The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  Unfortunately, when the second world war came along, Arnyvelde had no material Ark to carry him through it, and he did not have the opportunity to construct another psychological Ark, although he was still writing to Henriette Sauret from the internment camp in Compiègne in which he was imprisoned by the Nazis—where he died of pneumonia in 1942 before he could be shipped off to Auschwitz along with the great majority of the camp’s other Jewish inmates.

  The translation of Le Roi de Galade was made from a copy of the 1910 edition published by the press associated with the periodical Le Monde Illustré, to whose editor, Jean-José Frappa, the book is dedicated. The copy I have (which had remained partly uncut for more than a hundred years before I released the text from its virginity) was given away free as a sweetener to subscribers to the periodical and is marked “not for sale,” but I do not know whether the entire print run was circulated in that fashion; there is a price marked on the spine, which might suggest otherwise. The translation of L’Arche was made from a photocopy of the 1920 edition published by Societé Mutuelle d’Édition. The photocopy was made by Jean-Marc Lofficier from a copy of the book lent to him by Marc Madouraud, and I am very grateful to both of them for enabling me to make the translation of a text that I was particularly interested to see.

  Brian Stableford

  THE KING OF GALADE

  A Fantastic Tale

  Preliminaries

  The Physical and Moral Constitution of Galade

  I

  It is from Emmanuel, who was the king of which this book is the history, from the king himself, during the time when he was living in Paris, that the existence of Galade was revealed to me. You will search in vain for that country in the atlas. To the east of Italy, to the west of Austria, bordered by Illyria, Neuria and Senestria, rocky mountains surround it, which render access to it impossible, and the Illyrians, the Neurians and Senestrians have believed, since the beginning of the world, that a great lake slumbers behind those mountains, by which they are limited.

  Galade is a country of vast cultivable plains, forests abundant in game, mines of iron, copper and gold. Two watercourses, the Haint and the Jogne, sometimes parallel and sometimes drawing apart, wind sinuously across it. encircling villages, flowing alongside forests, and, emerging from two different points in the mountains, join up and escape into a gulf opening up behind the hamlet of Aldegonde, in the fearful din of an unfathomable fall, at the end of which they must continue their route—but God alone knows where.

  At the foot of the mountains, numerous villages, one or two leagues apart at the most, raise their wooden houses with thatched roofs, and white stone houses with roofs of clay, forming, when seen from above, a kind of girdle of alabaster, agate and ruby, the buckle of which is Gyzir, the capital of Galade, where the palace of the king stands.

  That palace, which overlooks the entire country with its crenellated towers, the slender steeple of its chapel and its proud fronton—a kind of broad terrace whose balustrade supports statues of the kings of Galade—backs up against the mountains, which, in times of war, render it attackable only from the front and the flanks.

  The climate is, in general, agreeable and temperate. High winds are unknown there. The sun is very warm for half the year, and, in the other half, is often covered by clouds that burst in rain, and sometimes in snow. The Haint and the Jogne, swollen by the rain or the snow, then overflow somewhat, which only benefits the cultivated fields in their vicinity. There is scarcely any evidence, in the meteorological annals, of the two rivers ever having been entirely frozen. On the rare occasions when that happens, the Galadians indulge themselves in joyful glissades.

  The routes that the instinct of the primitive inhabitants of Galade established through the forests and the plains to facilitate communications between their first groups, were never improved and are almost impracticable to pedestrians in times of ice or mud, but it does not matter, because the kings and aristocrats of Galade only go on foot inside their palaces. Elsewhere, they are only seen in carriages or on horseback.

  II

  Galade has retained to the present century the soul and the mores of the Europe of the Middle Ages. You will soon understand why.

  Of the race itself, with regard to its origins, nothing can be presumed, except that which is presumed to be common to the origin of all human races, whether it resulted from the slow evolution of an animal kingdom or whether its forefather emerged, ready formed, from the mud of the earth, animated by the breath of a god.

  As soon as the first-born of Galade had acquired, by a succession of victories over nature, the use of speech, fire and clothing, they formed tribes, hunted, built and pillaged one another.

  They made invincible forces—lightning, sunlight and darkness, hunger, wars and death—into deities, malevolent or benevolent according to the weather and events. Above the gods and goddesses they placed Goho and Vzygine, capital powers, male and female together or separately, in such a number of cases, and so subtly, that it is better to pass over any attempt to enumerate them and refer the curious to the religious history of all primitive peoples, where they will assuredly find cases and subtleties of the same order, if not absolutely parallel, to those of Galadian hierology.

  Under the reign of Harb, which corresponds approximately to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar the Great, lord of Chaldea, son of Nabopolassar,2 in the history of the Hebrews, which is more familiar to us, great events took place in Galade: the union of the tribes under the scepter of Harb, the construction of the royal palace of Gyzir, and the piercing of the mountain behind the palace.

