Gods, but the ancient tradition was almost abolished. It was still found in Veila, where the master-potter had revived it, in accordance with veritable texts, but even so, it had been polluted by Phoenician, Persian and Greek practices.

  An hour before dusk, the procession assembled in the shade of the Wall of the Ancestors. It marched in two ranks, the men enveloped in a kind of military mantle, the women in a brown, violet or dark blue palla, with the head hidden. All of them carried black clay lamps in the right hand, the flames of which, pale to begin with, brightened with the decline of the sun. The left hand raised the plants of mourning: box, cypress, maidenhair, asphodel and narcissus. At the head of the procession, a choir of maidens sang, in soft voices, a hymn as monotonous as the sound of the waves against the cliff.

  Very quietly, gentle and gripping, there was a harmony of reed pipes, lyres and clay bells moved by veiled hammers.

  Old Tarao gave the signal to move off. The cortege spread out very slowly over the paths, toward the elegant hills, traced in lines of shadow by the setting sun, vibrant with a sort of violet warmth. At intervals, the young women, the lyres, the reed pipes and the clay bells fell silent.

  Then the men chanted in a somber voice, in such unison that only a single voice was audible:

  Manes of the profound earth

  And the bright abodes,

  For whom all obstacles are abolished,

  Who traverse hard bronze like a wave,

  Be propitious to poor humans,

  Your descendants!

  And the women said in their turn, with a single voice, which seemed pure and young, as if there were no old women there:

  Manes, inhabitants of days past,

  You who left on our dwellings

  The perfume of your trace and sweetness of your toil,

  Come to the aid of the poor women

  Who give birth for the times to come!

  Then the clay bells sounded in isolation, in belated punctuation, and the harmony resumed its mysterious hum.

  They went as far as the cliffs where the ancestors reposed. The necropolis opened in a cliff. At the hazard of inspirations, from era to era, ingenuous artisans had sculpted the natural facades.

  The ruinous image of the primitive gods was visible, the vague and metaphysical gods that the abstract thought of the Rasenas had conceived. Then, not at the hazard of time but the hazard of space, came Melkarth with the dwarfish legs and the colossal head, fecund Astarte, the winged Diana of Iran, Phoebus Citharedes, Heracles taking Cerberus back into the shadows, Hades with heavy tresses, holding the key to the funereal gates, and Charon with the hawkish proboscis, armed with the symbolic hammer.

  The cortege stopped; the voices and the chords died in the frisson of an astonishing silence,

  Then the master-potter raised his lamp and a branch of box toward the simulacra, and all the lamps rose with a single movement. They resembled little souls of light before the red sun, half-buried in the ether.

  And the old man prayed.

  “O Gods of great Etruria, Gods of a hundred centuries, Veiled Gods, Complicit Gods, Lares, Penates, Genii, and you, Manes raised to immortal power, cast a favorable gaze upon the piety of the people of Veila. Somber Hades, inexorable king of darkness, listen to our prayer; we promise you two virgin ewes at the new moon. Their faces will be turned toward the ditch, their flesh reduced to ashes. Be favorable to us also, Charon; we never forget the obol that is due to you, and you will receive the flesh of the autumnal dove, which you prefer to all others, for it is black and bears the odor of cypress.”

  The people then divided up and spread out among the tombs. Night fell; the rocks lit up with a hundred uncertain gleams, decreasing as the visitors lost themselves in the galleries.

  In the eternal night, the Manes like light. They have maintained the mild need for lamps. Their joy is sure when the crypt, the funerary niche or the ancient pozzo tomb is brightened like an atrium on festival evenings.

  And the people of Veila, through the gaps between pilasters, the sepulchral chambers, and the often-vast dwellings, as numerous as the rooms of a consular house, sensed the friction of winged ancestors, the subtle quivering of souls like birds of darkness and vapor.

  Dionys followed the master-potter and Dehva, for the Etruscans’ guests were also taken among the ancestors.

  The young woman, enveloped by her veils, was marching like a melancholy Aeneas. She was submissive to the power of the Manes, she sensed them, alive and sighing very softly. Dionys admired the rhythm of her sadness, in the glimmers that she cast over herself in holding her lamp high.

  Tarao stopped. He had reached the abode of his ancestors, those who, for eight generations, had descended into the Necropolis of Veila. It was a low, round, vast chamber supported by a single pillar, hollowed out with niches that contained the remains.

  The master-potter spoke quietly to the dead.

