At what depth the region lay to which the sleeper found himself transported, he was never able to ascertain, having had neither the sensation of departure nor of travelling. Or perhaps he had forgotten the passage from exterior life to that one. Already, though, the space had become, in one sense, excessively limited. That habitable world was all breadth, like the galleries that miners hollow out in coal, whose height is measured by that of a man. But roads, in places, headed toward distant dwellings, forming crushed crossroads. Here and there, on the walls, metal lamps were fixed, whose indistinct light illuminated a few meters of the road. And from black cavities in the walls, whose darker patches could be vaguely made out, murmurous speech emerged, as if the people of that realm were hidden in houses or feat of a dubious daylight. Those houses had to be like tombs, and the life led therein, bleak and dismal as it undoubtedly is beneath the sunlit surface, that of the interred dead.
At any rate, the dreamer experienced, as soon as he took his first steps, a singular impression of deliverance and security. His diurnal dreads were abolished, and the emotion that he felt, having arrived in this unusual situation, had nothing in common with his habitual haunting. Immured in a catacomb vaster and more definitive than the hypogea of Egypt, he might be apprehensive of everything, but he no longer had any fear of falling, having the ground above him. And the protective earth surrounded him solidly—except that sometimes, raising his head in certain passages, he was surprised and disturbed, as if by an inverse vertigo. Large gaping openings, as if carved by blows of a pick-axe or produced by an explosive charge, appeared in the ceiling of the gallery. Given their irregular form, one might have thought of them as abandoned inverted quarries. They plunged upwards through the black rock for several meters, but had no exits, and one sensed all the thickness of the ground weighing down upon them.
A funereal bird, flying toward that illusion of space, fell back after three wingbeats, having touched the depths of the hollow. They were doubtless the remains and marks of puerile attempts to reach the Beyond, empty monuments to Icaruses who had tried in vain to flee. The sole remaining results of these efforts were the heaps of debris on the floor of these passages, needlessly obstructing the route.
But the road became easier as he became accustomed to it. It possessed an insensible slope, and he understood that, instead of a regular circumference, the discovered land must follow a spiral toward the nucleus. The law of progress was verified in this world as in others. Those descended from the exterior experienced a greater lightness at every step, the slow and continual realization of equilibrium, and ought to walk toward the declining horizon as towards a deliverance from imperious gravity. Always getting closer, they were circling their ideal. What did it matter if the road became narrower with distance and they had to bow their heads to cross the threshold of mystery? They would soon stand up again, in the unreal country, with their freedom from the weighty laws of the exterior world complete.
His attention was attracted as he went by lights other than those of lamps, moving around in the depths of the darkness. One might have taken them for hand-held torches. The inhabitants of the subterranean region were doubtless running away, alarmed by his approach, as people would be at the sight of a celestial monster descended to our world. No more noises could be heard behind the walls, save for that of hushed breathing. The audacity of the explorer did not go so far as to lean his head or extend his arm through the black openings of the windows. What shadowy hand might have reached out to seize his own?
But he went on, insensible to the threat of such an adventure—or, rather, so profoundly lunged in an ocean of fear that all his senses were submerged by it. At crossroads, he perceived altars hollowed out in the walls, around which more lamps burned. His curiosity was solicited by the form of the idols, but the cavities were sealed by close-knit grilles, and the depths of the retreats seemed too distant for anyone to be able to make out what was there. His eyes were barely caressed by a vague glint of gold on the folds of some vestment. He did not know, and never found out subsequently, what Hecate these infernal people worshipped.
He was undoubtedly going through a city. Other familiar images denounced the presence of a human race. Partly burned logs, beside a boundary-marker, revealed a recent fire. Besides, sad coronets of flowers posed on silent thresholds allowed the supposition of a lugubrious celebration, or perhaps marked the door of some tomb within the tomb.
And there was the sensation of walking more rapidly at every step. The slope had increased and the ground was falling away—without, however, giving any other impression than that of still being equally safe.
But the silence was disturbed. The traveler perceived a sort of murmur issuing from a distant gallery. He cocked an ear. Was he about to hear the voices and know the language of the dead at last? The noise gradually increased. A cry went up, which became several. The darkness was tinted with a diffuse light. And as the road opened into another, broader one, the seer, recoiling instinctively, barely had time to take refuge in a shadowy corner. A crowd was moving past him, so close that he could have touched their garments. By the light of a hundred torches, uttering moans, a disorderly troop of lugubrious men and women, the inhabitants of the black region, went by.
There were all those that a fatal attraction, or some intolerable despair, had precipitated into death. There were all those who had fallen from houses, towers, tall trees or the tops of sea-cliffs. Old men and children, supported on crutches, let their twisted limbs hang down. With a sinister pride, the heroes of the air went by, vain Titans rejected by the heavens. Wretches with broken spines, folded in two, had the ridiculous attitude of disjointed puppets. There were all those who, wandering through the countryside on moonless nights, had not seen the black holes open before their feet and had suddenly stepped into the void. Heads were swathed in bandages through which blood had oozed in large stains—for it is on the head that the unfortunate fall, and a man summoned by the abyss turns over to touch the earth in accordance with his center of gravity.
