The Eternal Adam and other stories

by Jules Vernes

  General MacKackmale could sleep with both eyes shut.

  It seemed that England had nothing to fear, that night, for the Rock of Gibraltar.

  2

  Everybody knows that formidable rock. It somewhat resembles an enormous crouching lion, its head towards Spain, its tail dipping into the sea. Its face discloses teeth – 700 cannon pointing from the casemates – ‘the old woman’s teeth’, as they are called, but those of an old woman who can bite if she is attacked.

  Thus England is firmly placed here, as she is at Aden, Malta, and Hong Kong, on cliffs which, aided by the progress of mechanisation, she will someday convert into revolving fortresses.

  Meanwhile Gibraltar assures to the United Kingdom the incontestable domination of the fifteen miles of that Strait which the club of Hercules struck open in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea between Abyla and Calpe.

  Have the Spanish given up the idea of regaining their peninsula? Unquestionably, for it seems to be impregnable by land and by sea.

  But there was someone who cherished the idea of reconquering this defensive and offensive peninsula. It was the leader of the band, a strange being – or perhaps rather a madman. This hidalgo bore the name of Gil Braltar, a name which, to his mind at least, had predestined him to that patriotic conquest. His reason had not been able to resist it, and his place should have been in a mental home. He was well known, but for ten years nobody knew what had become of him. Had he wandered off into the outer world? In fact, he had not left his ancestral home: he lived there like a troglodyte in the woods, in the caverns, and especially in the unexplored depths of the Cave of San Miguel which, it was reputed, led right down to the sea. He was thought to be dead. He was still alive, none the less, after the style of a savage, bereft of human reason, and obeying only his animal instincts.

  3

  He slept well, did General MacKackmale, with both eyes shut, though longer than was permitted by regulations. With his long arms, his round eyes deeply set under their beetling brows, his face embellished with a stubbly beard, his grimaces, his anthropithecoid gestures, the extraordinary prognathism of his jaw, he was remarkably ugly – even for an English general. Something of a monkey but an excellent soldier nevertheless, in spite of his apelike appearance.

  Yes, he slept in his comfortable apartments on Waterport Street, that winding road which traverses the town from the Waterport Gate to the Alameda Gate. Was he perhaps dreaming that England would seize Egypt, Turkey, Holland, Afghanistan, the Sudan, the Boer Republics – in short, every part of the globe at her convenience? And this at the very moment when she was in danger of losing Gibraltar!

  The door of his bedroom opened with a crash.

  ‘What’s up?’ shouted the general, sitting erect with a bound.

  ‘Sir,’ replied the aide-de-camp who had just burst in like a bombshell, ‘the town has been invaded!’

  ‘The Spanish?’

  ‘Presumably, sir. ‘

  ‘They have dared –’

  The general did not complete his sentence. He got up, wrenched off the nightcap which adorned his head, jumped into his trousers, pulled on his cloak, slid down into his boots, clapped on his helmet and buckled on his sword even while saying:

  ‘What’s that racket I can hear?’

  ‘It’s the clatter of lumps of rock falling like an avalanche on the town. ‘

  ‘Then there’s a lot of them?’

  ‘Yes, sir, there must be. ‘

  ‘Then all the bandits of the coast must have joined forces to take us by surprise – the smugglers of Ronda, the fishermen of San Roque, the refugees who are swarming in the villages?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m afraid so. ‘

  ‘Well, has the governor been warned?’

  ‘No, sir; we can’t possibly get through to his residence on Europa Point. The gates have been seized, and the streets are full of the enemy. ‘

  ‘What about the barracks at the Waterport Gate?’

  ‘We can’t get there either. The gunners must have been locked up in their barracks. ‘

  ‘How many men have you got with you?’

  ‘About twenty, sir – men of the Third Regiment who have been able to get away. ‘

  ‘By Saint Dunstan!’ shouted General MacKackmale. Gibraltar taken from England by those – those – orange-vendors! It’s not going to happen! No! It shan’t!’

