Vamireh

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  It was nearly three hours after noon when Gateln asked to rest. His voice was weak, his gaze wretched, his lips ashen. They were on a platform; the wall of basalt that cut off their view was cleft there by an enormous crevasse; they now had an abyss to the right and to the left, but the right-hand abyss was only a narrow gulf, exceedingly bleak and dark. The left-hand abyss opened on a miraculous dream of light and vastness. Gateln asked to be taken closer to it.

  His mountain fatherland entered his pale eyes, all the way to his pain-racked soul: the entire country, plunging down and rising up again, pitted and pierced, jagged, sterile and fecund, pale and green, dull and silvery. The entire mountain, a taciturn world in which eternity seemed to be afloat, which devoured the minute, a gnawed skeleton whose tooth-marks and cracks were witnesses to destruction—and Gateln was moved by melancholy.

  The breath of death stirred up his memories. He reviewed his life, fearfully. His life, alas, was there! It was in those great plateaus and massifs, the gorges, the peaks, the precipices, the pasturelands reminiscent of glaucous gems. His life was in those caves and crenellations; it soared between the needles of granite, the flanks of basalt, the cupolas, the pillars of gneiss or porphyry, the ravines, gentle or full of sterile rockslides, the jaws descending on the hillocks, the craters in which remained the lava of ancient fires, the pyramids and the cones standing like sentinels of eternity. And his life had climbed the argentine glaciers, the escarpments planted with black forests, the adorable gorges where fresh waters chattered.

  With the immense fear of a simple soul, Gateln sensed that he was about to leave these things behind, that he would never see the plants that had so often opened the round of the seasons for him again. The huge chestnut, devoured by its offspring; the fir-tree, conqueror of the oak; side by side with the beech, hemmed with all the delicacies of its foliage; the larch of the highest forests of all; and the arolla pine, the magnificent battler of tempests, with its somber pride, which makes its slow and invincible sap in the cold where the fir is no more than a stunted bush…

  And while his moribund eyes gazed at the layered forests, Gateln remembered the mosses in which one buries oneself as if in fresh snow; the meadowsweet in the woods; the golden showers of the Laburnum and the mountain-rose, adorably ephemeral; the tremulous Campanula; the proud and strong Rhododendron, and the rambling Anemone, which knows how to climb slopes and overturn obstacles. And the poor barbarian trembled with the desire that his life might not be over, and an infinite poetry—the poetry of children and animals—sang the sweetness of these things within him—and still his eyes were searching, alternately bleak and shining.

  While his eyes shone, and his blood recovered a little of its violence, he reviewed rapid days and battles, and the pursuit of the maid who had become his wife over the fresh grass and around the thickets; he savored his mother’s love and his father’s strength. While his eyes became dull, and weakness descended upon his heart, he reviewed dawns and days and violet nights, distantly.

  “Gateln has no more strength!” he murmured.

  No, he had no more strength—and yet he could still see the vague lakes, the white threads of torrents, the resplendent fall of cascades. Above him, a few scattered clouds drifted, clouds soaring like swans, suspended like sheets of fabric, like the fleeces of goats, or so light and so diaphanous that it seemed that the breath of a child might carry them away.

  Gateln was thirsty. He asked for water—the icy water that condenses on the rocks. There was none at this height, but they were able to melt a few pieces of ice for him. He drank avidly, then said, bitterly: “I can’t see the villages any more.”

  Eyrimah looked at him with pity; many of them were moved by their companion’s plight.

  Suddenly, the man-of-hidden-things pushed everyone aside. “Death is mighty,” he cried, “but one may sometimes chase her away!”

  Armed with an axe and a javelin, he began leaping around the dying man making horrible noises. His axe whirled, and his lance stabbed at the void. He proffered objurgations, and then resounding threats, in mysterious, rhythmic syllables, terminated by sharp cries. Gateln suffered the racket patiently; a hope appeared in his gaze, as indecisive as the first thin line of the crescent moon emerging from the darkness.

  The man-of-hidden-things continued thus for several minutes, amid the eager expectation of the mountain-folk. Finally stopping, he brandished the axe around Gateln’s hairy head, and stared into the wounded man’s eyes. “She is strong!” he said. “Let the warriors join in with me!”

