The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  A substantial fraction of his inheritance was rapidly swallowed up by that expedition, with no other result than the vivid joy of a great lord having become a gang leader and a serious attack of cerebral fever from which he nearly died. He gained, by way of compensation the total cure of one of his capital vices, drunkenness, of which the sledgehammer of the tropical sun rid him, striking into his skull with a single blow this morality: “If you feed yourself alcohol here, you’ll die or go mad.”

  He also gained the precious friendship of two men who were to have a considerable influence on his life, as we shall see. One was a younger son of the Irish nobility, Nathaniel O’Deekle, who had had been secretary to the famous Stanley during his last voyage to the Cape.59 The other was a ruffian from Menilmontant, Jules Guérinet, known as Julot, a former convict liberated from Biribi.60 Both of them were brave to the point of making Joson himself envious—which was saying a great deal, as you may imagine.

  He had lost sight of them at the end of his expedition, one returning to his former employer, who was back at the Cape, the other remaining a fourbancier,61 as he put it, between the various Congos, while waiting for a great scheme to be mounted somewhere else, in Algeria or the Cape—not by himself, of course, since the only capital he had was his bravery and his Parisian cunning, but if his friend the Comte, for example, were to be the leader...

  “Oh, in that case, yes! Nice! Now you’re talking.”

  And they had, in fact, arranged a rendezvous for a future exploration, as soon as possible: a two-year journey, it appeared, of which Nathaniel had a map, bequeathed to him by Stanley’s best guide, a certain Ibn-Aoud-Gadfaia, an Arab-African mulatto, a former slave-trader who knew Africa by virtue of having traversed it at least twenty times from north to south and east to west. According to this map, the ruins of a city anterior to all history existed in the center of one of the monstrous equatorial forests. The map permitted its rediscovery—and fabulous treasures were buried there.

  Joson had been obliged to abandon his friends and put off until later the hope of that expedition, the concept of which filled him with enthusiasm. The urgent needs imposed on him by convalescence following his cerebral fever, however, and those of his eroded fortune, recalled him to Paris, from which he would return as soon as possible.

  And he had, in fact, returned, but in poorer circumstances than before for attempting with any chance of success the famous expedition of at least two years that the voyage to and from the magical city required.

  In the meantime, in Paris, once returned to health, he had been terribly regripped by his second, long-idle vice: gambling. The clubs, then the dens, all the way to the lowest, had seen his elbows leaning on their green baize. He had become one of the heroes of that strange society, where so much virile energy, self-composure and nervous excitement is expended, and so many brains exhausted, in illusory gains and poignant emotions.

  The tension of that quotidian battle had preserved him, however, from other combats in which he would have risked losing something much more precious than his money, given the naivety, still pure and childlike, of his heart. Amours, facile or culpable, had been spared him, the former only leaving him with a sentiment of sad pity, the others a sort of horror at the idea of a possible felony. A few minor passions sketched in passing he had escaped advantageously, either by virtue of scorn rapidly felt for his accomplice and himself or, when he had got beyond that, jealousy beginning to bite too hard, and two “jolly duels” in which he had purged his bile by drawing a little blood and having a little drawn.

  He had not settled his account with the gambling so easily. His infatuation with the Queen of Spades was not a minor passion but a true, ardent, somber, intense and tenacious passion. How many times he had taken himself in hand, on arriving home in the morning, and sworn not to go back that evening! How many times, on receiving a letter reminding him of his promise regarding the distant expedition, he had said to himself, cursing himself disgustedly: “Joson, my lad, you’re the worst of cowards!”

  Even so, he continued. And three times his two and a half millions, already significantly eroded by the first expedition to the Congo—but in that instance for a noble adventure worthy of a Ponthual-Plouër—had slipped through his fingers, trickling away with the cards, almost all the way downstream, leaving him virtually dry. Three times his luck had turned and a fraction of the millions had flowed back into his hands—and even so, he continued.