  At that very instant the bedroom door opened, to admit a strange being who jumped on to the general’s shoulders.

  4

  ‘Surrender!’ he howled in raucous tones which sounded more like the roar of a beast than like a human voice.

  Several men, who had entered with the aide-de-camp, were about to throw themselves on that being when, seeing him by the light of the room, they recoiled.

  ‘Gil Braltar!’ they cried.

  It was indeed that hidalgo whom nobody had seen for a long time – that savage from the caves of San Miguel.

  ‘Will you surrender?’ he howled.

  ‘Never!’ replied General MacKackmale.

  Suddenly, just as the soldiers were surrounding him, Gil Braltar emitted a prolonged and shrill ‘Sriss.’ At once the courtyard of the house itself was filled with an invading army.

  Could it be credible! They was monkeys, they were apes – hundreds of them! Had they come to seize from the English that rock of which they themselves are the true owners, that hill on which they had dwelt even before the Spanish, and certainly long before Cromwell had dreamed of conquering it for Britain?

  Yes, they certainly had! And their numbers made them formidable, these tailless apes with whom one could live on good terms only by tolerating their thieving: those cunning and audacious beasts whom one took care not to molest because they revenged themselves – as had sometimes happened – by rolling enormous rocks on the town.

  And now these apes had become an army led by a madman as fierce as themselves – by this Gil Braltar whom they knew, who shared their independent life, by this four-legged William Tell whose whole existence was devoted to the one idea – to drive the foreigners from Spanish soil!

  What a disgrace for the United Kingdom if the attempt succeeded! The English, conquerors of the Hindoos, of the Abyssinians, of the Tasmanians, of the Australian Black-fellows, of the Hottentots, and of so many others, to be overcome by mere apes!

  If such a catastrophe took place, all that General MacKackmale could do would be to blow out his brains! He could never survive such a dishonour.

  However, before the apes whom their leader’s whistle had summoned had entered the room, a few of the soldiers had been able to throw themselves upon Gil Braltar. The madman, endowed with superhuman strength, struggled, and only after great difficulty was he overcome. The monkey-skin which he had borrowed having been torn from him, he was thrust into a corner almost naked, gagged, bound, unable to move or to utter a cry. A little later General MacKackmale rushed from the house resolved, in the best military tradition, to conquer or die.

  The danger was no less outside. A few of the soldiers had been able to rally, probably at the Waterport Gate, and were advancing towards the general’s house, and a few shots could be heard in Waterport Street and the market-place. None the less, so great was the number of apes that the garrison of Gibraltar was in danger of being forced to give up the position. And then, if the Spaniards made common cause with the monkeys, the forts would be abandoned, the batteries deserted, and the fortifications would not have even one defender.

  Suddenly the situation was completely changed.

  Indeed in the torchlight the apes could be seen beating a retreat. At their head marched their leader, brandishing his stick. And all, copying the movements of his arms and legs, were following him at the same speed.

  Then had Gil Braltar been able to free himself from his bonds, to escape from that room where he had been imprisoned? It could not be doubted. But where was he going now? Was he going towards Europa Point, to the residence of the governor, to attack him
and call on him to surrender?

  No! The madman and his army descended Waterport Street. Then, having passed the Alameda Gate, they set off obliquely across the park and up the slopes.

  An hour later, not one of the invaders of Gibraltar remained.

  Then what had happened?

  This was disclosed later, when General MacKackmale appeared on the edge of the park.

  It was he who, taking the madman’s place, had directed the retreat of that army after having wrapped himself up in the monkey skin. So much did he resemble an ape, that gallant warrior, that he had deceived the monkeys themselves. So he had only to appear for them to follow him...

  It was indeed the idea of a genius, and it well merited the award to him of the Cross of the Order of St George.

