“It’s not a perfume—or, at least, not a natural perfume,” Nazir Bey pronounced, with a gravity that sent a frisson through our entire bodies, and imposed itself momentarily on Leduc. “It’s…something else…and it’s coming from the direction of he Pyramids. But that’s not all. Look out of the window.”
We obeyed, mechanically. Alongside the terrace, in the darkness, with a slight sound of sandals on the sand, furtive shadows were moving, one by one—and I saw, with an inexpressible fear, that these mysterious passers-by were waving the large sleeves of their dark robes in the air…and I recognized, by the light of the stars, the “bats” of my dreams. Raymonde released a stifled cry—she had recognized them too!
Nazir Bey took advantage of our fearful silence: “And do you know where they’re going? They began to set out last night, when the south wind brought the first gusts of the…perfume…from the Pyramids. They’re going to meet that effluvium; they’re attracted by it, like a mesmerist’s subject—literally, gentleman—because…they’re asleep! They’re asleep, Monsieur Leduc. Do you finally understand that you mustn’t go to sleep!”
But the intrepid aviator had recovered his self-possession.
“It’s one thing for natives to let themselves get wrapped up in these mystifications. Personally, I won’t be going anywhere. Enough fairy tales. I’m sleepy. I’m going to sleep—and at midnight, I’ll pay a visit to these conjurers from Mars. Goodnight, everyone.”
And we are now alone. Nazir Bey, his attitude profoundly serious, is tapping his SOS…SOS…which no longer go any further than his manipulator. Raymonde, lying next to me on a divan, is following his gestures without seeing them. The servant is sitting on the tiles with his back against the door. And the mosque’s night-light is quivering in the gusts of the ardent southerly wind that brings us the Perfume, ever stronger, whose suspect origin does not make it any less delightful, as we grow increasingly accustomed to it.
Any other perfume would already have sickened us by its persistence. This one varies from minute to minute, incessantly renewing itself, as if all the sweet odors of the Earth were included within it. It reminds me of the perfume-markets of Tunis and Qayrawan; all kinds of flowers extend their essences there: carnations, lilies, jasmine, roses, and so many others whose names I have forgotten but which my sense of smell recognizes of its own accord, and which I savor with delight, one by one, like voices that fuse and harmonize with one another—and sometimes there is a prodigious chorus, a triumphant symphony that will surely guide us to the embalmed gardens, to the marvelous oases from which this perfume emanates…or rather to…
Has Nazir Bey not said to us, in fact, that what they are attributable to is “not natural?” What does that mean? I remember reading somewhere that not all perfumes are necessarily material, and that the subtlest of all simply correspond to vibrations of the Ether at a particular rhythm. Suppose that the Martians know how to amplify these vibrations? But to what end? It’s absurd!
10 p.m. I admit it, now; I’m afraid too. As Nazir Bey says, there’s mystery in the air. That incessant procession along the road, of furtive footsteps and shadows agitating bats’ wings….
And Leduc, Sylvain Leduc himself, has just abandoned us!
Five minutes ago, the soft and refreshing sound of the irrigation canal bathing the feet of the palm trees on the terrace sudden seemed to increase, to grow immeasurably…to become the purr of the helicopter where Leduc was asleep, and which took to the air without any warning! And I arrived at the door to see it rising up into the air, vertically at first, and then depart, in its turn, towards the south, towards the Pyramids—towards the Perfume!
What will happen now? Nazir Bey has interrupted his vain endeavor; he has a strange smile on his lips…he goes to the doorway, calls out to the servant, who has disappeared: “Ahmed!” His voice echoes bizarrely in the warm night. He hesitates, then goes out on to the terrace, where I catch glimpses of his white form going back and forth in the blue shadows, beneath the stars, which he seems to be invoking with his upraised arms….
He’s going! I can hear his light footsteps descending the stairs…passing beneath the window…and drawing away, in the direction of the Pyramids!
We’re alone now, Raymonde and I, beneath the night-light of the mosque, which quivers in the gusts of the southerly breeze, charged with the perfumes of the warm and ineffable Night….
