An Unknown World

by Pierre de Sélènes

  And it was agreed that, until further notice, they were keep to the signals thus far exchanged.

  V. In Algeria

  South-west of Biskra, about fifty kilometers from the Ziban capital, on the right bank of the Oued-Djeddi, a vast plain extends eastwards as far as Chott Melrhir and southwards as far as the Oued-Melah.

  To the west, the horizon is limited by the hills of sand that separate the basins of those watercourses, dry more often than not. It was in that region, visited by the Romans, and then the conquering Arabs who expelled the autochthonous Berbers, that the engineer Georges Dumesnil had decided to establish the system of signals that would permit correspondence with the inhabitants of the Moon.

  The old astronomer had sworn to succeed; he had kept his word, but not without difficulty. After the pitiful failure of the public subscription he had opened, there could be no thought of a further appeal to the masses. The egotistical crowd, enslaved to its material instincts, was incapable of getting excited about a great scientific idea still in the domain of theory, in which it saw no practical utility. Even those people whose studies or functions seemed to prepare them to welcome the great project favorably were incredulous and not disposed to loosen their purse-strings.

  Mathieu-Rollère had even addressed himself to the generous donor who had already made so many sacrifices to the progress of astronomical science and had endowed the Observatoire de Paris with its most advanced instruments, but at that moment the rich banker who had made such noble usage of his fortunes had recently devoted considerable sums to the erection of the Observatoire de Nice, and in spite of the enthusiasm that Mathieu-Rollère’s plan caused him, he was obliged to leave to others the glory of rendering the grandiose enterprise possible.

  In spite of his confidence, the old scientist was feeling doubt invade his soul, when a note read by chanced in a newspaper retuned all his confidence. At that moment, the man sitting on the throne of Brazil was not just a sovereign but a sage. Emperor Dom Pedro II divided his life between the duties of his position and the study of the sciences, about which he was passionate.24 Every year, when he had taken care of matters of State, he came to France, to that nucleus of enlightenment, which, in spite of the blows of ill-fortune, has never ceased to shine upon the world. A corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences, he was interested in all the works of that learned assembly. His broad mind, curious for knowledge, had never been able to lose interest in the important problems that astronomy poses incessantly to minds avid for speculative research. He had already met Mathieu-Rollère during a visit to the Observatoire de Paris in the course of a previous voyage. The latter’s work on the satellites of Uranus had seemed very remarkable to him.

  The prince, so different from the majority of those who wear the royal circlet, was poorly understood by the mass of his subjects, unaccustomed to seeing philosophers and scientists in government, so they were to rise up against him a few years later and expel him brutally from the throne.

  One day, while casting a distracted glance over the current events section of Le Figaro, Mathieu-Rollère read these lines:

  His Majesty Emperor Dom Pedro will arrive in Paris shortly. He intends to stay for some time, in order to put the final touches to an important work, about which he wanted to consult a few of his colleagues at the Institut.

  The old scientist’s face lit up. If he did not cry “Eureka!” like Archimedes, it was because he did not think of it, but he rubbed his hands together vigorously.

  “Just what I need,” he said. “That’s the only man who can understand me and help me.” Without delay, he went to see the august sovereign, who received him immediately with his customary bonhomie.

  In that first meeting, Mathieu-Rollère told his imperial colleague everything that had happened: the voyage accomplished by Marcel and his companions; the appearance of the luminous letters on the lunar disk; the work already done at Long’s Peak Observatory to sketch a commencement of communications. He showed him the telegrams exchanged with Sir William Burnett and the plans, already drawn up, to extract useful and desirable consequences from so many heroic efforts.

  The emperor was enthused.

  So, when Mathieu-Rollère told him about the failure of his attempt to raise the sum necessary for such work, his benevolent interlocutor was immediately disposed to come to his aid.

  Several more meetings took place. In which the accounts that the engineer Dumesnil had carefully drawn up were examined. The total was rather high, more than three million.

  Dom Pedro grimaced. “Damn!” he said. “I’m not a sovereign rich enough to pay for such a fantasy. The civil list my subjects grant me and my parliament balks at votes through every year couldn’t support such an increase in expenditure. Oh, my dear friend, monarchs today are poor, and I sometimes think sadly about your great King Louis XIV, who drew from the purses of his subjects as he wished, not hesitating for a moment when it was a matter of making the marvels of Versailles and Marly spring from the ground.”

  “Everything degenerates,” the old scientist murmured. “It’s also to Louis XIV that we owe the Observatoire, and if it didn’t exist, God knows whether our government would consent to pay its expenses today. I was however, counting on Your Majesty; that was my last hope, and if it fails, all is lost.”

  “Let’s see,” said the emperor. “Perhaps there’s a means to reach an understanding. Can’t you make a few modifications to the plan that’s been drawn up, and reduce at least some of the expenses?”

  A rescuing branch was being offered to the astronomer; he grasped it desperately. “Assuredly,” he said. “Our collaborator has included a Decauville railway between Biskra and the chosen site, which is about fifty kilometers away. We can do without that temporarily, and carry out the necessary transportations with carts or other means that are available locally. That would be a big saving. The expenses for staff and accommodation could also be reduced, I think, but nothing can be spared with regard to the electrical network. I’ll consult Dumesnil about it.”

