“Very well, monsieur.” The young Breton bounded back up the slope toward the carriage.
De Maillet balanced the spectacles on his large and fleshy nose. He reached into the basket for a letter, and broke its wax seal with his thumb.
Pont Gardeau, Suriname
February 12, 1737
To the Sieur Benoît de Maillet,
Grand Consul and Envoy
Plenipotentiary, ret’d.,
in Marseille.
Cher Monsieur:
Please forgive this execrable handwriting, which, I know, is almost as bad as your own. It seems that my secretary has fallen ill with one of the manifold agues of this pestilential region. Without the aid of this invaluable boy my studies of natural theology have fallen into a lamentable state. I myself am not so well as I should be; but it is nothing serious. I imagine that neither of us can claim the vigor we had in those faraway days in Egypt.
I regret that I am unable to send you the samples of rock you requested; during the past several months I have been upriver, in the interior, humbly struggling for the propagation of His Catholic Majesty’s most perfect Faith. During such time I collected a number of very curious worms and insects, with which I hope to confound the pedantic System of the infidel Linnaeus.
The natives of the interior are stubbornly set in their heathen errors, yet full of remarkable stories of men with tails, ancestral giants, and the like, which I hope to convey to you when I have more thoroughly mastered their language.
And now I must chide you. A friend of mine in the Royal Society of London, a colleague in natural theology (though very lamentably a Protestant), has told me that he has read a certain manuscript circulated secretly among the savants of France and England, which he called Telliamed; or, Discourses On the Diminution of the Sea. He was full of praise for this manuscript, which, he being an infidel, does nothing for the sanctity of your reputation. And you need not protest your innocence; for a child could see that the supposed Indian sage, named Telliamed, who narrates this new System of Geology, merely has your own name spelled backward.
Perhaps the sea really has diminished; I should find this hard to deny, since I, too, have seen the desert of petrified ships in the Bahar-Balaama west of Cairo. But this should not be interpreted to go against Revelation. As your spiritual adviser, I must warn you, my old friend: you are no longer so young as to be able to neglect the very pressing matter of the salvation of your soul. In the end the Dogma must triumph, and no amount of sophistical “evidences,” “hypotheses,” or “deductions” will save you when you argue before the Throne of Judgment.
I should hate to think that the collections of rocks and fossils that I have sent you had been used for an impious purpose. Yet I cannot leave you without a gift of some sort; and knowing your fondness for snuff, I have sent you some of the aboriginals’ own nasal aliment, which they derive from a number of curious bushes and vines. It is not tobacco, but upon the use of it, they receive the word of the Faith more readily, with excitement and rejoicing; so I cannot think that it is bad. I include the small birdbone snuffing tool with which they inhale the substance, for your collection.
In return, I ask that you burn a few candles for the repose of the soul of poor Bérard Procureur; and please try to go to confession with regularity. I pray for you,
Your ancient friend,
Fr. Gérard le Bovier de Fuillet, S.J.
De Maillet smiled. “It is not at all a bad thing to have one’s spiritual adviser in another country,” he mused aloud. He pulled from within the heavy envelope another, smaller envelope, which rustled. He peeled the gummed endpaper loose, and the snuff within the packet released a pleasant, faintly bitter aroma of exotic spices.
The smell unlocked a chain of memories within de Maillet’s mind: cones of black incense smoldering in a perforated silver bowl, dark coffee in a china cup, the nude rump of an Egyptian courtesan spread across a brocade pillow. With these unexpected and pleasant memories came a sudden comfortable loosening in de Maillet’s bowels. He felt a brief sense of animal well-being, a warm flickering from the ashen coals of youth.
His doctor had forbidden him snuff. It had been several months since he had last felt his nostrils solidly plugged. He peered carefully into the paper packet. The fine-ground leaves looked harmless enough. He fingered the light, hollow birdbone, then plunged it into the packet and snorted recklessly.
“Yoww!” he shouted, leaping to his feet. His spectacles flew off into the sand. Cursing, de Maillet stomped heavily around the pole of the parasol, his old eyes leaking tears. The pagan snuff had stung his tissues like an angry wasp, hurting so much that he could not even sneeze. He clutched his cheekbone and sinus with one age-spotted leathery hand.