  As for Gil Braltar. the United Kingdom gave him, for cash down, to a Barnum, who soon made his fortune exhibiting him in the towns of the Old and the New World. He even let it be supposed, that Barnum, that it was not the Wild Man of San Miguel whom he was exhibiting, but General MacKackmale himself.

  The episode had certainly been a lesson for the government of Her Gracious Majesty. They realised that if Gibraltar could not be taken by man it was at the mercy of the apes. And that is why England, always practical, decided that in future it would send to the rock only the ugliest of its generals, so that the monkeys could be deceived once more.

  This simple precaution will secure it for ever the ownership of Gibraltar.

  In the Twenty-Ninth Century

  The day of an American journalist in the year 2889

  The men of the twenty-ninth century live in a perpetual fairyland, though they do not seem to realise it. Bored with wonders, they are cold towards everything that progress brings them every day. It all seems only natural.

  If they compared it with the past, they would better appreciate what our civilisation is, and realise what a road it has traversed. What would then seem finer than our modern cities, with streets a hundred yards wide, with buildings a thousand feet high, always at an equable temperature, and the sky furrowed by thousands of aero-cars and aero-buses! Compared with these towns, whose population may include up to ten million inhabitants, what were those villages, those hamlets of a thousand years ago, that Paris, that London, that New York, – muddy and badly ventilated townships, traversed by jolting contraptions, hauled along by horses – yes! by horses! it’s unbelievable!

  If they recalled the erratic working of the steamers and the railways, their many collisions, and their slowness, how greatly would travellers value the aero-trains, and especially these pneumatic tubes laid beneath the oceans, which convey them with a speed of a thousand miles an hour? And would they not enjoy the telephone and the telephote even better if they recollected that our fathers were reduced to that antediluvial apparatus which they called the ‘telegraph’?

  It’s very strange. These surprising transformations are based on principles which were quite well known to our ancestors, although these, so to speak, made no use of them. Heat, steam, electricity, are as old as mankind. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, did not the savants declare that the only difference between the physical and chemical forces consists of the special rates of vibration of the etheric particles?

  As so enormous a stride had been made, that of recognising the mutual relationship of all these forces, it is incredible that it took so long to work out the rates of vibration that differentiate between them. It is especially surprising that the method of passing directly from one to another, and of producing one without the other, has only been discovered so recently.

  So it was however, that things happened, and it was only in 2790, about a hundred years ago, that the famous Oswald Nyer succeeded in doing so.

  A real benefactor of humanity, that great man! His achievement, a work of genius, was the parent of all the others! A constellation of inventors was born out of it, culminating in our extraordinary James Jackson. It is to him that we owe the new accumulators, some of which condense the force of the solar rays, others the electricity stored in the heart of our globe, and yet again others, energy coming from any source whatever, whether it be the waterfalls, winds, or rivers. It is to him that we owe no less the transformer which, at a touch on a simple switch, draws on the force that lives in the accumulators and releases it as heat, light, electricity, or mechanical power after it has performed any task we need.

  Yes, it was from the day on which these two appliances were thought out that progress really dates. They have given mankind almost an infinite power. Through mitigating the bleakness of winter by restoring to it the excessive heat of the summer, they have revolutionised agriculture. By providing motive power for the appliances used in aerial navigation, they have enabled commerce to make a splendid leap forward. It is to them that we owe the unceasing production of electricity without either batteries or machines, light without combustion or incandescence, and finally that inexhaustible source of energy which has increased industrial production a hundred-fold.

  Very well then! The whole of these wonders, we shall meet them in an incomparable office-block – the office of the Earth Herald, recently inaugurated in the 16823rd Avenue.

  If the founder of the New York Herald, Gordon Bennett, were to be born a second time today, what would he say when he saw this palace of marble and gold that belongs to his illustrious descendant, Francis Bennett? Thirty generations had followed one another, and the New York Herald had always stayed in that same Bennett family. Two hundred years before, when the government of the Union had been transferred from Washington to Centropolis, the newspaper had followed the government – if it were not that the government had followed the newspaper – and it had taken its new title, the Earth Herald.

