Hours must have gone by since the moment when, finally expelled in my turn, I had eventually recognized among the hostile crowd of strange fluid forms—my beloved! Dedicated to one another by years of love, our new beings had been attracted to one another, had penetrated into one another and fused into a single unique nebulosity of sapphire fluorescence, in which our united but distinct selves were localized.
Then: a long vertiginous bewilderment, such as a chrysalid must experience on its metamorphosis into a butterfly; the joy of our mutual survival; an insuperable loathing for the fluid forms whose dull red light was roughly etched with hateful and desperate faces; the haunting of our bodies possessed by those foreign souls…
Little by little, resignation to the inevitable soothes us. The fact of our corporeal envelopes ceases to interest us exclusively.
Thoughts of a strange synthetic vigor—intuitions—emerge in the “twin mirrors” of our two spirits and excite our curiosity with regard to our new existence.
We have lost all means of acting upon material reality. By way of compensation, however, that reality reaches us directly, without the mediation of senses. In consequence, our astral bodies now participate in the “fourth dimension” of the universe. Space and the impenetrability of matter have ceased to exist for us in the way that they condition the three-dimensional sensibility of “living” beings. As freely and instantaneously as thought moves from one point to another, a simple “volition” displaces our astral bodies.
Timidly at first, hindered by its very facility, we learn not to pay any further heed to the material objects that habit represents to us as barriers. We leave the little Sphinx View bar by going through the re-closed door, to follow our bodies as they head towards the Martian Cylinder amid the crowd of somnambulistic pilgrims arriving from Cairo in response to the summon of the Magi.
Night has fallen, but giant floodlights have been mounted on top of the Keep and the Pyramids, distributing a cold green light, like that of glow-worms. The Perfume’s vibration is increasingly intense—I say vibration because we have ceased to perceive it by means of a sense of smell, and that is the best available translation of my present intuition—and it causes us to experience a veritable horror, which we have to overcome in order to penetrate into our invaders’ lair.
The metallic walls of the Keep offer no more resistance to our intrusion than a window offers to solar radiation.
We explore the 20 floors of the monstrous bolide, which are packed with dismantled machines—pistons, wheels, strange pieces of machinery—measuring instruments, and stocks of unknown chemical products. There are also cabins for the Magi, and we come across one who is busy writing. He has folded his bat-like wings, which seem to be composed of a rubbery fabric the color of mahogany, behind his back. The protuberances on his forehead, which I had mistaken for Satanic horns, are elongating and retracting, following the rhythm of his thoughts. His golden eyes, with vertical pupils like those of cats, are momentarily directed towards us—but we are invisible, even to this familiar of the Occult.
On the upper platform of the Keep, which is almost as tall as the neighboring Pyramids, there is an enormous agitation in the wan light.
The unfortunate Terrans who have yielded to the appeal of the Perfume are brought up by the flying Magi and introduced one after another into a sort of solenoid, whose mysterious currents ensure the conclusive empery of the Martian soul. And these neo-Martians—Terromartians, rather—whose gestures are awkward, go to rejoin the troop of their own kind busy at the foot of the Cylinder.
I think I recognize the man who is directing them—yes, it really is Sylvain Leduc organizing the assembly of the machines. Constructions are rising up before our very eyes. Rails are being laid down that will connect up with the Pyramids’ railway. A helicopter takes off, then another, and a third…the process of taking possession of the Earth is beginning!
There are two other individuals beside Sylvain Leduc, however. The first one, whose red cape and horned cap makes him resemble a Magus—that’s me! It’s my stolen body, my body animated by the spirit of some great Martian leader! And his similarly-dressed companion is Raymonde—it’s the stolen body of my beloved!
Their gait is no longer as hesitant as it was the last time we saw them; their new personalities are expressed in their curt and authoritarian gestures—and, instead of the anxious solicitude of the first hours, they inspire an atrocious revulsion in us. It adds to the loathing we feel for the fluid faces grimacing all around us from the dull red glimmers, which seem to us to be laughing scornfully at our dispossession, and to the nausea of the Perfume, which penetrates us with horripilatory vibrations. The brutal atmosphere of the Martian colony is becoming increasingly odious and intolerable.