V. Between the Sphinx’s Paws
What have we done? By what fatal attraction have Raymonde and I been led here? Even though, after Sylvain Leduc’s escape and the departure of Nazir Bey, I swore that I would prevent us, at any price, from falling asleep tonight!
We have not slept, though!
Why, then are we here, refugees in this abandoned bar which bears the name: Sphinx View, while the all-devouring sunlight blazes all around us, on the desert sands, the Sphinx, the Pyramids and the formidable Keep of the Martian Cylinder.
I can still see us, as if in a dream, beneath the quivering lamp of the mosque, ready to go out and leave us defenseless against the mysteries of the Night, which the all-powerful Perfume was charging with a languorous intoxication of desires and irretrievable nostalgias….
Raymonde had made me a necklace of her arms, and, hanging around my neck, was reciting poems full of vast regrets, drifting in the heavenly radiance of a vanished past, like the enchanted golden clouds of a long summer sunset, on the shore of a phosphorescent sea, solitary and hopeless…
Illumination and seraphic music alternated with the supreme majesty of the infinite sadness of a farewell without return…the kiss of an eternal separation united our lips…
And the Perfume overwhelmed us—the Perfume of the glorious oases, where our new love was alive, rocked by the palm-trees, to the song of cool rose-water trickling into shallow bowls, served by handsome slaves pouring us nectar from crystal flagons beneath a tent from the Arabian Nights…
The perfume guided us along the route, and the irresistible appeals of the denser gusts are resonating in our souls. The palms-fringed pathway opened into the blue and starry Night: the ineffable Night, warm and perfumed…in the distance, on the horizon, were the Pyramids.
Shadows went past us without seeing us. We were no longer of this world. We went on under a charm, towards a greater charm. I thought of Dante and Beatrice. Raymonde was suffocating with benevolent ecstasy. She waved her arms slowly, tilting her head back, with her face raised towards the sky.
“It’s paradise,” she murmured.
Her words did not surprise me, but her voice! Her voice was entirely new, as tremulous as that of a little girl….
The starlight was very bright; I would have been able to read…I could see her face…and yet I no longer recognized her…and she appeared to be unable to see or hear me.
But we were not asleep! I swear that we were not asleep!
And it is because we were not asleep, and because we were walking so slowly, that we have been saved!
For the Sun rose as we arrived at the Sphinx—and the sight of its mutilated face stopped me abruptly, like a warning of some approaching danger, the threat of imminent death.
In front of us, the somnambulistic pilgrims went on towards the Pyramids, rose-tinted by the dawn…and towards the shining Keep, from whose heights the Martian Magi were drawing them with their incantations.
Cloaked in red—or were those actually true wings?—their luminous horns evoking the idea of Satans, they were performing the ritual gestures from which the perfumed waves were born. They were flying down to the ecstasized pilgrims and bearing them away, clutching them tightly—still bats!—to the platform of the Keep. Nearby, the grounded helicopters sat idle….
But in the purple and gold dawn, the silent flock of Magi went to stand on the tallest of the Pyramids, and their salute to the rising Sun rose into the air like a fanfare of perfumes…
By means of a heroic effort, however, I had vanquished the paralyzing torpor, and I dragged Raymonde into the int
erior of this little abandoned bar, whose door was wide open…and it was through the window that I watched the Magi regain return to their Keep and shut themselves inside it—for they seem to dread the bright light of day…
The Desert is empty, at this hour; the lonely Pyramids are standing up against the blue sky, vibrant with heat…the Perfume has weakened…the sleepwalking pilgrims no longer pass by…
But we must not go to sleep!
To keep us awake, Raymonde is playing strange improvisations on the bar’s piano, and I am writing this…and the Sphinx, with its mutilated face, is watching us through the window…
Glory to us! Glory to Thee, Our Father the Sun, which I come to approach once again!
Glory to our victory!
