by Jules Vernes
Then it was that one of these nations had undertaken to subdue its neighbours. Situated near the centre of the Mahart-Iten-Schu, the Andarti-Hai-Sammgor, the Men of the Brazen Face, had struggled mercilessly to enlarge their frontiers, within which their spirited and prolific race was being choked.
One after the other, at the cost of age-long wars, they had overcome the Andarti-Mahart-Horis, the Men of the Snow Country, who inhabited the southern lands, and the Andarti-Mitra-Psul, the Men of the Motionless Star, whose empire was situated more towards the north and the west.
Nearly 200 years had elapsed since the final revolt of these two peoples had been drowned in torrents of blood, and the land had at last known an era of peace. This was the fourth period of its history. One solitary empire having replaced the three nations of olden time, and the law of Basidra having been enforced everywhere, political unity had tended to merge the races. No longer was anything said about the men with the Brazen Faces, the men of the Snow Country, the Men of the Motionless Star. The earth now bore only one unique populace, the Andart’-Iten-Schu, the Men of the Four Seas, which in itself included all the others.
But now, after these 200 years of peace, a fifth period seemed to be opening. For some time disquieting rumours, arising nobody knew where, had been going the rounds. They suggested that certain thinkers were trying to arouse in the human heart ancestral memories long believed to have been abolished. The ancient emotions of the race were being revived in a novel form characterised by newly coined words. People were now speaking of ‘atavism’, ‘affinities’, ‘nationalities’, and so forth – all recently created terms which, answering as they did to some new need, had now gained recognition.
Based upon common origin, physical appearance, moral tendency, mutual interest, or simply upon district or climate, groups were appearing, and they were obviously getting larger and showing signs of unrest. Where would this growing evolution lead? Would the empire, scarcely formed though it was, start falling to pieces? Would the Mahart-Iten-Schu be divided, as of old, between a large number of nations? Or would it, to maintain its unity, have to seek recourse to the frightful hecatombs which, lasting for thousands of years, have turned the earth into a charnel-house?
With a shake of the head Sofr cast off these thoughts. The future was something which neither he nor anyone else could possibly know. So why depress himself by the prospect of uncertain events? This was no day to brood over these sinister possibilities. Today everybody was in a cheerful mood, and nothing was thought about except the august grandeur of Mogar-Si, twelfth emperor of the Hars-Iten-Schu, whose sceptre was leading the universe to its glorious destiny.
What was more, a zartog by no means lacked grounds for rejoicing. Not only had the historian retraced the pageant of the Mahart-Iten-Schu; a constellation of savants, to mark this grandiose anniversary, had, each in his own speciality, drawn up the balance-sheet of human knowledge, and had announced the point to which its age-long efforts had brought mankind. And if the former had to some extent aroused distressing thoughts by recalling by what a slow and tortuous route it had freed itself from its bestial origin, the others had stimulated their hearers’ legitimate pride.
Yes, in very truth, it was bound to inspire admiration, the comparison between what man had been when he arrived naked and helpless upon the earth and what he was today. Throughout the centuries, in spite of discords and fratricidal hates, never for one instant had he interrupted his struggle against nature; ever had he increased the scope of his victory.
At first slow, during the last 200 years his triumphant march had been astonishingly accelerated; and the stability of political institutions and the universal peace which this had produced had stimulated a marvellous advance in science. Humanity lived not only by its limbs but by its mind; instead of exhausting itself in senseless wars, it had thought, – and that was why, in the course of the last two centuries, it had advanced ever more rapidly towards knowledge and the taming of material nature.
So, as beneath the scorching sun he followed the long Basidran street, Sofr mentally sketched in bold outline the picture of the conquests man had made.
First of all – though this was lost in the darkness of time – mankind had invented writing, so as to perpetuate his thoughts. Then – the invention went back more than 500 years – he had found a method of spreading the written word far and wide in an endless number of copies by the aid of a block cast once and for all. It was really from this invention that all the others had sprung. It was thanks to this that so many brains had come into action, that the intelligence of each had grown from that of his neighbour, and that discoveries, both theoretical and practical, had so greatly multiplied that they could no longer be counted.
Man had penetrated into the bowels of the earth and had extracted its coal, the generous donor of heat; he had liberated the latent power of water, so that steam now drew the heavy trains along the iron rails or drove a host of machines, as powerful as they were delicate and precise. Thanks to these machines, he could weave the vegetable fibres and do what he pleased with metal, marble or rock.
In a realm that was less concrete or at all events of less direct and immediate utility, he had gradually unravelled the mystery of numbers and entered ever more deeply into the infinity of mathematical truth. By this means his thought had penetrated into the sky... He knew that the sun was nothing but a star gravitating through space according to rigorous laws, dragging with its flaming orb its escort of the seven planets.[vi] He understood the art both of combining certain natural bodies into new substances with which they had nothing in common, and of dividing certain other bodies into their constituent and primordial elements. He had subjected to analysis sound, heat and light, and was beginning to realise their nature and their laws.