  One fine day, however—oh yes, what a fine day! he often said, later—his valor had surged upwards and his courage had remained high. He had just received an almost-insulting letter from Julot. Yes, to him, the Comte de Ponthual-Plouër! Insulting! From Julot, the little ruffian from Ménilmontant, the escapee from Biribi! And rightly insulting, because the Parisian reproached him for two years stupidly and wantonly squandered!

  “What’s up, then, Monsieur l’Aristo? Going on the spree like any old cretin! Pooh! It’s really not worth the trouble of having a long string of names if one doesn’t know what to do with them, and fiber in the heart, which is the trump card, and a petrel’s eyes, as one boasts, and a nose like…I don’t know any more, but something like a sea-eagle, the noisiest of birds after the sparrows of Pantruche…!”62

  On which Joson, his blood up, and his millions being then reduced to three hundred francs in liquid assets—oh, how few!—had renounced running after his money, realized his disposable capital, practically all of it, packed his bags—which is to say, everything he needed for the famous expedition—and then had cabled news of his arrival to Julot and Nathaniel. He rejoined the former in Dakar, the second at the Cape, and finally set out with them on the great two-year expedition.

  It was at this point in particular, by virtue of that journey, that the veritable modern cape-and-épée novel that Joson’s life was to become had commenced. A cape-and-épée novel full of extraordinary adventures, as you can imagine, perhaps more extraordinary than old novels of that sort, sometimes going as far as the fantastic feats of chivalric romance. Sometimes too, one ought to recognize, bordering on the exploits of those other knights errant, of industry, who are the heroes of our era, at grips with the new monsters and dragons given birth by the land of “business.”

  Once again, we do not have the leisure—nor, very probably, the special talent—necessary to the description of those adventures. It would need the authors of Les Quatre fils d’Aymon, Amadis and Esplandian63 all rolled into one, and some picaresque Cervantes for whom we are still waiting, doubled with a Eugène Sue who would also be a kind of Balzac! Fat chance! For want of that problematic historiographer, we shall be content to summarize, in a few broad strokes, the last fifteen or twenty years of that hectic existence—as they say in feuilletons.

  We are certain, moreover, of easily receiving credit for these accounts of sometimes-incredible but true facts, which reality offers in such profusion today. We shall reserve the purely psychic facts for a chapter more summary still, since they are much less credible.

  XXXI

  The urgency that Joson had felt to leave and to act, in order to become conscious of his vanquished laxness and his recovered vitality, had been the cause of the conditions, poorer than before, in which they set forth. The season was wrong, four months too late; the preparations were insufficient, the equipment botched; the recruitment of the troop made haphazardly, almost at random. Such had been the faults of the commencement, several of which were irreparable. Result: a difficult expedition, needlessly costly, which, instead of two years, lasted a full three. And the practical benefit realized? Absolutely none.

  It seemed, nevertheless, to hear Joson talk, that he regretted neither the time wasted nor the last remnants of his fortune strewn along the road to nowhere. He was alone, though, with Guérinet, alias Julot, in being of that opinion and thinking that the journey had not been futile. Poor Nathaniel O’Deekle would have been the third to think in that fashion, if he had not died on the very threshold of the Promised Land—as J
ulot had put it, chancing to remember the Moses of his sacred history.

  For those who knew where their pilgrimage was headed had, in fact, found their Promised Land. The others, the brutes serving them as scouts, soldiers or beasts of burden, had not understood why they were marching for so long amid the dark foliage or the miry and sticky marshes of the monstrous equatorial forest, or why they had then halted for such a long time on that chaotic mountain of enormous rocks in the vast desert clearing occupying the center of the forest. But Joson had told Julot why—and they had both laughed and cried with joy.

  The story bequeathed to Nathaniel O’Deekle by Ibn-Aoud-Gadfaia was not, then, a tale from the Thousand-and-One Nights due to the imagination of some caravaner drunk on kif? It had really existed, that colossal city dating from antediluvian epochs! How could they doubt it, confronted by those enormous ruins covering such a vast area, attesting to gigantic constructions, the extent and mass of which proved the existence of a magnificent, opulent, splendidly-flourishing civilization, whose treasures were doubtless buried there, even more fabulous than Nathaniel had said?

