We stopped on the grass in order to enjoy it for longer. We found trees laden with fruit around us; we had a rural feast, and held council regarding the conduct we had to adopt in entering a land that seemed to us to be civilized; but as we did not know the humor of the people into whose midst we were coming, we descended from the mountain, replacing such things in the hands of providence.
Soon, we were noticed by three little men who were cultivating a field. They considered us for a long time, and then advanced a few paces in order to see us at closer range. After they had looked us up and down carefully, they ran away into a little wood not far away.
The three men were white; they were two feet tall at the most; their garments appeared to us to be made of cloth, not animal hides, like those of the majority of the savages, and they had implements of labor on their shoulders, which seemed to us to be made of bronze. In sum, everything announced that we were now in a flourishing nation, among a people submissive to laws.
The manner in which the three men had quit us was not a flight, but rather the action of men who had gone to warn their fellows of the arrival in the realm of six giants.
While we were finishing our meal, we saw the little men who had run away on seeing us reappear, but they were accompanied by a crowd so numerous that we were frightened. They seemed to emerge from a little wood and advance in good order, six abreast, armed with staffs. They were uttering war-cries, for they had taken us at a distance for unknown monsters, whose progress it might be necessary to stop. Their voices, repeated by a multitude of echoes, seemed to us to be terrible for men of their small stature.
When they got closer to us, we realized that the staffs they were carrying were armed at both ends with broad bronze blades. That particularity frightened the Manseau, and I confess that I began to tremble for my poor life, but Edward tried to reassure us, and urged us to wait for the armed troop until they were within a stone’s throw.
“Then,” he continued, “if, in spite of our non-bellicose appearance, they continue to manifest hostile intentions, we’ll be free to run away, and I hope that we have nothing to fear in a race...”
On that advice, the troop formed a line and waited, hats in hand, to see what the local leaders were going to do.
When the five or six hundred dwarfs who were coming to meet us were facing us at a distance of about a hundred paces, the captain called a halt and began, like his fellows, to consider us attentively. We were astonished to see that he was making use of binoculars, with which he was scanning us from head to toe.
After a long examination of our persons, a brief council was held. Thy judged, by our physiognomy, that we might well be human—of a strange nature, to be sure, but after all, humans are still not monsters, and we had, besides, honest faces, and no weapons.
That is why it was decided to employ the route of negotiations before having recourse to arms. The captain ordered his men to keep their pikes forward, in order to come to his aid in case we had been misjudged us and there was danger in approaching us. Then he came toward us, with six inhabitants of the locale, unarmed, as he was, in order to show us that he was not advancing as an enemy.
We waited for him, heads bared, in silence, for fear of giving umbrage to the little men by words that they might have taken for conspiracies. As the seven negotiators approached, they darted their gazes at us in order to examine our posture and our gestures. Clairancy perceived that they had bared their breasts and put their right hands over their hearts. He understood that it was probably their manner of greeting, or of demonstrating peaceful intentions, and he hastened to imitate them. We did likewise, which appeared to please the little men.
Even so, they stopped twenty paces away from us, and made signs inviting us to sit down, because we were too tall. We all hastened to imitate Williams, who was the first to understand the signs that they were making to us. Then the seven little men came forward rapidly and crossed their hands over their hearts, as a testimony of alliance. Each of us did the same.
After that, they asked us where we had come from. We showed them the sky—which is to say, the terrestrial globe—and made them understand that long misfortunes had brought us in an extraordinary fashion to their globe. They seemed very astonished, and confessed to us later that they had had great difficulties believing us.
For the moment, however, and without asking us any other questions, they uttered the cry: “Elbem!”—which signifies “friends”—while turning to their companions. The whole army immediately shouldered their pikes, came forward and surrounded us with every evidence of interest. When they had considered us fully, they gave us the sign to stand up, and announced to us by perfectly intelligible gestures that they were going to take us to the nearby town.
That resolution, and everything that had just happened to us, filled us with joy. We set forth, thanking Heaven, and were conducted triumphantly to the gates of the town, where the women were waiting for us.
But it is time to describe, in a few words, the inhabitants of that little world. The men we had before our eyes were almost all only two feet tall. A man of two feet is for them a good height. The women are proportionate to the men, which is to say that a beautiful woman is about eighteen inches tall. Their faces are generally regular and well-made, especially those of the women, who have a shiny complexion. The men wear beards, moustaches and long hair. Their hair is ordinarily blond, sometimes chestnut brown, never red and very rarely dark.
The clothing of the men is tailored in a fashion similar to those of the ancient Greeks: a tunic, large boots, bare legs and head; such is their ordinary and extraordinary costume. The women dress in almost the same way, the only difference consisting in the tunic, which descends as far as the ankle; they wear their hair curly and loose. With the ladies who came to meet us here were a few children. They were dressed in the adult fashion, but their height of ten or twelve inches gave them something of the appearance of living marionettes.