As the funeral procession unwound, terrified faces were visible in the light of the flickering torches. Thin and convulsive lips retained the heroism of the supreme resolution. Sad mothers passed by, their hair sparse, clutching tatters of bruised flesh to their hearts: they children with whom they had leapt from the top of the walls on the day that a city was captured, after having hidden them, to conceal the sight of death from them, in the folds of their cloaks. And all the madmen, all the inventors, all the Icaruses, vain challengers of vertigo, went along the corridor toward the objective toward which they had launches their first prodigious leaps. And the fearful canticle that rose up from the crowd was compounded out of every single scream, howl of joy or wail of distress uttered by each of them as they fell.
The sleeper uttered a cry of anguish himself, then—which woke him up, and whose prolongation he heard in the darkness, even after having emerged from the tragic shadows of sleep. The vibrant sensation perpetuated itself. He heaved an ample and profound sigh, and found himself back in his bed, seeing once more amid the vague flowers of the tapestry, in the glimmer of the night-light, arms and crippled bodies, heads burst open like ripe pomegranates. Then his fever calmed down. An immense lassitude overwhelmed him—and gradually, he fell back into unconsciousness, and the dream.
It was a different vision.
It seemed to him that he was sitting in the middle of a high-ceilinged room, whose walls were as white as chalk. There was no trace of any other furniture than the chair he was occupying. As the light penetrated broadly through an opening in the wall in front of him, he conjectured that he was on the uppermost floor. It had to be a house similar to those one finds in the centers of populous cities, with a stone ledge running along the façade, and window-panes in the wall that rose up, mansard-fashion, toward the roof And the winter months had surely come, for the light that designed a pale square on the floor was descending from the cold Moon. In spite of the silence and the solitude, the
seer knew that, all around him, other lives were hidden behind the facades, in the shadow of bleak chimneys, near balconies with iron bars.
How long had he been there, and for what purpose? He did not know, as one does not know, in dreams, the most logical things, and does not even wonder. But his heart was heavy and his soul was tormented by an indefinable anxiety. The distant corners of the room were lost in obscurity; all the tragic and future interest of the situation was concentrated in the middle, in the square of light in which the chair was set. And on the other side of the narrow street, separated from him by the abyss, he saw a window in the house opposite that appeared to be the mirror image of the one placed in front of him.
Suddenly, the window opposite opened, and a form appeared. It was a woman dressed in black. The folds of her dress descended harmoniously to the floor. She must have been beautiful, but the charm of her face had vanished. Nothing was legible in her features but an expression of slight anxiety and solemn resolution. Her lips moved, as if to pronounce a few mysterious formulae in a low voice. She stood up straight on the façade, her eyes raised and lost, her feet level with the window. Then she opened her arms crucifix-fashion, leaned forward in a regular curve, and let herself fall.
The seer started in alarm and, reproaching himself for his nonchalant stupor, ran to the door and downstairs. Never had steps seemed so numerous. He had the impression of passing an infinite number of floors. Finally, he was on the tiles of the ground floor, but could not get out. The corridor was crowded with all the inhabitants of the house, who had already come down, and the threshold as obstructed by a pack of curiosity-seekers, who had the same somber and ecstatic expression. Exclamations and satisfied sighs were audible on all sides. The sound of ringing bells was audible in the distance, which might as easily have been a festival carillon as a knell. It was permissible to conjecture, judging by the conversations, that a noble and ritual act had just been accomplished.
The witness of this strange scene finally succeeded in pushing his way through the groups, and when the crowd had dispersed somewhat, the view of the street revealed forms in pious attitudes, all heading in the same direction. They seemed to be following a cortege whose prayers could still be heard, borne by gusts of wind, and the torches of which were snaking away into the darkness. A few meters away, veiled women, tearing off their veils, were collecting the blood from a large pool that was reddening the ground, with respectful gestures.
And the sleeper finally woke completely, upset by the images that had been set before his eyes.
He searched for a logical connection between the two scenes that had appeared. Was not the second, by virtue of a mysterious inversion, the prelude and antecedent of the other? That woman had adored vertigo, and had doubtless already joined the lugubrious procession of the interior world. She was marching, as her shade, toward the gravity-less center.
And the idea came to him of a future religion, with simple and terrible ceremonies. Science has followed religion. Why not suppose, on the contrary, a religion born from science? Has the theory of universal attraction not beauty enough to be deified, while waiting for a new progress of human thought to overturn the theory and find another formula for the universe? In the meantime, might it not count its martyrs and its fanatics? And doubtless, one day, women will be seen, adorned for sacrifice, precipitated by the hands of priests, from the height of temples and towers, toward the subterranean Moloch.
Is not death divine, and is it not the only way to go toward God? It is from death that life is born, in a perpetual exchange. The bloodstream and a flame are tireless in their movement. The creative power destroys forms and renews them; it separates in order to reunite. It is necessary to draw away from the heart of the world incessantly, in order to return thereto.
Sunlight came into the room, dispersing nocturnal fears. Tiburce remained laying there, his head on his pillow. A ray of light fell upon a red wall-hanging facing the bed, and brought out the color. He remembered the lugubrious procession and the pool of blood in front of the house of death.