Slowly the pain faded to a strange numbness, not entirely unpleasant. De Maillet straightened his back, then bent to pick up his silver-headed cane and his spectacles. It had been a long time since he had bent so easily. He sat on the campstool without puffing for breath.
He noted with interest that his sensibilities seemed heightened. When he felt the smooth ebony of his cane, it was as if he had never felt it before. Even his eyesight seemed improved; the blue summer sky over the crystalline Mediterranean seemed to shimmer as if it had just been created. Even the sand grains on his silver-buckled pumps seemed to have been placed each just so, forming a tiny constellation of their own against the black leather.
He was just contemplating filling his other nostril when he saw a young townsman running toward him from a rockier section of the coast. Here there were a number of secluded dells and hollows where the young gallants of Marseille were wont to take their mistresses, or other young women whom they wished to persuade to assume that estate. The stranger was a handsome fellow of the commercial class with a face slightly marred by smallpox.
“Did you hear a cry for help?” the young man demanded, stopping in the broad shadow of de Maillet’s parasol.
“My word,” said de Maillet, embarrassed. “I’m afraid that I myself cried out. I, er, am somewhat troubled with the gout. I wasn’t aware that there was anyone within earshot.”
“It can’t have been you, monsieur,” the young man said reasonably, tucking in his linen shirttail. “It was followed by a spate of the most horrible cursing, some of it in a foreign language. My companion was so frightened that she fled immediately.”
“Oh,” de Maillet said. Suddenly he smiled. “Well, perhaps there was a boatload of sailors, then. My eyes are not so good as they were. I might have missed them completely.”
The young man grinned. “All is well. Women always want to prolong a rendezvous long after its natural summation.” His eyes fell on de Maillet’s cane, a presentation item from the city fathers of Marseille. “Forgive me,” the young man said. “You are the Sieur de Maillet, the famous savant, are you not?”
De Maillet smiled. “You know I am. You just read my name from the cane.”
“Nonsense,” said the young tradesman vigorously. “Everyone knows who Monsieur de Maillet is. Marseille owes its prosperity to you. My father is Jean Martine of the Martine Oriental Import-Export Company. I am his eldest son, Jean Martine the Younger.” He bowed. “He has spoken of you often. My family owes you a very large debt of gratitude.”
“Yes, I believe I know your father,” de Maillet said generously. He loved flattery. “He deals in Egyptian trade-stuffs, does he not? Bitumen, antiquities, and the like.” De Maillet shrugged with an aristocrat’s proper vagueness about such matters.
“The very same,” said Martine. “We have sometimes had the honor of supplying Your Excellency with curios for your very famous cabinet of natural wonders.” He hesitated. “Without meaning to intrude, Your Excellency, I cannot help but wonder why I find you alone here on this deserted beach.”
De Maillet looked at the tradesman’s open, guileless face and felt the natural urge of the old, the learned, and the garrulous to instruct the young. “It has to do with my System,” he said. “My life
’s work in natural philosophy, upon which my posthumous fame will rest. For many years, in my travels, I have examined seashores, and studied the history of the world as revealed in its rocks. It is my contention that the level of the sea is dropping, at a rate I calculate at perhaps three feet every thousand years. During my life I have amassed evidence of this diminution, and I believe it to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
“Very remarkable,” said Martine slowly. “But surely you are not sitting here in order to watch it drop.”
“No,” said de Maillet, “but when the weather is fine, I often come here, to think over old times, to examine my notes and journals, and to extend my chain of deductions.
“For instance. If you grant that the sea is diminishing, then it follows quite rigorously that there must have been a time, many thousands of centuries ago, when the entire earth was covered by the sea. And you may prove this quite easily. I have examined the cabinet of Herr Scheuchzer in Zurich, which contains a great many fossilized fish that that worthy man pried from the stones of the Swiss mountains. In the writings of the savant Fulgose we find the story of an entire ship, with its sails, cordage, and anchors, and the bones of forty of its crew, found fossilized a hundred fathoms down an iron mine in the Canton of Bern. Herodotus writes of iron mooring-rings found far up the slopes of the mountains of Mokatan, near Memphis. How else can we account for these vestiges, than to assume that the sea was once deep enough to drown these mountains?”
