“According to my calculations—which were defective—the rarefaction should have lasted for ten hours. Imagine my anguish during the six supplementary hours that its possession inflicted on me. It was at that moment that you came to see me, Sambreuil. I couldn’t shake your hand. I was unable to dress myself or to shave. Water went through me! But it is only fair to add that nothing had the power to make me dirty, since I was intangible, dust no longer accumulating anywhere but on my shoes. Oh, my shoes! Oh, my feet! What treasures they were, on that occasion! Because, damn it, ungraspable doesn’t mean weightless! Gravity still acted on the mass of my physique, attracting it mercilessly…”
“In that case,” I said, fearfully, “Morand…”
Bouvancourt drank his third glass of ratafia. “Morand…oh, Madame, when I think of it…Morand, at his request and by means of my treatment, had been prepared in his totality. Morand no longer had two very solid limbs at the base of his body, two objects of good firm flesh. In the matter of contact, he had nothing but dematerialized feet—things without leverage. His entire body became suddenly traversable, and capable of traversing, after the fashion of a body steeped in X-rays—or, rather, Y-light. So, as gravity…”
“So? So?”
“So he lost his footing, falling toward the center of the Earth, plunging directly into the heat of the dense gulf. First he went through the floor, then the sewing-machine, whose operator fainted at the sight of that indistinct prodigy, then, without even snuffing it out, the candle lit by a cooper who was washing the bottles in my cellar. After that, he went through the geological strata…without being able to catch hold of anything, as disarmed as his surroundings, an etherized man falling through a solid milieu, like an ordinary man falling through the atmosphere…”
“What became of him in the end?” asked my wife, urgently.
“If there’s an interior fire, his account is settled!” Bouvancourt declared. “If not, I don’t doubt that he’s been asphyxiated as a result of his plunge, in the course of that burial by immersion…there’s no air to breathe down there!”
“In that case,” I put in, “will his cadaver be at the very center of the Earth?”
“I don’t think so. I’m quite sure that it isn’t there at the present moment. Wherever it is, it’s only passing through. It’s necessary to take account of the acquired momentum, you see. Morand fell toward the center of the Earth, almost in free fall, with a uniformly accelerating velocity; he will therefore have reached the same speed as an unlucky person falling to Earth from a height of 6371 kilometers. A momentum of that sort only dies down gradually, and the poor devil, passing the center of gravity, will have continued his trajectory in a straight line, beyond the center toward the antipodes. But then his acquired velocity would have been countered by the force of gravity, and his momentum wouldn’t have been sufficient for him to reach the opposite surface of the globe. When he came within a few leagues of that surface, Morand, whose velocity was progressively slowing, undoubtedly began to fall back toward the center of the Earth, which he would have overshot again to return in the direction of Pontargis…that might last quite a long time!15 In order to get a better understanding, imagine that someone threw you into a diametric well, a chimney gong all the way through the planet…
“After hundreds of comings and goings, progressively reduced, Morand’s cadaver would finally come to rest at the center of the Earth, if 16 hours and 12 minutes were sufficient for the affair to reach its conclusion. But 16 hours and 12 minutes won’t be sufficient, and, having suddenly become tangible again—brutally immobilized during one of his frightful falls, then bogged down, penetrated, invaded, crushed cell by cell, transformed into a sudden amalgam of rock, clay and flesh—the wretch will remain eternally blended into the profound paste!”
My wife, who has an imagination, was not reluctant to give proof of it. “Wait a minute!” she cried. “Provided that there’s a sea at the antipodes, Morand might drown!”
Bouvancourt sketched a mournful moue with the corner of his mouth. “Madame, he’ll be dead before then, asphyxiated. Anyway, we’re quibbling idly, given that the existence of the interior fire is proven. There is not a shadow of a doubt regarding Morand’s incineration—for I can fabricate a human specter, but not a human salamander. I’ve conquered the resistance of solids, liquids and gases, but not their other defenses—not their asphyxiating envelopment. I’ve vanquished the water that moistens, not the water that drowns, nor the fire that burns! It’s a frightful death!”
