As a scholar, Monsieur Spéluque was far from any material preoccupation. He charged me with hiring the car and coming to pick him up at Fréjus after breakfast.
I found him the next day at his door. He had kept the long black coat that he normally wore, but he had bright sports trousers, boots and a mountaineer’s staff.
“Perhaps there’ll be rocks to climb,” he told me.
To my great surprise, he had a case under his arm containing a musical instrument. He deposited it in the vehicle very carefully.
“It’s my flute. I haven’t told you that in my spare time I play the flute.”
“But...”
“Music can have an important role as an entry into communication.”
I could not disguise a hint of surprise. “In sum,” I said, “you believe in the existence of gnomides?”
He raised his faunesque eyebrows and stared at me with his sparkling eyes.
“You’re astonished that an old Pythagorean like me, a son of the philosophers of Alexandria—for that’s what I am—attaches so much importance to the testimony of a young scatterbrain who, according to what you’ve told me, continually confounds her dreams with reality. But have you not noticed that, for everything that surpasses ordinary life, we only have data by way of the scatterbrained, people hardly sensate, who are reputed to be unworthy of faith in the eyes of everyone. The knowledge of what is hidden only filters as far as the mind of the sage via the testimony of folly. There is a whole category of people who, without knowing it, are the intermediaries of an invisible world. Now, it’s a matter in the case in hand of a descendant of the Lusignans. Think how exceptional it is to have in one’s ancestry a woman who changed into a snake once a week.”
“It’s a matter of an infinitely distant legend!”
“It’s precisely because it’s distant that it has chances of reposing on a basis of verity. I place the definitive materialization of the human species at a fairly recent date—around the fifteenth century. The form was not definitive beforehand. I believe that until that epoch, in wild forests, uninhabited mountains and deserted shores, the last representatives of the creatures—fauns, satyrs, sirens—that ignorant humans called gods because they had the feet of beasts or the tails of fish. They were only different species, trials made by the creator, who finally decided on the human form, after long hesitation. Perhaps humans gave proof of slightly less animality than their rivals, and it was in their brains, although very primitive, that it was decided that intelligence would be developed forcefully on earth.
“I believe that there are now no longer any creatures different from humans—none on the surface, that is. But that a few living groups might have taken refuge in the earth’s interior, in immense subterranean corridors, on the banks of rivers, of which we only see a small part flowing, nothing is more plausible! I could even add that it’s logical, and even certain. Where would humans go if the surface of the earth became uninhabitable for them? They would take refuge inside it. Vigorous beings would have adapted their organs in a few generations.
“We don’t know whether there might be a light appropriate to the great terrestrial depths, produced by gases or some other means due to the ingenuity of nature. There ought to be one. Perhaps there is also an entire vegetation there, of unimaginable trees and flowers, of a beauty equal to or greater than that produced by the sun in the sky, for perhaps, instead of the subterranean fire that science has ended up doubting, there is a radiant central sun.”
This discourse and others brought us to Comps, where the driver collected a few indications regarding the route to follow. It was necessary to reach the village of La Roque-Esclapon, and then set off on foot in search of the Duoi wood, the Avellan wood and the ravine where the grille was.
The rocks, the wild heather and the stunted pines presented an aspect of redoubtable uniformity. Fortunately, we found a guide. He was a very young man. He belonged to the category of those who allow to show on their fifteen-year-old face the one they will have at fifty. That lack of juvenility did not prevent him from knowing the grille.
“It’s dangerous,” he told us, laconically.
Monsieur Spéluque was increasingly agitated. He walked rapidly, jumping over tree trunks and stones, clutching his flute against his body.
He only stopped to tell me that he had never regretted not knowing Medieval French so much.
“What use would such knowledge be?”
“I situate in the Middle Ages, at the time of the great cultivations undertaken by the monasteries, the retreat underground of the non-human inhabitants of the wild places. The monks systematically deforested the land, not only to plant crops, but with the aim of an exorcism, to expel the sylvan, arboreal or fluvial beings, which they stupidly identified with demons. Those beings were separated from us in the Middle Ages and must still make use of the language that was current at the time. They were not very speculative, and that language was limited in its use for them. They knew enough, however, to have been converted to Christianity if the Church had shown a little fraternity in their regard. But alas, the wisdom of Christ never thought of saving either the animals or the creatures that are not human.”
“However, the slightly rhythmic words heard by Mademoiselle de Lusignan were, so far as I understood, in an entirely modern French.”
“Well, there is a intelligent elite and an uncultivated crowd everywhere. In the same way that there is a small number of people among us who know many languages, and the majority who only know one, perhaps there are a few individuals among the subterranean creatures who have been able to keep up to date and retain a knowledge of languages, by slipping behind a window in the evening, or listening from the bottom of a well to women drawing water. But it is possible to communicate by other means than language, which is, in sum, a rather primitive and purely human usage.”
Monsieur Spéluque caressed the case containing his flute with satisfaction.
