This morning, at 10 a.m., the 80 pilots and mechanics at Chamonix, with only a single exception, refused to obey Leduc, who was astonished to see them assembled in front of the hangars instead of separately attending to their assigned tasks. With them were about fifteen female “artists,” ex-models or “bluestockings” in traveling costumes. The leader of the band spoke for them. They had had enough, he said, of “toiling like slaves under the orders of a tyrant,” of “dying of cold in the mountains,” and being fed on “some rubbishy pharmaceutical product” which left their stomachs empty from dawn till dusk. The helicopters belonged to them—they had risked their hides often enough up above—and they were going to use them to find a place where they could “recover from their fatigue and take things easy,” far away from the likes of Romeux and Leduc…and the Martians. Tahiti or Tuamotu would suit them, and would also suit these ladies, who were accompanying them…and the leader gave the order there and then to get under way.
Leduc attempted to stop them, but nothing could be done, either with pleas or the threat of his revolver—which only resulted in his being disarmed by the mutineers. Tied up and helpless, he had to watch his ex-subordinates and their companions embark and take off in the eighteen helicopters of out airfleet, which disappeared over the southern horizon. He wept with rage as he told us the story of this vile desertion.
“The swine have deserted me!” he repeated “Well, it can’t be helped. I’ll do it alone, by God! Yes, I’ll fight the Martians on my own!”
He was exaggerating. He will not be alone, firstly, because he still has one loyal young mechanic—the one who prevented the mutineers from killing him and freed him from his bonds after they had gone—and, secondly, because he has Raymonde and me, who are persistent in our resolve to take part in the adventure. One of the two remaining machine is the one with which we arrived at Amiens, the one that Nibot succeeded in saving and taking to Le Crotoy on the night when I escaped the massacre and the fire. That is the one that Leduc has chosen, in view of the large capacity of its fuel tank. If the shell’s point of descent is situated within a radius of 3000 kilometers, we shall be able to reach it without being obliged to stop and search some town for a fuel-depot spared by fire and looters.
Everything is ready and we have two machine-guns aboard, along with revolvers and blasters, with which we will be able to lend some small assistance to whichever civilized station we are sent to by the Jovian cosmogram we are expecting at any moment.
III. From Mont Blanc to Cairo
July 6. What a grandiose and poignant poetry emanates from the desolation and solitude extending over the country over which we are flying, at top speed, aboard the helicopter that has transported us—Raymond and me—so often before. Nothing that we saw in France, Belgium or England equaled today’s spectacle.
For 18 months the ruins have been, so to speak, brand new. One felt that normal life had only just stopped in those towns where the fires were still burning or bands of looters interrupted their work to threaten us with their weapons. In the rural regions there were the Eternal-Nightists lighting the first altars of their monstrous rites, hordes or battalions on the march; there were cultivators, deaf and blind to unprecedented dangers, lifting their heads as we passed over their ancestral fields, where they were tracing the last furrow of the year-without-harvests; there were carmine vines, still-green meadows where the last domestic herds were grazing; there were fragments of intact nature, autumnal forests with yellowing leaves….
Today, there is the reign of death, and even the vegetal world, exhausted by its struggle against the red darkness, hesitated to extent the green shroud of compassionate nature over the heaped-up ruins. Although it is mid-summer, the trees along the roadsides are leafless, skeletal, as are those of the forests, the majority of which have been burned. Fields invaded by sickly brush, then a farm still standing, then a domestic animal—sometimes, at the sound of our rotor blades, a famished ox staggers to its feet and flees at a stiff gallop across the wild and fence-less countryside, scattered with vague skeletons picked over by flocks of crows and packs of dogs…or perhaps wolves.
But the most poignant thing is the absence of humans. One might think that our race had already disappeared from the Earth! Not once, since our departure from Mont Blanc, not once in ten hours of flight, have we glimpsed a single member of our species who was not reduced to a skeleton, or at least to a cadaver. The plains of Lombardy, once so fertile and so populous, are as deserted as the glaciers of the Alps! A desert!