“It’s an execution!” I rectified. “Thank God! Thank Bouvancourt, for having broken up the Morand gang!”
“My invention will do no other service than that. In the final analysis, you see, it would do more harm than good. The wretched thing shall disappear! I’ll burn my notes and calculations this evening, and I’ll destroy the spiral. Nothing must remain…Morand won’t talk…and I ask you, my dear friends, on your honor, not to tell this story until ten years have gone by.”
We had to do leave it at that. I agreed, reluctantly, to the ten year delay, without understanding why the invention would then be impossible to recover. If my reader happens to be a Berthelot—or, if female, a Curie—perhaps he will perceive what I cannot. But perhaps he will also criticize me sternly for having made a promise that deprived science of a considerable enrichment. I made it because there are certain critical moments at which one cannot refuse certain supplicants. The overexcitement of the placid and wise Bouvancourt frightened me. He did not omit to tell us about the mortal terror to which he had been subject during his dialogue with the handsome and softly-spoken villain, the alternatives of justice and pity that animated him, the tortures he endured between his duty and his emotions, his disgust at the indispensable tragicomedy, or how he feared at every moment that the demi-scientist with a smattering of physics might happen upon the truth.
“His reasoning was so naïve!” Bouvancourt remarked. “And so dangerous! Mistaken and immoral! Fifty times over I thought all was lost! Fortunately, he was fascinated by the final cause, hypnotized by his goal. What a crime! To put one’s hand into a strong-box, through the door, and empty it! But how would he have been able to grip the gold and silver? And even if he had been able to grab those piles of louis and écus, how would they have been able to pass through the wall of the safe, being no more rarefied than the wall? Never! Never! As for the feet, that really was the ABC of deduction…oh, Sambreuil, the shame!—the shame of abusing that poor fool! And the torture of lying to the child that I had caught in the trap of my falsity! Oh, no, I wasn’t born to be an executioner!”
I put my hand on his shoulder, looked him in the eyes and aid, gravely: “Don’t you think you’re reasoning falsely in your turn? You’ve purged the Earth of a monster; you stand alongside Hercules, Theseus and the One who precipitated Lucifer into the eternal flames, as you have done with the new Satan. Bouvancourt, it seems to me that you ought to feel a great divine satisfaction…”
“Yes,” sighed the physicist, “I’m racked by satisfaction…”
And as I insisted on the fabulous character of the event, he demonstrated to me that it was an illusion.
“To imagine,” he said, “that we might plunge into the Earth is as natural as thinking: perhaps creatures exist that are incapable of passing through the air and traveling through gases. The proposition isn’t antiscientific—far from it. Solids have always been seen resting atop one another, and for centuries humanity has been resting on the surface of the world. Does it follow that I can deny the possibility of the contrary? Not at all! Until a man had thrown a cork into a river, all corks might have believed that water was as impermeable to them as the earth is to humans. Now, what that man did to the cork, I have done to Morand.”
Having murmured that name, Bouvancourt lost the thread of what he was saying. He abandoned himself to the pursuit of a preoccupation from which I refrained from distracting him, for he gradually recovered the expression of wisdom, strength and fo
rbearance that I should like to see in the features of the All-Powerful, if ever we should come face to face.
THE FOG OF OCTOBER 26
To J.-H. Rosny Aîné16
At this dark shadow I gazed wonderingly for many minutes.
Its character stupefied me with astonishment.
I looked upward. The tree was a palm.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
The late director of the Museum, the botanist Chantelaine, has left some curious memoirs. If they are still unpublished, it is because too many revealing portraits are to be found there of contemporary figures; it is necessary to wait for those individuals to belong to History before publication is appropriate—that is what custom demands. We have extracted from the manuscript these exceptional descriptive pages, in which the author does not deal with men of the present day.
“Put your coat on,” Fleury-Moor said to me. “It’s getting cold now, and I want to show you my state-of-the-art mushroom-farms.”
“Is it far?”
