Impressions of Africa (French Literature Series)

by Roussel, Raymond

  The moment the accident occurred, Talou, as if to prevent any interruption in the proceedings, had discretely given orders to Rao.

  An immense choir suddenly rang out, composed of deep, vibrant male voices that buried poor Olga’s distant wails.

  At this sound, everyone turned toward the west side of the square, in front of which the black warriors, squatting near the weapons they’d laid on the ground, all sang the “Jeroukka,” a kind of proud epic written by the emperor, who had taken as subject the detailed narrative of his own exploits.

  The melody, with its bizarre rhythm and tone, was based on a single, fairly brief theme, repeated ad infinitum with new words each time.

  The singers chanted each couplet, clapping their hands in unison as if they were a single man, and this glorious lament, executed with a certain opulence and character, produced a rather grandiose impression.

  Nonetheless, the constant repetition of the single, eternally unvaried musical phrase gradually gave rise to an intense monotony, accentuated by the inevitable opportunities for prolongation offered by the “Jeroukka,” a faithful and exhaustive record of the life of the emperor, whose notable deeds were many.

  Completely inaccessible to European ears, the Ponukelean epic unfolded in garbled stanzas, no doubt relating many capital events, and night gradually fell without any indication that the tedious drone might be nearing an end.

  Suddenly, just as we were despairing of ever reaching the final verse, the choir stopped short and was replaced by a lovely soprano—a marvelous, penetrating voice that echoed purely in the already opaque twilight.

  All eyes, seeking the spot from which this new performance originated, lit on Carmichael, who, standing at left before the front row of the chorus, thus completed the “Jeroukka” by phrasing solo, without changing a note of the musical motif, a supplemental canto devoted to the “Battle of the Tez.”

  His remarkable head-voice, which flawlessly reproduced a female pitch, soared delightfully in the limitless acoustics of the open air, apparently unimpeded by the difficult pronunciation of the incomprehensible sounds composing the song.

  But after several moments, Carmichael, initially so self-assured, faltered in his recital, his memory refusing to recall one word in the series of unintelligible syllables that he’d conscientiously learned by heart.

  From a distance, Talou loudly whispered the fragment forgotten by the young Marseillais, who, picking up the narrative thread, continued without further hesitation to the end of the final couplet.

  Immediately the emperor uttered several words to Sirdah, who, translating into excellent French the sentence her father had dictated, was forced to inflict three hours’ detention on Carmichael as punishment for his slight lapse.

  VI

  THE BLACK WARRIORS, standing en masse, had just picked up their weapons.

  Reassembled under Rao’s direction, the original cortege, augmented by our group and most of the Incomparables, began filing quickly southward.

  The southern part of Ejur was crossed at a brisk pace, and soon the plain appeared, bounded at left by the great trees of the Behuliphruen, a magnificent garden full of phenomenal unknown species.

  Abruptly, Rao halted the immense column, having reached a great stretch of land whose very dimensions made it propitious for certain long-distance phonetic experiments.

  Stéphane Alcott, husky and barrel-chested, stepped from the ranks with his six sons, young men aged fifteen to twenty-five, whose fabulous leanness showed starkly through their simple, skin-tight red leotards.

  Their father, dressed like them, took a stance at a given point, his back to the setting sun; then, carefully making a half-quarter turn to the right, he stopped sharply, adopting the rigidity of a statue.

  Starting at the exact point occupied by Stéphane, the eldest of the six brothers walked obliquely toward the Behuliphruen, scrupulously following the path forged by his father’s line of sight and counting aloud along with his long, slow strides, making sure to give each a rigorously invariable length. He stopped at number one hundred seventeen and, turning around to face west, followed the paternal example by striking a studied pose. His youngest brother, who had accompanied him, made a similar trek toward the southwest and, after seventy-two mechanically identical steps, froze like a mannequin, his chest toward the sunrise. One by one, the four youngest performed the same movement, each time taking as departure point the conventional goal reached by the last measurer and bringing to the execution of this brief, marvelously regulated walk the mathematical precision normally reserved for geodesic surveys.

