The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “All that is extremely remote from us. Those primitive Galadians possessed, it appears, the secret of scaling the mountains, and nothing of what might be beyond them, and throughout the sky, was unknown to them. There is a part of legends there, and a part of mystery, in which profound intelligences—like that of my tutor Mnektes—specialized in those arduous studies can distinguish certain marvelous verities.”

  “Ah!” said Melidine. She was quite astounded by the turn that the conversation was taking. Perhaps the king was playing with her, and deliberately talking about anything except what preoccupied him so forcefully. He was avenging himself and wanted to appear to have never had the slightest inclination for her. It suddenly seemed to her that his brain, which had imagined all that, was driving a clawed hand inside her, all the way to her heart, gripping it, squeezing it and scratching it.

  “If you like, Melidine, “I can sent you one of those beautiful conversations.”

  For since the king had sat down next to Melidine, a strange warmth had flowed through his entire being, and it appeared to him that he could no longer live apart from her—that merely sensing her close to him was the most delicate of joys, intimate and sweet, as if it were changing all the blood in his veins to honey. Obviously, he would respect his vow and forbid himself any unchaste attraction toward Melidine. He would only kiss her hand and her forehead, as a fraternal friend...

  She replied: “Sire, whatever Your Majesty would like me to hear, or that it would please him to send me, the honor of being close to Your Majesty would cause me to follow it swiftly. Sire, I will listen to the sage words of your tutor, and that which I cannot hear very well with my poor ears, I shall understand in your eyes and the light in your eyes. And if I see you enthusiastic, I shall immediately be filled with the surest intoxication.”

  She finished, and waited again. She was waiting for the king to pick up her hand and murmur: “The honor alone? Nothing but the honor, dear Melidine?” Then she would have confessed that another sentiment, less solemn and more august than honor, attached her to His Majesty. She was entirely ready. She would have made that confession.

  The king did not take the hand at all, and he said: “Only the honor, dear Melidine? I would have liked it also to be the pleasure of learning beautiful and brilliant things.”

  It would not have taken much, at that moment, for him to declare that no fêtes were worth as much as Mnektes’ lessons—as much because the thought of having Melidine with him troubled him delightfully, as because it appeared that the presence in question would give an extreme glamour to the information of philosophy.

  “Since I’ve been listening attentively to Mnektes,” he continued, “I see marvelously that there are many things among those which we pass over indifferently that are precious to know. In the songs of birds, the colors of foliage, the perfume of flowers, the sound of springs, the character of people... Like a sculptor with his chisel, carving, hollowing, lashing, mutilating and lacerating a block of stone, in order to extract a ravishing form, Mnektes cuts up, decompose, digs and renders nature transparent, in order to form a divine architecture. Imagine, Melidine, what joy there would be for us, after having listened to Mnektes’ beautiful descriptions, after having gone, together from marvel to marvel, the heart more lively, the gaze widened, and the mind ardent, to attain, as the ballets of the court succeed one another with increasingly perfect dances, the terminal apotheosis…to attain for the apotheosis...”

  “I understand, Sire!” said Melidine, who could no longer contain herself. “The kiss! The kiss of our impatient lips, the worthy and unique apotheosis of such rare transports!”

  “I meant joy,” stammered the poor king. “The glorious joy of knowing a little more...” He stood up. “Adieu, Melidine. Here comes your friend.” And he quit her, immediately, almost weeping inside himself.

  As for Melidine, she cut her walk short, replied feverishly and at random to her friend, and went home exceedingly upset, wounded, ashamed, furious, sobbing, and asking herself: Is that the king who is said to have such great prowess in amour? Is he disdaining me? But he invited me to accompany him. Is he making fun of me? But I did not see him tremble as he left me. Has he judged me stupid, and that I did not understand what he was saying to me, or is renown a liar and that handsome king does not know that such a pretty woman ought to be offered more than speeches and declamations?

