Vamireh

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  Tholrog saw her, and was inflamed, his blows taking on a terrible velocity.

  The interval of that fair female gleam against the red of the massacre was brief. Several of them fell, skewered by lances or javelins; the invincible drive resumed, a troop of lake-dwellers dividing the mountain-dwellers forces into two remnants.

  It was the end, the disaster. Tholrog called to Irkwar. A moment went by; he called again.

  Suddenly, Eyrimah experienced the vertigo of death. Her race spoke, overwhelming her with emotion, and drew her into the mêlée too, a poor tiny creature desperately caught up in the cataclysm.

  Tholrog called Irkwar for the third time.

  There was the rumble of a landslide, interrupted by the roar of trumpets, and then by screams of horror and agony—and the giant advanced, throwing himself upon the lacustrians like an aurochs on a herd of zebus.

  At the clamor of trumpets, the fall of the basalt rock, the cries of agony and Irkwar’s impetuous charge, the men of the lakes became anxious.

  Already the giant was upon them, a reaper of death with inexhaustible muscles. All recoiled before his resplendent audacity. He symbolized the mountain, the terrors of storms, the hardness of porphyry, the depths of abysses. At his vast gesture, the cries of despair that went up from the stream-bed, the weakening of the dark-haired men, the male and female mountain-dwellers felt their power enlarged and increased.

  Tholrog succeeded in gathering a dozen men and launching them forward like an avalanche—and the victory was there to be won, in the terror of one side and the confidence of the other. The balance of morale shifted: superstition and foolish terror ran from the mountains to the lakes, with the sentiment that after the women, the rock-fall and the arrival of Irkwar, other unforeseen circumstances would follow—and the aggressive force that had previously surged up so terribly, retreated and descended, adding the effort of its flight to the effort of the besieged.

  Pell-mell, the lake-dwellers shoved their way down the slope, tumbling in the rout, massacred without difficulty, knocking down the weak themselves and trampling the wounded. Howling creatures, furious with terror, ran away through the blood or died beneath the shattering blows of clubs.

  Frantic, pursued without pause by Irkwar’s challenges and the long blasts of trumpets, 100 lake-dwellers escaped, scattering at hazard into the pathways, losing themselves in the unknown…

  From the height of the plateau, Tholrog contemplated his victory. His heart swelled with pride. In the gorge, there was a grim sacrifice of heads, torsos and limbs, a continuous flow of warm blood, a stale and nauseating reek of living flesh.

  They, at least, were hated individuals, of the abominable race that had vanquished, hunted and persecuted his own for 20 generations. On the plateau, however, randomly mingled with the round-heads, the dark hair, the thickset figures in fibrous tunics, were fair-haired warriors of the highlands, lying amid the blackening redness of blood and mantles of animal fur. Even more profoundly heart-rending, there were the cadavers of women, still young, the charms of their faces preserved in death.

  Tholrog leaned toward faces that he loved, toward mouths that would never speak again, wide-open eyes that could no longer see the firmament at which they were directed, and an unsoundable regret rose up within his barbaric spirit—but he thought, too, that it had been a glorious victory, that 400 lake-dwellers had paid for the death of 66 mountain-dwellers, and that, at such a price, the people of the lakes would not be able to resist the fair-haired tribes. That past had been defended with glory; the enemy would no longer dare to exert its force, taking far away the terror of the massacre.

  Tholrog also thought that, with so few men, it was necessary not to allow the pursuit to continue. His horn sounded the return.

  Gradually, they all came back. The chief counted 25 warriors. The tribe would not refuse reinforcements, when Tholrog informed them of the carnage of the men of the waters!

  IV. The Mountain

  Tholrog waited for reinforcements.

  Standing aside from the battlefield, where the blond warriors were finishing off the lacustrians and the last wounded mountain men were dying of poison or their wounds, he meditated, watching the warriors and the women come and go.

  As Eyrimah passed by, his heart swelled to the maximum—and she aroused the terrible grace of lust, which causes insects to die and large predators to tear one another apart. Among the corpses and the blood, the young woman’s grace overshadowed everything: her windswept blonde tresses, adorable throughout the ages; the delightful curve of her neck; the fine flame of her gaze; all of her captivating movements, like the undulations of birch-trees on a hillside.