Turin in ruins, Milan a desert, burned during the great Anarchist uprising, nothing but unrecognizable corpses in the rubble-strewn streets. Florence, where the Dome, spared by a caprice of the fire, still stands amid the ruins of palaces and museums, a desert….
Tuscany, a desert, where the emigration of an entire town seems to have been struck dead at a single blow—10,000 corpses, perhaps, filling the roadway along the banks of the dark waters of Lake Trasimeno, as in Hannibal’s time! All of Italy a desert, beneath the bright rays of the Sun, from the Alps to Rome—where we set down for a few minutes, at Raymonde’s request, in the ancient Forum, whose 2000-year old ruins were still standing, as were those of the Palatine and the Coliseum, in the midst of other ruins that the Torpedo had created two years before. The Martian satanite, which had broken down the stone blocks and stucco of the neighboring buildings, the banks and palazzos of the Corso and the Via Nazionale, the 360 churches of the Eternal City, including St Peter’s, and the Vatican and the Quirinal, had scarcely achieved any further corrosion of the heart and bedrock of Imperial and Republican Rome. The only difference between these sets of ruins was that the more ancient preserved more traces of beauty—but the same backcloth absorbed them all: the backcloth of a past without perspective, that of conclusive death.
“All this will never be revived!” said Raymonde, remembering the desert over which we had traveled. “Humankind will never regain possession of the Earth!”
“It will require several centuries years for man to reclaim possession of his domain,” I said, considering the three columns of a temple—that of Castor and Pollux, I think—surmounted by a fragment of architrave, which stood out, fawn in color, against the dazzling azure of the sky like a melancholy hope.
“Centuries?” jeered Sylvain Leduc, withdrawing the water-filled canvas bucket he had just plunged into a fountain whose edges were ornamented with the remains of sculptures. “Possibly. What does it matter? Evolution has no lack of time. Hold on, through—look over there instead of going into ecstasies over these old stones. There’s someone who has already reinstalled himself in his domain!”
Indeed, at the far end of the Forum, we saw the first survivor of the indescribable disaster. It was the young mechanic whose piercing eyes had discovered him and alerted his master in a low voice. In the shade of an old portico, the unexpected individual was studying us from afar while smoking his Neapolitan pipe—and beside him, on a column, was the baroque inscription Custode del Rovine: custodian of the ruins! Raymonde was the first of us to burst into nervous laughter.
But Leduc had only consented to top in order to find a little fresh water. He cut the interlude short, and we embarked again….
While I am scribbling these notes, we are flying over a mountainous landscape—deserted, of course—in which my memory of classical studies situates the lands of the first peoples conquered by Rome: the Aequians, Sabines, Volsci, Hernici—but I scarcely dare mention their names to Raymonde, installed beside me in one of the rear seats. Leduc, who is at the controls with his faithful lad, greets any poetical, or even slightly elevated, reflection with mocking laughter or vulgar jokes. He has also acquired the habit of swearing roundly at every opportunity, and his company is becoming less and less agreeable. He refuses to make a slight detour, so that we can get a better view of the vicinity of Vesuvius and the Solfatara, which we are leaving behind to starboard, along with Naples, enshrouded in lava, and the gulf into which new promontories
extend. He only permitted me to take five or six photographs with a telephoto lens, which will show us scarcely anything….
We have crossed the Apennines; the twilit waters of the Adriatic are on the horizon. Our pilot will not stop. He wants to keep going all through the night, he says…the night during which the Martian shell will fall, “in the vicinity of Cairo,” at 11:42 p.m. I shall try to sleep for a while, to the monotonous rhythm of our rotor blades, with Raymonde’s head on my arm. Shall I dream of bats again, as on previous nights?
July 7. Yes, I was subject once again to that obsessive nightmare. I saw the crepuscular bats again, flying around me and coming in turn to present their humanoid faces to me, with staring, hypnotic eyes whose gaze penetrated me with a quasi-premonitory fear.
