Ouha, King of the Apes

by Félicien Champsaur

  “Since then, though, having returned to Riddle-Temple and being obliged to resume the old life, I’ve experienced once again all the emptiness of our civilization. I tried to react, though; I made heroic efforts; I tried, I don’t say to love, but to esteem sufficiently the man you had designated as a fiancé for me. To be sure, Archibald was a good fellow, but he stunned me with banalities. Finally, as a last effort toward the norm, I gave myself to him, in order to see. Another disappointment!

  “What, then, can I do? Return to the land of the apes? I’ve considered it seriously, and only the impossibility was holding me back when we went out yesterday. Playing tag, I lunged into the virgin forest and found myself face to face with a tiger. I was doomed. Ouha arrived, and killed it. Saved from the tiger and from progress, I made a rendezvous with Ouha so that he could spend the night with me. I had the romantic fantasy of making him play the role of Romeo—except that, at daybreak, I would go with him. You know the rest, Father.”

  Harry Smith had listened to that long confession—which was, for him, a kind of indictment—with his head bowed.

  “I share your ideas to some extent,” he said. “But where does that leave us? Although you can’t leave your hairy lover, I’m not sufficiently misanthropic to live with the apes. In any case, they probably wouldn’t tolerate me. And what will become of you if your Ouha dies of his wounds? Will you give him a successor of the same species? Whichever way we turn, it’s an impasse. Devil take Abraham, who made us come here. Perhaps I should have committed suicide—then I wouldn’t have these troubles today.”

  “There’s still time,” said Mabel.

  The American started. “What! You think I should?”

  “You’re looking for a way out. That’s one, for you as for me. Listen, Father—life wearies you, and me too. At the idea of resuming the old life, my heart revolts. One can find one Wilson, but not two. As for the simian life, I don’t think that’s possible either. Look at Ouha—he’s dying.”

  Indeed, during that long conversation, the orang had increasingly let himself go. His head was hanging down on his breast; his breathing was labored; bloody foam was oozing from his mouth.

  Mabel contemplated him; she did not feel love for the monster, but an immense pity. It’s for me, she thought, for me, the egotist, the sensualist, that he’s going to die, taking with him my last reason to live. I feel terrible weary. Why persist? The days will follow one another now, all alike.

  Suddenly, raising her head, her eyes shining, and a sardonic rictus creasing her lips, she said: “Let’s get out of this stupid maze in an original fashion! Would you like that?”

  LXXXVIII. The Arrival of the Liberators

  Meanwhile, the doctor, Gorden and his companions were not idle. Scarcely had they arrived at White House than they send urgent appeals for help in every direction. The colonists, understanding the danger that everyone in the vicinity was running with the anthropoids so close, gathered their servants, armed them, and came in a crowd to respond to the alarm call, to put themselves at the disposal of the Englishman. The latter was recognized by everyone as the most capable of leading the little army to Riddle-Temple, to destroy the invaders and annihilate them forever.

  By the end of the day, Gorden had fifty men, most of whom were used to combating the wild beasts of the great forest. Anxious about Smith, who had been forgotten in the confusion of the departure, he decided to set forth immediately.

  Gorden’s plan was quite simple: to occupy the Temple and his galleries, expelling the orangutans if they had installed themselves there, and shoot them all through the windows of the galleries, if they had the imprudence to remain in the great courtyard or the garden, in the open.

  All the necessary horses were gathered, and at daybreak they were within sight of Riddle-Temple. Everyone dismounted, and, leaving the horse under the guard of a few men, the troop climbed the monumental stairway, making as little noise as possible. Having arrived at the top, they scattered into the apartments. The orders were to fall back and call out as soon as an orang was sighted.

  The apartments were empty, and had been strangely pillaged. The floor was littered with all kinds of objects, and the wooden furniture had vanished. They all met up in the hall, without having seen a single ape.

  “Either they’ve already gone, or they’re in the gardens. Let’s advance prudently through the galleries.”