  And let nobody imagine that it had declined under the administration of Francis Bennett. No! On the contrary, its new director had given it an equalled vitality and driving-power by the inauguration of telephonic journalism.

  Everybody knows that system, made possible by the incredible diffusion of the telephone. Every morning, instead of being printed as in antiquity, the Earth Herald is ‘spoken’. It is by means of a brisk conversation with a reporter, a political figure, or a scientist, that the subscribers can learn whatever happens to interest them. As for those who buy an odd number for a few cents, they know that they can get acquainted with the day’s issue through the countless phonographic cabinets.

  This innovation of Francis Bennett restored new life to the old journal. In a few months its clientele numbered eighty-five million subscribers, and the director’s fortune rose to 300 million dollars, and has since gone far beyond that. Thanks to this fortune, he was able to build his new office – a colossal edifice with four façades each two miles long, whose roof is sheltered beneath the glorious flag, with its seventy-five stars, of the Confederation.

  Francis Bennett, king of journalists, would then have been king of the two Americas, if the Americans would ever accept any monarch whatever. Do you doubt this? But the plenipotentiaries of every nation and our very ministers, throng around his door, peddling their advice, seeking his approval, imploring the support of his all-powerful organ. Count up the scientists whom he has encouraged, the artists whom he employs, the inventors whom he subsidises! A wearisome monarchy was his, work without respite, and certainly nobody of earlier times would ever have been able to carry out so unremitting a daily grind. Fortunately however, the men of today have a more robust constitution, thanks to the progress of hygiene and of gymnastics, which from thirty-seven years has now increased to sixty-eight the average length of human life – thanks too to the aseptic foods, while we wait for the next discovery: that of nutritious air which will enable us to take nourishment... only by breathing.

  And now, if you would like to know everything that constitutes the day of a director of the Earth Herald, take the trouble to follow him in his multifarious operations – this very day, this July 25th of the present year, 2889.

  That morning Franc
is Bennett awoke in rather a bad temper. This was eight days since his wife had been in France and he was feeling a little lonely. Can it be credited? They had been married ten years, and this was the first time that Mrs Edith Bennett, that professional beauty, had been so long away. Two or three days usually sufficed for her frequent journeys to Europe and especially to Paris, where she went to buy her hats.

  As soon as he awoke, Francis Bennett switched on his phonotelephote, whose wires led to the house he owned in the Champs-Elysées.

  The telephone, completed by the telephote, is another of our time’s conquests! Though the transmission of speech by the electric current was already very old, it was only since yesterday that vision could also be transmitted. A valuable discovery, and Francis Bennett was by no means the only one to bless its inventor when, in spite of the enormous distance between them, he saw his wife appear in the telephotic mirror.

  A lovely vision! A little tired by last night’s theatre or dance, Mrs Bennett was still in bed. Although where she was it was nearly noon, her charming head was buried in the lace of the pillow. But there she was stirring... her lips were moving... No doubt she was dreaming?... Yes! She was dreaming... A name slipped from her mouth. ‘Francis... dear Francis!... ‘

  His name, spoken by that sweet voice, gave a happier turn to Francis Bennett’s mood. Not wanting to wake the pretty sleeper, he quickly jumped out of bed, and went into his mechanised dressing-room.

  Two minutes later, without needing the help of a valet, the machine deposited him, washed, shaved, shod, dressed and buttoned from top to toe, on the threshold of his office. The day’s work was going to begin.

  It was into the room of the serialised novelists that Francis first entered.

  Very big that room, surmounted by a large translucent dome. In a corner, several telephonic instruments by which the hundred authors of the Earth Herald related a hundred chapters of a hundred romances to the enfevered public.