The Aerial Valley

by Brian Stableford

  After an eight-hour march, I arrived at the foot of a long rampart of perpendicular rocks about three hundred toises high. I thought then that my guide had mistaken the route, for it seemed to me to be absolutely impossible to penetrate any further by the path we had followed thus far; but the sight of that enormous barrier, on the contrary, restored his confidence, which had begun to waver.

  “I’m no longer anxious now,” he exclaimed. “We’re close to the Aerial Valley, there’s no longer anything but this wall off rock separating us from it.”

  “Eh! How are we going to get over it, without the wings of those eagles soaring over its summit?”

  “It won’t be as easy for us as for those eagles, but we’ll succeed. Let’s begin by leaving our mules here, and let’s each arm ourselves with one of these iron-tipped staffs I’ve brought.”

  We dismounted, and I followed my guide, who first followed the bed of a stream that emerged from the foot of the rock. That exit was masked by a thicket of bushes, and it was only by crouching almost down to the ground that we were able to advance. We proceeded thus, bowed down, for fifty paces; at the end of that distance there was a small, extremely steep path to the right, which we followed for a quarter of an hour, and we finally reached a narrow ledge that snaked along the flank of the rock. It was there that our rope footwear and our iron-tipped staffs rendered us great service. We switched them from one hand to the other, following the different direction of the ledge, in such a way that the tip was always applied to the edge of the precipice. Sometimes the ledge was interrupted and it was necessary to leap across the gap. My guide was an intrepid chamois-hunter, but when we reached the summit of the rock he confessed that he would never have attempted the route if he had known that it was so perilous.

  From that summit we had a view of the Valley, which appeared to me to be about a league in diameter. It was completely surrounded by a girdle of rocks similar to the one that we had just scaled. I could make out the hermits’ cabins near the center. In order to reach the Valley it was necessary to descend in almost as far as we had climbed up, but the sinuosities of that descent, by an easy path, which could be followed by eye all the way to the valley floor, was exempt from any kind of danger. As there was little daylight left, I decided to take my leave of my guide, in order that he would have time to descend along the ledge and seek shelter under an outcrop of rock before nightfall.

  The sun had set, obscurity was beginning to descend, and a few stars were already scintillating in the sky when I reached the Valley. The purest serenity promised one of the brilliant nights that one only sees in all their beauty in places elevated above the grosser vapors of the atmosphere. I admired the profound silence of those deserts, only interrupted by the hum of a few insects and the melancholy babble of distant steams descending from the higher slopes.

  Soon, harmonious sounds struck my ears; I thought at first that it was the effect of water falling upon some sonorous substance, but on listening attentively, O charm of arts! O supreme director of things! ravishing sounds in that bears den! celestial music under the pole! I marched with a long stride and then heard, distinctly, a woman’s voice singing a ballad, accompanied by a theorb. Another voice, more masculine, reinforced at intervals the passages that lent themselves to harmony. I was alternately retained by the fear of causing alarm and excited by the desire to see the producers of such a concert in such a place. A dog, which I heard barking, decided me precipitately to advance.

  The door of the cabin was open. Scarcely had I appeared before it than a young woman uttered a cry of fright, and the man came toward me abruptly. He paused momentarily, nonplussed, but, seeing that I was unarmed, with my hat in my hand and a cordial smile on my lips, he collected himself.

  “Who are you, Monsieur, and how were you able to penetrate this enclosure? What are you looking for?”

  While he was speaking a host of confused ideas captivated my mind; these were not foreigners, they were French people, who appeared to have been born in a distinguished class. Two men had been mentioned to me, but I only saw one. Might the young woman have disguised her sex? But why that mystery? Why...?

  The gaze of the man, who armed himself with severity, recalled me to myself.

  “Monsieur,” I replied, “The sole desire to see you brought me to this place. I hope that you will not find my curiosity indiscreet when you know its motive. I ask you for hospitality for the night.”

  My response did not appear to satisfy him. He received me in his house with a cold politeness, but, my purpose being entirely innocent, I did not feel at all offended by that coldness, and I accept frankly the seat by the fire that he indicated to me with his hand. Sticks of fir-wood illuminated the cabin brightly, and I was able to consider the pretended hermits.

  The man, who appeared to be about fifty years old, had one of those faces characterized by great ordeals. When the impetuosity of age is past and the struggle between passions and reason commences to die down, one then perceives, with the triumph of virtue, the scars of the heart. There remains in the features an imprint of austere melancholy, which is alarming at first glance, and it is only when one knows a man better, when one has penetrated his soul, that one becomes attached to him and loves him.

  The young woman, for her face was evidently that of a virgin, was between sixteen and eighteen years of age. I had never seen so much beauty united with so much naivety. From the astonishment, emotion and curiosity that was painted in all her features it was easy to divine that I was the first civilized man who had appeared before her. Her timidity, her modesty and her grace were the work of nature alone. It seemed to me that I had been suddenly transported back to the first age of the world, and that I found myself in the bosom of the family of some ancient patriarch. The man’s garment was made from a bearskin, the young woman’s from the skin of a ewe.