  A bestial clamor rose up:

  “Ouha! Ouha! Ouha!”

  “They’re in the gardens! Forward, my friends. We’ll shoot them from the galleries...”

  LXXXIX. The Apotheosis of Fire

  They launched themselves under the arcades. A cry of astonishment and amazement escaped them.

  In the middle of the immense courtyard was an enormous pyre, composed of all the furniture of the Temple, to which had been added all the wood from the stores. The whole was crowned by the immense table from the hall, on which a heap of cushions, carpets and curtains formed a kind of magnificent throne. On that heap of velvet and silken fabrics, Ouha, supported by Mabel, was dying, while the billionaire was emptying cans of gasoline, oil and alcohol—all the accelerants he could find—over the pile of furniture and wood.

  “They’re mad!” cried Goldry. “Smith, Smith, stop, you fool! What are you doing?”

  The misanthropic billionaire turned round, stared at his friend, and then, pointing at the immense pyre, said: “This is what I should have done in the beginning; my life no longer interests me. Goodbye, Abraham! I give you Riddle-Temple—make better use of it than I did.”

  He struck a few matches, and threw them on the pyre. The flames sprang up immediately. Then, hurling himself forwards, he climbed the heap, and disappeared into the flame and smoke.

  A moment later, they saw him emerge on to the platform, next to Mabel and the anthropoid. Supported from both sides by Mabel and her father, Ouha stood up to his full height.

  What was passing through the mind of the great ape? Was he conscious of the grandeur of that suicide of civilization, or was it only the last convulsion of his agony?

  It seemed to him that his brain, enlarged under the influence of death, suddenly embraced an immense horizon. Where does animality begin and end?

  At the supreme moment there is, for some individuals, an instant when a gleam of great mystery comes to illuminate the profound darkness. At that moment, the entire life of a man sometimes passes through his thoughts with the velocity of a dream, a dying appeal to his consciousness: all the mistakes, the sins and the crimes accomplished in the brief evolution that is a life. But those words, which only have meaning with regard to human thought, can have none with respect to an animal; for him, there are only sensations without judgment, or nearly so.

  In that last instant, at the tragic denouement of his love, Ouha was very close to humanity, for, although he could not translate his thought into words, a flood of vague imaginations, fetuses of ideas, desires and regrets filled his brain.

  He had, then, the intuition of an apotheosis, in which his brutality was more artificial than real; he suspected that his mentality was scarcely inferior, leaving aside the education he had received, to that of the wife that he had adored as a divinity, and who had descended to his level.

  For that idol, he was about to die—and his vague, misted gaze embraced, even so, the last ray of sunlight that he was to see. In the east, the sky was tinted with a delicate mauve, as tender as a flower or a precious stone. The colossal mass of the Temple was profiled there, with the thousand details of its monstrous sculptures, its tiara- and miter-embellished gods with innumerable arms, bearers of lotus-blossoms and emblems, its monsters, its dragons, its serpents, its elephants, its horses and its tigers, bizarrely contorted amid the dancing-girls and the goddesses. All that architecture covered sections of wall three hundred feet long, whose height was lost in the azure, with its pillars, its columns and capitals, cut out like lace. The Temple, still half-veiled by the shadows of the night, was hollowed out here a
nd there by violently blue shadows, although the summits and reliefs were already gilded with a prodigiously ardent red.

  Then, on the opposite side, there was the forest: the forest whose dense foliage was nuanced with all imaginable shades, from the dazzling green of emerald to the most varied decompositions of yellow and blue. All those colors merged with the brighter hues of the lianas and flowers, which, melted by distance, formed an infinite and vague continuum. The virgin forest was shining, awakening in the distance—his domain! The forest in which his four hands found purchase and support on all sides, where he could roam, half-human and half-avian. The forest, his shelter, his refuge, his horn of plenty, his life. The forest, and his superb excursions through the branches, the lianas, where he found both his nourishment and his repose, hammocks of flowers and leaves in which he could lull his idleness, having all the fruits, berries and coconuts within arm’s reach: magnificent comfort for the terrible hairy athletes, kings of that wilderness of verdure, that exuberant vegetation.