Despite of the enemies of our holy race—the degenerate occupants of that vast abode which is known here as Jupiter—despite the impious fire that they have drawn from Thine rays, O Sun, to bring the End-of-the-World to our beloved Fatherland,
We have transmigrated by way of the Etheric fields, and reached our promised Eden, which those other presumptuous demons, Humans, call their Earth!
Humans! We shall be among them henceforth, O my brother Martians, more numerous and powerful than ever! Better than our messengers of death, the genius of our Magi will make them bow down before us in thousands, and deliver their bodies to our souls!
O perfume of Eden! O joy! I breathe you in, sacred Sign of Rebirth, which my soul had tasted three times over since its first awakening from nothingness—to Thy pure light, Sun!—up there, beneath the marvelous Arch of Saturn!
Then an avatar on white Venus—another on wild Mercury—and delivered, Sun, from the travails of life, I shall drink the Flame forever in Thy eternal bosom!
Our Father Sun!
So shall it be!
Was it me who wrote that? What is this unknown and monstrous prayer? What is this awkward and hesitant handwriting, as if I had learned to write all over again, with a strange hand?
Have we been asleep? No. She is still playing the piano. And me? Could I have dozed momentarily? I would not have allowed myself to be…invaded…by this Presence that lays siege to me…by this soul that is trying to supplant me in my own body…which will profit from my sleep by displacing me conclusively from my body, of which it has already made use to write that prayer…
Ah! That Martian prayer!
I understand! I understand! It’s as if I have experienced a Revelation…as if a Spirit has informed me of these things…
Yes, indeed! It is the Other that knows, the other soul that has just profited from my inattention, my temporary drowsiness, to visit my brain, which it covets…and within my brain, that visitation of the Martian soul has left traces…
I understand! I understand!
The Bat-Magi, the Satan-Magi, have come to Earth to aid in the reincarnation of Martian souls, to introduce them by means of their perfumes into human bodies and secure them in place by their incantations, after having expelled the human souls!
For the Earth is the Martian paradise, the place necessary to Martian souls after death; it is on our planet that these souls are ordinarily reincarnated in the bodies of new-born babes, which become in consequence violent and bellicose individuals, criminals and warriors…and because the population of Mars is four or five times less than that of the Earth, these errant souls find themselves rapidly reincarnated, and the ex-Martians are a minority among human beings….
But the cremation of their planet by the Thunderbolt from Jupiter has liberated millions of Martian souls at a single stroke! They have arrived on Earth, their paradise, hoping to begin the new existence that will eventually permit them to pass on to Venus, then Mercury—necessary stages of the transmigration that is destined to end in he supreme beatitudes of the central star: the Sun!
Now, there being few or no births among the few tens of thousands of surviving humans, adult bodies, already provided with souls, can be forcibly taken by other souls, in exceptional circumstances.
The Martians knew that. They knew that the Thunderbolt would destroy their planet. They sent their Magi to Earth as quartermasters of souls—the Magi whose perfumes create exactly that exceptional state in which a human body is susceptible to receive a new soul…
Where and how is the exchange of souls effected? What becomes of the souls dispossessed of their bodies? Is the perfume designed to serve the Martian souls as an atmosphere or a vehicle? Does it require the presence of a large number of those souls? What is its exact role? Would the possession by the new soul be temporary without the intervention of the Magi? How does the new soul learn to make use of an adult body that has never been its own? So many questions, which I might perhaps be able to answer…if I were more familiar with Spiritualist and Theosophical doctrines, to which I was wrong to pay too little attention…or if I allowed myself to be invaded again by the Other, by Martian soul that has chosen my body as its terrestrial residence…
I sense it, invisible, prowling around me; I can feel its fluid feelers brushing my coveted brain, whose activity it is studying, in order to learn how to use it…
If I fall sleep, if dreams distract my soul for a single instant, the Other will take possession of my vacant body! It has already done so once, a little while ago, when it used my hand to write its sacrilegious prayer; but it did not know, thanks to its inexperience of my bodily functions, how to retain its hold against the return of my soul. Will I be as fortunate another time? Will it not grow bolder, fortifying the place where it has already left an imprint?