  At the emergence from the earliest ages, as soon as they were able to obtain a little leisure from the rude struggles to eat, sleep and dress themselves, some of the Galadians became preoccupied with what we would call the geographical situation of their homeland. As a result of long labors they realized that Galade was completely enclosed by the mountains. A troubling problem rose up before them: were those the extremities of the world, under a sky that seemed to extend far beyond those mountains, well above their summits, and not to curve over them?

  How could they resolve that problem? To reach the sky, there seemed to be no conceivable way except death—and no dead person had yet descended again to narrate what he had seen. As for the audacity, it would have been too bold and perilous to go to present oneself, alive, before Goho, before Vzygine, of which it was the abode, even admitting that a means could be found.

  With regard to ascension, the tops of the mountains were much closer than the sky.

  Now, from generation to generation, until the reign of Harb the most knowledgeable Galadians built or designed machines made of rope, stone and piled up wood, by means of which they counted on raising themselves all the way to the mysterious summits—but none of them ever succeeded.

  Only one managed to reach a height of seven thousand nine hundred and four feet above the ground, clinging, from the seven thousand eight hundred and seventy-ninth foot onwards, to pointed and cutting rocks; then, having turned his head, he was seized by vertigo and horror, let himself fall backwards, and was found in pieces.

  With the aid of time, in accordance with the propensity that the mind has in all countries to form legends regarding what it cannot scale or penetrate, they imagined, behind the mountains, an entire abominable world only accessible to degraded souls. And in order that they might be dragged by the Haint and the Jogne into the accursed world, they threw the cadavers of miscreants into the bottom of the gulf of Aldegonde.

  Then came the reign of the sage king Harb, who had the dead incinerated, and the climbing came to an end.

  Harb and the Troglodytes

  Harb, the son of a priest of Naul, the goddess of estival springs, lived a healthy life in Gyzir, under the tender gaze of his father. He was tall, handsome and obliging, ready to lend his assistance to anyone who asked. As he went hunting almost every day, he sometimes, while running after a deer or a wolf, missed the hour for the family meal. Then he wen
t to the house of a peasant in the nearest village to the place where he had stopped, with the wolf or the deer over his shoulders, and asked to be given bread, water and a few cooked vegetables. Thus, he knew almost all the peasants in Galade, and they knew him. Many of them liked him, because he often abandoned his prey as thanks for the meal that he had been served, saying that, so far as he was concerned, the true pleasure of hunting was in running through the thickets, the clearings and the brambles, and that as soon as the animal was killed, it was no longer anything to him, only having been seduced by the living to the extent that it gave him a pretext to run, hope and vanquish.

  The inhabitants of the area around Gyzir lamented that the other inhabitants of Galade often came to pillage them cruelly, because their region was the most fertile. Each of them had attempted, in the interests of self-defense, to exterminate the greatest possible number of marauders, but they arrived in bands, unexpectedly, and what could a lone peasant do, surprised by half a dozen united bandits, and who did not even have time to shout for help?

  Those in the vicinity of Gyzir, therefore, having met together, decided to join forces, to arm themselves, select a leader and to resist the thieves en masse, if not attack them and reduce them to impotence and loyalty.

  They fell into accord that no Galadian could lead them better in combat than Harb the hunter, the son of the priest of Naul. They pressed Harb, who accepted, placed himself at their head, marched against the pillagers and obliged them to beg for mercy and promise to content themselves henceforth with the profits of their own labor. He had twenty-four of them skinned alive, cut the ears off thirty-two, blinded in one eye fifty-six chosen from among the most redoubtable, and granted mercy to the rest, who proclaimed him magnificent.

  From that combat he acquired a renown so great that he became ambitious to be the king of all the Galadians, and was, as soon as he manifested the desire publically.

  The facility of his election stemmed from three causes: firstly, because those he called his friends, and who recognized that he was more skillful than they were in wielding the ax and the spear, and in leadership, felt glad and flattered to have a king for a friend, and they counted on him for certain favors that, difficult for them to acquire by themselves in isolation, would be achieved much more easily; secondly, the Galadians once pillaged thought that, under the protection of that strong individual, they would be sheltered from further invasions; and finally, the pillagers, quite frankly fearful of being skinned alive, having their ears cut off or losing an eye after a further battle, considered it an excellent idea to live in peace with their vanquisher. They even paid a tribute every year of virgins, minerals, pigs, lambs and cheeses.

  Harb appointed his father the high priest of Naul, simple servant though he was, and the latter lived happy and honored until his hundred and seventy-third year, which was the normal age at which fortunate humans died in that epoch of Galade.

  One day, Harb, then in the fullness of his strength and wisdom of mind, had gone out hunting capercaillie. He went alone, because he liked occasionally to recover in the forest his soul of a young man, and could not do it when his usual retinue accompanied him, who reminded him too much, at every moment and on every occasion, that he was His Serene Highness Harb, the Overlord, the wise King, His Majesty, and a hundred other resounding elevations.

