Chalet in the Sky

by Albert Robida

  Monsieur Cabrol pushed Melanie forward. The train was about to leave. It left, moving in a delightful air-current.

  Four exclamations rang out: “What about Phanor?”

  They had forgotten Phanor—but a joyful barking resounded in the foremost cabin; it was Phanor replying. Also a sports fan, he had got aboard before his masters, and, being installed in the front cabin, was watching the countryside, almost on the back of the driver, without paying any heed to his protests.

  Anyway, there was not enough time to get annoyed; the journey only lasted three minutes. They left; they arrived.

  At first sight, Andoche and Moderan found the sports ground bizarrely designed—very large, to be sure, as was appropriate, but all in gently undulations, covered with thick soft grass, a veritable vegetal fleece, which was knee-high almost everywhere.

  There were a few small stalls—almost tents—here and there and, in the center, a large, perfectly oval construction: a little two-meter wall surmounted by ten meters of glass, forming a brilliant ring, without any kind of partition or framework.

  “It’s in there—let’s go,” said Andoche.

  Melanie took Phanor in her arms and hid him under her mantle. “I won’t be forced to take part in exercises?” she said, a little anxious.

  “No, no—me neither,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “My favorite sport is the rocking chair.”

  “Exactly!” said Andoche. “They have them here, as you see…”

  On the inside, the construction formed a vast open air semicircle, whose center was marked by a slender tower like a minaret, terminating in a balcony bearing a bizarre apparatus, whose wheels obviously allowed it to rotate in every sense.

  On the ground, all around the minaret, rows of rocking chairs were aligned, occupied by a noisy crowd, their backs turned to the tower.

  “Let’s sit down to get a better view,” said Monsieur Cabrol. making the chairs rock while waiting for the other sports.

  They had only been sitting down for five minutes when the blast of a whistle pierced their ears. On top of the tower, a phono loudspeaker announced: “Winter sports in Savoy!”

  Cabrol and his nephews looked at one another in alarm.

  Abruptly, the great circular glass wall, dull and colorless until then, went white—lighting up, so to speak—and formed around the lined-up sportsmen an immense horizon of immaculate snow, with steep slopes, opening over blue-tinted gulfs, and mountain ridges between which glaciers poured forth—and behind the glaciers, peaks projected their white needles into a sky almost as blue as the one suspended a little while before over the date-palms and cacti of the Archipelago.

  “I haven’t brought a coat—I’m afraid of getting cold,” the housekeeper said to Monsieur Cabrol.

  Suddenly, on one of the snowy plateaux, something appeared in the distance: little dots moving and growing in size very rapidly. Leaning forward, arms folded or raised in the air, cutting through the snow with their skis, they flew over the slopes, or plunged into the abysses.

  Behind them, in every direction, other amateurs surged forth, gliding, whirling, tumbling, plunging thigh-deep into thick layers of snow, and luge-riders lying on their little sleds were running, always head-first, between the legs of the skiers; toboggans and bobsleighs followed, making up a multicolored, fluttering swarm amid all that white.

  The Cabrol family missed none of the ups and down of the session; no one around them said very much, which permitted the laughter and shouts of the skiers to be heard, and even the sound of crashes, and the quarrels of luge-riders who had collided. At one moment, in the background, there was a thunderous din, followed by a long rumble. It was an avalanche, which could be seen in the distance collapsing from a high white wall.

  For three hours, Monsieur Cabrol and his nephews, as well as the housekeeper, watched winter spots in this manner. It was not too tiring. There was a ski-jump at the top of one snowy slope, a luge track, and one for toboggans and bobsleighs, which excited the spectators seated in their rocking chairs almost as much as the people out there, whose cheers could be heard.

  Suddenly, a mist spread over the entire alpine landscape; the mountains and glaciers, luges, toboggans, skiers in brightly colored woollens, all gradually disappeared; then the mist dissipated in its turn and the snows reappeared. But it was another landscape—an immense forest of large trees, all white, dressed in a carapace of frozen snow.

  “Canada!” cried the loudspeaker.