  A howling chorus had just begun, when Gateln sat up. “Look down there!” he murmured, in terror.

  Everyone looked.

  It was a fateful omen. A frail young chamois was standing on a narrow outcrop of rock. A great Alpine vulture was circling around it, moving back and forth, rapidly beating its vast wings, which bore it smoothly through the ether. The delicate quadruped, panting with anguish, raised its horns, facing up to the powerful bandit—and the carnivorous beast, not daring to swoop down upon its victim as yet, frightened it with its flapping wings and its bleak gaze.

  This was after a long pursuit, in which the chamois, fleeing from peak to peak, had ended up on this frail haven on the edge of the void. Now the final battle had come, and the lamentable defense. In the moments of respite when the vulture regained its momentum, the chamois searched for a way out; it felt the rock, lifted its head. There was nothing accessible above it, even given its flying leap. If it attempted a descent via the imperceptible footholds by means of which it had climbed up, a single thrust of the lammergeyer’s wing would have knocked it down.

  The bird came back swiftly, screeching, wearying and paralyzing its charming prey.

  “Gateln is the chamois!” murmured the wounded man. “Death is coming like the great vulture.”

  Suddenly, the vulture made up its mind. Taking to the field with a war-cry, it fell upon the chamois, struck it with its wing and beak, and tipped it into the void. The mountain-dwellers watched the antelope tumble into the depths, while the bird, wings half-furled, followed it with a murderous screech.

  Gateln lowered his eyelids then, resigned. Like the poor chamois, he sank into the gulf. His heart would not race again, nor his eyes light up. Everything within him diminished and descended gently. He still had the strength to say: “Gateln has fought well!”

  “The mountain will know it!” Tholrog replied.

  Gateln went to join all those who, for hundreds of thousands of years, had lived and disappeared. His companions contemplated him, going to sleep as they would one day, with a beauty as cold as the winter sky—and Gateln, lying in a hollow in the rock, waited for the carrion-eating beasts to come and take him, to remake his life within themselves.

  V. The Storm

  They continued their march. It became increasingly difficult: all precipices, crags and vertiginous slopes. They passed through gorges over which vaults of ice were suspended, in which a shout might provoke an avalanche. They moved above the void on ledges so narrow that they could scarcely put both feet on them; then, extended leather ropes served as a hand-rail for the women and those enfevered by some injury.

  The vegetation was even more stunted and plaintive, save for distant glimpses of a few meager fir-trees, crushed by the endless struggle, stocky larches twisted by effort or glorious arolla pines, proud and durable, and sometimes a small twinflower or a little sparse grass. A few raucous birds or furtive ibex passed by.

  Then the desert resumed, pale and crystalline: the wintry cold and the beautiful silence; the ever present peril, with a strange tremulous sensuality. In the distance, mists formed—clouds on the summits. All the symptoms of wind and sky promised snow for the evening; it must already be falling lower down.

  Tholrog kept close to his sisters, watching over Eyrimah and Eï-Mor. He protected them at terrible moments. He encouraged them with a protective severity. Eyrimah remained silent and reserved, with an inward gaze that irritated the young
man. Eï-Mor was afraid, meekly obedient, replying softly. At brief halts, her face was raised anxiously toward her master, and the splendid melancholy of her eyes spoke of astonishment and supplication.

  There were strange conflicts within her. In this perilous ascent with the enemies of her race, she experienced, in truth, apprehension, regret and fatigue, but she also found therein a dreamlike joy and a sentiment of the marvelous. Then, Tholrog hardly frightened her at all. She could not help looking at him at times when the route was easier, admiring his pale skin and the blue clarity of his eyes—and the sentiment of the unknown and unexpected refreshed every fiber of her being, so young, enchanting the adventure.

  Sometimes, Tholrog spoke to the young women. “We can’t rest before nightfall,” he said. “We need to be sufficiently far away that your people can’t overtake us during the night.”