The grille was well hidden at the bottom of a ravine and it had an appearance simultaneously mysterious and unnecessary. It sealed a crevice in the rock that resembled any crevice. Very old box-trees grew all around it.
“Box-trees always grow around caves,” said Monsieur Spéluque, “And even inside them, since the people of the region descend with ropes in order to extract, sometimes from a great depth, ancient trunks with which balls are made for the game of boules. Box is content far from the sun and one can suppose that the long, sad avenues that extend underground, on the banks of silent rivers, in a light that comes from who knows where, are bordered by box-trees as old as the planet.”
We took two or three steps into the entrance of a low cavern.
“It’s dangerous!” shouted the adolescent with the aged face. “There’s a hole.”
Monsieur Spéluque had taken a lantern from his pocket and he aimed the beam at a gaping orifice that opened before us. It was a broad orifice, one side of which was sheer, while the other had vegetation and asperities to which one could cling if one were audacious enough to attempt the descent. I saw in the gloom of the cavern that Monsieur Spéluque was smiling. He opened the case of his flute and brandished the instrument in his hand.
“Fortunately, I have the best means of appeal.”
And, placing himself as close as possible to the edge of the chasm, he started to play. He played with passion, leaning forward, sometimes delivering himself to movements so disordered that I dreaded seeing him disappear into the gaping opening, to which he was dangerously close. The tails of his coat were agitating behind him like wings, and I grabbed him forcefully several times, so near did I think he was to disappearing. He could have plunged in his musical appeal and not even perceived it.
When he stopped, I saw that his face was illuminated.
“It’s a piece of my own composition,” he told me. “One might have thought that I had foreseen...I’ll surely obtain a response—or else the chasm is uninhabited and they aren’t there. Hold me; I’m going to listen.”
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br /> He let himself fall face down and crawled until his head and a part of his torso were perched over the void. I had seized his feet. I heard him murmuring words that I could not distinguish.
He stayed in that position for a long time. I thought that it couldn’t go on forever, and I tugged him gently by his feet.
He got up, as if regretfully.
“They responded. They’re feminine voices. They have singing voices. But they came from very far away.”
At that moment the young guide, who had left us, and who seemed to consider the cavern as a malefic place into which it was better not to penetrate, reappeared near the grille. The afternoon was reaching its end, and it was necessary to get out of the rocks and box-trees before dark.
Before going, I wanted to sure myself of Monsieur Spéluque’s extraordinary affirmation. He did not show any astonishment. He seemed to consider that only the distance prevented a narrower communication with the gnomides. And he was slightly disappointed.
“In your turn, hold me,” I said to him.
I did as he had done, and leaned forward.
What came to me as a prodigious silence rising from the abyssal depths that I saw extending beneath me in a funnel of darkness. I saw it, but at the same time I reflected that I could only have the perception of that depth because I could see somewhere, very distantly, a vague, uncertain glow.
“Can you hear them?” Monsieur Spéluque asked, behind me.
No, I did not hear any song, nothing but silence. But I reflected again that I could only measure the intensity of what I took for an absolute silence because it was troubled by something. That seemed to be coming from another plane of existence; it had nothing of the human voice, nothing that could be produced by human or extra-human organs, and yet there was a voice; it was the speech of living water.
In the distance, at the bottom of that funnel similar to an infinite spiral, there was flowing water: terrestrial water; light water. In spite of the distance, I perceived the softly blue-tinted glow of its essence, and I heard the sound it made on an invisible shore, the song of the water. And that murmur, and that ineffable distant light, were more mysterious than all the songs or apparitions of gnomides or subterranean gods.
For a few seconds I was in communication with the impenetrable life of the secret part of our planet, with a beauty that it is not given to humans to contemplate; I could hear the heartbeat of the earth.
“I heard,” I said, afterwards, to my companion.
And while the car carried us away, Monsieur Spéluque repeated several times: “What a mystery it has been given to us to approach!”
I said: “That’s true!” But it was not a matter of the same mystery.
THE DIMENSION OF THE MYSTERY
Once we had arrived at the door of his house in Fréjus, Monsieur Spéluque said in a tone that brooked no reply: “Send the car back.”
He did not care about the time it would take me to go home on foot. Those contingencies did not touch him. He took me by the arm, and having set down his flute and his staff, he made me take a few steps with him in the central path of his little garden.
“Perhaps you’re wondering why an old Pythagorean like me, a Greek sage full of reason and knowledge, adds faith to fairy tales.”
“I haven’t asked any question.”
“You’re wrong. I would have replied to you. I’ll reply to you without you asking me anything. I’ve been able to discover a little of my past. I’ve succeeded in going back as far as my most distant origins, origins that are lost in the night of time. You know that there are tribes in Africa that abstain from killing a certain animal species and render it the worship that one renders to the ancestors. For some it’s the buffalo, for others the crocodile. Those simple men know, by virtue of an immemorial tradition, that they were issued from that ancestral animal. And a certain filiation remains in spite of the centuries. Well, personally, I’m a descendant of the beings that are known as fauns or satyrs, half-human and half-goat, inhabitants of the woods, who have a liking for music.