  Phanor growled. A family of white-coated bears passed by, prancing heavily; the parents and the cubs plunged into the trees on all fours.

  The Canadian landscape also faded away, replaced almost immediately by another, just as white.

  “Greenland!” howled the loudspeaker.

  The wind was whistling and howling in a sinister manner, blowing in gusts and sweeping up whirlwinds of snow.

  Black rocks stuck up here and there. A few black trees raised their lugubrious carcasses over white plains, soon lost in the fog. A sleigh leapt forward, pulled by a team of dogs.

  This time, Phanor burst out into volleys of barking—which, in spite of Monsieur Cabrol’s efforts, lasted until the sleigh disappeared into the mist.

  “A sinister excursion! Are we going to plant our Villa Beauséjour out there?”

  After that there was nothing but snow; there was a crush of enormous fractured glaciers, lifted up by waves—an ice-sheet with icebergs drifting away.

  “Oof! Let’s get out of here!” said Monsieur Cabrol, finally.

  “We’ll end up falling ill in all that snow, Monsieur,” said Melanie. “I can already feel myself getting a chill.”

  “You can take a borage and quatrefoil pill when we get back,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “Let’s get back to the 30 degrees and perfumed atmosphere of our graceful archipelago. At this moment, I’d like to climb into the coconut palms or the baobabs and try myself in the sports of our little brothers the monkeys.”

  They left the sports ground, not without first informing themselves what was going on in the brightly-ornamented colored pavilions around the arena of rough and difficult sports.

  “Here, there’s fencing, over there, rugby football, baseball, etc. Let’s go in and see…. Very fine fencing—I’ve done a little in my time, on doctor’s orders, to rest my brain.”

  In the fencing pavilion, however, as in the larger stadium, the fencers were on a cine-phono screen. In the boxing pavilion, the boxers were not boxing themselves. Installed in nice armchairs, they were following the ups and downs of black or white boxers on the cine-phono. It was the same for the rugby. No kicking or scrimmaging, other than on the vast cine-phono, which gave the people comfortably seated in the tent the illusion of being on the pitch, in the brutal mêlée, exposed to dangerous tackles.

  “Oof! Let’s get away!” said Monsieur Cabrol. “I can’t take any more of this.”

  “There are many others,” said Andoche. “Look at that pavilion: Bridge…”

  “And that other one,” said Moderan. “Roulette…a tranquil sport, this time.”

  “Good. We’ll come back.”

  And they gladly climbed back into the train-carriage.

  VII. Airstrip 148, New York.

  The aerovilla stayed in the Caucasian Archipelago for more than three months, drifting from island to island, sometimes installing itself on top of a mountain, sometimes beneath the green dome of an oak forest, sometimes in spa towns among bathers from all the countries of the world, nabobs from India and billionaires from America who had met in the richest casinos of old Europe. Sometimes—and most frequently, anchored on the marvelous beaches—they anchored on the marvelous beaches of the Sargasso Sea, where the waves sometimes bought the scents of marine vegetation, mountains of algae swarming with marine insects, hunted by crabs, hunted in their turn by myriads of lobsters emerging from all the holes in the rocks.

  And while they led this gentle existence, the great work of repairing the world was entering a period of intense a
ctivity out there in the Parisian region. Oh, how much better it was here, breathing the pure Atlantic air beneath the noisy forests.

  Every evening, Moderan said to his mother or father, in the Tele: “Leave those Reconstruction Works, those engineers repairing the world who might succeed in precipitating Paris into the third underworld…come here, where everything is so nice….”

  “But what about business?” said Monsieur des Ormettes.

  “And the Chamber?” said Madame. “I’m glad to tell you that I’ve been promised a portfolio in the next ministry.”

  “Yes, it’s very pleasant here in the climate of the pleasure Archipelago,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “I might even say too cozy—let’s not linger! In this excessively agreeable environment, I’m not working. My great work hasn’t advanced by six pages since we got here. We raise anchor tomorrow. Bah! We’ll come back. Let’s not forget that we have many things to see. Listen—there’s one extraordinary item in our program: Astra Island, the fragment of an unknown world that fell in the Atlantic26 only 30 years ago.”