  After having pierced a large number of birds with his arrows, and put them in his belt and his game-bag, he felt tired, and lay down next to an oak tree, where he immediately fell asleep.

  He was woken up by a murmur of voices, but he refrained from moving, for he was wise enough to be as prudent as he was courageous, and the opportunity seemed propitious to listen without being seen, in case he had been followed by conspirators intent on attacking him shamefully while he was alone and far from his court.

  He raised his head silently, and through the foliage that concealed him he saw three old men, thin and wretchedly dressed.

  Ah! said Harb to himself. They must be there Wise Men of the Anaide Grotto. It was in that direction that the hazard of the hunt took me. The words of those men ought to be good to hear, because they’re generally venerated.

  Against the wall of the mountain, at the back of a forest whose ultimate fir trees attempted to climb a few meters toward the summits, there was a grotto hollowed in the rocks, which was known as the Anaide Grotto. Three men lived there meagerly on forest roots, mushrooms and strawberries, and offerings that charitable Galadians made them. In return, they clarified certain complicated problems, such as the exchange between two peasants of a cow for a small field of carrots, counseled maidens on the subject of their marriages, and prophesied accurately what the weather would be like several weeks hence.

  If any indiscreet person asked them why they isolated themselves as they did, and lived so precariously, refusing agricultural labor, they replied that commerce with people—apart from the two companions that each of them had—was not agreeable to them; that it pleased them to live thus, in an amity that nothing could dent, since they avoided all venoms by avoiding all agglomerations; that they did not ask anything of anyone; and that if they accepted the offerings that were made to them it was because they immediately gave in exchange the precious juice of their science and sagacity.

  The peasants, occupied in working in the fields and the care of their own existence, did not take their inquisitions any further, and gradually, the solitaries became highly respected. They were admired for living so poorly, willingly depriving themselves of all the good things that the earth produced and the comforts that Galadian women so obligingly provided, even though no one felt inclined to imitate them.

  They received visitors at the mouth of their grotto, and no one ever passed the threshold. Talkative and malicious adolescents fabricated fables about what the three men did in their grotto, but one bold child who penetrated into it one day when the Wise Men were gathering their harvest in some distant location saw nothing there but benches for sleeping on and iron pikes lined up against the wall. The back of the grotto was completely dark. It seemed that a strange grating sound was coming from it. He wanted to go closer but, having heard one of the Wise Men coming back, he fled in haste, slipping through the undergrowth.

  “Some fox in a cage,” his father said, when the scamp, having narrated his escapade, made allusion to the grating sound in the shadows.

  Harb, who had heard mention of the sages, therefore listened to what they were saying, ready, in his soul open to all good seed, to profit from it if he could.

  “Brothers,” said one of them, “I assure you that I saw a blue-tinted light coming through the fissures. At the harder blows I struck then with my pike, full of pleasure, pieces of rock fell, which went into the fissures and caused darkness to be reborn.”

  “The labor had fatigued you, Brother,” replied one of the others, “and when you saw the light it was a sort of illusion, as one has in sleep.”

  “Might it be possible that we’re so far advanced already?” said the third.

  The first one resumed: “I sense that each of you will, like me, keep a lookout for that light through the fissure—and both of you think, internally, that it’s possible that I saw it. But both of you want to be the first to reach the other side of the mountain, in order to announce your discovery with loud cries to Galade and reap all the honor, if not all the profit!”

  “What could one of us do without the other two?” said the second. “Isn’t our surest interest that all three of us should triumph? For, just as it’s necessary to unite our efforts for the immense task, it will be necessary to unite our spirits for the immense benefits. How could only one of us take credit for the effort necessary for the discovery? And for the gifts that it will deliver to us, and the tributes that we’ll demand for letting the curious in—in sum, the settlement of the offering and the enjoyment of the power—can one alone take on the burden?”

  “As for the enjoyment,” said the third, extending his arms in a broad gesture
above his head, first to the left and then the right, “the capacity of a single man to support it is as extensive as the sky, whose limits we do not know.”

  “That’s talking like a dog deprived of meat,” said the first. “Having only ever had bones, you can’t imagine that your stomach bursting with food and your belly with multiple delights. Believe me, three of us won’t be too many to support our wealth!”

  “To work,” said the third, “To work! We’ve been piercing the rock for seventy-two years now. It takes more than a day’s march to get to the point we’ve reached. Tomorrow, perhaps, under our pikes, the rock might split like a window! What shall the one of us who penetrates first into that unknown world find? And who knows whether he will ever come back?”

  Well, said Harb, to himself, there are some singular explorers!

  He waited until they had gone back into their grotto. He got up slowly, went back to Gyzir and returned home. The next day, he summoned the most ingenious builders and said to them: