Vamireh

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  An hour of the hectic chase went by, during which Vamireh continued to increase his lead. Softer and more oblique, the sunlight lent an amber tint to the savannah, and the shadow of the hunter and his prey extended immensely toward the east. Suddenly, as he looked back, Vamireh could no longer see his pursuers. He climbed up on a mound, and perceived them more than 5000 meters away.

  Triumphant laughter welled up to his lips and he cried: “Ehô! Ehô!” Then, to the young woman, he said: “Vamireh is the stronger!”

  She turned her head away, offended by his laughter and his cry. He sat down. They remained silent for five minutes. Vamireh’s breath, initially hoarse and panting, became regular, his pectoral muscles rising more rhythmically. Then he murmured a few words. She opened her eyes and their gazes met. The man’s was calm and tender. She lowered her eyelids; a malicious and disdainful feminine temerity appeared in her face. Vamireh was disconcerted and charmed by it, finding it even more delightful. With less conviction, he repeated: “Vamireh is the stronger!”

  Already the pursuers seemed much closer; it was necessary to resume his flight. He started to increase his lead again, and it seemed evident then that it was the others, not him, who would tire first. Besides, their company, which had stayed together thus far, was breaking up, three or four of them being too exhausted to continue the chase. The rest remained more or less closely grouped, none of them attempting to go on ahead of his companions, held back by the mystery of the adventure, and the tall stature and extraordinary agility of the dolichocephalus.

  The daylight dwindled further; the yellow hour arrived. On the savannah there was a less vibrant silence, a cool and melancholy atmosphere—a restful phase. The sparse oases spread life around them. The mosquitoes flew above the moist surfaces in huge columns. A euphonious rustling began everywhere, the chirping of small birds. It was an interval of safety and well-being, when the diurnal animals no longer had to fear predators on the prowl, in which the large ruminants were lying down on the plain in welcome security, in which something of the youthfulness of the morning reappeared in declining daylight.

  Vamireh’s run became slow and lumbering—but behind him, it seemed that the pursuit had been abandoned. At the extremity of the horizon, the silhouettes of the bowmen had vanished, and the hunter tried in vain to catch sight of them by climbing a small hill. For the second time, he took a rest, and put the foreign woman down. She remained standing beside him, melancholy, understanding the futility of any attempt at flight. He felt too tired, at present, to express his triumph, and was also anxious, for he felt that he no longer had the strength to start running again. Even so, he consoled himself with the thought that they too must be exhausted.

  They remained there, without saying a word. Dusk fell. With august slowness, the universe of colors died away with the sunset and Vamireh shivered as he saw his companion bow down, extend her arms toward the horizon and speak to the disk of the Sun. A son of the priestless Occident, vaguely superstitious but devoid of religion, he did not understand what the oriental woman was doing. He watched her curiously, perhaps anxiously. When she had finished, they remained there for a while longer, until the Moon rose.

  “Come on,” said Vamireh, then.

  She understood the gesture, and walked beside him, unresistingly. In the solitude of the night, when the wolf and the jackal were beginning to howl on the steppes, he would be protection. She had a more profound admiration for the huge club thrown over his shoulder, attached by ligatures. She already felt an embryonic intimacy and trust; her resignation was not as grim. Taciturn and weighed down by fatigue, he did not have his former ardor; the blood of May, full of generous molecules, had wearied in his arteries.

  Their silhouettes went on for a long time, while the prehistoric Moon rose. The steppe was already more thickly covered with oases, the trees were multiplying into groves, advertising the proximity of the forest. The moonlight was already more silvery upon the grass, and Vamireh thought that his companion must be hungry and drowsy. He was particularly thirsty.

  “Rest!” he said. “Vamireh will watch out for the beasts!”