The strangest thing is that Raymonde has had the same dream! But Leduc—who never dreams, he says—mocks our “idiotic” terror and attributes our visions to the fact of being in the helicopter. I’m wary of discussing it with him, because he’s in an atrocious mood this morning. When I expressed my regrets at not having seen Ithaca, Olympia and Cythera, which we had overflown—especially when I raised the subject with my beloved of the previous life we must have lived in the light of antiquity—he began swearing volubly: a string of oaths that left no time to draw breath…and he struck the little mechanic, who was gazing at him with the eyes of a faithful dog, with his fist. I excuse him, for he has had difficulties with the engine and has been awake all night. But, even so, I think he’s a little excessive! There’s no reason for it, although he hasn’t seen the luminous streak of the shell’s fall, as he had hoped….
We’re flying over the sea—the glittering Mediterranean, displayed all around us in an uninterrupted circle. Only Crete broke that uniformity momentarily; we saw its mountains, the highest of which still bore traces of snow, but we only caught a distant glimpse of it, to port. Despite my reminiscences of antiquity, I kept quiet—because I only had to murmur the name of the Minotaur for Leduc to turn round, with a sardonic smile. Fortunately, he kept his joke to himself
The heat is becoming suffocating as the hot Sun turns our cockpit into a greenhouse; we had to open the forward porthole, and that has slowed us down a little, because of the resistance of the airflow, but even our indomitable pilot admitted that the artificial breeze was necessary. Besides, he knew that he had to conserve his engine, which was overheating dangerously. What would we do if a breakdown deposited us on the surface of the sea, in which ships no longer circulate? Far from seeking to reassure us though, friend Sylvain cursed “that damned swine of a mechanic, who was made expressly to annoy him.” He talked to his engine as if to a real person, insulting it, accusing it of “taking sides with the Martians against us” and challenging it: “You wouldn’t have the cheek to fail for good and all here, would you? You’d be going head-first into the drink with the rest of us, with no one to pull you out!”
We’re alarmed by his intensity, and it sometimes seems to us that the engine might take him at his word, when it produces a series of misfires, as if in response to his crazy objurgations.
Finally! The Egyptian coat is in front of us: the Nile Delta... and now the growing silhouettes of palm-trees, terraced houses like white dice among the islets of verdure surrounding the mirror-like flood…to starboard, the indistinct ruins of Alexandria…but it’s not entirely deserted here; the native villages have a few inhabitants, who raise their arms in their large white sleeves towards us…and on the roads, before we reach Cairo, the occasional camel with its driver, or a donkey loaded with baskets of vegetables…and in the distance, behind the city, whose minarets are still standing, on the far side of the Nile, the suburb of Giza and the pylons of the TSF station, where we’ll head first to obtain information as to the shell’s point of descent, of which we’ve seen no sign anywhere…
IV. The Attraction of the Perfume
July, 9 p.m. Here we are at the TSF station in Cairo. I’m writing by the light of a mosque’s night-light, while a strong southerly breeze shakes the mosquito-nets covering the windows and continually brings us strange gusts of intoxicating perfume….
On the other side of the room, even though the apparatus has stopped working, Nazir Bey persists in tapping out a distress signal: SOS…SOS…SOS…three sharp clicks, three slow clicks, three sharp clicks. Raymonde, lying on a divan, is watching him do it. Outside, on the terrace where the irrigation canal laps gently at the feet of the tall palm trees, Leduc has chosen the helicopter’s seats to take a brief nap, in the company of his young mechanic. Furtive footsteps continue to sound along the road, en route to the Pyramids…and the Martian shell.
And I’m writing this, because I’m afraid to go to sleep.
We arrived at 5 p.m., after flying over the city, whose entire northern sector is in ruins but whose southern part retains enough intact houses to lodge between 1000 and 2000 inhabitants. Their oriental fatalism has preserved them from the panic, but not the epidemics and the attacks of Eternal-Nightist hordes from Port Said and beyond the Suez Canal. On the road to the Pyramids, 1500 meters from the suburb of Giza, we found the TSF station, whose white buildings shelter the civilized colony: some 20 intellectuals, the elite of Egypt, took refuge there more than a year ago, and was able to sustain itself there under the direction of Nazir Bey, the head of the TSF station, an ex-student of the Polytechnique.