  When the youngest was in place, the seven performers, placed at uneven distances, turned out to be staggered along a strange crooked line, each of its five whimsical angles formed by their two joined heels.

  The seeming incoherence of the figure was intentional, due to the strict number of regular strides, the six respective totals of which varied between a minimum of seventy-two and a maximum of one hundred forty-nine.

  Once standing in place, each of the six brothers, violently sucking in his chest and stomach with a painful muscular contraction, formed the boundaries of a wide, deep space, which the addition of his arms, rounded in a circle like supplementary edges, rendered deeper still. The leotards, thanks to a special coating, adhered tightly to every inch of the wearer’s epidermis.

  Cupping his hands in a megaphone, their father, in a deep and resonant timbre, shouted his own name toward the oldest.

  Immediately, at irregular intervals, the four syllables Sté-phane Al-cott were repeated successively at the six points of the enormous zigzag, without the others’ lips having moved in the slightest.

  It was the family patriarch’s actual voice that had just echoed off the thoracic antrum of the six young men, who, owing to their extraordinary thinness, scrupulously maintained by a draconian diet, offered the sound waves a sufficiently rigid and bony surface to deflect its every vibration.

  This first attempt did not satisfy the performers, who modified ever so slightly their positions and postures.

  The fine-tuning lasted several minutes, during which Stéphane often bellowed his name, monitoring the results. These were increasingly perfected by his sons, who sometimes shifted their feet a mere centimeter in a given direction, sometimes leaned slightly to better facilitate the rapid passage of sound.

  The ensemble looked like some imaginary, difficultly tuned instrument whose proper adjustment required meticulous and patient care.

  Finally, the last attempt having seemed correct, Stéphane, with a brief word that echoed six times in spite of him, ordered the emaciated sentinels to hold absolutely still.

  At that point, the real performance began.

  Stéphane, at the top of his voice, pronounced a wide variety of proper names, interjections, and everyday words, infinitely varying their register and intonation. And each time the sound, ricocheting from chest to chest, was reproduced with crystalline purity, hearty and strong at first, then gradually fading down to a final mumble no louder than a murmur.

  No echo in forest, cave, or cathedral could have rivaled this artificial combination, which produced a true miracle of acoustics.

  Obtained by the Alcott family at the cost of long months of study and trials, the geometric layout of the crooked line owed its artful irregularities to the particular form of each chest, whose anatomical structure offered a resonant power of greater or lesser range.

  Several audience members, having approached each vibrating sentry, could verify the absence of trickery. The six mouths remained hermetically shut, the initial utterance alone causing the multiple repetitions.

  Wishing to give the experiment the greatest possible breadth, Stéphane rapidly emitted short sentences, slavishly reiterated by the sextuple echo; certain iambic pentameters, recited one after the other, were perceived clearly without overlapping or muddle. Various bursts of laughter, deep for “ho,” sharp for “ha,” and shrill for “hee,” created a sensation by
evoking a lighthearted, mocking crowd. Cries of pain or alarm, sobs, pathetic exclamations, resounding coughs, and comic sneezes were registered one by one with the same perfection.

  Moving from spoken word to song, Stéphane emitted strong baritone notes, which echoed beautifully at the different bends in the line and were followed by vocal exercises, trills, parts of tunes, and snatches of lively popular refrains.

  As a finale, the soloist, taking a deep breath, continuously scaled a perfect chord in both directions, using the full breadth of his voice and giving the illusion of an impeccably attuned choir, thanks to the ample and lasting polyphony produced by all the echoes blending together.

  Suddenly, deprived of the musical source that Stéphane, out of breath, had just cut short by falling silent, the false voices faded one by one, and the six brothers, resuming their natural pose with visible relief, could stretch voluptuously while heaving great sighs.

  The parade, rapidly reassembled, headed south once more.