  Everything, at present, acquired an aspect of infinite calm and tenderness. The trees of his forests appeared to him in images different from before, in silhouettes that they had never known, with colors that faded into one another, becoming nothing but a sequence of fantastic reflections. The mountains took on the contours and graces of recumbent women. The torrents still ran impetuously, but fluidly, as if immaterial. All of it became as transparent and limpid as the sky overlooking it.

  But the magnificent orangutan, the king of the apes, redirected his gaze at Mabel, the strange and marvelous beauty who had allowed herself to be vanquished by his formidable ugliness.

  Then, an immense expansion overwhelmed his being, in spite of his weakness. He stood up to his full height, and, against the ruddy background of the gigantic pyre, he displayed his silhouette, a savage and mighty giant—and, seizing his wife, he lifted her up above him, offering her to the rising sun, presenting her to the Master of the Universe, like a tribute of his expiring strength to the Eternal Torch.

  And in order to express these confused ideas in his head—as an emerald scarcely disengaged from its matrix might evoke the verdant Ocean with its innumerable waves—the monster uttered, for the last time, his resounding cry:

  “Ouha! Ouha! Ouha!”

  Gently, he set Mabel down beside him, and, crossing his hairy arms, sat down again upon the pyre. Like a supreme caress of the Father of Life, the first rays of the of the sun came, in the midst of the swirling flames of the blaze, to halo the great anthropoid’s tragic, humanized mask with a surge of light. A thick cloud of smoke, driven by the morning breeze, massed behind him, making a somber screen on which the gigantic flaming heap stood out like a pedestal of honor and victory. A hero of simian strength in advance of humankind, he died triumphantly, thanks to the eternal lust that propagates life.

  He died, suppressing on that pyre the inequality of animals and humans, of woman and ape, demonstrating by his adventure—without knowing it—the inanity of the Himalayas of fortune and civilization, both impotent before reciprocal desire.

  And he repeated his war-cry, more hoarsely each time:

  “Ouha! …Ouha! ……Ouha!”

  Formidable voices in chorus, echoed that wild cry, causing the guttural anthropoid howl to resound. And the orangs, habituated by the sight of their chief no longer to fear fire, began an infernal dance around the blaze.

  Ouha’s fading pupils, contemplating the infinite nourishing forest, directed what one might have taken for a reproachful glance toward the treetops, to the mysterious Sylvan, Pan, the unknown god that had betrayed him—and he cried, for the last time, amid the clamors of the other apes, in a resonant and painful exhalation:

  “Ouha! Ouha! Ouha!”

  That was the simian monarch’s final effort. He sank, slowly at first, into Mabel’s arms, and then collapsed, and did not move again. The young woman had followed him in his fall; and suddenly, there was a greater collapse, and a sheaf of flame and sparks shot up. Then there was the crackle of fireworks, amid the smoke, blazing particles, and the sizzling of burning flesh—and in the red swirls, larger and higher, the rumble of the conflagration became louder.

  The apes, frightened, took flight, pursued by rifle fire.

  The tale of Beauty and the Beast had ended.

  Notes

  1 tr. as The Human Arrow, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-045-6.

  2 1922, directed by René Leprince, starring Léon Mathot and Gina Relly.

  3 tr. as The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-934543-61-0.

  4 A more detailed synoptic account of Champsaur’s career can be found in the introduction to the Black Coat Press edition of The Human Arrow, q.v.

  5 Classic tales of ape-men including C.M. de Pougens’ Jocko (1824), Emile Dodillon’s Hemo (1886), Marcel Roland’s Almost A Man (1905) and The Missing Link (1914) are included in the collection The Missing Link, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-935558-14-9.

  6 tr. as Toho and the Gold Destroyers, Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-935558-34-7.