  Sobbing more forcefully, she added: Alas, I think that I hate him, and that I’m the most unfortunate of women.

  It happened, on another day, that the king was standing at the window of the great hall of the palace, gazing distractedly at what was on the other side of the glass.

  The window of the great hall overlooked the square of Gyzir, and it was market day. The people of Gyzir were going, baskets in hand, past the stalls and displays, the piles of cabbages, apples, and all the usual fruits and vegetables of Galade. That swarm, in the sunlight, was very pleasant to see. Men were tugging the bridles of horses or donkeys that they had come to buy or brought to sell; women were proclaiming the merits of their merchandise at the top of their voice.

  “My people! My good people!” said the king. He thought that it had been a long time since he had made contact with his good people. The day opened before him like the mouth of an ogress. With irremediable ennui it would devour him, conscientiously and voluptuously, until the hour of sleep, and grind his twelve hours with pointed teeth...as well that distraction as another.

  He sent for his high chamberlain and said to him: “Announce that the palace gates will soon be wide open, and that the king will listen to complaints from anyone, and will receive the good people of Galade with joy.”

  And the news immediately spread through the town.

  There was a market gardener in one of the outlying districts of Gyzir named Fanoche, who was reputed to be the prettiest market gardener in the environs of Gyzir, and even of all Galade. She had many admirers among the gardeners. She was ardently courted, and she was not—as many Galadian women in the vicinity of Gyzir maliciously said—insensible to the covetousness of her courtiers.

  When she heard that the king was receiving his people, she blushed, went pale, dropped her baskets, left the market, ran home and began to dress herself pompously. In love with the king, like all Galadian women , the thought—which she had not dared to formulate previously—of being distinguished by him among all others invaded and excited her. She made up her face and put golden pins in her hair. She put on her Sunday dress, which was silk with a low neckline.

  Beneath her neck, gilded somewhat by the customary open air, the top of her bosom was a trifle rosy, because she sometimes loosened her corsage while working on her crops. The gilt gradually faded into the pink, and a little beneath the pink, her flesh was a white as pure as that of any noble lady rich in powders, pastes, paints, unguents and milky lotions. Her beautiful dominical costume displayed her gilded neck boldly, left her pink bosom visible and permitted a glimpse of her white breasts.

  Thus prepared, she headed for the palace.

  Every Galadian woman had done as much as Fanoche, but not all of them were as agreeable.

  The crowd went into the hall, murmuring and intimidated, everyone shoving everyone else as hard as they could, because everyone wanted to get to the front rank-but they shoved slyly and in silence, because of the gold on the walls and the beautiful fabrics and the noble furniture. A few toes were crushed underfoot without evoking a sound, and a few ribs jabbed. But when Fanoche came in and wanted to fray a passage, an accentuated eddy was produced. The men made way for her, smiling; the women amplified and stiffened the triangles formed by their shoulders, their bent elbows and the hands resting on their hips, in order to prevent her from getting past. But the men were heavier and stronger than the women, and their smiling movement of recoil obliged the latter to recoil too, cursing. And Fanoche was in the front rank when the king appeared.

  Acclamations burst forth. The king darted an amicable glance over
his people, went up the steps of the throne and made a little well-turned speech about the peace of Galade, the good understanding of its citizens, the honesty of its mores—which had been represented to him, he said, as a trifle free—and in which respect everyone ought to remember that one could not, even in the name of amour, trample underfoot in any way whatsoever piety, duty, decency and respect for the law.

  Then he descended from the throne and approached the people. Fanoche, trembling, tried to stiffen herself and not to let her keen desire to be noticed show, but, involuntarily, she shuddered, and went pale, and blushed as the king came closer. That he was going to see her, among the entire crowd, look at her, speak to her...it would be too much...

  He looked at her. He stopped in front of her. He spoke to her. She fainted.

