The Martian Epic

by Octave Joncquel

The winter, as I have said, was unusually mild. The advent of summer made very little difference. The semi-translucent covering imposed on the region—and presumably on the whole of Europe, if not the entire world—smoothed out the seasons by retaining beneath it the calorific radiations of the Sun that penetrated it, thanks to its red tint.24 The parts of the spectrum endowed with the chemical properties indispensable to the growth of vegetation, however—especially the ultra-violet—were blocked. What was for human eyes a simple obscuration was, at least for plants, already an Eternal Night; the earth no longer produced any but stunted shoots with discolored leaves, like those lettuces that are cultivated in caves.

  The grass in the meadows was a creamy yellow color, which seemed red in the light of the eclipse, and the livestock refused to eat it. The fruit trees did not come into flower; the ears of cereals were empty. The peasants, thus far the most obtuse of people in comprehending the full extent of the terrestrial catastrophe, despaired on seeing the bosom of the Earth, which had faithfully nourished humankind for countless generations, dry up.

  No famine in history had ever been advertised by such complete and inexorable signs. It was, in an absolutely literal sense, a year without harvests.

  IX. The Triumph of Eternal Night

  It was on July 12 that I escaped the destruction of Amiens by the Eternal-Nightists. For only the second time in our marriage, I was separated from Raymonde; a slightly sprained ankle had kept her in Saint-Valery while I undertook my tour of aerial guard-duty above Amiens.

  The tedious routine got on my nerves, and must have caused the painter Nibot to regret, more than once, the offer he had made to accompany me. The Eternal-Nightists seemed to me to be prowling in greater than unusual numbers around their fumigenic fires; suspicious airships were moving on the horizon. When I landed, at dusk, I was oppressed by dark presentiments and I almost refused the invitation extended to me on behalf of Madame Blagatzky in favor of an immediate return to Saint-Valery—but “rationality” got the upper hand; I suppressed my feelings and went to the celebrated Theosophist’s house, the former Hôtel Belfort, facing the new Musée de la Gare, to witness “experiments in levitation by the medium Zébia Baradino.” 25

  There were about 20 of us assembled in the large drawing-room, and the lights had just been put out, when the warning sirens sounded lugubriously outside, immediately followed by a fusillade and the detonations of bombs and shells. In the drawing-room itself there was an outburst of laughter and the characteristic ffrrr...ffrrr… sound of a blaster wielded by the false medium, followed by a blinding shock, the thought of my beloved—and then darkness.

  Amid confused voices, my body was manhandled and palpated brutally; there was a sharp pain over my left ear, and I distinctly heard these words: “Don’t bother—leave him, he’s a goner. They’re all done for here—set the hovel on fire and we’ll look further afield!”

  Consciousness returned, and strength, despite the heaviness of my concussed skull. The footsteps faded in the distance; I opened my eyes and saw that I was surrounded by corpses—the guests at the Blagatzky soirée! Flames were growing at the bottom of the curtains…escape?

  Inside the house, the crackling of the fire; outside, the clamor of the horde that was master of the city, pillaging, killing…and Raymonde, my poor beloved!—must not Saint-Valery be suffering a similar fate?

  I got to my feet and staggered across the drawing-room. Smoke was swirling in the stairwell. I went down to the ground floor. Howling mobs were filing through the square on the other side of the door. The smoke was getting thicker; flames gushed out of an antechamber. I went forward, feeling my way, opened one door, then another…a descending stairway…then a vaulted cellar, spacious, vaguely illuminated through a ventilation shaft at the far side. I reached it, climbing up on a block of wood supporting a cask…

  And the spectacle that I beheld made me forget the mortal danger of my situation, imprisoned in that cellar between the fire above my head and the cannibals filling the square.

  Cannibals? Yes! A few meters away, a crowd was swarming around a lighted brazier in the roadway. The shadows of the cellar hid me from them, but I could see them—all too clearly! A man in a red apron leaned over to plunge a knife into the throat of an unfortunate captive laid at his feet, bound and blindfolded. There was a gurgling death-rattle; the jet of blood was received in a beer-tankard by a bare-breasted red-haired woman, who drank first, as the volume of the shouting redoubled:

  “Me, me!”

