Ouha was still gesticulating, in a bellicose fashion. Mabel now understood, from the signs of menace emphasized by the twirling of the rifle, scepter and club, the purpose of the fantastic, monstrous, bizarre council in the center of the moonlit clearing.
Ouha having stepped down, a new orator seemed to be pleading, with expansive gestures, for an opposite thesis. Howls, a volley of insults, interruptions and clamors went up. Young orangutans stood up, and threats were sketched, addressed by one group to another. Then, one of the tallest seated in the first rank of the apes, leapt into the center of the assembly, his tall black silhouette looming up in the pale starlight.
Akutch, almost as venerated as the king, calmed the storm by his intervention. He pointed at the mutineers with his hand and appealed to them. The women, accustomed to these brief designations, understood the controversy. Mabel, forgetful of her sentimental tragedy, still struck by the human resemblances, smiled ironically, less appalled than amused by the original spectacle. She smiled. Who could tell whether the beasts’ war might not lead them into civilized regions, whether some encounter might not assist her deliverance?
She smiled, among other smiles, at seeing a large ape beside Ouha who was looking at her persistently and who strangely resembled her godfather, Dr. Abraham Goldry. The poor doctor! What had become of him? Was he still alive?
For a long time, amid the hubbub of the crowd of orangutans, with lazy poses, the scratching of ears and behinds, seemingly disarticulated fingers rummaging in the mouths and nostrils of the audience, the assembly deliberated.
Then they all bounded around Ouha, and over the sovereign’s head, the notable apes and their she-apes leaping like vertiginous acrobats from branch to branch with cries of joy and dancing rounds; and they all whirled, brandishing their fists or gnarled branches, doubtless toward the refuge of the thieves.
Shivering, Rava had got to her feet, and, striking the two flints that she always carried together, lit a fire of heaped-up branches. The moon was now setting behind the treetops, and the darkness was getting deeper, becoming dense where the crowns of the tall poplars, sycamores, giant red cedars and tulip-trees faded away.
Meanwhile, the females, in response to the cries of the disbanded council, had come down from the branches to the ground, amid the monstrous males, in order to draw them toward the city. Couples were swarming in the center of the clearing, lying down, interlaced—but the flames suddenly caused them to flee. Separated, the couples galloped in single file, and wide-open females passed from the hands that were gripping them to others.
In the halo of the blazing fore, staining the trees with gold and crimson and hurling reflections of infernal debauchery into the gaps between the trunks, Ouha remained superbly still, calm and erect, his upper right hand resting on Mabel’s shoulder. The American billionairess, the flower of centuries of civilization, was standing between Dilou and Rava, the lovely and slender Malay, statues of ebony and bronze.
XLV. The Victory of Intelligence
As soon as the sun rose, Ouha’s army was ready to take action. The king, the doctor and Ko-Zu represented the general command. The difficulty was one of communication with those turbulent soldiers, from whom a strict discipline and observation of orders received was necessary. The plan proposed by Goldry required few instigators, but it was necessary that they be supported by the whole army.
Abraham had understood immediately that a pitched battle was impossible against an enemy whose mobility and lightness put it out of range of any attack. It was necessary to use cunning. Knowing the curiosity and imitative compulsion that characterized the quadrumanes, he based his plan on that means of action. Thus, after multiple explanations to the most capable chiefs, the action commenced. It was the general command who were running the greatest danger.
To make the configuration that the battlefield was about to make more easily understandable, let us briefly recall the distribution of the terrain. The Orangs’ domain was represented, above all, by the mountainous massif, inaccessible on the northern side, the massif being cut off steeply by the coast of Borneo for an extent of at least thirty miles. After that cut-off, the terrain descended, by a sequence of decreasingly elevated hills, to the median level of the island. To the east and the west was a sequence of small hills mingled with rocks and forests of tall trees, rich in fruits of all kinds; that was the true homeland of the orangutans, Harr-ha, bounded to the south by the river and the burned forest.