  “Do that,” said the Emperor. “I’ll put a sum of 1.5 million francs at your disposal; that’s the best I can do.” He smiled and added; “And I’ll be scathingly criticized for this new folly.”

  “That will be sufficient,” said Mathieu-Rollère. “It will have to be sufficient. May Your Majesty be blessed!”

  In the last days of January 188-, the banks of the Oued-Djeddi became the theater of an extraordinary activity. All the components necessary for the projected installation were brought by railway to Biskra, and every day, long processions of carts and camels, laden with heavy boxes or various bizarre forms that frightened the local natives, departed from the city. Life became unusually active in that usually bleak and desolate region. The grinding of gears, the whinnies of the horses and the oaths of the drivers troubled the silence of the wilderness.

  Assisted by twenty carefully-selected electricians from Paris, Mathieu-Rollère and Dumesnil were seen everywhere, with their cork helmets and white garments, hastening the convoys and supervising the unloading of materials, Soon, they were able to begin the construction of hangars and the wooden huts to accommodate the staff of the enterprise. In fact, they only had to assemble the sections prepared in advance and carefully numbered.

  The work advanced rapidly, and by 8 February they were able to start preparing the ground where the electrical network was to be established. Over an extent of about two hectares of carefully leveled ground, they first disposed a massive framework of beams a meter long and connecting at right-angles. The edge of the framework constituted a rectangle 125 meters long and 80 wide, divided into ten thousand one-meter squares. To each of the intersections of the beams a powerful electric arc-lamp was solidly fixed, furnished with a silvered parabolic reflector fifty meters in radius. Each reflector was linked to its neighbors by means of grips and pressure-screws, which ensured cohesion of the ensemble.

  For a month, the twenty electricians, stimulated by Dumesnil, who
was devoured by a feverish impatience, worked relentlessly. To the great astonishment of the indigenes, whom curiosity drew continually to the work-site, the ten thousand lamps were laid out on the ground. Already, when the sun, so ardent in that hot climate, darted its rays at the polished surfaces, it made them shine with an unsustainable glare. More than once they were obliged to remove importunates whose persistence threatened to disturb the work, and Mathieu-Rollère ended up enclosing the site and its buildings with a solid fence whose boundary was patrolled by a number of sentinels.

  On the network thus disposed, all the letters of the alphabet could be easily depicted in luminous lines. A system of carefully-insulated electric wires linked each lamp, on the one hand, to powerful dynamos that produced current, and on the other, to 25 commutators disposed like a keyboard, each of which bore a letter of the alphabet.

  As a considerable number of lamps could enter into the composition of several different letters, they were careful to link them by different wires to the commutators designed to light up each of the letters in which it was to participate. Thus, some of the lamps serving to form the letter D also served to form the letters B, E, R, L and so on. Each of them was thus attached by wires to each of the switches that had to be activated to form those various letters. It was sufficient, to obtain the desired symbol, to depress an ivory handle. When it was raised again, everything was extinguished, and, by means of another maneuver, under the action of different currents, the lamps designed to form the next letter were illuminated.

  That was the simple and practical application of the signaling system conceived by Georges Dumesnil. On a relatively restricted surface, always the same, all the characters necessary to express thought with the utmost precision could succeed one another at brief intervals. It was impossible to imagine a more complete and more reliable realization of the theory of the optical telegraph.

  One of the huts had been fitted out to accommodate the series of commutators, situated some distance away from the electrical network, in order that the manipulation of the levers should not be hindered by the unsustainable glare of the luminous lamps.

  To protect the rectangle thus established against the rains that fell every year in winter, large tarpaulins had been set up which, when unfurled, covered the entire surface.

  All of that work, so delicate and scrupulous, had taken a great deal of time. A month had sufficed to fix the ten thousand lamps solidly on their framework, but to establish the multiple network of wires that ran side by side without confusion took five long weeks. In the meantime, mechanics set up the steam engines and the dynamos.

  Everything was ready to function by 14 April. By that time, the new moon was approaching.

  “Let’s take advantage of the moment,” said Mathieu-Rollère, to make sure that everything is working properly. We can now test our apparatus by night without fear of being seen by our friends, who surely aren’t on the lookout. We ought not to be running any risk of giving them false hope by commencing signals that we’ll be forced to interrupt. We ought not to act until we’re certain.”

  The precaution was wise. Before arriving at perfect functioning there were several hitches. Wires were broken; others, in spite of the precautions taken, were entangled and the insulating material had been destroyed by friction. In consequence, there were perturbations in the current and repairs that needed several days to carry out.

  Finally, everything was ready and they could attempt the final trial.

  On a dark night, when thick cloud covered the sky, the ten thousand lamps were switched on, and that flood of light, springing abruptly from the ground, struck the clouds and made them resplendent with an unaccustomed glitter.