  “Ancestral Manes, you see your child become an ancestor himself, and deprived of descendants save for this fragile young woman; and you, Manes who followed me on earth for a shorter voyage, here is your father and your husband, and the father of those who engendered you. Watch over this tender plant. She is all that remains of a noble blood that flowed on the shore of Lake Regillus, Lake Vadimon and the Ciminian forest. Give her life an
d fecund loins. Let a posterity emerge from her like the indefatigable inhabitants of the sea; may she be pure, strong and faithful, for races are condemned who are born from an adulterous womb.”

  He took Dehva’s lamp, put it on a ledge of the pillar, and said: “This is the lamp, dear Manes; you have all loved the light, when alive.”

  Then he turned to the young couple. “I shall go alone, as is my wish, to the primitive tombs.” He went into a narrow corridor, Dionys and Dehva watched him disappear, like a glimmer at the bottom of a shaft,

  They were silent. The Syracusan, full of a religious and tender disturbance, considered the cloudy silhouette of the virgin, the long pleats of the palla woven in wool from Canusium.

  Eventually, he said: “I am glad, cherished maiden, to have come with you to your ancestors. It seems to me that I am the guest of all your race, and that all of them are welcoming me as one of yours.”

  She did not reply. A slight frisson shook her shoulders.

  Dionys went on: “Do you not want me to do likewise at every festival of the Manes, with Tarao and you?”

  Dehva’s voice replied, as faint as the light of the cave: “But you know, Dionys, that I am consecrated to Diana Etrusca until my eighteenth year.”

  “I spoke for ever, Dehva. We shall wait for the termination of your vow.”

  She trembled more, while he reached out slowly with both hands. Her eyes were hidden. Only her mouth was visible. He placed his lips on that red mouth for a long time; and the lamp flickered with a very soft crackle, as if the Manes were burning their wings in its flame.

  Meanwhile, the master-potter had reached the primitive graves, the shaft-tombs. They were situated higher than the others, on a small plateau, linked together by very narrow tunnels, where the passage was very inconvenient. Large vases of red clay were found there, cinerary urns and cabin-urns, amber and jewels contemporary with the ancestral Lucumons.

  The old man set down his lamp in the well that was reputed to be the most ancient. He remained bowed down beneath memories that he had not lived himself, but which moved him nevertheless.

  Then he said, softly and with resignation:

  “Divine, glorious, invincible spirits, you who curbed under your strength the men of Rome and Alba, and the indomitable Sanites, you who repelled the Gauls with red hair who made Tyre and Carthage tremble, be happy in the imperishable world! Alas, your sons have had no fatherland for centuries. Will not a day arrive when they will shine again in the world, if not by means of glory, at least by means of beauty?”

  VI. The Veiled Gods

  The festival of the Veiled Gods was still celebrated in a few Etruscan districts of Campania. That nocturnal and mysterious custom was scarcely known to Roman authority. It had to coincide with the full moon in the months of May, while the festival of the Manes invariable fell on the kalends.

  It commenced in the middle of the night and continued until dawn.

  When the gnomons projected the shortest shadow, the master-potter struck his great clay bell seven times.

  At the same moment, the voices of men called to one another through space. The first voices departed from the east of the village, and the last from the west, near the edge of the marshes.

  They said:

  We implore you, Veiled Gods,

  Fathers of matter and beings,

  Born before the waters and the stars,

  Source of all growth and all fecundity...

  Those voices fell silent, but a hidden woman sang in the middle of a garden. Then other voices joined in with hers. The choir was swollen thus like a flock of migratory birds gradually gathering for the great voyage. One by one, the voices of men joined in with it, and all of them, invisibly, celebrated the invisible powers.

  From the invisible force

  Is born light.

  From obscure and shapeless powers

  Spring the Chariot of the Sun,

  Number and figure...

  O Gods who floated over the primal sea,

  Have pity on the Rasenas.

  When the entire village had completed that strophe, the voices resounded one by one, and the last rose solemnly into the silence, sung by old Tarao:

  Have pity on the Rasenas.

  For half an hour, the space remained motionless. Tarao had gone inside with Dionys. He gave his guest a wolfskin to put on, and covered himself with the skin of a stag. The hairy heads fell over their faces like masks; two holes were cut out therein at the level of the eyes.

  “Be careful, Dionys,” said the master-potter, “not to remove that mask from your face; you would be punished by three months of servitude, and I could not get you out of it.”