Fifty years ago he had learned how to generate that force whose most terrifying manifestations are lightning and thunder, and he had at once made it his slave. Already that mysterious agent transmitted the written thought over incalculable distances; tomorrow it would transmit sound; and next day, no doubt, the light[vii] ... Yes, man was great, greater than the immense universe of which, on some day yet to come, he would be the master...
But for him to possess the truth in its integrity, one last problem remained to be solved. ‘This man, master of the world, who was he? Whence came he? To what unknown ends did his tireless efforts lead?’
It was precisely this vast subject that Zartog Sofr had just discussed during the ceremony from which he had emerged. Admittedly he had done no more than to skim over its surface, for such a problem was at the moment insoluble and would no doubt long remain so.
Yet a few vague gleams had already begun to throw light upon the mystery. And of all these gleams was it not Zartog Sofr who had thrown the most powerful when, by systematising and codifying the patient observations of his predecessors and of himself, he had arrived at his law of the evolution of living matter, a law universally accepted and which had found nobody whatever to contradict it?
This theory rested upon a threefold base.
First there was the science of geology which, born on the day when the bowels of the earth had first been dug into, had reached perfection through the development of mining technique. The earth’s crust was now so perfectly known that they had dared to fix its age at 400,000 years, and that of Mahart-Iten-Schu, as it was now, at 20,000 years. This continent had formerly slept beneath the waters of the sea, as was testified to by the thick layer of marine silt which interruptedly covered the rocky beds immediately below. By what force had it been lifted above the waves? Doubtless by the contraction of the cooling globe. But whatever the truth about that, the elevation of Mahart-Iten-Schu from the sea must be regarded as proved.
The natural sciences had furnished Sofr with the two other foundations of his system, by making clear the close interrelationship on the one hand of the plants, on the other of the animals. He had gone still further: he had proved from the available evidence that almost all
the plants still in existence were connected with their ancestor, a seaweed, and that all the animals of earth or air were descended from those of the sea. By a slow but incessant evolution, they had gradually adapted themselves to living conditions at first resembling, then more distant from, those of their primitive life. Thus, from stage to stage, they had given birth to most of the living beings which peopled earth and sky.
But this ingenious theory was unfortunately not unassailable. That living beings of the animal or vegetable orders had descended from marine ancestors, that seemed incontestable for almost all of them, but not for all. There still indeed existed a few plants and animals which it seemed impossible to connect with the aquatic types. That was one of the two weak points of his system.
The other weak point – and Sofr never concealed this – was mankind. Between man and the animals there was no point of union. Certainly their primordial functions and properties – such as respiration, nutrition, and movement – were similar and were obviously carried out or showed themselves in a similar manner, but an impassable gulf existed between the exterior forms, the number, and the arrangement of their organs. If, by a chain of which few of the links were missing, the great majority of the animals could be associated with their ancestors from the sea, no such affiliation was admissible as regards man. To preserve the theory of evolution intact, the truth of a hypothesis had to be assumed gratuitously, that of a stock common to the inhabitants of the waters and to man, a stock of which nothing, absolutely nothing, demonstrated the former existence.
At one time Sofr had hoped to find in the ground the arguments that favoured his predilection. At his instigation and under his direction, digging had been carried out over a long succession of years, but only to lead to results diametrically opposed to those he had hoped for.
Below a thin layer of humus formed by the decomposition of plants and animals like or similar to those of every day, there had come the thick bed of silt, and in this these vestiges of the past had changed in nature. Within this silt, no more of the contemporary flora or fauna, but a quantity of fossils exclusively marine resembling types which were still living, most of them in the oceans surrounding the Mahart-Iten-Schu.
What was to be inferred from this, if it were not that the geologists were right in stating that the continent had once served as the floor of those same oceans? And that neither had Sofr been wrong in affirming the marine origin of the contemporary fauna and flora? Since, but for exceptions so rare that they might rightly be regarded as monstrosities, the aquatic and terrestrial forms were the only ones of which any trace had been found, the latter must necessarily have been engendered by the former...
Unfortunately for the generalisation of the system, other finds were made. Scattered throughout the whole thickness of the humus, and even in the most superficial part of the deposit of silt, innumerable human bones were brought to the daylight. Nothing exceptional in the structure of these fragmentary skeletons, and Sofr had to give up asking for the intermediate organisms whose existence his theory asserted: these bones were human bones, neither more nor less.
However one fairly remarkable peculiarity was not slow to be realised. Up to a certain antiquity, which could be roughly evaluated as 2,000 or 3,000 years, the older the ossuaries were the smaller the skulls within them. Beyond that epoch, on the other hand, progress was reversed and thenceforward the further one went back into the past, the bigger was the capacity of the skulls, and the larger therefore were the brains which they had held.
The very largest were found among the debris, somewhat scanty to be sure, found on the surface of the layer of silt. The conscientious examination of these venerable remains admitted of no doubt that the men living at that distant epoch had a cerebral development far superior to that of their successors – including the very contemporaries of Zartog Sofr. So that, during a period of 160 or 170 centuries, there had been an obvious retrogression, followed by a new ascent.