It was, therefore, a matter of forcing the enemy to go back over the river and then the zone of destruction. Now, the whole gang of little monkeys, having devastated the orangutans’ territory and reserves, finding food increasing hard to come by, were spreading out eastwards and westwards rather than returning to the immense virgin forest from which they had come.
Shortly after the rise of the God who reigns in the sky and over the earth, surrounded by radiance, a little troop comprised of Ouha, Ko-Zu, Dr. Goldry and thirty young orangs set forth.
On Abraham’s instructions, each of them carried on his head a basket full of bananas, hidden by branches and leaves; these green baskets would, as in Shakespeare, imitate a moving forest, serving the plan of campaign and also protecting the orangutans.
They wove their way around the clumps of trees that bordered the river, crossed it by leaping from rock to rock, and, after having wrong-footed the enemy by their maneuver, finally entered the burned region. Having arrived there, the orangutans looked back.
All the trees on the other side along the bank, were laden with monkeys, mandrills and sapajous, a curious and intrigued simian host, following the course of the ambulant bushes with thousands of keen and ingenuous eyes. The swarm of small monkeys of every species was weighing down the branches.
“So far so good,” said the doctor.
He and his companions advanced further and further into the desert of ashes—or, rather, what had been a desert, for nature was already reasserting its rights, and vegetation was sprouting everywhere.
Having passed beyond the range of their missiles, but not so far away that the little monkeys would miss a single one of their actions, the troop of orangutans, following the doctor’s example, leaned down to the ground and pretended to be searching for and picking fruits. The bananas carried in the verdant baskets played their role. Abraham, while playing his role like his comrades, never took his eyes off the monkeys.
Soon, a large mandrill, bolder than the others, came down from his tree and crossed the river He had no difficulty finding a banana dropped for his intention. He sat down and ate it greedily. Ten minutes later, a hundred monkeys had come to join him and search for the bananas that, imitating Petit Poucet, the doctor and his friends were sowing behind them. Encouraged by the example, thousands of small monkeys started fighting among themselves, in a mob, as to who would cross the river most rapidly, like Panurge’s sheep in Rabelais competing to be the first to leap into the sea.
In less than an hour, the plain was black with small four-footed creatures searching the long grass for the bait of bananas, over which they fought with outbursts of anger and somersaults. Seeing the success of their ruse, the orangutans disguised as clumps of banana-trees increased their pace, heading at top speed toward the forest, still followed by the enemy army, which, while feasting, had not the slightest intention of attacking them. By nightfall, the orangutans had reached their goal and the baskets were empty.
Taking advantage of the last glimmers of twilight, they took refuge in a thicket and waited. Darkness caught the multitude of little monkeys by surprise. They now had the desert of the burned forest behind them; they were obliged to seek refuge in the forest, and, with the cerebral fragility and intellectual mobility of their race, they hurled themselves into its branches for the night, without suspecting that they had changed domicile and that they would have no memory of it the following day.
The doctor and his acolytes waited some time for all the little people to go to sleep; then, sure of not being o
bserved, they retraced the steps of the journey they had made during the day. In the morning, they crossed the river, greeted by the acclamations of the orangutan nation. Thus was terminated, without shedding a single drop of blood, the invasion of the pygmy quadrumanes.
XLVI. The Beast and Mind
Taken back by Ouha, the doctor returned to his cavern, and the monarch testified his satisfaction by rubbing his friend’s back. Goldry hastened to take off his simian envelope, in which he was stifling. Then the conversation began.
“So,” the scientist said, “you also have Mabel prisoner, and you hid it from me.”
“Mabel is my wife, and I feared that you would try to steal her from me.”
“What an idea! From the moment that I became a postulant orangutan, why should I have any objection to my goddaughter being your spouse? All that I want is for you to make her happy.”
“Don’t worry; she has everything she needs.”