  The young chief contemplated her in an immeasurable bliss. She seemed stronger than the mountains and the lakes, more penetrating than the sacred word of the elders, more graceful than the flowers of the solitary vales.

  He tried to talk to her. “You are brave, Eyrimah…the blood of the mountains is awake in you…”

  But she lowered her delicate lashes, hiding her eyes. “I haven’t learned to fight,” she said, evasively.

  “Eyrimah—do you prefer the mountain to the lakes?”

  The bright gaze was raised toward him, then lowered again—and the young barbarian trembled, but no word that was within him could have expressed the immense sensation of harmony, beauty and all-consuming sensuality that gripped him.

  Coldly, Eyrimah replied: “I ran away from the lakes!”

  “Your heart is with the people of the mountain?”

  “I ran away from the people of the lakes.”

  Her enigmatic reply and her attitude shocked Tholrog; when he said nothing more, she drew away. He was so emotional that he was quivering; a vague anger mingled with his love for the fugitive. He shook himself and marched off.

  He soon found himself close to Eyrimah again. She was not alone; Hogioé and Rob-Sen’s daughter were standing with her. Tholrog looked at the group somberly, and suddenly noticed that Eï-Mor was looking at him. He was the object of a gaze full of mystery, nostalgia and shadowy splendor.

  The anger in Tholrog’s soul disappeared. His gaze followed the foreign woman, the enigma of her gait, the infinite languor of her grace. Something unknown thrilled within him, in which he found an analogy with the large electrical clouds whose borders are so pale in the summer sky.

  The Sun was climbing rapidly. It was nearly midday when Tholrog saw his couriers coming back, accompanied by a man-of-hidden-things—a quasi-priest of the mountain-dwellers’ vague religion. He was clad in a bearskin longer than those of other men and his forehead was covered by a wolf’s-head.

  The man said: “Iordjolk is taken. Hsilbog is returning to Kiwasar. You will certainly be pursued. This is what Hsilbog says: since the best two routes are impossible for you, take the route over the glaciers and rejoin Kiwasar, or go on to the land of Ariès.”

  The man-of-hidden-things then explained that Rob-Sen, having been beaten, had returned unexpectedly to the plateau of Iordjolk and had taken it. Thus, one of the strongest positions in the mountains was in the hands of the lake-dwellers.

  Exasperated, Tholrog gathered his men and began the retreat, abandoning the lacustrian prisoner. After a few hundred meters, the route they had to follow was barred by a wide precipice. An enormous pine-tree had been laid across it. To prevent the enemy from crossing over, it was necessary to cast the tree down as soon as the fugitives had crossed the abyss.

  They had not yet detached the tree when they saw the lake-dwellers appear, not by means of the dry stream-bed but along a path that connected with the plateau of Iordjolk. The mountain men combined their forces in a supreme effort. The lacustrians were only a few paces away when the tree collapsed into the abyss, with a terrible noise.

  “Let the men of the waters pursue us!” cried Irkwar, ironically.

  Eï-Mor and Eyrimah recognized In-Kelg among the pursuers. Rob-Sen’s daughter reached out her arms, shouting to her brother. Eyrimah, pale and paral
yzed by emotion, sought the gaze of the young lake-dweller on the far side of the abyss. Tholrog saw that, and a grim anguish weighed upon his heart.

  At that moment, In-Kelg shouted: “Our guides will be able to pick up your trail!”

  “We’ll die at the moment when you pick up our trail!” shouted Tholrog. His terrible gaze went toward Eyrimah; the young woman lowered hers, without humility—with the insulting pride of love.

  Meanwhile, the scout Tahmen jeered. “Do your guides have the feet of ibex?”

  With a clamor of defiance, the mountain men drew away.

  They marched in the astonishing silence in which one can hear one’s own life: the flux of blood and the breath of the lungs. The route was harsh. It rose upwards, interrupted by excavations and obstacles, between two gully-walls, surmounted by chains of rocks; it was like a tear inflicted in the primal era, a persistent cut in the hard granite flesh. The lichens and mosses were sparse. They were in a dead and implacable environment, crystallized, infertile and severe, sealed with the trace of immemorial things, contemporary with the world’s origins.