  7 The author subsequently abandons the “Lauwer” and is content to allow this character to be merely “Harry Smith.”

  8 The idea that there was once an advanced civilization in a hypothetical continent that connected the islands of the “East Indies” together prior to a prehistoric cataclysm, is commonplace in French adventure fiction, dating back at least as far as the works of Joseph Méry in the 1830s.

  9 This character is never mentioned again, but his name is recycled, a slight variant of it being attached to a different character.

  10 I have Anglicized the text’s lethifères, but cannot identify what tree the author might mean; the word means “deadly.” The jambosa is also known as the “Malay plum” or the “rose-apple.” The “chatny” mentioned later in the paragraph is the source of the English word chutney.

  11 This allegation is utterly false, but is an understandable embellishment of the mythology of the great apes. Several naturalists reproduced the tales told to them by indigenes of orangutans stealing women, and anxious imagination did the rest.

  12 Literary fauna rarely correspond to natural fauna in French adventure novels, and species are often found far from their natural ranges. None of the named primates is native to Borneo, and these must therefore be regarded as fictitious variants; I have retained the name sapajou rather than translating it into “capuchin monkey,” as the term is obviously being used loosely or eccentrically.

  13 This plan, by virtue of which two separate rescue expeditions set forth, scheduled to arrive in the orangutans’ lair, seems replete with dramatic potential; for whatever reason, however, the author forgets all about it and reduced the two expeditions to one. He could have removed this chapter entirely, thus obliterating the inconsistency without leaving a significant lacuna in the narrative, but did not do so.

  14 Although Rava calls upon Allah here, she will subsequently cite Buddha in the same fashion, and is described eventually as a “Hindu.” It is not unusual in French adventure fiction for Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism to be confused, and treated as if they were the same set of beliefs.

  15 Like sapajous, ouarines are New World monkeys, also known as howler monkeys.

  16 Champsaur must have attempted to reproduce these lines from Coppée’s poem “Est que c’est les oiseaux se cachent pour mourir” from memory. A literal translation of the actual lines would read: “We do not find their delicate skeleton/In the April grass through which we run./Is that because birds hide away to die?”—the last line also being the poem’s title. It is not clear why Champsaur refers to Coppée, with slight contempt, as a “petit bourgeois poète.”

  17 The quotation is from Virgil’s Eclogues, where the full line is Claudite iam vivos, pueri sat prata biberunt [Stop watering, slaves; the fields have drunk their fill]. Like Goldry, Virgil meant the advice metaphorically.

  18 These lines, found inscribed on a window-pane at Chambord, were assumed to hav
e been scratched there by the French king François I (1494-1547).

  19 The reference is to Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Le Cid (1638); the characters are based on the life of Rodrigo Diaz, “El Cid,” who married Jimena, the daughter of Don Diego, whom he had killed.

  20 The author seems to have forgotten Gorden’s earlier claim to have killed many more, made after his tale of an encounter with a tiger that led him to declare eternal enmity on the species.

  FRENCH SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY COLLECTION

  02 Henri Allorge. The Great Cataclysm

  14 G.-J. Arnaud. The Ice Company

  61 Charles Asselineau. The Double Life

  23 Richard Bessière. The Gardens of the Apocalypse

  26 Albert Bleunard. Ever Smaller

  06 Félix Bodin. The Novel of the Future

  39 Alphonse Brown. City of Glass

  40 Félicien Champsaur. The Human Arrow

  81 Félicien Champsaur. Ouha, King of the Apes

  03 Didier de Chousy. Ignis

  67 Captain Danrit. Undersea Odyssey

  17 C. I. Defontenay. Star (Psi Cassiopeia)

  05 Charles Derennes. The People of the Pole

  68 Georges T. Dodds. The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

  49 Alfred Driou. The Adventures of a Parisian Aeronaut

  -- J.-C. Dunyach. The Night Orchid;

  -- J.-C. Dunyach. The Thieves of Silence