“There remains to me, from them, the conformation of my feet, which had me rejected by the draft board, the form of my eyebrows, and two excrescences that I have on my temples and that have gradually attenuated. Mentally, I’ve inherited the liking for music, and above all the love of sciences. In the same way that aerial creatures only think of dancing and spiritual reveries, beings close to the earth have a passion for the exact sciences. It’s to that relationship with the inhabitants of the subterranean world that you owe having heard the song that replied to my appeal.”
“What I heard,” I said, “was a distant sound of water that came from an immense depth. Don’t you believe that?”
Monsieur Spéluque started to laugh with satisfaction.
“It’s always the same. It isn’t given to everyone to hear. For one it’s the sound of water, for others the delightful song of semi-human creatures. A marvelous phenomenon always present itself under two aspects, one of which is natural and the other supernatural. The apparent order of the world is at that price.”
I was slightly confused to be placed in the category of vulgar people who see nothing of things but their ordinary appearance.
“You should have heard the song,” said Monsieur Spéluque, forcefully. “And I’ll tell you why you didn’t hear it. You live in the location where, in my judgment, Saint Eleutherius built his hermitage. Now, a powerful soul turned in upon itself, impregnates the things among which it lives, for an indeterminate duration. The soul of Eleutherius is still floating in your garden. Now, as a Christian, Eleutherius must have had a horror of all the beings of semi-human form that he encountered. In his time, there must still have been many of them in the dense forests of the shore. According to Christian error, however he mistook them for demons. He repelled them with all his power. He refused to hear them.
“It’s the refusal in question that is acting upon you without your knowing it: Eleutherius’ refusal to hear the nymphs, the gnomes or the satyrs. Whereas he conducted himself differently with the animals, the question of whose nature had been regulated by theology, and with which the devil had nothing to do. Certainly, he loved them and he talked to them, since he has left a reputation as a saint. If you were to tell me that you understand, in a certain measure, the language of beasts, that wouldn’t astonish me. That would be all to the praise of Eleutherius and his powerful force of projection. And that is produced here, but not elsewhere. That’s the true mystery. Have you not come with the aim of studying it?”
Monsieur Spéluque was speaking excitedly. Sometimes, he gave me a little tap with his index finger. He stopped, and then he started walking again, drawing me along.
“Yes, here and not elsewhere! But within what limits does here mean? Are you asking yourself that? For the dimension of the mystery has a great importance. The sacred place of Delphi might have been no larger than the placement of the Pythoness’s tripod, and there are accursed places that embrace the extent of an entire mountain. Where ought we to place the limits of the influence that occupies us?”
I did not understand what Monsieur Spéluque was saying at all. It had to do with the motive that had impelled him to install himself in Fréjus. The same motive—at least, he believed so—had brought me to the region. But what was the motive? I did not know. I would have liked to understand and to penetrate that enigma. My embarrassment was visible. Fortunately, he only saw his own thoughts. He lowered his voce.
“In my opinion, it extends, approximately, from the rock of Roquebrune to the highest point of Saint-Pilon.”
“Approximately.”
“Ah! That’s also your opinion. But it’s late. We’ll talk about it again.”
Monsieur Spéluque had a taste for interrupting conversations abruptly. While taking we had arrived near the portal and the obscure road. He shook my hand.
“Yes, we’ll talk again. Come back soon.”
THE DEPARTURE OF
THE SUBLIME FRIEND
S
I should have gone back to see Monsieur Spéluque again the next day, but I did not. I did not even think about him anymore. It was the next day that the strange phenomenon was manifest in me of the past resuscitated.
It began, in an unforeseeable fashion, with the abandonment of certain companions of my life of whose presence I was unaware. And I only knew that they had been around me at the moment when they quit me.
How had they been present without my knowing it, or almost? How had I not been able to take account of such admirable presences? We have witnesses close to us, advisers and protectors of which we have no suspicion. They are there in the form that they had while alive, but that form has become subtle and immaterial, to the point of not being visible. And sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, it materializes for a few seconds and we have a rapid vision of beings who were sitting in our armchairs, leaning toward us while we are writing, exchanging signs with one another on our subject.
What! I ought to have cried. You were there and I didn’t know it?
And I should have intoned a hymn of praise, glorifying myself for having had such visitors. But I did nothing. I remained stupidly mute, occupied by a prodigiously futile thought which had suddenly taken on a primordial importance.
The first that I saw go out was the one whose work I had read most recently. It was the day before in the evening, when I came home, and I had even murmured, as I chose his book from my shelves, the impious remark: “What shall I read in order to go to sleep?”
And I had chosen The Ornament of Spiritual Weddings by Ruysbroeck, rightly nicknamed “the admirable,” a book translated perfectly by Maeterlinck.16 I am obliged to confess that the book in question had played the role I expected of it that evening. For it contains the description of divine ecstasies susceptible, by their great beauty, of causing a passage from the waking state to that of sleep, especially if one has been running around the rocks of Canjuers all afternoon.
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