  They understood the necessity of the flight. Vigorous beneath her apparent languor—and if not skillful, at least resistant—Rob-Sen’s daughter was resigned to it. She was astonished that the chief thought it necessary to explain himself to his captive. When Tholrog spoke, Eyrimah drew closer to Dithèv and Hogioé; she always experienced a mixture of inclination, admiration and terror in his presence.

  There was an accident two hours after the death of Gateln. The fugitives, rounding a bend in a passage, found themselves confronted with a frozen waterfall. On a steep slope, the ice formed a phantasmagoric chaos of truncated pyramids, twisted needles and blocks in the process of pulverization, down which masses of ice rolled at intervals, making an immense racket, in which the splendor and prodigious beauty of billions of facets and ridges was intermingled with the horror of the thunderous cataclysm of crevasses in formation and crumbling masses.

  Leaning over this hectic solitude, the mountain-dwellers were intoxicated by the fury of the inanimate. One of them descended a little way, in spite of the warnings of his companions, and his foot suddenly slipped. He tumbled down to the bottom of the frightful slope. Scarcely had he got there, and his cry of fright had risen up from the depths, when a block of ice crushed him. His blood sprang forth in a red splash, his crushed flesh coloring the prismatic gleams with blue gems.

  That death made the march even more somber. Eï-Mor, in particular, was in despair; she thought she was destined to die in the glacial desert of the mountains. Eyrimah felt scarcely more reassured, and the past that had been so hard was transformed by the deceptive grace of memory: oh, the warm lakes, the transparent mornings in which the lake sang the song of life, full of beautiful bright fish; the sounds of stone being carved, grain being milled; running through the grass or among the young foliage; the work of pottery, spinning, weaving, sitting outside the huts on the edge of the pilings…

  The storm advanced in great clouds over the glaciers and the peaks. The birds of prey had descended to their eyries. The immense vultures had ceased to watch for chamois. A terrible penumbra limited the view.

  Irkwar, Tholrog and Tahmren attempted to accelerate the fugitives’ march. They were approaching a sea of ice.

  First, there was a wild torrent between two smooth rows of needles and slopes, in which all the furies of the waters seemed to be rushing in silence. An impetuous surge advanced in a fantastic light, a sublime wrath of waves and foam—but it was only a representation of movement, all threat and swollen precipitation, advertising peril and power, but all was motionless between the high banks, walls of quicksilver, with great ruffs made for the collars of giants, blocks leaning over the abyss, ice-bridges astride the frightful walls of ice. And the silence was so prodigious that they all felt oppressed, solemnized, and they were all silent in the formidable peace of the landscape.

  They were able to move alongside the river of ice for a while longer; then, as it broadened out, they either had to risk themselves on the surface, full of pitfalls and treacherous points or remain on an inhospitably narrow and stunted platform of rock.

  At that moment, the storm descended in the vicinity.

  Tholrog and Irkwar conferred with the warriors. Irkwar, highly-ranked among the hardiest explorers of the summits, knew the configuration of the heights and the glaciers better than anyone, and the perils of storms, avalanches and abysses.

  “We can’t stay here; the night would freeze us. We have to reach the caves of Môh before nightfall. Tahmen and I will guide you. We need to walk 2000 meters over the ice, then take a path through the rocks.”

  They were obliged to yield to his arguments and to set forth across the sea of ice covered with needles, peaks, ice-bridges, frozen waves and solid surf, traversing crevasses and labyrinths. To make things worse, the storm had reached them.

  Rapid clouds descended; it seemed that the sky was absorbing the Earth. Howling winds spread out from all the mountains. The keen blades of the wind cut large fractions out of the clouds. There were silences, then terrible efforts, forces unleashed; the sky whirled above the peaks. The pale zenith displayed all the realms of gray and blue; it descended further. Subtle white flowers flowed within it, sometimes sown with furious gestures by squalls, sometimes arranged in bright bouquets. They stopped, and they reversed direction. Their finite delicacy, their network of minuscule petals, spanned the entire horizon.

  Suddenly, the crisis arrived; the wind and the snow mounted a charge. In a sinister dusk, Tholrog and his companions were climbing the side of a glacier, with no shelter. All the rocks were smooth, eroded by the wind. The crevasse multiplied, increasingly perfidious, hidden by heaps of white snow, continually threatening to swallow the humans.