And he knew that life is red.
Fragment of a Tale of the Future
It was one of those visions that it is necessary to write down as soon as one emerges from a dream, at the risk of being unable to recover, on re-reading the story, anything but unintelligible babble.
Certain phrases, in sleep, seem admirable and definitive. We are in haste to recover our entire consciousness in order to note down those absolute expressions—but as we emerge on to the surface of the sea of dreams, into the atmosphere of normality, the phrase with such a clear and beautiful meaning is transformed, without any of its syllables changing, into a sequence of incoherent words whose ensemble is nothing but absurdity. It remains to know at which moment we are right. But past misfortune ought not to deflect us from that concern, for it is not always thus, in particular when it is a matter of a dream of some importance. Dreams were prophetic in Antiquity. They still are today. Once the harvest is in, one still has to separate and throw away the weeds. In the net that the fisherman brings up from the depths of mysterious abysses, in the midst of algae and debris, shines a beautiful fish with golden scales.
My mind was subject at that moment to the influence of some reading. On the previous days, I had plunged with ardor and conviction into the study of paleontology. I have always had a penchant for that science; it is poetic. There is nothing certain and positive in it; it is an ingenious creation.
It seems that, in my sleep, I ought to have reviewed herds of plesiosaurs grazing in the shades of giant ferns, or a prehistoric man armed with a heavy club battling a cave-bear—but it was the opposite phenomenon that was manifest. My imagination, doubtless to rest from its repeated voyages into the past, transported me into the future.
I found myself living in the midst of a distant humankind, in an era that it is impossible to specify. An indefinable presentiment, however, informed me that the epoch in question could not be less distant from ours than a thousand times a thousand years. It was one of those absurd notions that one perceives in dreams, and which one accepts without thinking of disputing them.
I gave no more thought to wondering how I had been introduced into that strange new world. It happened without any usual or familiar delay, and I doubtless passed days, months, years among those future humans.
The houses where they spent their lives did not appear to me much different from those of the present day. I only noticed an exclusive predominance of curved lines; one searched in vain to find a corner. Those with walls were rounded. According to what I was able to understand of scientific principles, all geometry stemmed from the circle, the ellipse and analogous figures. It was absolutely impossible, in the course of my conversations with the scientists, to give them the slightest idea of the triangle. Still less was I understood when I tried to propose the religious formula of the same concept, with the initial point, the father, from which one can only trace one line to arrive at the opposite point, the unique son, and the last, which one can attain by departing from either one: the third element of the trinity—which, in our apostolic symbol, proceeds from the father and the son. For they had no longer had any idea of religion. I could only make them understand the term in the etymological sense, that of bondage, and very imperfectly at that. One single word, already archaic, represented all analogous concepts in their language: chain, constraint, hindrance, shackle, narrow-mindedness. Their vocabulary, from certain points of view, was very restricted.
Even the gestures of these people had something circular about them. Their manners were courteous and their speech unctuous. The animal is hidden infinitely better in them than in us. In addition, they speak very little. The long habit of living enables them to understand one another by implication.
The form of their bodies is little different from the ancient—or, rather, it is the same form perfected. The eyes, nose and mouth, ideal in their design, are disposed as they are today. There is only one detail, albeit a ve
ry important one, in the ensemble of the face that is in absolute contradiction to the present arrangement. To get some idea of it, imagine, for example the mouth in the place where our eyes are, or something similar. It’s forbidden for me to say more. A sentiment analogous, in its imperious character, to what we presently call modesty, although it is completely different, absolutely prohibits making the slightest allusion to that physical disposition. And I would be too afraid, if I broke the sacred silence, of finding myself once again in the midst of that future humankind in a dream, and being subject to the horrors of the most terrible death, in expiation of the unforgivable sin.
However, I appeared, in spite of my rapid adaptation, to be something of a foreigner, and a foreigner of distinction. There was no celebration that was not put on for me. I was present at numerous ceremonial dinners. In this respect I fear that my description my description lacks originality, but our dreams, even the strangest, borrow their elements from terrestrial experience, and I must have remembered the attempts made in our day to reduce nourishment to its minimum volume. Scientists have thought that the substantial elements might be isolated and presented in a chemical form. Nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen are assimilable other than in cumbersome compounds.
The progress still has not been realized in our day that will permit a month’s rations for a campaigning army to be carried in a small box. The problem is complicated by the fact that it is insufficient to nourish the body, but still necessary to furnish a mass sufficient to the muscular and other work of the digestive organs, until the organs have been modified by adaptation in the desired direction. It is not astonishing, however, that in my dream I saw meals served on minuscule saucers, in which the most redoubtable appetite was satisfied by a pill the size of a small pea.
Snobbery, moreover, had not lost all its influence. Certain guests, to give proof of refined habits, affected to nourish themselves on ridiculously small pills. I saw some of them searching their plates for invisible aliments with the tip of a needle, under a microscope. The interest afforded to them seemed to me to be analogous to the esteem in which we hold expert gourmets.
The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait Page 6