A solitary servant in a pink turban and a long blue robe appeared on the threshold, parting the mosquito-net made of pearls of multicolored glass, when our helicopter landed on the terrace in the shade of the palm-trees. It astonished us that he was alone, but the heat was still overwhelming; we assumed that the staff-members were still taking their siesta. Leaving the young mechanic to guard the machine, we followed the servant, who jabbered a voluble explanation—in Coptic, I imagine.
In the corridors, several sub-bronzed servants were sleeping on the yellow-and-blue-tiled floor, as if suffocated by the torrid air—and also by the violent and indefinable perfume that we had initially attributed to he flowers of the terrace, but which pursued us into the apartments.
As we entered, Nazir Bey raised a face ravaged by insomnia from the TSF apparatus, whose elements were making their cicada-like stridulations, and looked at us with haggard eyes. Sylvain introduced him to “Léon and Raymond Rudeax, Sylvain Leduc, sent by the station at Mont Blanc to cooperate in the defense of Cairo against the Martian invasion.”
With mechanical politeness, the Egyptian bowed and put his right hand to his heart; then he took his sweat-inundated forehead in both hands and said, in a voice full of anguish: “I beg your pardon, gentlemen; I thought that it was…them. Our aerial squadron took off at 1 a.m. to fight the Martians…yes, the shell arrived last night, as announced…very close to the Pyramids…it was visible at dawn, like an enormous keep…inert, moreover—nothing came out of it…
“All my colleagues were aboard the airfleet…but no one—no one, you understand, gentleman…has come back! They had machine-guns aboard, rapid-firing cannon, explosives…but nothing has been heard; there has been no battle…
“They simply stayed there…all of them! My 18 colleagues, 63 aviators and 25 aircraft!”
“Come on!” cried Leduc, while Raymonde and I sat down on a divan, our legs cut from under us by emotion. “Come on, Monsieur—you can’t expect us to believe that all of them been captured by the Martians, spirited away without a shot being fired, just like that!”
“Monsieur, I dare not tell you all that I suspect, but strange things have been happening in Cairo since the arrival of that shell…”
At that moment, the monotonous crackling of the TSF apparatus ceased abruptly. Nazir Bey spoke a few words of the native language into a telephone receiver, listened to the reply, and resumed: “This time, it’s our dynamo that has jammed. There has already been strange interference, apparently deliberate, which is making the replies from the other stations indecipherable. Have they even received my signals? I’m a positivist, gentlemen,
and I have looked at the previous catastrophes in the cold light of reason, but in the face of what has happened today, I give in: there’s a mystery here.”
“What’s mysterious about a little interference and the breakdown of a dynamo?” Leduc relied, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s the recalcitrance of the material. Every mechanic knows that machines have their preferences, their whims, their eccentricities, just like people…and as for your Pyramid story—it’s too pyramidal!28 Let me get a couple of hours sleep—it’s hellishly oppressive in your country—and I’ll go put one over on your Martian magicians all on my own, and get back all the people you mention, even if they’re holding them prisoner in the shell, like Jonah in the whale!”
But this comic-heroic bragging made no impact; Nazir Bey’s words increased our dull malaise and inexpressible apprehension. “Don’t tempt the unknown, Monsieur—and above all, if you can take my word for it, don’t go to sleep.” He repeated the last sentence: “Don’t go to sleep! That’s dangerous, here.”
These elliptical statements exasperated Leduc. “Ta ta ta! I’ve just spent 33 hours piloting a helicopter. I’m sleepy and I’m too hot—I’ll grant myself a brief siesta in my machine, on the cool terrace—and then, Martians beware! Why should it be dangerous to sleep? I don’t believe in the supernatural, I warn you.”
“Do you believe your own senses?”
“I don’t believe in anything else, damn it…that and my reason!”
“Consult your sense of smell.”
“That perfume, you mean? Well, it’s very strong, and you’ve put it everywhere, but we’re in the land of ground-nuts and patchouli, and I don’t see….”
The Martian Epic Page 23