  “The Martian’s blood!”

  “Again! Another! Let’s all drink!”

  “We’ll live!”

  “Glory to the Eternal Night!”

  And the tumultuous crush hid the disgusting scene from me, while horror caused me to release the bars of the grille and slump back on the cask.

  The successive consumption of burning floorboards unsettled the vault of my cellar and smoke began to seep in. Even so, the masonry held firm and the fire did not last long. All night long I remained there, half-asphyxiated, with my face plastered to the grille, without daring to draw back the simple bolt that retained it, making no attempt to escape. The dismal light of the buildings set on fire by the victors left me in no doubt that such an attempt had no chance of success.

  Every time that a gap appeared in the tempestuous mass of the nearest mobs, I was a furtive witness to some new scene of the abominable bacchanalia celebrated by the triumphant Horde. Four ritual braziers were ablaze in the Place de la Gare. I saw the corpses of prisoners, my unfortunate fellow citizens, sputtering upon them, having first had their throats cut and their blood drained, a hideous beverage. I saw the precious paintings, engravings and manuscripts from the nearby museum go up in flames, while convulsive debaucheries were perpetrated everywhere and the shrill sounds of harmoniums and accordions cut through the incomprehensible hymns bawled with all their might by the dancing and quivering crowd.

  And incessantly, at every new horror glimpsed or overheard, there was the heart-rending obsession of thinking that my beloved might perhaps be meeting the same fate…

  Dawn broke, the reddened light of the new Sun made the flames seem less bright, and the foul features of the Eternal-Nightists, in their verminous rags, with amulets suspended around their necks, seem even more repulsive. The lassitude of the orgy wearied them little by little, and before mid-day they were all asleep in heaps, like animals. Several had their backs to my ventilation shaft, blocking my view, giving off such a stink of sweat and old leather that I had to retire to the depths of the cellar, from which the smoke was, fortunately, beginning to clear.

  My frightful captivity lasted all through that night and the following day. I would not have been able to bear a mental agony so prolonged had not its very excess, perhaps combined with the confined atmosphere, put me into a comatose torpor that deprived me of consciousness. When I came to again, the opening of the ventilation shaft was clear; in the square, an indescribable scene of ruin and carnage, there was no longer a soul to be seen; the Horde had gone on its way.

  Hoisting myself up on the cask, I emerged into the open air and breathed in the odor of burned and roasted flesh avidly, as if it were a salutary breeze. In the distance, towards the center of what had been the city—smoking ruins and charred walls—suspicious sounds revealed the presence of looters. Although I had not so much as a club with which to defend myself, I did not waste time searching for a weapon. As the day died, oppressed by the anxieties that were torturing me, I went along the boulevards, which instinct selected for me as the safest course, and the one least obstructed by the debris of burned-out buildings.

  Like a man in a trance, I headed towards the violet light of the setting Sun. What did Amiens, the last refuge of the Arts, matter to me? As I stepped over corpses, avoided the fall of burning beams, and went around the heaps of rubble strewn across my route, I had only one thought in my mind: to find my beloved! For I did not want…for my entire being refused to believe…that she too….
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br />   Several times I saw marauders hide as I approach; at the corner of the Rue Beauvais another took a step towards me, but refrained from attacking me—and I arrived without hindrance at the Gare Saint-Roch, where I set out along the railway line. There would be less risk of losing my way in the darkness, and I hoped that I would run less risk of dangerous encounters on the way.

  I learned very quickly to step on the sleepers without touching the ballast. My pace became steady, and I went forward quasi-automatically, my eyes fixed on the rails, like a cockerel which sets its beak on a chalk line.

  I had not eaten anything for 24 hours except a single Nutriment pill that I found in my waistcoat pocket; I had no more left because the wretches who had thought me dead had rifled my pockets and stolen my pill-box, along with my watch and everything else, with the exception of a notebook. Hunger tormented me, and I had a frightful taste on ink in my mouth, but I did not want to stop at some well and search for food. Besides, my empty stomach was not without its advantages; it caused a slight fever to run through my veins, and my anguish was sometimes eclipsed by the scenes unfolding in my imagination.