  To complete the experiment and take an exact account of the fashion in which the apparatus was functioning, they caused all the letters of the alphabet to appear in succession, and the strange spectacle was seen of the gigantic characters lighting up against the somber vault of the sky. One might have thought that a mysterious hand were tracing those lines of fire, as once, at the feast of a barbarian king, the threatening letters announcing the collapse of an empire had shone upon the polished marble walls. The neighboring populations, struck by terror at the sight of that new kind of meteor, prostrated themselves in the dust, wondering what spells the accursed foreigners had brought to the locale, and murmuring the name of Allah.

  All the Europeans living in Biskra and a good number of tourists, attracted by curiosity, gathered around the enclosure and saluted the events with their cheers and cries.

  It was beginning to cause a stir in the scientific community. The Brazilian emperor’s act of generosity had not taken long to become known, and the sacrifice of such a huge sum had impressed those who had so far been the most incredulous. It was said that for such a clear-thinking monarch to have made such a decision without hesitation, Mathieu-Rollère must have furnished him with precise information and conclusive evidence. And it was as if the tide of public opinion began to turn.

  People returned to the question of possible communication with Earth’s satellite, and the problem no longer seeming insoluble. The theories alleging that certain parts of the Moon might be habitable returned to favor; the appearances of luminous points that certain observers claimed to have seen on the lunar dusk at various times were remembered, and it was said that, after all, experience had frequently belied seemingly well-founded assertions in the realm of astronomy, and brought science unexpected revelations.

  That agitation of minds crossed the narrow bounds of the Institut and scientific societies. Specialist periodicals took possession of the problem and examined it from every angle. In their wake, the great organs of publicity thought it their duty to inform their readers, and with the fever of reportage and need for rapid information characteristic of our epoch, they followed that path swiftly and for a long distance.

  First of all, they wanted to be sure of the departure of the three voyagers that Mathieu-Rollère alleged to have reached the satellite’s surface. Intelligent reporters went to Florida to see the Columbiad with their own eyes, interrogate the local people, magistrates or simple residents, and made it known to the entire world that a second departure of the shell founded by the Gun Club really had taken place on 15 December 188-.

  Proofs confirming that extraordinary event arrived from all directions. In Baltimore, the official record was found of the sale at which Lord Rodilan had acquired the Columbiad and all its accessories. At Long’s Peak Observatory, Sir William Burnett was interviewed many times over, telling the story of Marcel’s life in the region, the discovery of the mysterious ball and confirming the reality of the appearance on the lunar disk of letters indicating the arrival of the three voyagers.

  Before that abundance of information, spread everywhere in thousands of copies, doubt was scarcely possible, and the names of Marcel de Rouzé, Jacques Deligny and Lord Rodilan soon became famous.

  It was in England, most of all, that the excitement assumed the sharpest character. As soon as it became known that a member of the English aristocracy was included among the audacious explorers, the snobbery of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom gladdened their hearts, and the columns of the Times, which always reflected the sentiments of its numerous readers so exactly, caused the name of the noble lord to resound. The role that he had played in the colossal endeavor was now known, and it was repeated endlessly that without him, nothing would have been possible, which proved once again that England was always and everywhere the foremost nation in the world. It would not have taken much for all the honor of the grandiose conception to be attributed to him, Jacques and Marcel being relegated to the role of modest collaborators.

  The apathy and indifference with which Mathieu-Rollère had collided was succeeded by an incredible infatuation. The scientists who had previously treated him as a madman now spoke about him with emotional admiration. Everyone wanted to have foreseen the grandeur of his projects and encouraged them. In the confines of the desert he con
tinually received the most flattering letters, and, now that he had no need of them, the most brilliant offers arrived from all directions.

  Entirely absorbed in his work, however, the old scientist disdained this return to renown. He estimated the more or less self-interested praise at its true worth; he had collided too rudely with the egotism and ignorance of his fellow men to be able to be touched by the gestures of belated sympathy of which he was the object. He waited patiently for the moment when the lunar night would concord with the terrestrial night, and promised himself, as soon as the luminous letters shone again, to launch the first message that would inaugurate interstellar communications.

  The monetary sacrifice made by the emperor of Brazil had not, in spite of the prince’s generosity, answered all of Mathieu-Rollère’s dreams. Ideally, he would have liked to install in proximity to the electrical network an instrument similar to the one permitting our satellite to be observed from the Rocky Mountains. Communications would then have been more rapid and uninterrupted. It had been necessary to give up on that, however, and as the Long’s Peak telescope was the only one in the world capable of making out the signals sent to Earth exactly, the old astronomer had been obliged to rely on his communication with it. A telegraphic wire linked him to Biskra; from there, by the ordinary route, he could correspond directly with Sir William Burnett. It had been agreed that as soon as a new signal appeared on the Moon, Mathieu-Rollère would be informed immediately. As observers were working in shifts at the ocular of the telescope, nothing could escape them and no delay in the transmission was possible.

  Everything being thus prepared, Mathieu-Rollère wanted to reserve for the man he considered as his benefactor the honor of sending the first message, and Dom Pedro had immediately accepted that flattering mark of distinction. He arrived on 20 April; the Moon was then entering its first quarter and shadow would envelop the region of the Ocean of Storms.