  After a short, easy walk in the gathering darkness, the head of the line came to the edge of the Tez, a great, tranquil river whose right bank was soon crowded by the deployment of the column.

  A dugout canoe carrying native oarsmen received onboard Talou and Sirdah, who were ferried over to the opposite shore.

  Then, silently emerging from a bamboo hut, the black sorcerer Bashkou, an ivory goblet in hand, approached the blind girl, whom he guided by the shoulders toward the ocean.

  Soon both entered the riverbed, progressively sinking as they moved away from shore.

  After a few steps, immersed to his chest, Bashkou stopped, holding aloft in his left hand the goblet half full of a whitish liquid, while near him Sirdah disappeared almost completely into the dark, babbling waters.

  With two fingers dipped in the milky balm, the sorcerer gently rubbed the girl’s eyes, then patiently waited for the remedy to take effect; when enough time had elapsed he applied a thumb to each eyeball and with firm swipes cleanly detached the two blotches, which fell into the currents and were carried away to sea.

  Sirdah emitted a cry of joy, proving the operation’s complete success, which had indeed just given her back her sight.

  Her father answered with a delirious shout, followed by an enthusiastic clamor from the entire crowd.

  Rushing back to solid ground, the overjoyed child threw herself into the emperor’s arms, while he held her in a long embrace of touching emotion.

  Both again took their places in the dugout, which, crossing the river, let them off on the right bank, while Bashkou returned inside his hut.

  Sirdah’s skin retained the precious moisture from the sacred waters of the river that had witnessed her cure.

  Guided by Rao, the column climbed back up the bank over a stretch of a hundred yards and stopped before a huge device that, set amid four posts, hovered above the water like the arch of a bridge.

  Night had deepened little by little and, on the shore, an acetylene beacon affixed to the top of a stake lit up, by means of a powerful and carefully positioned reflector, every detail of the astounding machine toward which everyone’s eyes now turned.

  The contraption, made entirely of metal, immediately suggested a weaving loom.

  In the middle, parallel to the river currents, stretched a horizontal warp composed of innumerable light blue threads, so remarkably fine that, placed side by side in a single thickness, they occupied a width of only six feet.

  Several heddles, vertical strings each fitted with an eyelet, formed successive planes perpendicular to the warp, through which they crossed. Before them hung a batten, a kind of huge metal comb whose imperceptible and innumerable teeth smoothed the warp as if it were hair.

  To the right along the edge of the warp, a large panel about three feet square was composed of numerous pigeonholes separated by wafer-thin partitions; each of these compartments housed a small fly-shuttle whose quill, a narrow bobbin attached at front and back, carried a supply of silk thread in a single color. The filaments inside the shuttles, numbering perhaps a thousand, represented every conceivable shade and variation of the seven colors of the prism. The threads, more or less unspooled depending on their position, converged at the first corner to the right of the warp, forming a strange and wonderfully multicolored network.

  Underneath, almost at water level, many paddles of all sizes, arranged in a full square like a squadron, filled the entire base of the apparatus, supported on one side by the riverbank and on the other by two pilings sunk into its bed. Each paddle, suspended between two narrow rods, helped power a driving belt wrapped around an unoccupied portion of the thin hub to the left, its two parallel ribbons rising vertically.

  Between the hydraulic paddles and the warp stretched a kind of long chest, no doubt containing the mysterious mechanism that drove the whole contraption.

  The four posts supported at the top a thick rectangular ceiling from which hung the heddles and the battens.

  Paddles, chest, ceiling, panel, shuttles, posts, and the ancillary parts—all, without exception, were made of fine steel of light gray hue.

  After placing Sirdah in the front row so she could watch the automatic creation of a certain coat he wished to bestow on her, the inventor Bedu, the hero of the moment, pressed a switch on the chest to activate the precious machine born of his industrious perseverance.

  Immediately various paddles plunged halfway into the river, exposing their blades to the powerful currents.