  For these stone blocks, which the others took for rocks in chaos, were ruins. And although Joson, like the Irishman, was a Celt inclined to magical dreams, he was also a former cadet of the Borda, a naval officer, with a mind sufficiently cultivated to be able to recognize inscriptions, although without being able to decipher their meaning. Now, in these pretended rocks, in many places, signs were traced, not by natural striations but visibly “written” by human hands. Joson had even discovered several depictions of the zodiac, of a capital and manifest importance, of which he had been able to explain to the ill-educated Julot both the character and the significance, which will be explained later.

  From all that, Joson concluded, not as a Celt fond of tales, but as a sagacious reasoner, that it was a prehistoric city of an advanced civilization, perhaps as rich or even richer than our own-and, in any case, superior to those that preceded ours. For, by the amplitude and enormity of its vestiges, the city in the desert—Ibn-Aoud-Gadfaia’s city, rediscovered by them, Julot and Joson—triumphed effortlessly over the most illustrious and most marvelous of dead cities. Reconstituting it in the imagination—the imagination of a scientist rather than that of a poet—merely according to the testimony of its vestiges, it was manifest that, by comparison, Thebes, Memphis, Ecbatana, Nineveh and Babylon must have been modern and relatively poor cities.

  “Yes, Boss poor! As Pantin might be said to be, compared with Paris.”

  It was thus that Julot, instructed by Joson, had summarized the matter picturesquely. And he and Joson had seen, mirrored in mirages, by the blinding sun that was roasting the ruins, palaces in gold and precious stones, as sumptuous as the chimerical edifices of the clouds at sunset.

  It had been necessary, however, to leave those mirages with empty hand—bloodied hands, in fact. A part of the troop had revolted, weary of that halt in the mountainous desert. A battle had started. Joson and Julot had retained their mastery, after the slaughter of half their men, but Joson was wounded and his baggage had been destroyed by the fire. All that remained of his geographical and scientific observations was a single portfolio he had carried on his person, in which, fortunately, were the latest detailed data recorded in order to determine the exact location of the city.

  Of the road to reach it—which he had also traced, with carefully-determined reference-point, as befit a naval officer—it was now impossible to have the slightest notion, as it was of the route they needed to follow to return through the equatorial forest. All the instruments—chronometers, sextants, theodolites and compasses—had been smashed, but the essential thing as safe, since Joson had in his portfolio the exact location, fixed by several scrupulous measurements and checked by various verifications, of the discovered “Eldorado.”

  “Except,” Julot had said, “to get back here overland—nothing doing! For in the whole of Africa, it would be like finding a pinhead in a sackful of lead.”

  “We’ll come back by air, then,” Joson had replied, “flying.”

  “As in a dream!” Julot had concluded, adopting a pose from a sentimental romance, raising his eyes to the heavens with his hand on his heart. After which he had warbled, in a whimpering voice that stammered through the tremolos: “All I have in my hour of need, is half of a hirondelle.”64

  And that while carrying his leader on his back, because Joson had a bullet-hole in his leg and was shivering with fever, and he did not want to confide him to another bearer. For at that moment, as they were returning through the darkness of the forest, they were paddling through a marsh, slipping in the mud, and as there was a danger of falling, of getting stuck therein, the brave Parisian would not rely on any but his own feet—those of a gutter-cat—to protect his boss, who he adored, from a fatal misstep.

  The two friends—for the escapee from Biribi and the “little Chouan” had arrived at a complete fraternity—were obliged to separate, however, once they got back to the Cape. Joson still had a few relics of his fortune lodged with a notary in Paris, on which he needed to draw. He had abandoned what remained to him at the Cape to furnish Julot with a small stake, in order to clear the way for an attempt at mining in the Transvaal. He had re-embarked, with his passage paid and three hundred-franc bills in his pocket, promising once again to return.