  “Oh yes!” exclaimed Andoche and Moderan. “Astra Island—the morsel of a world that nearly shattered our poor planet!”

  The joyful prospect of going to the island fallen from the sky consoled them for leaving the Caucasian Archipelago. That was something genuinely new.

  “And it isn’t far,” Monsieur Cabrol added. “900 kilometers to the south.”

  “We’ll be there tomorrow evening, then?”

  “No, it’s necessary to measure out sensations. We’ll go to America first. Oh, just to pass through—time to see the contrast between this happy archipelago that we’re about t leave, this excessively comfortable life beneath the caresses of the Sun and softening breezes, and America, brutal industrial civilization taken to its apogee, America, where the reign of technology is the most powerful imaginable.”

  Andoche and Moderan dreamed about Astra all night, burning with impatience. They were up at dawn, waking their uncle.

  Monsieur Cabrol had warned Melanie, who was already regretting the Archipelago, where everything was so pleasant. There were no preparations to make, since they were taking their house with them.

  “What about the pilot?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s true…Barlotin’s still here, since he’s missed all the Dakar-Paris airships. Call him, then.”

  Barlotin took three quarters of an hour to wake up; he was heard moaning and yawning in his room. He arrived still half-asleep.

  “Well, Barlotin, you missed the dirigible again two days ago. Are you going to take today’s?”

  “My word, I don’t really know. I still feel very ill, and the climate here suits me quite well.”

  “You don’t look as ill as all that, Barlotin—you seem well enough.”

  Melanie, who was setting the table—which is to say, putting out a few saucers—smiled and winked.

  In fact, Barlotin’s face was slightly red, and he seemed to have put on a lot of weight since arriving in the Archipelago. “I often feel weak,” he said. “I need to get my strength back. Perhaps I ought to take the waters here—Vichy, Bourboule or something like that. They have them all here. I’ll ask, or even try them all.”

  “But we’re leaving soon, for a brief visit to America.”

  “Oh! In that case, I’ll leave with the villa.”

  “As you wish—come with us. Get ready for departure, then. We’ll take off at 9 a.m. exactly.”

  “Understood, Monsieur.”

  “Yes,” whispered Melanie, “he has a red nose and he’s getting a bit too fat. He has four or five meals a day and he isn’t content with one or two pills—he takes three or four, well washed-down, I assure you, with refreshing Burgundy or Bordeaux, hardly moistened at all. It’ll do him no good. I keep telling him, and I refuse to give him the pills, but he has his own personal supply.”

  “Let’s keep him anyway, to maintain and man the apparatus.”

  While Barlotin prepared his apparatus and tidied up the cockpit, which was a little dusty, Monsieur Cabrol went to the customs-house to have his papers stamped. He soon came back and made a rapid tour of inspection.

  Everything was ready. Seated in the cockpit, Barlotin got ready to press the starter button.

  “Is everyone here?” asked Monsieur Cabrol. “Melanie hasn’t gone out? Nor Phanor? Nor Babylas? Good—let’s get going.”

  The Villa Beauséjour was detached from the bushes and swayed momentarily as if it could not quite decide to quit the soil of the Archipelago, then rose gently into the radiant sky.

  “Head north-west, and set a course for New York,” said Monsieur Cabrol, “not too fast to begin with.”

  Below the villa, the landscape changed. They flow over the capital, Archipelia. All around the large island, like chicks around a mother hen, the islets waved their greenery, changing position with the perspective, and they all looked as if they were on the march, heading for the open sea to escort the Villa Beauséjour. Soon, however, they all became confused, the mass blurring and fading away into the blue of the sea, reflecting the blue of the sky.

  Phanor barked on the balcony. Moderan sighed. The Archipelago was far away. Monsieur Cabrol went back and forth, but his eyes never strayed from the cockpit. He no longer had any confidence in the pilot that had been supplied to him with such fine guarantees. Only the cat Babylas remained indifferent; curled up in a ball, he was asleep in an armchair.

  “So we’re going directly to New York?” Andoche asked his uncle. “What time will we arrive?”