  What if the colony at Saint-Valery, menaced by the Horde, had embarked on the aircraft at Le Crotoy? What if Leduc, seeing Amiens destroyed, had given up the idea of landing there and profited from the opportunity to emigrate with the survivors—saving my beloved first!—and transport them to the inviolable summit of Mont Blanc? I would find Saint-Valery in ruins, Le Crotoy evacuated; I would have to go after them on foot, and alone!

  And I imagined the vicissitudes of my journey to come; I heard its story, as if someone were telling it to me: a narrative voice speaking in the intimacy of my cranium as if commenting on a cinematographic film. In truth, I was no longer there! I was witness to my imaginary adventures; I listened, and was amused by my cruel uncertainties, for there was no mention of Raymonde.

  A hopeless enterprise! 700 or 800 kilometers to cover, alone, across a country more dangerous than the jungles of Borneo: France surrendered to the Hordes; France returned to Paleolithic barbarism. The necessity of avoiding the approach of my “peers” as if they were wild beasts. I saw, as if taking dictation, silhouetted against my memories of being an aviator, cities ravaged and deserted, cities destroyed, where solitary looters fought against dogs, cats and pigs nourished on corpses, which had become redoubtable in consequence. I made a long detour to the south of the Parisian conurbation, the lair of bandits who fell upon the cities sacked by the Eternal-Nightists. I traveled by night, fearful of the jet of some helicopter-pirate’s blaster, hiding in the bushes by day to sleep…

  And the chapters of the novel extended endlessly while I followed the rails in the ruddy darkness, striding somnambulistically over each successive sleeper, putting one foot in front of another, from one sleeper to the next.

  ….I tack between the Hordes, revealed by their stink, fearful of being discovered, alone, always alone, surrounded by their execrable fires and the pillars of purple smoke sustaining the dome of Eternal Night. By chance, I discover a blaster abandoned on a battlefield—without ammunition, alas! The weapon is no more use to me than a hazel twig. No matter: I put it under my arm; one never knows…

  Hold on! The Wandering Jew! The first human encounter in the hallucinatory world of my tireless nocturnal marches. The Wandering Jew accosts me, but I recognize him despite his long beard and dirty overcoat with grotesquely-bulging pockets: oh yes, it’s Isaac Schlemihl, now a tramp, damn it! And who, instead the legendary five sous, takes a large piece of radium from his pocket. He makes me a gift of it—to me, “his pretty rara”—because I’m an old acquaintance, and he winks at me, and explains with a sly expression that he “does business” with the Hordes, who have run out. For a gram of it, “Their Excellencies the Chiefs will give…ah! ah! ah! They sometimes have very pretty daughters, those Gentlemen of the Hordes!”

  ...The Wandering Jew has left me. Thanks to my weapon, I introduce myself into a Horde, more savage and degenerate than all the rest. They have lances and javelins with flint tips, and my blaster soon wins me a prestige equal to that of their leader. At close range, I see their customs, their superstitions, their amulets, which reduce the to the level of Papuans; they do not even know any longer how to divide time, save into “day” and “night,” and they are beginning to tattoo themselves in red and blue with the ripolin 26 they have discovered. But they are docile to my advice, and I dream of regenerating and re-civilizing them, and building a new society with them. The leader’s wife, veiled like a muslim, is especially taken with me. She pursues me with dangerous assiduity…

  The wandering Horde eventually arrives on the shore of the Mediterranean. One night—one radiant night, starry as of old—the leader’s wife unveils herself to me alone, on a terrace of rock. I have foreseen this moment; I have been waiting for it: She has Raymonde’s features…oh no! She is Raymonde, abducted by the Horde and forced to become…O horror!

  And I cut the reel of film, to find myself moving once again along the rails, distinct in the red-tinted darkness. The Moon, in its last quarter, had risen. A dog was barking in the distance…

  An immeasurable hatred swelled up within me, against the Hordes: a hatred as ferocious as their cannibal rages. I bitterly regretted that, in Amiens, we had rejected the proposals of Leduc, who wanted to exterminate them. I plunged with all my heart into the desire for massacre; I invoked the images of the Eternal-Nightists that I had observed, in order to kill them in a thousand various ways, with atrocious refinements of torture, one by one or in hundreds, or thousands, and to line up their bloody corpses side by side, kilometer after kilometer, their heads and feet crushed with iron bars.