  On the jagged edges of the rocks high above, however, the Sun traced a jewelry of light; patient, industrious and cunning life profited from narrow refuges, clinging on with a humble and ingenious energy: a white fir-tree standing above the void; a gentian sheltered in a clump of short grass; myrtles lost in a cleft; indefatigable brambles; the reddish tufts and varnished leaves of Rhododendrons; a poor stunted forget-me-not; adorable saxifrage.

  A timid ibex appeared, miraculously perched, and crossed an empty space with its huge bound, in which muscular strength competed with the prodigious surety of equilibrium. The exquisite animal lowered its large horns, savoring the liberated joy of overlooking the precipices, the vague animal poetry.

  The great vulture of the Alps, the golden lammergeyer with the pale collar, opened its ten-meter wingspan, soaring in quest of its charming victim, the chamois. Buzzards, crows and eagles ploughed long furrows while a few poor snowy finches fled.

  After an hour or so of marching, the way was blocked by a 60-meter-high wall. Seemingly insurmountable, it gradually revealed a vertical sequence of anfractuosities to which the mountain-dwellers’ industry had added rungs. The ascent proved to be relatively easy, except for the difficulty of hoisting up a wounded man, Gateln, who was inert and feverish, wrapped in an aurochs-skin.

  The gully came to an end thereafter; a circular space opened up in an amphitheater of needle-like peaks. There was a valley to begin with, then, limited by a frontal moraine, came the fan-like opening of a glacier. Threads of water silvered the valley in clefts. To the right of the moraine, a hole opened up in the rim of a gulf.

  The valley was rugged, sown with erratic blocks of stone. Amid the grim indolence of the stones, fir-trees breathed in the light, their pagodas of branches terminating in sword-points. Offspring of hard ground, they were in harmony with the harsh surroundings. The breeze spoke a stony language there, almost the same as on the crags. The rigid trunks and leaves distributed a keen and consoling scent, the strong balm of resin.

  Supernatural gleams filtered between the peaks; a pool seemed to be asleep in the depths; networks of snow illuminated shadowed corners. The rocks rose up like ancient beings, devoured by frost, heat and the invincible water. The wind murmured deep soft notes in long corridors; higher up, a clearing revealed pale mountains, linen robes extended over the heights, the taciturn splendor of glaciers and gorges.

  The man-of-hidden-things came to his companions and said: “The ice-giants have transported these stones; it is necessary to ask their permission to pass through them, for they know how to punish those who forget.” He took a javelin, whose point he sharpened, then threw it into the valley, howling. Grim-faced, with their arms folded, his companions looked at him fearfully, waiting for the giants to appear.

  Nothing appeared, however, but an elegant herd of chamois, mingled with slender fawns. The humans watched them moving up to inaccessible escarpments, losing themselves among the abysses—flying, so to speak, from pedestal to pedestal, and galloping along narrow ridges. Each light little fawn, a child of tempests conceived in the winter storms, accompanied its slender mother. Already far away, they saw one matron pause, with two twin fawns, on a ledge decorated with a single gentian. She turned her pretty horned head toward the company of humans.

  The man-of-hidden-things made a cross with two pikes. He brought out a little bag, from which he took some dead leaves. He threw ten leaves in all directions, and then howled ten times. Drawing a lump of rock crystal from his bosom, he caused a ray of sunlight to pass through it, projecting the marvelous colors of the rainbow in front of him. Then he intoned a mysterious plaint, and listened to the wind.

  “We may pass,” he said.

  The mountain-folk crossed the valley.

  Apart from trees and aromatic herbs, one might have thought it a desert. Invisible creatures were, however, keeping watch on the passage of the humans.