Disturbed by these strange facts, Sofr pushed his researches further. The bed of silt was dug through and through; its thickness showed that at the most moderate computation it could not have taken less than 15,000 or 20,000 years to form. Beyond, much surprise was felt at the discovery of the scanty remains of another layer of humus. Then, below that humus, there was rock, its nature varying from place to place.
But what raised his astonishment to its height was the discovery of some debris, undoubtedly of human origin, obtained from these mysterious depths. They were some pieces of bones obviously of human type, and also some odds and ends of weapons and implements, potsherds, vestiges of inscriptions in a language unknown, fragments of hard stone exquisitely worked, some sculptured into statues which were still almost intact, and some into the remains of delicately worked architecture, and so forth. Taken together, these discoveries led logically to the conclusion that about 40,000 years earlier, and thus 20,000 years before the rise – nobody knew how or where – of the first representatives of contemporary man, human beings were already living in the same places and had arrived at a high degree of civilisation.
This was, indeed, the conclusion generally accepted, though there was at least one dissident.
This dissident was no other than Sofr. To admit that other races of men, separated from their successors by a gulf of 20,000 years, had at one time peopled the earth, was, to his mind, sheer folly. What would have become, in that event, of the descendants of ancestors so long vanished? Rather than welcome so absurd a hypothesis it would be better to suspend judgment. Although these strange facts were unexplained, it did not follow that they were inexplicable; sooner or later, they would be interpreted. Until then it was better to ignore them, and to keep to the following principles, so fully satisfactory to the reason:
Planetary life might be divided into two phases: before and during the age of man. During the first the earth, in a state of perpetual change, was for that very reason unhabitable and uninhabited. During the second the earth’s crust had gained enough cohesion to stabilise it. At once, having at last a solid substratum, life had appeared. It had originated in the simplest forms, and became ever more complicated to reach its climax in man, its last and most perfect expression. Hardly had he appeared upon earth than he at once began his endless ascent. At a slow but sure pace he was on his way towards his goal, the perfect knowledge and the absolute domination of the universe...
Borne away by the heat of his convictions, Sofr had gone past his house. He turned round fuming.
‘What!’ he said to himself, ‘to admit that man – 40,000 years ago! – had reached a civilisation comparable with – if not superior to – that which we enjoy today? That its knowledge and achievements have vanished, without leaving the slightest trace, so completely that their descendants had to start right at the beginning, as if they were the pioneers in a world as yet uninhabited?... But that would be to deny the future, to announce that our efforts are all in vain, and that all progress is as precarious and as uncertain as a bubble of foam on the surface of the waves!’
In front of his house he stopped.
‘Upsa ni!... hartchok! (No, indeed no!...), Andant mir’ hoë spha!... (man is the master of things...)’ –he murmured as he opened the door.
When the Zartog was somewhat rested, he lunched with a good appetite, then stretched himself out for his daily siesta. But the questions over which he had been pondering as he was coming home still obsessed him and drove away sleep.
Greatly as he wished to demonstrate the complete unity of nature’s methods, he had too critical a mind to fail to realise how weak his system was when it touched on the problem of man’s origin and development. To adapt the facts to agree with a foregone conclusion, that is one way of convincing others, but not of convincing oneself.
If instead of being a savant, a most eminent zartog, Sofr had been classed among the illiterates he would have been less embarrassed. The people, in fact, without wasting their time in deep reflections, were content to accept with their
eyes closed the ancient legend which from time immemorial had been handed down from father to son. Explaining one mystery by another, they had ascribed the origin of man to the intervention of a Higher Will. There was a time when that extra-terrestrial power had created out of nothing Hedom and Hiva, the first man and first woman, whose descendants had populated the earth. After that everything followed quite simply.
Too simply! As Sofr reflected. When you have given up trying to understand something, it is only too easy to bring in the intervention of a deity. But that makes it useless to look for an answer to the riddles of the universe, for no sooner are the questions asked than they are suppressed.
If only that legend had even the semblance of a serious basis!... But it was founded upon nothing. It was only a tradition, born in the epochs of ignorance, and thence transmitted from age to age. As for that name ‘Hedom’! Where did that strange vocable come from, for it did not seem to belong to the language of the Andart’-Iten-Schu?
Confronted only with that trifling philological difficulty countless savants had worn themselves out unable to find any satisfactory answer... All nonsense that was, unworthy of a zartog’s attention.
Sofr was still agitated as he went into his garden. Still, this was the hour when he usually did so. The setting sun shed a less scorching heat over the earth, and a warm breeze was beginning to blow in from the Spone-Schu. The Zartog wandered along the paths in the shadow of the trees whose trembling leaves murmured in the wind from the open sea, and little by little his nerves regained their accustomed calm. He was at last able to shake off these troublesome thoughts and to enjoy the open air, to feel an interest in the fruits which formed the wealth of his garden, and in the flowers, its ornaments.