By way of reaction, our desires are ardently raised to the Heavens!
II. Which Will Startle Readers Who Care Little For Astronomy
And our new faculty of displacement at will, which we still have not mastered, transports us into the heights of the atmosphere, hundreds or thousands of meters up.
Surprised by our unexpected deliverance, far from trying to moderate the phenomenon and curb this glorious levitation, we exert all our will to activate it. The Martian floodlights on the Pyramids and the Cylinder have vanished into the distance, and are also carried eastwards by the rotation of the Earth—which continues to sink into space, diminishing, resolving itself into a planetary globe as seen through a telescope!
Knowing no corporeal needs, careless of the barometric pressure that is doubtless already reduced to zero, and of the ardent solar radiation that reaches us again as soon as we move out of Earth’s conical shadow, we bathe in the infinite serenity of the velvet-black night, in which the Sun and the stars shine simultaneously, thanks to the absence of any veil of air.
O purification! Marvelous recompense for having dedicated so many hours of our terrestrial lives to the disinterested joys of Astronomy!
What a miserable larval 29 period disintegration must be, for souls that have only ever exercised the material part of their beings! How well the expression “souls in torment” must apply to them, once deprived of organs susceptible to satisfaction by means of the only appetites they have developed!
Would not we, ourselves, be disorientated and maddened by the spectacle of the sidereal space that surrounds us, if it were not for our astronomical cultivation? Would we not hurry to regain the sole familiar ground of the Earth, where we would be reduced to wandering, prey to regretful memories of the base routines and vulgar interests of quotidian existence, amid the rabble of Martian souls aspiring to reincarnation, that being the only mode of existence intelligible to the grossness of their appetites?
Ah, how clearly I understand now that the supreme sacrament is the disinterested search for truth!
A sublime intoxication carries us away: a passionate desire to explore this Space into which our will has transported us of its own accord. The long evenings formerly spent at the telescope have been a fecund initiation; they have prepared our spirits for the joys of the infinite! How much better, though, than all the accumulated figures, with which I took the trouble impregnate my imagination in order to obtain a paltry perception of distances and volumes, is the direct intuition that now allows us to perceive the relationships of the stars to one another and the actual disposition of the Universe.
In the marvelous Night that surrounds the Milky Way, the Sun astonishes us with its new brilliance. Instead of the white disk with marked contours that seems to be visible from the depths of the terrestrial atmosphere, a vast aureole in the form of a luminous housing envelops the regal Star. Around its circumference, an effervescence of rosy flames launched forth, as from a gigantic bowl of punch, to the right and the left, long rectilinear plumes similar to the “rays of glory” that sometimes spring forth from clouds as sunset approaches—two wings of light on which the God of daylight and life—Ra, the sacred Hawk of ancient Egypt—hovers…
Lost in the radiat
ion of that dazzling aureole is the minuscule planet Mercury; more distant and more voluminous, Venus, twin sister of the Earth, displays itself in a phase akin to a “young” Moon—the Moon whose orbit we surpassed in little more than a second, at the speed of light, which we adopted as son as we were out of the atmosphere. In about eight minutes, it would have taken us to the Sun; but it is in the opposite direction, towards Mars, that our flight is taking us…
Four minutes, and the planet previously swept clean by the avenging Thunderbolt passes before us, escorted by its two tiny moons, its face still enveloped by the opaque clouds of the frightful conflagration.
Half an hour at the speed of light—which is extremely fast on the scale of terrestrial measurement, since light could go round the Earth seven and a half times in a second, but which adapts to the millions of kilometers of the planetary scale and ceases to appear enormous to us while the familiar Earth is reduced in the vicinity of the Sun, as Venus was a little while ago, to a large blue diamond juxtaposed with a white satellite—will bring us to the giant Jupiter, whose brightness increases gradually as we pass through the zone of the minor planets.