De Maillet jabbed his cane into the sand. “So. It follows, then, that life must have arisen from the sea, and that such creatures as sea adders, sea apes, sea dogs, and sea lions must have swarmed in the depths when there was no land at all. Similarly, sea grapes, sea lettuce, sea moss, and sea trees must have supplied the land with its greenery.”
“This is very troubling,” the young man said. “What of men, then? Do you believe that men, too, arose from the sea?”
“To be sure, it is troubling,” de Maillet said. “But the evidence, young man; one cannot ignore the evidence. I admit that I have never seen mermen. But I have seen the bones of giants. Thirty years ago, in the quarry of Cape Coronne, just a few miles from here, I saw the bones of a giant, lying on his back, enclosed in the stone. When you have seen a marvel like that with your own eyes, you may confidently put aside your doubts…” A strange feeling was creeping up and down the length of de Maillet’s spine. He closed his eyes and felt a weird tremor below the soles of his feet, as if the bowels of the earth had shifted. When he opened his eyes, with a crawling sense of vertigo, he saw a phenomenon so odd that he rejected it almost at once as a trick of the light.
It was as if the hand of God had dropped a formless pane of tinted glass on the horizon. Then this mighty pane, or this wall of invisible essence, had swept forward from out of the distance and flashed past him. It was as if this formless wall had combed the sea to its depths, and had passed through the very substance of the earth, leaving no ripple of its passage, yet leaving everything somehow subtly changed. He himself felt different, stirred somehow, with an odd tingling sensation, as he sometimes had before a thunderstorm. A strange cool breeze began to blow steadily off the sea. It seemed to de Maillet that the suspicious breeze had a faint marshy reek of roiled mud, from the subaqueous depths of the world.
He looked at the young man sitting in the sand at his feet. Some manner of subtle transformation had affected the young tradesman. He was eyeing de Maillet with a bold and speculative look, as if he were about to buy the world and was ready to offer de Maillet as a down payment. De Maillet said faintly, “You didn’t see…?”
“See what, Your Excellency?”
“A certain…flash, a certain wind? No? No, of course not.” De Maillet shivered. “Where were we?”
“Your Excellency was speaking of mermen.”
“Mermen.” Although it was one of his favorite topics, the word sounded strange to de Maillet, as if in a single instant the word had aged a thousand years and was now some dusty and totally discredited apparition from the remote past. Had he ever really believed in mermen and merwomen? Surely he must have, for they merited an entire subchapter in his masterwork.
“Ah yes, mermen. Though I have never seen one, I have garnered many references from writers of unquestioned veracity. We must omit the tales of ancients such as Pliny, who speaks of flute-playing tritons and the like; they were entirely too credulous.
“Avoiding old wives’ tales, then, and sticking strictly to the facts: I have read the works of al-Qaswini, the celebrated Arabian writer, in the original. In his narrative of the travels of Salim, envoy of the Caliph Vathek of the Abassids, he mentions a fishing party on the Caspian Sea, where a mergirl was rescued whole from the belly of a monstrous fish. She was not half-fish and half-woman, as popular error has it, but a woman entire. On being parted from the water, she sobbed and tore her hair, but could not speak any human words. This was in the year of the Hegira 288, or the year 842 of our era.
“In the year 1430, after a great flood in the Zuider Zee, a mergirl was captured from the mud behind the dikes. The good women of Edam taught her to dress herself, to spin, and to make the sign of the cross, which, one must suppose, was the entirety of the accomplishments of the women of that rather dull country…In later life she attempted to return to the water on a number of occasions, but her lungs had accustomed themselves to the breathing of air, and she was not able to do it. Such was no doubt the case with our remotest ancestors, who, emerging from the sea onto the first uncovered islands, found after a certain time that they could not return. I imagine that this process happens even today. I have read accounts of savage men, the orangoutans of the Dutch East Indies, who are covered with hair and cannot speak human language. Obviously they are not far removed from their merhood.