  “There, exactly,” he said, “with regard to decency, is an exceedingly low-cut dress.” And he said it in an ill-humored tone that touched her horribly.

  The king passed on. If she did not collapse entirely, it was because the crowd was pressing to the point that no movement was possible for anyone. A large tear ran down her cheek. She did not know whether she was furious or in despair. She was deeply wounded. And it is necessary that the reader should not forget that, because it was to have considerable consequences.

  Archeological Studies

  The last day of the year, which would mark the completion of the king’s vow—all the more sacred because he experienced so much pain in consequence—was not approaching very rapidly. In the meantime, he distracted himself as best he could, and almost always without effusion, as if with nonchalance, lassitude and making do. He devoted himself, for a time, to collecting old coins, and then antique weapons found by digging in the soil in the country and under ruined monuments. He took slight interest in the cultivation of flowers and the breeding of hunting dogs and horses. He only hosted feasts when forced.

  His usual poets no longer dared sing or compose pleasant ballets or light comedies, because no subject was tolerated that might darken the king’s mood, and so nothing remained but those that had no need of svelte dancers and their thin veils, such as miracles or sententious proverbs cut into scenes for the theater. The king having withdrawn his august favor from a painter who had depicted a bather in the nude, sculpture and painting gradually engaged in dry, tedious and mystical representations.

  The Yawn was the master of ceremonies at the court of Galade. Like the proud standards flapping in the wind that are covered and paralyzed by crepe in times of mourning, amours, once blossoming, hymns and freely luminous, hid under severe attitudes and serious discussions, and, once buoyant, whispered, as if furtively.

  Uncle Gasp no longer set foot in the court, having acquired a little house a long way from the palace, where he made merry at his ease, and reassumed, when he went out, the pious appearances he had put on under Georgis. Monseigneur Gohain approved of the funereal atmosphere, because the obstacles and dissimulations thrown in the path of amour gave it a disagreeable taste of transgression, rendered present in the mind the bitter dread of sin and put the brake on certain unquiet souls—and, by the same token, brought a great number back, as constraints and apprehensions increased, toward the celestial liberties.

  Along with the coins and the weapons, the king had discovered and collected undatable and indecipherable manuscripts, as yellow and dry as iron, in which the ink had gradually eroded the paper underneath in places, designing capricious grooves therein. He had handed the greater number over to Mnektes, but had kept a few of them to riffle through, because he had seen illuminations and designs therein, incomprehensible at first glance.

  After hard labor, Mnektes, having succeeded in reading several of the manuscripts, taught the king to read, and the latter strove in idle moments to penetrate, by means of the text that accompanied or surrounded them, the meaning of the illustrations and designs.

  One of them, in particular, intrigued him. It depicted a kind of grossly-formed leg, the ankle of which was swelled by a short spur, and the heel of which was elongated to form a point, curved back at the extremity toward the foot, which was divided into two, as if the big toe, swollen and tumefied, were trying to catch up with the others, separated from it, if one could admit as toes a compact mass that seemed rather to be an entire foot, designed even more crudely than the leg. At the top of the singular limb, a line sketched something like the hem of a dancer’s skirt, becoming blurred some distance from the line and soon dissipated, made a variously and vaguely colored fabrics. One searched in vain for a second leg, nowhere indicated. On each of the differently colored patches of fabric forming the sketch of the skirt a name was written: Iberia, France, Germany. On the leg was another name: Italy.

  The king did not understand any of it.

  After long and dogged effort, he read, more astonished as he pieced the phrase together: Disposition of the countries north of the Mediterranean Sea...

  Further along in the same manuscript he read: Report of the humble and zealous missionary Zahun, son of Aharg, to His Excellency Mahara, regent minister of Galade, on his voyage through the three worlds.

  That same evening, he asked Mnektes what the significance was of the names Germany, Iberia and France, but without showing him the image. Mnektes made him repeat them, and affirmed that they did not correspond to anything know to him.