What’s this? Raymonde is repeating the same few notes indefinitely, having already played them three, four, ten times over…
She was asleep! She was playing mechanically! Her fingers were continuing to play of their own accord, reflexively, but she was asleep! And the Martian soul that coveted her has taken advantage of the moment…
She is possessed! It’s over. The nameless misfortune, the monstrous adventure, has arrived…it’s my fault, damn it! And there she is, extended on a divan in front of me, asleep, asleep without my being able to awaken her, with a face that I no longer recognize—with the reflection in her features of the Martian soul that possessed her: a fixed and haggard smile—a smile of madness, I would say, if I did not know the abominable truth!
It’s my fault! Because we did not flee this accursed place at daybreak. Because I could not overcome the mysterious torpor of the incantatory Perfume, which constrained us to take refuge here, in this abandoned bar, within sight of the Pyramids polluted by the Magi, within sight of their Keep, within sight of the mutilated Face of the Sphinx. Because I did not dare to cross the desert in the blinding sunlight, instead of waiting for the twilight and cool of the evening…
Alas, my lost love, even if you had resisted until then, would we not have succumbed to the redoubling of the Perfume when the Night sent the Magi flying to the Pyramids, from which they would send forth their fluid passes again?
What does it matter now? Why fight on? Why not go to sleep and surrender my body to the Other? No, no, no! I don’t want to! I don’t want to! An enormous jealousy makes me rebel, makes me huddle within my body; I refuse to yield it to the Other, who, incarnate in my place, will love her. Love her? Her? But it isn’t her! In our two bodies, there will be two new souls. It is a couple of Martian lovers who will love one another!
In the moments when the Other insinuates itself into me surreptitiously, in those instants when I no longer recognize my own gestures and scarcely recognize my thoughts as they cut across currents of strange memory…then She (the new one!) seems to emerge from her lethargy and recognize the new me…she loves him. Him, with a new love that does not know me…and when it is me who reigns again within my body, she turns her head away, and I no longer hold anything in my arms but the inert and de-souled body that was once my Raymonde.
But I sense that the Other does not love her as much as I love her: that my new me will make the new Raymonde suffer cruelly, and a frightful
distress adds to the rage of my impuissant jealousy. But what is her new soul to me? To me, to my true me? Nevertheless, I do not want to! I do not want to leave my body…I shall resist the invader until the end!
Oh, if I could concentrate all the power of my will! It seems to me that I would regain my strength, that I could chase the intruder from my body, conclusively. And who can tell whether I might also be able to exorcize my beloved, to restore her true soul, which is perhaps still here, beside me—beside us!—without being able to manifest itself, cut off from the world of the living, prey to the malevolence of other Martian souls awaiting their fleshly resurrection?
But no! It’s the Other that will expel me from my body forever, as soon as I stop writing, as soon as I give way to sleep…
See how the mutilated Face of the Sphinx is darkening mysteriously in the twilight…
My de-souled beloved is shivering voluptuously under the redoubling of the paradisal Perfume…
The somnambulistic pilgrims are beginning to go by again…
Up there, in their sinister Keep and on the Pyramids, the Magi of Mars with luminous horns are moving their bats’ wings in the hot evening, toward the horizons of the Promised Land…
THE AGONY OF THE EARTH
Part One: The Terrestrial Port of Call
I. Disincarnate!
We were dead—really dead! Our souls—our astral bodies, as the Spiritualists put it, which is perhaps closer to the mysterious truth—had already stopped watching over our henceforth-unusable bodies. By no means cadavers attained by decomposition, we were drifting towards the reward or proving-ground of a new incarnation! We were, at least, free from the sentiments that had attached us, in a derisory fashion, to the material world of living beings in which we were now incapable of action. That impuissant solicitude did not keep us captive in any way, did not continually draw us back to the neighborhood of our bodies—our living bodies, which we had inhabited for so long that our present beings were like their imponderable effigies; our living bodies, which had fallen into the power of invaders, who possessed them, and would animate them from now on!
The Martian Epic Page 24