One of these boulders—I don’t know what name it bears in the catalogue—attracts our curiosity as we pass by, and we deflect our course towards the surface of the irregular spheroid, whose diameter is inferior to that of Paris: miniature continents, whose cliffs, a few centimeters high, are lapped by the waves of Lilliputian oceans…forests of unknown vegetation grow as tall as a finger’s length…animate beings, species of red and black ants, emerge from their subterranean cities in tight columns, which march to meet one another in the middle of a clearing, exterminating one another furiously, biting, slashing, breaking their adversaries’ heads, necks and legs with thrusts of their mandibles!
Horror! Here too there is war, the inexorable struggle of life against life, the destruction of life by itself! Does the animator of worlds not know, then, how to do its work without this perpetual wastage of energy? Is destruction an integral part of its plan? Or is there no plan at all, no goal within Creation? Might the universal Consciousness be an impassive and serene witness to the play of forces that interact within its bosom—the same forces that hold worlds and the universe in equilibrium, in the network of gravity, and result in the internecine battles of ants and humans…and Martians against Terrans? Is the universal Spirit insensible to evil? Or do we qualify, within the narrow limitation of our prejudices, as necessary accidents?
We have fled, revolted by that spectacle of warfare, at a strangely accelerating speed. Jupiter, the planet of wisdom, has passed before our eyes, its gigantic face obscuring half the sky, momentarily eclipsing the luminous spindle of the Sun, which is already reduced to a fifth of its diameter as seen from the Earth…and the Sun is still diminishing; Jupiter is soon no more than a dot drowning in its fire…
Saturn, the enormous Saturn, only slightly less massive than Jupiter, girdled by its triple ring, has just been surpassed, distant in its orbit…Uranus…Neptune…then the other planet, the Transneptunian planet anticipated by terrestrial science…
Unless we have lost all notion of time—which is possible, now, in the absence of reference-points—it is no longer light that is transporting us; it is some other vehicle, more rapid still. The Sun has lost the privileged aspect that is conferred upon it by its proximity to the Earth; it is no longer the day star, no longer the astral ruler of a harmonious cortège of planets on which its rays support life. All the planets have disappeared; the entire system enclosed within Neptune’s orbit, which light takes eight hours to cross, has been reabsorbed into a single shining point—a star like the others, barely of the first magnitude, reddened like Aldebaran, whose neighbor it is, close to Algol in the constellation Perseus.
Unprecedented solitude! Extreme isolation in the sidereal Night! We experience here, in reality, that which our imagination once made an effort to conceive, in abstracting itself from the support of the material Earth, which hid the entire celestial hemisphere situated beneath our feet from our eyes. Then, there was an up and a down; the weight against which the verticality of our bodies battled furnished us with a stable reference-point, imposed upon us, of its own accord, something of the atavistic illusion of being at the center of the universe, and it required a great effort of meditation to forget the presence of our fellow humans, to whom we clung instinctively when seized by vertigo as we looked into the infinite Void…
No more people around us now, close at hand or far away; no more maternal Earth, here; neither up nor down; space in every direction, swarming with stars, which accumulate in a luminescent zone: the Milky Way. The only reminder of our condition as spirits born on the Earth is the forms of the constellations, which are still similar.
No terror at all. A sacred wonder. The sense of the infinite that sometimes brushed us, too fleetingly, when we forced ourselves to penetrate its actual presence, when an intuition passed through us of our true place in the Universe, of the vertiginous profundities of the space that surrounded us, in which the Earth was plunged, in the neighborhood of the Sun, in the bosom of the lenticular mass of stars that appeared to us, seen from within, in the form of the Milky Way…
What a sublime augmentation of Mystery, now that we are no longer reckoning sidereal space according to the scale of our human senses, now that the egotistical animality of the body has ceased to impose its puerile terrors and prejudices on our spirits!