  Irkwar and the lightly-built Tahmen, marvelous guides in a storm—the one by virtue of his lucid strength and cheerfulness in the cold, the other by virtue of the subtlety of his movements—warned them of traps, throwing out lifelines. Several times, for want of ice-bridges, they had to carve out steps in the walls of crevasses, descending into the abyss and climbing out again.

  Tholrog, bringing up the rear, protected the women. They were marching courageously, but Rob-Sen’s daughter was tiring somewhat, and often slipped, having difficulty keeping her balance on her tiny feet. Eyrimah had recovered the atavistic energies of a mountain-dweller; she moved forward, oblivious in the difficult but dreamlike struggle, excited by the freshness of the gusting wind.

  The disorder increased. Tumultuous masses of air rushed upon them and collided with them; clusters of snowflakes glided like packs of white bears; the rocks were reminiscent of motionless livid aurochs; the great glacier sometimes resembled a desolate plain and sometimes a sea whose successive waves were breaking into dazzling foam—and over all of it, howling, roaring, trumpeting, mysterious whistling sounds and wild screams.

  “Keep going!” cried Tholrog. “Another 2000 meters and we’ll find refuge…”

  Suddenly, in a blinding squall, he saw Rob-Sen’s daughter slip and roll toward a gaping crevasse. He hurled himself forward, trying to grab her, but she rolled further; they both thought that she was doomed.

  On the very edge of the gulf, however, the young man caught hold of the young woman. With one hand he grabbed hold of a block of ice; with the other, he held on to the brown-haired girl. Through the blizzard he could make out her dilated eyes, the terror in her pale face; a warm blast of energy shot through him; he hung on desperately—but his hand slipped on the ice. In his turn, he began a slow, inexorable descent. He thought that he was about to perish, but even so, he did not let go of the maid; their ardent gazes met, courage in the one, anguish in the other…

  Then a hand fell upon Tholrog, and a rope was knotted around his feet. Several mountain men were holding on to it. Tholrog was safe, and he drew the young lake-dweller toward him with both hands.

  Eventually, she was beside him, her youthful form disposed with an abandoned flexibility, her eyes terrified. The wind flung her hair around Tholrog’s neck. He shivered, and saw depths more profound than any peril appear in the pale tempest. Still breathless, leaning against him, she had never been so frightened or so
astonished; she could not understand why the enemy chief had risked his life for her.

  Soon on his feet again, he set his companion down, sustaining her; all the howls of the storm could not abolish the sensation of the soft and delightful roundness of her figure.

  The march became almost impracticable. At every step they saw men and women sink into the snow; a few stumbled, remaining buried for some time—but it was extremely dangerous to stay close to rocks; landslides and small avalanches threatened their lives there.

  Irkwar, in his colossal splendor, enjoying the storm, was the chief here rather than Tholrog. His stature, his voice and the easy gestures with which he picked Tahmen up when the latter sank into snowdrifts, sustained everyone. He seemed to be the muscular sovereign of the mountains, his legs untiring and his blood red, his lungs made for frost and powerful respiration. Even Tahmen, so slender and agile, lost his sense of direction in that conflict and racket in the funereal dusk. Irkwar’s strength and intelligence was redoubled, his instinct, orientation and divination miraculous. He avoided crevasses and recognized practicable routes, never losing the direction of the cave of Môh.

  The slope began to climb more steeply. They went into an embranchment of glaciers, marching once again between two embankments. It was continually necessary to hollow out a route through snow accumulated on platforms. They were slowed down by a factor of ten. Suddenly, the wind blasted directly into the gorge, and frightful masses of snow came with it.

  “All together!” cried the colossus.

  They came together, huddling against one another; the avalanche arrived, a torrent of snow. Packed into a niche, the troop could not do anything but await the cataclysm. For an instant, the torrent flowed, and passed on. Not one of them escaped being buried. In the place where 30 vigorous individuals were standing, there was nothing any longer but a white surface stirred by the eddies of the storm: potent nature, the triumphant voice of the elements, the clouds opening over the peaks, the marvelous conflict of forces…