  Submissively, she sat down, beneath three stout fig-trees full of the perfume of spring. The Dream was flowing between the branches: the eternal dream of the Moon and the Stars; the daughter of the orient plunged her confused soul into it. She was aware of the fragility of her being. Her family and her tribe, the evening fires, the priests and the herds of Asiatic cattle haunted her, tormenting her until tears came. Alone as she was, though, she was not moved to hate the man who had stolen her, being all too well aware of the fact that he was her only barrier against the formidable night.

  In the open, Vamireh watched the surrounding area attentively. The profiles of cats appeared at intervals. A deer fled in the distance. Sniffing the air, a wolf approached the three fig-trees. Almost immediately, the form of a frightened hare bounded away. Launching himself at an angle, Vamireh reached the point at which it would be closest to him; then his spear was raised, and whistled through the air. The little animal rolled among the grasses. As the hunter bounded forward, the wolf took flight, and the man went to collect the hare.

  He skinned it rapidly and suspended it from a branch. Then, piling up dry grass and desiccated branches, he took one of the flints with which the dolichocephali made fire from his bag. He laid out some exceedingly dry fibers, and struck sparks. After a few attempts, the flame caught, tiny at first. Then fistfuls of combustible materials were skillfully arranged, and the hare began to roast.

  The Asiatic woman bowed down to the firelight as she had to the setting Sun, with a similar chant. Impassively, Vamireh roasted the hare. When it was done, he offered it to his companion, and they ate in silence.

  The meal was brief; one of them was too tried and the other too emotional to eat much—but a keen thirst tormented them, and it was therefore necessary not to think of stopping for long before having found water. They set off again.

  After less than 1000 paces, Vamireh began to hear the rustle of a stream, and a little watercourse soon revealed itself, from which they drank.

  “Sleep!” said the man.

  She understood the gesture, and scrutinized Vamireh fearfully. In the pale moonlight, his face was sad and weary, not at all ferocious. She sat down with her back to a birch-tree, and closed her eyes, but she was still mistrustful and struggled against her tiredness. Its force defeated her, unconsciousness overtook her and she succumbed to the quotidian semi-death.

  Sitting on the bank of the stream, Vamireh contemplated the facets of the water, the tangles of vegetation and the mullions of the willows interposed before the Moon. A dream as vast and peaceful as the night drifted through his brain. Softened by fatigue, his entire adventure appeared to him in slow, profound and tender notes. The Moon’s ascent, the howling of beasts, the fluid murmur and the arborescent phantoms looming up on the steppe seemed to him to be dispensing time and space. In order to have carried away the maiden, he had felt that she was his, to the same extent as the spelaea skin that was hanging from his shoulders. As the firmament quivered, though, and the trees were transmuted into moving physiognomies, Vamireh sensed in his turn the weight of the environment; his mind retreated as his flesh submitted to drowsiness. Vaguely, he dragged himself under the birch-tree, took hold of the young woman’s garment and curled up on the grass.

  Time passed, and the Moon began to descend along the course of its decline. It was less than 30 degrees from the horizon when Vamireh woke up. With a glance, he assured himself of the presence of his companion, and then stood up, exploring the steppe. Nothing suspicious was evident there, and he concluded that the pursuers had abandoned the young woman, or that their fatigue, more considerable than his own, had forced them to rest.

  As he felt his mood lightening, and his strength coming back, he decided to improve his chances further and get under way again. A quarter of the hare remained, which he divided in two with the aid of his flint knife, one part of wh
ich he ate. Then, having dipped his head in the stream, he remained still for a few minutes, contemplating the sleeper.

  She had curled up on the ground. Her delicate head was resting on her shoulder. Her entire body, folded up in zigzag fashion, had an exotic charm that disquieted Vamireh. An afflux of blood throbbed in his temples; his savagery awoke entirely and he leaned over. What instinct, what poetic gentleness, raised him up again, full of pity?