  The father—for I did not take long to learn that the young woman was his daughter—was only concerned to begin with to know who I was, where I came from and by what incomprehensible means I had scaled the wall of the valley. I read in his face that my answers satisfied him, and it was only then that I was satisfied myself. If nothing troubles the mind as much as the fear of displeasing, there is also nothing that restores free respiration that the certainty of being regarded with a kindly eye by people that one is meeting for the first time.

  I could not prevent myself from asking a host of questions in my turn. These are the only enlightenments that he thought it appropriate to give me for the time being:

  He had been living in the valley for three years with six other people that I would see before long. The path that had brought them here had been wider then; it had permitted them to bring a number of animals with them. They had broken the ledge themselves. They had not imagined that they could be visited by any living being except eagles and chamois. The latter animals had only hazarded to follow that perilous route when beings vigorously pursued. The return journey was impracticable for them, with the result that they found themselves imprisoned for the rest of their life.

  During our conversation, Dina—that was the young woman’s name—had taken up a distaff and was spinning thread, darting sly glances at me from time to time, of curiosity as much as astonishment. Both sentiments were quite natural, in view of my strange visit and my equally strange clothing.

  “Ah! There they are!” she exclaimed, suddenly.

  At that moment, the door opened, and I saw two men enter who seemed to me to be father and son. Both had beautiful faces in the manner of Henri IV, which respired frankness and attracted confidence. They too were clad in animal skins, and were carrying agricultural tools on their shoulders, which they went to deposit in a room adjacent to the one we were in.

  Both of them, on perceiving me, uttered exclamations of surprise, but the older one resumed his ordinary cheerful expression when he had observed the tranquility of his friend.

  “Monsieur,” he said, “You’ve apparently come here on the back of some eag
le. I imagine our astonishment is equal to ours, and that you were scarcely expecting to find humans so close to heaven.”

  While I repeated the story of my journey, supper was prepared in the next room, and it was served shortly afterwards.

  I expected a frugal meal of roots, but a young woman who appeared to be a servant garnished the table with a dish of fine trout, white bread and bottles of bear made in the Valley.

  “You can see,” said Simeon—he was the latter of the two hermits that I had seen—“that if our desert resembles the Thebaid, we nevertheless don’t live entirely like anchorites.”

  I agreed, and they were able to perceive by my appetite that I would have been difficult to content with a meat of roots—which was not astonishing after such a long and difficult journey.

  After the supper, everyone gathered in a circle around the fire. I wanted to please my hosts, and thought that there was no better way to succeed in that than by bringing the conversation to the political news, which must be absolutely unknown to them after such a long intervals. To my great surprise, however, I was interrupted as soon as I broached the subject by Antonin, the older of the two solitaries.

  “What does the news matter to us,” he said, “of a house of which we are no longer tenants? What could you tell us? Burned cities, devastated fields, the blood of several thousand men spilled, and all those horror in exchange for a few leagues of terrain that will be passed on at the same price tomorrow, to their original owners or someone else? Talk to us about the sciences, literature and the arts; those are the only things whose progress interests us, because they make the happiness, or at least the consolation, of the human race.”

  “For myself,” Simeon said, “I’m still more interested in the fate of good agriculturalists. Let the people—the laborers who make up the most numerous and the healthiest part of the people be happy—that’s all I desire. The glory of the great fatigued me before; I only breathe easily with the idea of public tranquility and wellbeing.”

  We did not have to fear the espionage or the denunciation of the servants of Le Tellier and Louvois,19 and we were able to speak the truth frankly. As I knew that the hermits were among the number of victims persecuted for their religion on the orders of Louis XIV, I expected violent declamations against that monarch, but I saw, on the contrary the confirmation of the saying that solitude deadens the passions, especially hatred, while fortifying reason.

  “We mourn sincerely,” they told me, “kings who want to do good but cannot. They are surrounded by people who are more interested in the evil that they do. It would require the penetration of God himself to distinguish a true friend of the public good among that crowd of egotists who are only occupied with themselves. And what torches can be given to the son of kings to enlighten them in the midst of the darkness that surrounds them?

  “Incontrovertibly, the most difficult of all métiers is the government of a great nation, and it is the man who studies it least that fortune destines for it. What am I saying? They learn, on the contrary, that only evil means do that great work. How could one reproach a pupil in the art of Apelles who is merely a dauber, or a poet who can only write doggerel, if, instead of exercising a salutary censure over their faults, they were constantly credited with sublime beauties?

  “In truth, considering all the obstacles they have to overcome, it is not the rarity of good kings by which it is necessary to be astonished, but the fact that there are any at all. They are phenomena, extraordinary favors of Providence, who cannot be admired or cherished too greatly.

  “But let us postpone that conversation until another day; you must need repose. You’ll be taken to the cabin where you can spend the night peacefully.”

  Then a young shepherd took a few strands of lighted pine-branches, and, walking ahead of me, guided me to a small cottage a few paces away from the one from which I emerged. I found a bed there, which, like the interior of the cottage, was of the utmost cleanliness. That cleanliness, which contrasted so remarkably with the habits of the inhabitants of the mountains, was the spectacle that had struck me immediately on entering the dwelling of the hermits, and since then I had not seen it belied anywhere in what belonged to them.