  I saw them, those iron rails and those bloody cadavers; I trampled them underfoot, one after another…

  No! The railway sleepers, visible at this hour in the gathering daylight…

  My murderous delirium frightened me, and I was also fearful of my solitude, a panicky and puerile fear; and I was afraid of the light—that sinister purple light, to which we had grown increasingly accustomed, in the city, but which appeared to me now, for the first time, in its monstrous character…alone on that abandoned railway, alone in a world surrendered to bestialized Hordes, alone in that ravaged landscape, invaded by the vegetation of the Eternal Night, that vegetation which I knew to be white but saw red, that stunted and deformed flora disturbing my botanical consciousness, hideously appropriate to the new planet on which I was wandering alone, in quest of my lost beloved, beneath the red Eternal Night!

  I sensed that it was necessary for me to eat and rest, if I did not want to lose my reason entirely. After searching for a while I discovered an old field of sugar-beets. I dug one up, scarcely larger than my thumb, and chewed it slowly; it revived me somewhat, in spite of the rebellion of my stomach, accustomed to the Nutriment.

  Then I lay down beneath the disturbing red-and-black foliage of a little wood of fir-trees, and drifted off into an incomplete slumber, as if in the grip of a long nightmare, with the illusion of marching and marching forever, without ever arriving…

  When I awoke, bathed my feet at the edge of a marshy pool and got under way again, the nightmare continued. I congratulated myself, in the midst of my distress, on having chosen that railway, so little frequented, instead of the road. Only twice was I obliged to hide to avoid encountering solitary pedestrians. On the road, I would inevitably have been taken by surprise by one or other of the suspect gangs whose footsteps and loud voices I had heard, for it would have been impossible for me to run for three strides.

  I dragged myself onwards. To avoid a detour of a few 100 meters, and even though the twilight was still clear, I took the risk of going through the station at Abbeville. It was deserted, fortunately, as were the buildings into which I glanced as I passed by, and where I saw two naked corpses. I was so exhausted that it took me all night—seven hours, at that season—to cover the last ten kilometers: an interminable Calvary! Without the helicopter, I f
irmly believe that I would not have reached Le Crotoy.

  Yes, Le Crotoy: for the truth that I suspected, which seemed to me indubitable, was confirmed a little further on than Port-le-Grand station, in the first faint light of dawn. In the distance, beyond the bare, flat fields, were the light of fires and columns of purple smoke. The Eternal-Nightists were celebrating their execrable triumph in the ruins of Saint-Valery! On the other side of the bay, however, high in the air, two helicopters were mounting guard over the Air Force camp. My beloved had to be there. With all my failing strength, I clung to that hope: the “Herons of the Somme”—Leduc’s squadron—had had the time to save the villagers—or, at least, my Raymonde!

  What an anguish devoured me, though, despite that certainty!

  The daylight broadened. I approached Noyelles—how wretchedly slowly! Twice already a white helicopter had passed overhead without seeing me. I was in despair. I wanted to lie down on the side of the railway and wait for death.

  Finally—finally!—my shirt, which I had taken off to wave, by way of a signal, attracted the attention of a third pilot. Ecstatically, I saw the helicopter pause, hover and descend towards me…and it was the painter Nibot who opened the cockpit door and helped me up into the rear seat, saying: “Well, Rudeaux, you have all the luck! Everyone thought you’d died with the others at Blagatzky’s! Only your wife insisted on waiting for you. Even so, the exodus to Mont Blanc is decided. A few hours more, my poor friend…”

  Faint with emotion, I went into the hangar where the escapees from Saint-Valery were still asleep on improvised couchettes. The red daylight came in from the vast bay, along with the morning breeze. She was lying there, her head on an outstretched arm…

  She sensed my presence. She opened her lovely eyes, swollen with tears, and sat up to welcome me as I feel to my knees beside her, breathless.

  “Oh, my love!” she murmured, hugging me. “I knew that you’d come back!”