  A marmot sentinel, sitting on its backside like a minuscule bear, interrupted itself while gnawing a root that it was holding in its forepaws. With a whistle, it alerted its companions, scattered around their common domain. They all ran back to their lair, staying silently in the little dwelling, all their senses alert to any danger. A pale hare had fled. With its piercing eyes, an anxious lynx followed the troop from afar. An old solitary bear with poor eyesight but keen nostrils, shielded by a circle of erratic blocks of stone, breathed in the numerous enemy odors that were passing over its seigneurial territory.

  And other small animals, a discreet swarm of eyes, paws and ears, were disturbed by those who were passing by, but who did not perceive the numerous and secret life of the laborious valley.

  The glacier was soon close by, eaten into by a resplendent Sun. A rumor escaped from it, confused voices mingled with elements, a conflict of forces—and also, toward the left, a faint and graceful ringing sound, like crystalline music.

  “The giants are at work!” said the man-of-hidden-things.

  It is true that the glacier was at work. It was collaborating in the great work of the weather. Destroyer of the mountain, a breaker of stones, a former of springs and torrents, it transported, excavated, engraved and polished, participating in making fecund soil for the valleys. Its ice cleaved or splintered, its drops of water dragged debris away. It was its forerunner that had once carried the erratic blocks of stone to the valley where it now maintained its separate domain.

  The surface was melting, save for two or three pits of shadow; moraines were advancing, the largest stones reminiscent of verdant and flourishing islands, or oases sown with rustic grass and plants, others like heavy and somber reefs. Holes and wells were hollowed out by the Sun. The denser water continually descended into the depths, replaced at the surface by colder and lighter water. Some of the wells were pierced all the way through to the bottom, flowing through sub-glacial conduits—and it was the tumult of these flows that rustled, whimpered and sang.

  To the right, where the water flowed torrentially, a large glacial cavern opened up, beneath bridges of ice and pillars resplendent with blue-tinted light, the water bore diaphanous debris, stroked by iridescent blades. Here and there, a ray of sunlight illuminated a blaze of gems, hardened a needle, or projected a sash in the half-light like a sheaf of incandescent lances.

  It was a temple of solidified light, a temple of sapphires, colonnettes of lapis lazuli, capitals of crystal, into which refraction, here and there, cast rubies, amethysts, aquamarines, emeralds, topazes and carbuncles. Minuscule springs emerged everywhere, like singing worms, a thousand tortuous fountains that woke up in the sunlight and were paralyzed by night, gentle devourers of rocks and fecundators of tiny valleys.

  Mounted on a crest of the frontal moraine, Tahmen and Irkwar explained that the glacier was merely a branch of a sea of ice. For the moment, it would suffice to cross a few hundred meters along a lateral moraine; they would then be able to walk al
ong a ledge 2000 meters long, go back down on to the ice, climb over the rock and go across a section of the great glacier to rest in the cave of Môh.

  The fugitives ventured on to the ice. The Sun did not reach the moraine along which they were passing; the ice there was solid. Sometimes it was necessary for them to traverse labyrinths or needles of layered ice, marvelously beautiful and bleak. Crevasses were rare, easy to go around.

  Irkwar marched in the lead, on the lookout for ambushes, the treason of hidden abysses, holding the end of a long and solid braided rope, also held by those who followed him.

  A gulf opened up, of vertiginous depth; it extended for a long distance, connecting with other, equally perilous crevasses. There being no possibility of a detour, Irkwar located a bridge of compacted snow and ventured forth upon it. There was a great and solemn silence—but the colossus slowly made his way across the dangerous passage, and then, with the aid of the rope stretched from one side to the other like a rail, the women also passed over. Only Rob-Sen’s daughter manifested any fear, but she was able to overcome it. The most difficult thing was to slide Gateln across, lying on his aurochs-skin. They succeeded, however; the frail bridge over the abyss suffered no damage from the weight of all those people.

  They arrived without further incident on the rock indicated by Irkwar. A ledge alternated thereon with narrow corridors. They could only march in single file; the abyss called to them with an insistent voice, vertigo attracting the mind like a whirlpool around a boat. From the depths of the shadows, the void seemed to be demanding its victim.

  Rob-Sen’s daughter looked away, trembling, fixing her eyes on the granite wall. They all walked silently. There was no sound, save for the echoing fall of pebbles, and Gateln’s occasional plaints.