“No, indeed. A few steps. It’s up there.” The geologist pointed to the top of the hill. “Do you see that hump, Chanteraine? It ought to be famous. More than a fraction of Notre-Dame-de-Reims came out of it. The whole ridge is perforated by subterranean tunnels, which are abandoned quarries. I use them to grow my cryptogams; they open on the far side of the hill. You can bring your rifle—the hunting rights belong to me. Come on!”
“It’s already getting late—past 3 p.m.”
“We’ll be back well before nightfall. Let’s get on with it!”
I brought my 12-caliber and my game bag. To be frank, the excursion was not at all unwelcome—save for its mycological aim—to an old landscape-lover and indefatigable sunset-watcher like me.
The date was October 26, 1907.
The path sloped gently upwards through the stripped vines and asparagus-fields that were running wild following the harvest. Peasants were pruning the high foliage and piling it up for burning. The gleam of fires was visible in every direction, and smoke ascending into the calm air. We went up unhurriedly toward a copper and rust-colored wood. I frequently looked back over my shoulder at the gorge and the plain that it revealed. There was a bend in the path at the edge of the wood, and along its border, set out before us, the rounded valley: a spacious semicircle, becoming funnel-shaped on the far side, which already offered an image of the foggy month that was about to begin. In spite of the cold and harsh weather, the dull sky and the mist whose precocious veil blurred the marshy depths, its mantle of yellow foliage dressed it with a kind of sunshine. No breeze stirred the branches. From time to time, a tree would shed its leaves in the forest with the dismal sound of a light shower. It was the sound of the invincible gathering, the precursor of winter. One could sense the countryside becoming torpid from moment to moment as the autumn ripened.
We called a halt before going into a sandy cutting, beneath a vault of thinned-out acacias. It was then that I mentioned the fog for the first time, observing that a malarial miasma was now misting all the low-lying ground like a mold whose grey plush was visibly thickening. A flat cloud laid siege to Cormonville; invisible spinners were weaving arachnid threads from one end of the gorge to the other, stagnant and ever-more-opaque, while long stationary vaporous steaks were multiplying on the indefinite plain without any visible cause. We would not be starting back until they had covered the whole area with down, all the way to the horizon where darkness would soon be falling.
“Let’s hurry,” said Fleury-Moor. “It’s so easy to catch cold!”
I followed him into the narrow path.
Shortly thereafter, it seemed to me that the surroundings became blurred. I passed my hand over my eyes, thinking that they were becoming confused, but the grayness persisted. It was the mist; it had enveloped us in its muslin.
“Aren’t you afraid of being caught in the fog?” I asked.
We were now moving between walls of fawn-colored sand stratified with floury earth. My colleague had taken a fistful of that earth and presented it to me, having crumbled it, I could see nothing there but an infinity of calcareous particles, the minuscule debris of shells, including those of ammonites and gastropods, some of which had survived intact thanks to their microscopic size.
“There! That’s what I was telling you, this morning!”
I remembered perfectly well what he had told me that morning, and I immediately recalled the moment when the 35 horse-power machine in which we were traveling had emerged from the Ardenne forest. It was as if the Sun had suddenly risen for a second time. The Champagne plain had extended before us as far as the eye could see, white, chalky, broadly undulated by harmonious waves that seemed to be in motion, almost marine by virtue of being immense and seemingly meandering. The widely-scattered villages were reminiscent of rocky islets. The clumps of fir-trees, occasionally shaped into rectangles as if by a set-square, imitated strange geometric coral reefs. There was a highway in the distance so straight that one might have taken it for a jetty.
“We’re going at 75 kph,” said Fleury-Moor.
I would have preferred it had he said “We’re traveling at 40 knots,” so strongly was I experiencing the lovely nostalgia for the sea that is contained within the human heart, and so urgently was the territory reminding me of seaside regrets and naval illusions.