“Hmm! Do you remember her residence at Riddle-Temple? There must be many things lacking here, and do you not know yourself how much more comfortable her life was at home than here? If I’m striving to raise you to a higher level, and I myself am becoming an orangutan, it’s up to you to become a human...”
Ouha nodded his head. For the first time, he felt that the contact he had made with human beings as, in a sense, putting him outside his race—but would that be an advantage for him and his fellows, if he drew them with him by is example? He examined the doctor, who was certainly no Antinous, being tall, thin and angular, and cast a complacent glance down at himself, judging, privately, that humans were rather ugly animals, and that, from the physical point of view, he was considerably superior to them.
However, Ouha had one great advantage over his fellows: memory. He could recall his sojourn at Riddle perfectly, and the comfort he had enjoyed at that time. There was, most of all, a certain English armchair, in the depths of which he had sprawled voluptuously, while his friend Abraham explained one of the great natural laws to him, or Mabel, sitting at an item of furniture had made singular noises by tapping pieces of ivory partly lined with black wood.
While Abraham continued his speech, the distracted mind of the ape recalled the past, while an embryonic project was born in his brain. His character as a conqueror regained the upper hand, but this time, with desires well above his simian individuality.
After having become the absolute chief of almost all of the orangutan population, no longer having any against him but a few rebels, having acquired the blind friendship of a man of science, and having conquered a white beauty, he dreamed of the domination of the milieu in which he had seen them live, where he sensed that he would now not be out of place.
He could see himself, Ouha, comfortable swaying in the rocking-chair, savoring a fine cigar, with delicious beverages within arm’s reach, while his wife, Mabel, seated at the piano, lulled him with the harmonious chords with which she sometimes accompanied a song trilled in a strong, pure voice. In the drawing-rooms, his subjects the orangutans were coming and going, clad in light garments similar to those that he had once been made to wear—which had inconvenienced him greatly, but which it had been necessary to suffer in order to get closer to that humanity he envied.
At times, stupefied by the variety of the images that succeeded one another, he passed his hand over his seething skull. How far away he was today from what he had been before his sojourn at Riddle-Temple!
As if he divined the thoughts that were whirling in his pupil’s mind, the doctor redoubled his zeal, hammering away, as it were, at the ape’s brain.
“My dear Ouha, I can see and sense that you understand me, and that justly entitles me to the glory of having created you. What a noble success it is for a scientist like me to see prehistoric humankind surging through the ages, picturesquely, to have lived with him the brutal and material life of the primitive being, and to lead him, in a few months, to the level of present-day civilization. From that viewpoint, you still know very little, and can’t form any idea of what our great human agglomerations are like. Figures tell you very little, but imagine, for the sake of comparison, the army of little monkeys that you fooled so cleverly; I estimate their number at about twenty thousand. Well, some of our big cities contain a hundred times as many humans. I say that because it’s necessary not to give you any illusions, to give you a false idea of your victory over us, for you only have dealt with a very tiny fraction of my race. Don’t think that I’m telling you this by way of boasting; in spite of your remarkable spirit of domination, Ouha, the tiny number of your subjects can never acquire supremacy over humans. You can’t have any idea of what the globe on whose surface we live is like, and how unimportant this island is relative to the immensity of the Earth.”
“I haven’t even traveled all over the island,” Ouha mimed, “but I’ll be content with that.”
“Oh, you’re always so ambitious! So much the better. I approve; such an ambition is, for you, a necessary emulation. The conquest of the island; there, to be sure, is an idea. I’ll even help you, for there are no Americans in Borneo—which is two-thirds Dutch and one-third English—except Harry Smith, Mabel and me.”
Ouha put a hand on his head. “You’re mine.”
“Hmm!” Abraham muttered. “I’m yours? Let’s understand one another. An American is a free man and cannot be the slave of an...” He was about to say “ape” but stopped himself. “…A primitive human, a man anterior even to the Stone Age, for I haven’t seen any of your subjects making use of weapons carved from flint. Clubs made from broken branches, not even stripped, and formless stones hurled by hand—that’s all you’ve discovered.”