XVI. The realm of Albur. A fortified town.
Accommodation. Way of life. Costumes.
Meanwhile, we were at the gates of the town. As it was on the frontier of the country, it passed for a fortified location, and was surrounded by ditches and walls. The drawbridges, which also served as gates, were lowered before us,14 and we entered into a street so broad in proportion to the houses that we mistook it at first for a public square; but we soon realized that all the streets in the town had the same width. They had been leveled with precision and paved agreeably with stones of various colors. The houses were all symmetrical, built with a great deal of elegance and taste, admirably neat and clean.
Combine that with the delicacy of the architecture, and twenty-foot houses with four stories, the bottom one of which was raised a foot or two above the ground, and you will have an idea of the sight that was offered to our gaze. We also noticed that all the walls were painted pale yellow, as they are painted white in Europe. The roofs appear to us to be covered with dark green bricks, and the doors had the same color. The shops were gracious, but without luxury.
We were so amazed by all these things, the multitude of men and women filling the streets, and the good order that reigned everywhere, that we were somewhat ashamed of our own countries, where towns are usually nothing but a mass of tasteless edifices devoid of accord or liaison.
We were taken to the middle of the public square, which was immense. There was only one in each town, because the streets were all like prolonged squares. It was round, like the town whose center it formed, and a pyramid about forty feet high rose up in the center.
The principal inhabitants were assembled there, deliberating as to what measures ought to be taken to accommodate us. A rich merchant and owner of a spacious house proposed to take us in and lodge us in his warehouse, the ceiling of which was seven feet high. We accepted his offer as frankly as it was made, and he went away to give orders for our room to be cleared of the bales of merchandise with which it was cluttered.
In the me
antime, four-footed ladders were brought; they were placed in front of us, and people set about measuring us, on the orders of the town’s governor. After they had taken the exact dimensions of our height and girth in all directions, an engineer took a kind of stylet from his pocket and began to scribble figures on a kind of slate, which other engineers dictated to him. If we had been astonished to find binoculars among a population of dwarfs, and a beautiful town in a land unknown in Europe, we were no less so to see writing, calculation, geometry and step-ladders in usage there.
The result of the engineers’ calculations was that each of us ought to eat for his meals the ordinary portions of sixteen of the local inhabitants; and the town took charge of sending ninety-six portions to the merchant who was lodging us, every six hours, at its own expense, for the six giants. When those sage precautions had been taken, we were escorted to our abode. I ought not to forget to say that we were obliged to walk with extreme slowness in order not to travel in two minutes the distance that the people of the land could only cover in ten.
When we arrived at the establishment of the kind merchant who was giving us hospitality, however, we found his warehouse only half unloaded, although ten workers were toiling there with the greatest zeal. Edward and Clairancy took pity on the sweat of those poor fellows and indicated by signs that, with their permission, we would lend a hand. The merchant understood our offer of service marvelously, and received them very agreeably.
As the door of the apartment we were being given so generously was six feet tall, in order to let in carts laden with merchandise, we passed through it easily, and each of us set to work. The heaviest bales only weighed twenty-five pounds. Either to be finished sooner or to be admired, we took four or five at a time and carried them at a run to another warehouse.
The master of the house and all the spectators swooned with pleasure on seeing us operate so briskly. After a quarter of an hour, the large space that was to serve as our accommodation was entirely cleared. The owner went in immediately, and after all the dust had been swept away he summoned his family in order to give us a fraternal welcome. He embraced us all, and asked his wife, his son and his two daughters to do likewise; he was obeyed very cheerfully, and we returned the kisses we received with a good heart.
The elder of the two daughters was soon to be married; she was so pretty, so well made and her physiognomy as so sweet that I would gladly have abandoned the prerogatives of my great stature in order to sigh at the young woman’s feet in a twenty-four-inch body. At any rate, the customs of the land seemed to us to be sufficiently welcoming.
When we had received the kisses of hospitality, the master of the house pulled out one of his hairs; all his family did the same, while asking us to do likewise. Then he tied the hairs together, threw them in the fire, and gave us to understand that there was an eternal alliance between him and us—after which, we were left alone.
Then we considered the lodgings that we were occupying. I have already said that the ceiling was seven feet high, which was a great deal for the people of the country, and adequate for us. As for the width of the room, it was amply sufficient, since it was six long strides in each dimension. The ceiling, which was wooden, and painted sky blue, like all the ceilings in the town, was supported in the middle by four columns of the same color, but slightly mixed; four oval windows overlooking the street illuminated it very well. In sum, we were comfortably lodged, except that we had no beds or anything to sit on.
One of the domestics of the house soon came into our apartment and made us a sign to follow him. He took us to a kind of furniture store where there were several small mattresses, which he invited us to take in order to serve as a bed. He also showed us three large beams, with which we made a bench of sorts. While we were preparing our furniture a carpenter came to take measurements, on the orders of the proprietor, in order to build us a table and solid benches, for those we had been given then were only to serve us while awaiting better ones.