  “Oh, it’s a matter or five or six hours. We could have aimed for Panama and then headed north, but we’ll take that route when we go to Astra…”

  What a change there was in the afternoon, long before America came into view! Less blue above and below: a slightly turbulent sky; a greener sea. On the sea there were many long, broad and heavy cargo-ships heading in all directions; in the sky, innumerable dirigibles, aircraft of every kind and size, gigantic or minuscule, swarming at all altitudes.

  Without allowing himself an instant’s distraction, Monsieur Cabrol kept watch on the protective apparatus vitally necessary to avoid all possible accidents in the midst of the heavy traffic, which became increasingly accentuated the further they went into the skies of New York. At 4:35, Monsieur Cabrol uttered an oof! of satisfaction; the Villa Beauséjour arrived safely in harbor, moored on the rather cluttered terrain of Airstrip 148, south of New York, in the district that had seem to them from above as the most practicable.

  “Well?” he asked his nephews, when they had taken their places in comfortable armchairs at the dining-table, “are you delighted, overwhelmed, seduced by the beauty of the landscape, the tranquility of the location?”

  The howling of sirens, rumblings and explosions punctuated his speech.

  “Hmm! Interesting…terribly interesting, Uncle…”

  “What did you say? Speak louder… Yes, we’re in the quiet district, the quietest—the Airstrip attendant has just confirmed that.”

  What a landscape! As far as the eye could see and penetrate through the thick vapors or swirling clouds of smoke, colossal superimpositions of edifices of every shape, heaps of factory buildings, extended in every direction, all tangled up, branches sticking out like tentacles beneath scaffolding. There were aerial bridges and iron towers carrying more iron buildings upwards on large platforms, moving elevators, and various kinds of mighty cranes rotating and rumbling. Further away, lines of skyscrapers 40 or 60 stories high, were stacked pyramid-fashion on top of one another, mounting an assault on the clouds, succeeding one another and melting into one another, extending to all four corners of the horizon.

  And what a concert the vertiginous rumor of that industrial Pandemonium was! What an infernal concert! Gasps, groans, roars and whistles, regularly punctuated by muffled explosions! Strange music escaped from every one of those immense factories, rising in crescendos and tremolos, accompanied without by the frightful tumult of the traffic:
the howling, miaowing and bellowing of wheeled or flying vehicles; the noisy rumbling of millions of trucks.

  Monsieur Cabrol took stock of that landscape, the huge agglomerations of factories, each as vast as a large town, and closed his eyes in terror as he thought about the frightful internal machinery of those colossal constructions, and the populations attached to those gigantic machines in operation.

  “The birdsong doesn’t sound promising to me; even so, it’s necessary to see it at closer range. Since we’re here, let’s venture outside.”

  Monsieur Cabrol and his nephews went out on foot, setting off prudently along 255th Street, their eyes alert to avoid any collision with some small truck, only weighing 25 tons and launched into the battle at a speed of 40 kilometers an hour.

  It was necessary to risk crossing crowded intersections at a trot, to pass over footbridges from one sidewalk to the other, to take elevators to be lifted up and carried over islets of factory buildings, or pedestrian tunnels to go underneath them. After half an hour they emerged, completely lost. They had forgotten to take a compass.

  They were in a district of skyscrapers: immobile giants in the form of towers or pyramids, extending stiffly into the clouds, with exterior elevators and platforms at the summit bearing gardens, statues and fountains, with huge iron airstrips projecting into the void on audacious iron arabesques.

  After letting himself fall on to a bench in the vestibule of one of the skyscrapers, in order to catch his breath, Monsieur Cabrol declared frankly that there was no need to take things to excess, and that it would be prudent to go home, close the windows firmly and have a rest from the accumulation of slightly terrifying visions and impressions in the tranquility of their home.

  “Yes, but how are we to get back? I can’t see any possible vehicle for us in this place!”

  The resourceful Andoche stood up, selected an elevator at random and climbed into it. In the elevator, on a console bearing 30 buttons with explanatory labels, he read: Janitor 12th Floor. He pressed the button; the elevator rose, as if sucked upwards. Two minutes later, it came down again.