“Of course!” cried Fleury-Moor, when I confessed that. “Champagne resembles an ocean as a daughter resembles her father. The configuration of the region reveals its Neptunian origin, and the fact that the prehistoric sea once modeled it in its own image, with the broad strokes of waves and surges. Look, way down there are the hills that emerged first, in the Eocene epoch, when the waves were retreating from century to century—that’s where the hills of the Vesle and the Aisne finish, and it’s also where we’re heading. Well, you see nothing there but the hillocks of sediments and alluvia, sandbanks and calcareous deposits that were once submarine, which are overflowing with shells.
That was what I remembered. “That’s all very well, my dear chap,” I replied. “But what about the fog? Aren’t you afraid of getting lost in it, if it thickens?”
“There’s no danger! I know these crannies by heart, you see. I could go to my beds with my eyes closed. Besides, fogs are never dense hereabouts. If you want, though, we can soon get ahead of it if we hurry.”
Soon, in fact, as we came out of the corridor, the path sloped abruptly upwards, and the atmosphere became free of any confusion. I took advantage of that to glance around, and I observed—not without astonishment, given Fleury-Moor’s assurance—that the whole of Cormonville was now invisible. The valley was full to half its depth with nebulous spirals; they extended into the remotest distance and submerged the vast intensity.
“Hey! Do you maintain that that fog isn’t dense?”
“No, it isn’t. If we were within it, you’d share my opinion. But we’re looking at it from above, so it seems very thick.”
A rabbit broke cover. I killed it. The shot rang out without echoing.
We were reaching the summit: a grassland strewn with outcrops of stone and scattered juniper bushes. The place seemed so desolate to me that I experienced a certain shame at passing through it without being in mourning or suicidal. The solitude, the silence and the immobility aggravated one another. The contours were already blurring with the effect of the rising mist. The location, vague with mystery and melancholy, was like the memory of a landscape; I took pleasure in imagining that we were haunting a pastel drawing that was in the process of being erased.
Fleury was still moving on. Our boots were trampling sharp-bladed grass. We were crossing the ridge.
“Damn!” exclaimed my guide. “It’s absurd, all the same!”
From there, one would have thought that Champagne was no more than a vast snow-covered steppe: a Siberian surface, shining beneath a laborious sun, utterly flat. What was quite poignant was the abandonment that phenomenon seemed to have vis
ited upon us. I had the impression that a universal fleecy deluge had only spared the two of us, upon that hill—and the spell would have been prolonged had it not been for the voices of woodcutters and the whistling of birds that resonated fantastically beneath the impenetrable layer.
Fleury informed me that the valleys usually formed delightfully-wooded half-moons at intervals. Even so, exceedingly boggy marshes soaked their floors, the last vestiges of the Paludean era that had followed the Lacustrian period, which had been substituted for the Marine epoch. Pointing at the concavity of the scallop that had just appeared in front of us, he said: “My mushroom-farms are down there.”
He took a path whose track followed the curve of the crest at a lower level. A stand of fir-trees extended to our left, on a bank that rose up vertically. To the right, the downward slope—covered in brambles, sweet-briars and clematis, whose withered flowers were like a host of dead spiders—extended into the mist.
The setting Sun, which shone through momentarily, was now no more than a pale disk with vaporous make-up, so lunar that it would have fooled Pierrot.17 The distant plains gradually vanished. Slanting ridges of stone, like monstrous strands of gossamer, meandered around the bushes—and the bulk of the mist furtively extended its assault on the slope.
I scarcely had time to notice five or six of the openings of quarries that cut dark holes directly into the slope at intervals. Suddenly, the sun was extinguished, like a Japanese lampshade when its candle goes out. A pallid night surrounded us. We passed clumps of hazel-trees, diffuse masses that appeared and disappeared again. The livid darkness was icy, and as a frost formed, the light diminished further.
Contrary to my advice, my mushroom-farmer pressed on doggedly toward his mushroom-farms. He advanced unhurriedly. I saw him less and less clearly, like a scarcely-perceptible shadow—as if his shadow had separated from him and started walking on its own. To find his way, he entrusted himself to the guidance of the path. We could no longer see anything other than that trace—or, to put it better, anything other than a circle of ground of which we were the center.
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