Shortly thereafter, the dinner that the town had promised to furnish us arrived, to our great satisfaction, carried on three stretchers by six local men. We expedited it as joyfully as could be, very content finally to be rid of the care of providing and cooking for ourselves.
This is how our meal was comprised: six dishes of cooked plums; six dishes of olive-green fruits that tasted something like stewed pears; and two other very good foodstuffs that resembled nothing we had ever eaten, which were roasted, served with milk, something resembling potatoes, and local eggs. The bread was lightly salted and extremely dark, but delicious, especially for people who, like us, had been deprived of it for a long time. The wine, which made the indigenes tipsy if they even drank a little, did not have the slightest effect on us, but we drank it nevertheless with as much appetite as English beer. We had been brought a large earthenware jug of it for our dinner.15
Every six hours we received a similar pittance, but never more abundant or less economical. We also remarked, with astonishment, that we were never given meat, and ate nothing that had been animate. We soon discovered that that was the custom of the land.
“Well,” said Williams, on learning of that custom, “I feared to encounter cannibals here; if I’d known that they don’t even eat animals, I’d have spared myself a good deal of anxiety!”
We also noticed a great simplicity in the costumes, the religion and the manners of the country. The mores of the inhabitants seemed patriarchal to us, and we desired ardently to learn their language in order to learn and infinity of things. Our patron came to see us several times a day, as well as his family, and those worthy people diverted themselves by teaching us their idiom; the progress that we made redoubled the amity that our mildness had given them for us.
I have said that they brought us something to eat every six hours; I ought to explain that custom. As they do not eat meat and the air is rather lively in that land, they have a meal on getting up, a second at the sixth hour of the day, a third at the twelfth and another immediately before going to bed. That routine seemed healthy and convenient to us, and it cost us no effort to become habituated to it.
A good table had been made for us, benches and a bed. The principal inhabitants came to visit us incessantly; we only received frank civilities, and we would have been very happy if we had not had the distressing idea that our compatriots of the sublunar globe would never know about our adventures, and that we could no longer think of seeing out native soil again.
After a sojourn of six months, we were beginning to speak the language of the country, which was very soft, passably. The town where we had been welcomed with so much humanity was part of the great realm of Albur, and the town was called Silone. The realm of Albur, the largest of all the states of the small globe, was a hundred and twenty-four leagues in length and more the seventy-five wide. It included four hundred and fifteen towns, a multitude of villages, hamlets and farms, and nearly forty-five million inhabitants.
We were also told that we owed the good treatment we had received, and the care that the town of Silone had taken of us, not only to the rights of hospitality, which are sacred in civilized nations, but also to the great desire that the monarch had to see us and converse with us. That is why everyone wanted us to learn the language of the country quickly, and there was general rejoicing at the great progress we made in that every day.
As soon as we could make ourselves understood, we informed ourselves of customs that astonished us among those happy people. The uniformity and simplicity of costumes was one thing that surprised us, especially on the part of women, who wore no jewelry or adornments. One day, when our host had come to see us with his family, Clairancy asked him why the women did not seek to heighten, by the assistance of art, the charms that they received from nature.
“They have no need to resort to artifice here,” he replied. “When we look at a young woman, it is not upon her dress or her head but on her face that we cast our gaze.”
“However,” his wife added, “a fe
w ornaments do no harm to beauty. There was a time when women adorned themselves in the realm of Albur, as in neighboring countries, and we were no poorer then than at present.”
“That might be,” sad he little man, “but there was more vice, and the state was less calm.”
“What!” exclaimed Tristan. “At another time you say, toilette was permitted to women? By what magical force was it possible to bring them back to the beautiful simplicity that astonishes us?”
“By sage laws,” replied our host. “Attempts had been made in vain for several centuries to annihilate the terrible luxury that was ruining families. King Brontes, the father of the reigning monarch, was the only one fortunate enough to succeed. He forbade women any other coiffure than their hair, but permitted them to adorn themselves as they wished provided that they were ugly or old, and judged themselves so badly served by the gifts of nature that they required those of art. From that moment on, all jewels and superficial adornments were abandoned, and the Alburians at least saw their wives as they were.”
“But don’t the old and the ugly take advantage of the permission that distinguishes them?” Williams asked.
“Since Brontes’ law permits them to judge themselves,” the Manseau replied, “all women must find themselves constantly young and beautiful.”
“That’s what has happened,” added our host. “So there are no more adornments in the realm. It was thought at first that the absence of luxury would inflict a great wound on commerce, but we found the means to place our jewels and precious fabrics with neighboring peoples. If a few individuals are less opulent, the mass of the citizens is happier.
Voyage to the Center of the Earth Page 10