  Incapable of analysis, he was no less sensitive to impressions; he shook his companion gently to wake her. She sat up slowly, alarmed, her eyes confused by sleep. Then her perception of the situation returned, and she became sad, gazing somberly at the moonlit steppe and the descent of the reddening Moon into the occidental abyss. A vague joy penetrated her, though—the sensation of approaching daylight, the energetic appeal of good fortune in young flesh—so she did not refuse the summary meal that Vamireh offered her. Her appetite having come back, she even took pleasure in biting into the roasted thigh of the hare.

  Charmed, he gazed at her lupine teeth, the hair flowing along her neck and a mysterious suggestion of maternity mingled with the young prehistoric man’s increasing love.

  Looking at him furtively between her lowered eyelashes, she accustomed herself again to the hunter’s presence, finding him even more handsome and powerful than the day before—but the sacred memory of her tribe interposed itself between them, and filled her with regrets.

  VII. Pursuit

  Shortly after dawn, Vamireh and his companion finally reached the river. The abandoned canoe was still in the bush where he had hidden it; he only had to lift it on to his shoulder and put it back in the water. When he tried to put the foreign woman into it, however, she manifested a violent revulsion. It was almost necessary to force her. Furthermore, as soon as she was embarked, the resignation of her Oriental fatalism returned.

  Sticking close to the bank, where the current was manageable, Vamireh began to move slowly upstream. The hour was delightful, in the oblique sunlight, not yet hot; all of nature was rejuvenated on the steppes.

  Increasingly numerous trees announced the proximity of the forest. Vamireh hoped to reach it before the Sun was halfway to its zenith. He had only been paddling for half an hour when there was an alarm. His keen eye perceived a distant company of humans and animals on the steppe.

  After a few minutes, there was no more room for doubt. They were men similar to those of the previous day—the same, in all probability. Thanks to the curtain of trees, there was every chance that they had not seen the canoe immediately, while Vamireh, much closer to the curtain in question—for whom, in consequence, every gap was an observatory—was in a position to follow their movements over the sloping surface that led to the river.

  They were, in any case, not moving swiftly; they often paused, and it was soon obvious to the nomad that they were following his trail, with all the halts that such a mode of pursuit involved. Vamireh concealed his impression from his companion, and started paddling more ardently, with the intention of reaching the forest and disembarking on the other shore.

  After a few minutes, however, the young woman perceived the new arrivals in her turn, and her features became animated. An exclamation sprang from her throat, and then, turning to her abductor, she looked at him in a humble and pleading manner. Embarrassed, he lowered his eyelids—but he was overtaken by resentment, and a wild determination that made him say, as he had the day before: “Vamireh is the stronger!”

  She stiffened herself, apparently indifferent, keeping an oblique watch on the others’ approach. Vamireh calculated that if he could be out of sight when they came close enough to the bank to see the details of the river through the bordering vegetation, they would be forced to hesitate between three possibilities: that he had gone downstream, that he had gone upstream, or that he had crossed the river and continued his eastward course.

  By maintaining the present velocity of his canoe, it would be possible to reach a long and narrow island covered with trees, which he perceived about 2000 meters upriver. If he veered to the right there, it would become impossible for the pursuers to see anything. Estimating the distances and respective speeds, Vamireh could only arrive at the approximate result that his salvation would depend on a matter of ten meters. He therefore gathered his strength for a supreme effort, and moved rapidly toward the islet. At the same time, though, the others were nearing the river.

  At one moment, his anxiety became immense; one of the Asiatics had just stopped, and, putting his hand to his forehead as an eye-shade, seemed to be looking in Vamireh’s direction. From the manner in which the hand fell back, Vamireh deduced that he had not seen anything, but he was convinced nonetheless that the curtain of trees must already seem less opaque to the others, in order for one of them to attempt to peer through them.

  Fortunately, the islet was getting closer. A few more strokes of the paddle and Vamireh would reach the point. Then, suddenly, having understood the desperate maneuver, his companion stood up in the canoe and started shouting. Powerless, Vamireh supplied the last paddle-strokes, rounded the promontory, and then, finally invisible in the shadow, he moored in a little creek and stood up furiously.

  “Shut up!”