  II

  The next morning I got up before dawn. I was impatient to explore the domain of the solitaries and the conquests that their industry had made over raw nature. The air was calm, the sky pure, the firmament spangled only by the principal stars; the rest had disappeared, eclipsed by the approach of day, which was already bleaching part of the horizon, where the great star was about to rise in all its majesty.

  Soon, I was able to distinguish the contours of the Valley. I observed that it was uncovered to the east, and that no mountain was interposed in the direction of the sun, from which I concluded that the first rays would soon appeared in the plain situated in the same latitude. The part of the north which looked toward France, by contrast, was closed by a very high hill, which was the one by which I had descended. I judged that such a disposition, given the encasement of the valley, must soften the vivacity of the air in that high region considerably, and that even in the middle of winter, if the sun was not veiled by any cloud, there would be some place where the temperature was as mild as Hyères or Nice.

  I walked, plunged in the reveries inspired in me by the beauties of the place and its worthy inhabitants. My thoughts went back to the valley of Tempé, the terrestrial paradise, the fortunate Golden Age, one of the most beautiful fictions of poetry.

  I said to myself: These people have lived in high society; everything announces that they are as distinguished by their birth as by their courage. Some great misfortune has doubtless cast them into this solitude. Well, where is the man tossed by events on to the reefs strewn in such great number in the bosom of society who, in order to escape the shipwreck, has not thought of seeking a refuge on some desert island, in some corner of the world forever separated from despotism and servitude? But one dreams of happiness and one thinks of fortune. These, perhaps, are the only men who have had the courage to render themselves free and happy in spite of opinion and prejudice.

  Meanwhile, the sun was already gilding the summits of the occidental mountains when I found myself on the edge of a lake whose crystal was as clear and transparent as the air. I saw at my feet trout skimming the sand in the deep water, and far above my head, an eagle describing vast circles in the air. A flock was heading for the mountain, preceded by adventurous goats wearing little bells around the neck, and guided by the shepherd’s son, a young Orpheus who was charming the silent march of his faithful companions with an old ballad of the region.

  Following the shore of the lake, I arrived at the enclosure of a kind of park, the entrance of which was closed by a gate. I met Simeon there with his son Rubens, who served as my guides in the enclosure.

  If the harmony of the previous day had struck me with astonishment, what I saw as I advanced caused me no less. It was a garden of the Chinese genre, but as far above all those of that species as the great models of nature are above the paltry copies of art. Imagine the most ingenious distribution of the beauties of the region, of waters, rocks, caverns, mountains, verdure and flowers. All those things had received from the hands of a savant industry the most picturesque and fortunate combinations.

  Here, a cascade rose up again in a single jet to half its height; there the water fell in a sheet disposed in such a manner as to form a superb rainbow in the sun’s rays; further away, one passed under an arch of rock that served as the bed of a torrent. Emerging from there, one found oneself in the midst of enormous granite blocks, dispersed in confusion, among which snaked a narrow path, and one suddenly arrived in a meadow enameled with the most beautiful Alpine flowers.

  At the far end rose an enormous rock in the base of which was a door almost entirely hidden by ivy, vines and other climbing plants. That door closed the entrance to a grotto, in the depths of which were two baths carved into the very rock, which received water from a thermal spri
ng of the greatest virtue.

  In another direction, groves of willows, acacias, sorb trees, hawthorns and lindens suspended perfumed garlands of various colors.

  The stream, which had disappeared under dense foliage, returned to the daylight and formed various meanders in the distance, where its curved arms were seen to embrace a vast rock. A rustic bridge, which traversed the steam at that point, was supported at its far end on the rock, the top of which could be reached by a sequence of projections disposed all around it in the form of a spiral. One arrived thus at the summit, which was flat and covered with flowers, among which a pretty thornless rose could be distinguished. In the middle stood a beech tree, which, extending its vast branches, spread an agreeable cool shade. Seats of moss embraced the foot of the tree; the view from here embraced the full extent of the Valley.

  The same stream went on to form another, more extensive, island on which a few chamois were grazing, removed from the wild state at the most tender age, and which habit had submitted to domesticity. The bed of the stream, hollowed out and broadened in that place, had extinguished any idea of liberty in them, and the most attentive cares of their masters had rendered them to amiable servitude.

  Far from having sacrificed the useful to the agreeable, however, the latter had been made to contribute to the increase of the former. The trees and the rocks protected an orchard and a vegetable garden from cold winds, situated in the part of the valley exposed for the longest time to the sun’s rays.

  A sandy path had directed our march, and my two guides and I found ourselves back at the entrance to the park, when I thought we were still at the opposite end. Some distance from the enclosure I looked back and admired it more, on observing that it only occupied one of the less precious parts of the valley. The whole of the bottom of the valley, which received fertilizer from the mountains, was given over to culture, and only awaited a greater number of arms; the mountain-sides were meadows, and the upper slopes were crowned with woods.