  This time, however, the promise had not been kept, for reasons of force majeure. The vague residue of his fortune left in Paris was too vague—just enough to stop him dying of hunger. And again, month after month, and then years, had been used up doing nothing but scraping along, trailing his gaiters through gambling-dens, then taking lamentable jobs for nothing more than food and a bed, sometimes under false names, so ashamed was the descendant of the Ponthual-Ploërs.

  A junior teacher in schools devoid of pupils, an overseer industrial labor in dilapidated factories, a clerk in a circulating library, a maritime insurance salesman, a recruiter of spade-workers for emigration—those, among other calamitous avatars, some less strange, were endured by the genteel Joson, son of the exquisite Comtesse. Oh, how that noble and delicate creature, so elegant, with the angelic voice, and her expression of smiling pride and distinguished melancholy, would have suffered and silently wept to see her Joson amid the rolling dirty waves of promiscuity, stirred by the eddies of poverty!

  More than once, afflicted by incessant bad luck, impotent to raise his head in the swell of relentless blows, he had been tempted to end it al by suicide It was precisely the memory of his mother, the tears that she would have shed over such an end—the tears that she would have shed in Heaven—that had prevented him every time. For, as in the time of his debauchery, today in his time of trials, in despair as in vice, the Breton who was the “Little Chouan” conserved all the integrity of his Catholic faith. And to know that his mother was in Heaven, while he would be damned, was a terror that he had—he, who had never been afraid of anything in the world—and it ensured that he never lost that support.

  From the depths of the abyss into which he had sunk, the thrust of that faith had brought him back to the surface, and to land. One day, after many other and worse misfortunes that it would be superfluous to narrate. Joson had recovered his manhood, emerged from the mire and even the quasi-strife, as an employee of a company importing and storing produce from colonies in Ethiopia, something of a colonist himself, and seemed to have achieved a sufficiently tranquil life of honest ease, increasing every day, beneath a sky that pleased him, reminding him of his crazy years of African adventure.

  He was then nearly forty years of age, no longer thought about anything but his business and the routines of his existence, and did not even have the idea at the back of his mind that his ease might become wealth and perhaps permit him one day to realize his dream regarding the city in the desert. It seemed to him more curious, and sweeter, to be alone in retaining that dream, and to consider it always and uniquely as a dream.

  Not having had, for a long t
ime now, any news of Guérinet, alias Julot, who had replied to his letters at first, he had resigned himself to believing that he was dead—as he surely must have been, the poor devil, to neglect his boss. No one in the world, in consequence, knew anything about the fabulous city. The secret bequeathed by Ian-Aoud-Gadfaia to Nathaniel O’Deekle. having died with the Irishman and then with the Parisian, would not be long delayed in becoming a dead star in the sky, once Joson, in whose mind its last glimmer was mirrored, had died.

  And yet, Joson piously conserved, like a relic, the portfolio containing the pages in which he had recorded with so much care, carefully checked by means of reference-points and scrupulous calculations, the exact location of the new “Eldorado.” And often, on consulting those yellowed leaves in private, he smiled, without knowing why. And then, always, as if the smile had triggered the memory of Julot, he recalled the ruffian warbling, in a whimpering voice, stammering over the tremolos: “All I have in my hour of need, is half of a hirondelle.”

  After which—in such a way as to encourage the belief that the trigger had also started the mechanism of the memory working, albeit backwards—the reply came back to him that he had made to his companion, who was carrying him through the marsh on his back: “We’ll come back by air, then, flying.”

  And he did, indeed, see himself, transformed into a swallow, returning on beating wings to the Eldorado whose location he knew. But it was no longer a desire for realization; it was purely a dream, a fairy-tale. Only the child-like and poetic Celt enjoyed it, not the man of action any longer. Joson-swallow, Joson the little bird of romance, was the Joson who now set out on the chimerical wing of dream toward that reality, changed henceforth into a dream: toward the desert mountain of rocks in chaos; the so-called rocks covered by inscriptions that were the ruins of the colossal, magnificent antediluvian city full of treasures, older, more civilized, more splendid and more enormous than Thebes, Memphis, Ecbatana, Nineveh and Babylon.