  “Are they not the ancient names of Galadian hamlets, deformed by time?”

  But the savant Mnektes assured him once again that he had never read or heard those names. “Where did you get them from, my son?” he asked.

  “One of the old manuscripts,” said the king, and added: “I count on determining their meaning by more ample reading.”

  And the following day, he plunged into the report of Zahun, son of Aharg. He learned therefrom that three immense worlds, each of which would have contained the entirety of Galade ten thousand times over, surrounded the sea called Mediterranean, as flower-beds and trees surrounded the pond in the park, and that that sea was so vast that, in order to begin to imagine it, it was necessary to know that a ship at least a thousand times larger than the largest skiff on the pond in the park, would have to go straight ahead without stopping for more than forty days and forty nights to reach the shore opposite the one from which it had started. Those three immense worlds were Europe, Asia and Africa, the first inhabited by people with white faces, the second by yellow people and the third by black ones! The last was almost completely unexplored, with the absence of Arabia, which occupied its edge.

  Zahun, having left Gyzir aged twenty-five, had returned at the age of forty-eight, and said that he had not seen everything, but felt too old and weary to remain far from Galade without having reported on his mission. In the manuscript, which was torn in places and lacked numerous pages, there were extraordinary narrations. An incalculable people, beyond the extreme limits of Europe, uncountable days’ march therefrom, possessed a magical substance, one pinch of which, in exploding, could reckon with the hardest rocks. He had brought some back, in fact, and presented it under the name of fulminating powder. A few European princes also knew how to make it, but they utilized it in combats. He described the magnificent monuments elevated to the glory of the different gods of the lands traversed, including the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris in France and the temple of Kayraha in India.6

  A second part of the report began thus:

  After the great voyage in which I was able to see for myself and then condense what my predecessors had seen and related in the course of multiple generations, I have attempted to represent for Your Excellency, as succinctly as possible, the state of the world in the year of grace 1320...

  Following the names of emperors, kings, caliphs and princes, the story of incessant battles that transformed the political situation of each continent in a few years, giving Africa and Iberia to the Arabs, part of Germany to the French, part of France to the Germans, and many other perpetual upheavals, Zahun had divided the world into three castes: the emperor
s, the priests and the peoples. The first were always engaged in battles, the second in prayers and the third in labor. He glorified calm Galade in the midst of that incessantly bloodied world, tortured by a thousand ambitions and the thousand scourges. He also recorded the names and works of the great scientists and artists that he had met in France, Germany and the Orient, and wrote about the profundity of the knowledge of some men and the ignorance of others, the splendor of palaces, the indescribable pullulation of human beings, the diversity of races and the unanimity of suffering, villainies and dreams.

  The king, his eyes wide and his brain buzzing, read on and on... He was searching now for a page that might inform him of the route that Zahun had taken to get out of Galade. There was no mention of scaling the mountains. He knew from Galadian history that all attempts of that sort had stopped in the reign of Harb. Had there been mysterious procedures in Zahun’s time? Could one escape from one’s body, as Mnektes had given him to believe?

  He was about to run to his tutor, when he felt so happy, having recovering his appetite for life, in having such a marvelous problem to solve, that he preferred to keep everything to himself, burning with curiosity, and he continued to turn the pages with his quivering fingers.

  After having marched for three days in the darkness of the Grotto, I reached a plain dazzling with light. At the extremity of the plain, large edifices loomed up. I soon arrived there, and found myself in a city called Traese, capital of Senestria...7

  At present, the pages were consecutive. They were marked with various dates. The oldest was a report addressed to His Serene Highness Galenide, successor of Harb, the second king of Galade.

  The king tidied away the manuscripts and ran to the Anaide Grotto, which opened in the wall of the mountain at the back of the park. It was dusk; shadows were rising around things. For centuries, no one had gone into the grotto, whose entrance was obstructed by thick ivy. The king cleared a passage and penetrated cautiously.