  Dionys lowered the mask carefully. They went out. From all the houses in the village, fugitive forms emerged, clad in animal skins, with their faces hidden. There were only men and one single woman: a virgin slave fifteen years old, almost naked, her hair scattered, led by an old man. She was pretty, as the rites prescribed. A certain anguish dilated her long Oriental eyes and caused her charming brown shoulders to quiver.

  Gazes sparkled toward her through the beasts’ muzzles.

  Two shepherds brought a black he-goat and a white she-goat. At a sign, Dionys intoned the hymn of the Veiled Gods, which Tarao had taught him.

  The troop set forth and marched to the confines of a silvery pine-wood and a field of roses. Two spacious ditches had been hollowed out next to an altar made of one of the stones carved by men who lived in fabulous times.

  The procession halted there, Tarao ordered the slave and the goats to be brought forward. Each man brought some small offering: wine, eggs, doves, milk, alica wheat or fruits.

  The master-potter cried:

  “Gods who were in Chaos when the earth and the planets were floating in eternal night! Precursor Gods born with all the gods, already eternal when Time did not yet exist! You who revealed the Rasenas, sons of men armed with clubs, who lived by the strength of their arms alone...

  “Veiled Gods, tutelary, formless, omnipotent and merciful, we give you the virgin slave, the white she-goat and the black he-goat, the doves, the fruits of the earth and of beasts.”

  The crowd responded with a long cry, prolonged like the passage of an equinoctial wind through the oaks. A man set about cutting the throats of the doves while a priest’s assistant lit an odorous fire on the altar, The goats were thrown into the left hand ditch; they were to die there, after having accomplished the sacred act,

  Then Tarao had the virgin slave brought before him. She was afraid; her charming shoulders and her small new breasts were heaving forcefully. The fear of death replaced tears in her eyes.

  But the master-potter said to her softly: “Your life is not threatened, young woman. It is necessary to flee through that pine-wood. You will be pursued. The first man to catch you by the hair will be your master and will sacrifice you to the Veiled Gods, but not by your death.”

  She raised her somber head with a smile; her terror fled. A mocking gaiety appeared at the corners of her mouth, for she had confidence in the old man.

  “Go,” said Tarao, “and remember that the Gods will be discontented if your flight is not rapid enough, or if you do not seek the surest retreat.”

  He gave the signal. She ran away lightly over the dusty path. Her white form, her loose hair and the sway of her run caused all the men to shiver. She was the enchanted legend of little nymphs fleeing before satyrs and fauns. War and amour followed her agile trace.

  She went into the wood, Tarao rapped ten times slowly, and all of them, young and old, launched forward, the former confident in their speed and the latter in cunning or fortune.

  Only Dionys, still intoxicated by the scene with Dehva, remained immobile.

  “It’s necessary to pursue,” said the master-potter. “I alone am exempt, with the two assistant priests.”

  Dionys set off. He penetrated among the great silvery columns. No breeze rose up from the Campanian plains; the silence of the trees was
as profound as that of the stars; hamadryads filled their souls. But the running footfalls of men were audible, carried away by frenzy, mystery, and the petty prodigy of the adventure.

  Dionys sat down on a branch. He listened to the hunt. It reverberated within him, alloyed with the beating of his heart; and he thought without respite about the lips that had flexed beneath his own with the suppleness of young roses. They were his life and more than his life, they added to his being what spring adds to the joyful earth. They made his soul a fertile field, a palpitating forest.

  A furtive noise deflected his dream. He saw something white passing, and recognized the consecrated slave.

  Desire, in spite of everything, surged in his flesh. He only needed one bound to seized that floating hair, and the virgin, as mysterious as any beautifully shaped virgin, would know through him the magnificent law. He was too late. The slave had already disappeared; and he was falling back into the moving indolence of reverie when a clamor caused him to spring to his feet.

  The slave had come back. A man had sprung forth, agile, who threw himself upon her and seized her by the hair with a triumphant cry.

  “The gods have given you to Mantus, beautiful girl. Cease struggling.” For, instinctively, the slave was trying to tear herself away from her captor. The words calmed her. She lowered her head, she followed the man, and, summoned from clearing to clearing, everyone returned to the field of roses near the altar.

  A great fire roasted the doves, and the priest’s assistants, at a sign from the master-potter, began to carve them. They gave a piece of meat to everyone there, except for the slave and her captor, isolated, standing next to the right-hand ditch. And the scene, silent and slow, seemed veritably to be unfolding in the fabulous centuries in which the heroic legend, the history of the world, was still in formation in the depths of the woods, the sinister marshes and the yellow deserts, between Heracles armed with an oak branch and wild beasts armed with claws.