“You’re mine!” repeated Ouha, angrily.
“Ah! If you take that tone, my lad, we’ll fall out. I know that you’re stronger than I am, but don’t forget that I’m cleverer, and that if I stay with you, it’s a matter of friendship, not servitude.”
Ouha seemed to understand. He softened his attitude, and wrung the doctor’s hand.
“Good! Understand that, when I wish, I’ll easily find a means to give you the slip. You interest me, as an enigma posed to science. I sense in you an intellectual force in conflict with your animality. I want to help you to cast off that envelope and take a great step forward in the scale of beings. But for your part, don’t forget that I’m an American subject, a doctor of science, a professor at the University of Philadelphia, a member of several academies, and a laureate of numerous anthropological societies.”
Ouha shrugged his shoulders and showed his monstrous fists.
“Again!” cried Goldry. “Opposing brutal force to scientific discussion! You’d deserve it if I left you to overcome confusion on your own, with your ideas of conquest. Rapine is sufficient. What could you do with your population of animals? Do you think that you know enough to raise them above their bestial level? Remember that you’re an extraordinary exception.”
“Yes!” opined Ouha, swiftly. “That’s why it’s necessary that no one equals me, for then I’d no longer be the master.”
Abraham leapt upon the ape and embraced him. “That my lad, is very wise. You’re definitely the Napoléon of apes. But think, nevertheless: what if you have no posterity that resembles you, to succeed you and continue your work? Humans don’t work only for themselves, and must make provision for the future; that’s the best way of being immortal. By the way, Ouha, what do you think about death?”
“Don’t know,” Ouha replied.
“That’s what I mean,” said Goldry, pointing to Kri-Kri’s skeleton.
Ouha scratched his head energetically. Evidently, he did not understand. The doctor strove to give him an inkling of the end of life, movement and thought, but he ran into a complete indifference. Evidently, the ape had already seen many cadavers, slain accidentally or even without blows, but the mystery of the Beyond said nothing to him, remaining outside his reflection and his anxiety. It was necessary to think about one’s individual fate before death, bu
t afterwards…the orangutan did not cross the boundary of his existence. He was a wise animal, who lived without thinking about his end.
The scientist remained thoughtful. Was that—the sentiment of survival—the secret of the first civilizations, careful preserving their dead and depositing weapons and food supplies with them in their tombs, for the Beyond? Rubbish, all of that.
“We’ll come back to it,” said Abraham. “It’s not yet time to start a course in philosophy. You still have so many things to learn. Sat prata biberunt.17 I think, in any case, that we’ve earned a little rest. Sleep here.”
“No,” said Ouha, “I’ll go home. I’ll come back tomorrow to discuss my future projects with you.” He got up, shook the doctor’s hand and withdrew.
Left alone, the scientist had something to eat, and then threw himself down on his bed.
XLVII. Voices Underground
Night, it is said, brings counsel. At any rate, the human brain ruminates, obscurely, the ideas of the day, as a cow ruminates the grass she has grazed. That was undoubtedly the case with the doctor, for, on awakening, he still had the evening’s conversation with Ouha in mind.
That fellow, he thought, will go far, especially if I lend him my aid. Have I the right to do that? In sum, I’m making enemies of my brothers, and I’m not very sure of my pupil’s gratitude. Damn! It’s a rude case of conscience, and more than one casuist would be embarrassed by it. Let’s see, my old friend, what are you going to do? Take the side of the apes wholeheartedly? That would be amusing—but do you feel that you have the courage to die in the skin of an orangutan? In sum, the study that I wanted to make of the anthropoids is now complete; they’re assimilable—but it will take many years to lead them to the mentality of that phenomenon Ouha. The best thing is to see what comes, while creating a means of exit in case of trouble. In addition, I have to find a way of questioning Mabel about her situation here...
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