  His rough hand lifted the young woman up and shook her. Afraid and overwhelmed, she fell silent, her fatalism returning. For two minutes he remained angry, his temples hot; then he calmed down, certain that the cry had not carried, and resumed studying the steppe.

  He definitely had the advantage. The others, moving more slowly and hesitantly, had reached an area where urus tracks were mingled with the traces of Vamireh’s passing, and were evidently unable to explore the river. Vamireh pointed them out to the Oriental woman with a triumphant finger.

  “They’ll never get you back—never!”

  Forcing her to sit down in the canoe again, he took up the paddle and continued upstream, sticking close to the island.

  For an indeterminate interval, the little vessel advanced in silence. The islet broadened, filled with a hectically tangled mass of vegetation, its trees devoured by lianas. Colossal toads and web-footed wading birds were revealed periodically. Through the vernal incense, the perfumed joy of corollas, the scent of humus, damp wood and reptilian organisms emanated from the shadows. There was a whole sequence of capes to double, and water-weeds to impede the canoe. The arching branches of alders and ash-trees brushed Vamireh and his companion, and the trembling reflection of things rebounded from the waves, simultaneously dressed with a more discreet grace and a vertiginous distress.

  Vamireh had completed half his course in this fashion when the islet began to thin out and get narrower ahead. The water became bluer. Eventually, the point appeared, and the river became broad and limpid, the forest outlined at a distance of 3000 meters.

  The nomad thought that, by staying to the left, the imposition of the insular outcrop would surely keep him invisible, so long as his adversaries had not reached the region of the river bank opposite the center, on the assumption that they had continued the pursuit. Even if they were to move to the other bank—in which case the peril would be greater—he would probably reach the forest region without having been seen, and there, the hindrance to their progress would give every advantage to the vessel moving freely over the waves…

  VIII. A Night Beneath the Branches

  Night again! Life vast and minuscule, the mystery of forces, forested places, the collision of molecules and living beings, the inexhaustible wriggling in the earth, immobile cold-veined organisms looming up, shivering in gusts of air, the prowling of the avid, the anguished and the amorous—and a pale amber star drifting in the solitudes of the firmament!

  Vamireh had constructed a temporary shelter between mossy blocks of stone, covered and sealed with thick beams of wood interlaced with lianas. The fortress was solid, and if any wild beast attempted to violate it, Vamireh would have the time to stab it mortally, through the interstices, with the point of his spear, which was anointed
with a subtle poison and sheathed in an ash-wood staff.

  About midnight, a scraping sound awoke the nomad and he looked out. Wolves were prowling near the shelter and a panther passed through the constellations of light and shadow. Meanwhile, raucous sighs rose up. Vamireh perceived the silhouette of a tiger, which was devouring an antelope that was still alive.

  “Elem!” he murmured.

  The ferocity of the night entered very gently into his soul. The word that he had pronounced was his companion’s name, which he had obtained during the midday halt, when he had pressed her with gesticulatory questions. This was the third night they had spent in the forest, without the nomad knowing whether or not he was being pursued. The flight had been harsh, the river full of treacheries and the forest of ambushes, but he had overcome all the obstacles. Now, its vicissitudes came back to mind, mingled with his companion’s name.

  “Elem! Vamireh is Elem’s master!”

  He contemplated her as she slept. A flow of pale moonlight through the cracks in the shelter interlaced with darkness on the maiden’s face. Vamireh quivered before the blurred profile, reconstructing the pale features. As they had fled, while he had struggled on her behalf and against her, and he had multiplied the things he had done to please her, she had become more precious to him. His growing tenderness had coincided with subtle pity, and the delicacy of sentiments hitherto unknown. Although he had decided stubbornly to press on to the end of his adventure, and wanted Elem regardless of what she wanted, in spite of any and all perils, he felt, by way of compensation, full of mercy and patience. Only the imminence of a danger, the fear of losing her or of dying, could move him to the brutality of a troglodyte.