  Invisibly moved by the driving belts, the upper portions of which disappeared into the shadows of the chest, the box of shuttles slid horizontally in the axis of the current. Despite their displacement, the countless threads attached to the corner of the warp remained taut, thanks to a system of retrograde tension with which all the shuttles were furnished; left to itself, each spit, or pin supporting the quill, turned in the direction opposite the unwinding, owing to a spring that offered a very slight resistance to the extraction of the silk. Some threads automatically contracted while others stretched; the weave preserved its original purity, becoming neither limp nor tangled.

  The shuttle-box was held in place by a thick vertical shaft that, after a sharp bend, horizontally penetrated the chest; at that point, a long slot that couldn’t be seen from the shore evidently permitted the silent horizontal adjustments that had begun only moments before.

  Soon the shuttle-box stopped to change height. The vertical portion of the shaft extended slightly, revealing a system of collapsible sections like those of a telescope; a powerful corkscrew spring, triggered by the interaction of an inner rope and pulley, was the sole cause of this subtle ascent, which soon ended.

  The movement of the shuttle-box had coincided with a slight shift in the heddles, certain strings of which had lowered while others rose. The work continued out of sight in the heights of the ceiling: only narrow slits were needed to allow passage of the immense fringes pulled earthward by a legion of thin lead weights, which reached nearly down to the chest. Each silken thread of the warp, individually crossing the eyelets of one of the heddle strings, was accordingly raised or lowered by a few centimeters.

  Suddenly, quick as a flash, a shuttle launched by a spring in the shuttle-box passed through the open shed of the warp, flying across the entire width of silk threads to smack against a single compartment fixed at a predetermined and calculated spot. Unspooled from its fragile casing, a shoot, or weft thread, now stretched transversally across the warp and formed the beginning of the weave.

  The batten, lowered by a movable shaft in one of the slots in the chest, struck against the shoot with its countless teeth, then immediately resumed its upright position.

  The heddle strings, adjusting once more, provoked a complete change in the arrangement of the silks, which, moving swiftly back and forth, made a significant shift up or down.

  Propelled by a spring in the left-hand compartment, the shuttle sped across the warp in the opposite direction and returned to its pigeonhole; a second shoot,
unspooled from its bobbin, received a sharp chop from the batten.

  While the heddles pursued this curious back-and-forth motion, the shuttle-box, keeping to a single plane, used its two means of displacement simultaneously to move on a diagonal; aimed at a predetermined spot, a second pigeonhole used a brief pause to expel a shuttle that, flying like a projectile into the collective corner of the silks, lodged itself in a compartment on the opposite side.

  A blow from the batten onto the new shoot was followed by an ample movement of the heddles, which prepared the return path for the shuttle as it shot rapidly back to its socket.

  The process continued, following an invariable path. Thanks to its marvelous mobility, the shuttle-box positioned shuttle after shuttle opposite the fixed compartments, their two-way voyage coinciding perfectly with the work of the batten and heddles.

  Gradually the warp increased on one side, pulled by the slow rotation of the warp beam, a large transversal cylinder to which all the threads were attached. The weaving happened quickly, and soon a rich textile started appearing before our eyes, in the form of a thin, even band with finely gradated tonalities.

  Down below, the paddles kept everything moving with their complex and precise operation—some remaining almost constantly immersed while others dipped for only a few moments in the current; the smallest paddles, for their part, merely brushed the waves with their blades for a second before rising again, only to lower in the same fleeting way after a short pause. Their number, the staggering of the various sizes, the disparity or simultaneity of the brief or lengthy dips, provided an infinite number of combinations, allowing for the creation of the boldest motifs. It was like some mute instrument plucking chords or arpeggios, sometimes slight and sometimes phenomenally lush, their rhythm and harmony constantly renewed. The driving belts, owing to their supple elasticity, lent themselves to these constant alternations between expansion and contraction. The entire apparatus, a wonder of design and lubrication, operated in silent perfection, suggesting a flawless mechanical marvel.