“From time to time tailed men are found among the European races. A courtesan I knew in Pisa told me of a lover of hers whose body hair was black and thick, whose strength was that of several men, and who had a tail. Doubtless a race of tailed mermen exists somewhere in the sea’s unplumbed depths. New species of all kinds must creep from the sea at one time or another; how else are we to account for the flora and fauna of remote islands? No one has ever seen such an emergence. But how many have watched the shoreline patiently, for years on end, knowing for what to look?”
“I suppose that no one but Your Excellency could be so qualified,” Martine said. “Is this, then, the reason for your vigil? You expect some prodigy to emerge from the sea?”
De Maillet smiled sadly. “No, of course not. The chances are infinitesimal that I could actually witness such a thing. But what else am I to do? My legs are too weak and gouty for me to leap about in cliffs and quarries, as I did in my youth. All I have now are my eyes and my brain. Even if a merman were to emerge at this moment, I would not be able to capture or subdue him. But if I saw him, I would be sure of my System—surer even than I am now, after amassing evidence for years. I could die knowing that History is sure to vindicate me.”
He looked out wistfully across the waters. “Suppose that, at this moment, one were to see a strange movement among those waves that roll and pitch so oddly in this wind. Suppose one were to see that patch of sea-foam begin to eddy and twist-yes, just as it is doing now, only faster. Faster, becoming unmistakable!” De Maillet heaved himself to his feet and pointed with his cane. “My God, look!”
The young man stared out to sea. “I see nothing…”
“Use your eyes, fool! Do you not see where that whirlpool gyres and spreads? Its rim glitters with foam like diamonds, and its waters are the green of…of ancient bronze, or Chinese jade, or the sheen of an insect in amber, or…or…” The words ground to a mumble in the sudden torrent of images. De Maillet pointed dumbly with his cane. The young man looked at de Maillet, then back at the sea, then at de Maillet again. Suddenly he turned and ran off headlong down the beach.
De Maillet ignored the fleeing youth and took two tottering steps closer to the appar
ition. About the whirlpool’s foamy edges, half-translucent phantoms were chasing one another in the wind, streaking around and around the whirlpool’s center in a riot of films and veils. Some of the phantoms embraced one another; other, darker spirits moved sluggishly, as if poisoned by earthly biles; yet others, with streaming hair and rolling eyes, blew curling gasps of wind from their mouths. Their looks and movements proclaimed them senseless things, mere servants and harbingers of the prodigy that was to come.
More and more of the aerial spirits were cast off from the frantic whirling of the jade-green maelstrom; mere blobs of foam at first, they took on form in their flight and spiraled upward, forming before de Maillet’s amazed eyes a slowly whirling tower of unearthly presences. Above them, a surf of clouds boiled out across the empty, crawling sky.
A shaft of muddy green light sprang upward from the maelstrom’s depth, and another presence, a greater one by far, began to emerge from the whirlpool’s core. She rose with slow majesty from the bottom of the sea, whirling like a dervish entranced: a Dark Girl, whose skin was the color of slate and whose black, slimy hair had the damp, clinging look of kelp or sea moss. She was nude, her secret parts concealed by her hand across her breast and the curling of a mass of hair across her hip. As her knees and ankles rose above the water’s rim, the whirlpool slowed and vanished, showing her bare feet perched within the mother-of-pearl bowl of an enormous clamshell.
Awed by the majesty of this dark giantess, de Maillet fell painfully to one knee. The Dark Girl’s eyes opened; they were the color of the whirlpool’s waters, a dark archaic green.
Two of the wind-spirits offered the Dark Girl a long cloak or veil, made of their own intangible essence. As it touched her dark shoulders, it at once assumed weight and substance, and became a miraculous cloak, arcanely worked with embroidered symbols of manticores, rocs, krakens, one-eyed giants, and other monstrous beasts and prodigies.
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