That star which is growing in size in front of us—in the part of the sky unknown to the inhabitants of the northern terrestrial hemisphere, next to the scintillating Southern Cross—which is doubling into two twin suns rotting around one another, is Alpha Centauri, the “Proxima” of astronomers, whose light is transported to us in a little over four years. But what we are riding at present is the mysterious gravity ray, whose transmission seems instantaneous at any distance…gravity, perhaps no more than a word. Do we know what reality is hidden beneath that appearance, about which we know no more than its numerical law? Are we not concerned, not with a force, but with the connective fabric of the universe, of a simple modality of the Ether whose hypothesis necessarily entails that of the “fourth dimension” and the continuity of all existent things within a single WHOLE? 30
Alpha Centauri has passed before us like a station lantern glimpsed by night through the window of an express train; we are traversing light years in seconds, and new stars are strung out, one by one, along our route. Descending the scale of stellar magnitudes, the Sun that lights our Earth gradually retreats into invisibility. It is now at the humblest rank of all, and it requires our sustained attention not to be lost in the rapid dislocation of the constellations. Cassiopeia flattens out. The square of Pegasus is constricted into a lozenge. Orion and the Southern Cross are unrecognizable. And the familiar magnitudes are modified: Capella, Vega, Deneb, Arcturus, all the stars of the northern hemisphere, fade like the Sun, and seem to multiply, while the seed-bed of stars in front of us becomes sparser. Black gaps, like the famous “Coal Sack” in the vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds, are opening in the sidereal fabric, like “eyes” forming in the iridescence of a soap-bubble that is about to burst.
The black lacunae grow, join together; a few last suns are passed…and it’s finished! The soap-bubble has burst—we have emerged from the Milky Way, leaving it behind us with its millions of suns, including our long-lost place of birth. The Galaxy elongates, and finally appears in its entirety, seen from without instead of within, in the form of a vast and dense mass of stars disposed in spiral lines—rather like the luminous jets that emerge from the fireworks that are called “Catherine Wheels.”
And the Blackness, the Void of the Outer Universe, into which our flight plunges us—in pursuit of the Great Secret—remains populated with distant luminescent formations: Nebulas in which new universes are elaborated, slowly rotating on their axes as they flee through Space…to encounter other Nebulas, immense and amorphous clouds of ancient matter, disintegr
ated worlds, chaos awaiting the penetrating, fecund and rejuvenating shock—just as the conjugation of cells gives living matter the necessary impulse to develop new beings once again!
And from Nebula to Galaxy, from one universe to the next, again and again, in the bosom of the illimitable All, our hectic flight continues obstinately, desperately, towards the impossible wall of the External Nothingness…
And the dimensions are abolished. Large? Small? What do these notions signify in relation to the Infinite All? Masses of stars…Nebulas...Universes? Atoms? Every sidereal whirlpool is, on a different scale, the whirlpool of ions and electrons that make up the invisible elements of matter! Analogous, their relative distribution; of the same order, their velocities! Formidable questions: might these Sidereal Atoms be grouped like he atoms of matter into Molecules of a superior degree? Might those, by their aggregation, form living entities of an ineffable order of vitality? Might universe-blood-corpuscles be circulating in the arteries of an incommensurable Being…inhabiting in its turn a world…itself embodied within…31
And then! What then! Why that Being? Yes, why? Why is there anything at all? Why this and not something else? Is there actually anything, in REALITY? Might not ALL be an illusion—equal to NOTHING?
And in the intoxication of that ideal vertigo, amid the infinite blackness where the Nebulas were vague glimmers and the Galaxies drifted—isolated in the material Void and yet bathed by the Unity of the essential gravitational Ether, which makes everything One—our sublime spirit, which has just explored and measured the round of Universes, is swallowed up in despair beneath the overwhelming Mystery. Our distress makes us human again, and turns humbly towards the security of the maternal Earth, aspires to the equilibrating ballast of the material organisms from which our prideful lust to know the universal Truth rejoiced in being freed…
The Martian Epic Page 25