Martyrs of Science

by S. Henry Berthoud

  In the evening, the warriors, laden with game, returned to their canoes of bark and wood, which they had carefully concealed in the reeds on their departure, and took to the water to regain the island. When their return was signaled by a trumpet or a kind of pipe made with the bone of a wild horse, the women and children ran to the bank and welcomed them with cries of joy, hurrying to relieve them of their burdens. The children took them by the hand and led them to the threshold of the tribal chief.

  The old man listened silently to what the warriors told him about the incidents and produce of their hunting, addressed a few brief observations to them, if necessary, and then went back into his hut, where he was soon brought the most delicate morsels of the day’s haul.

  Every household was then enclosed in its dwelling, with the exception of five or six warriors charged with keeping watch all night long on the security of the island. They made rounds, spears and bows in hand, and were ready, at the slightest hint of danger, to sound the alarm and rose all the men of the tribe. For that purpose they carried whistles hung around their necks on thin cords, made from the hollowed-out phalanges of a reindeer’s foot, holed at the base of its stronger extremity. Such whistles, of which several examples have been found in the caves of the Dordogne, rendered a clear shrill note audible throughout the island, especially in the silence of the night.

  Eight years went by without anything justifying these precautionary measures, and the prosperity of the tribe made further progress every day.

  The warriors possessed a large number of axes, solidly embedded and obtained by a method that demanded no less than five years. In fact, the method consisted of making a fissure in a young tree, into which a flint blade as forcibly introduced, maintained by strips of hide tightly knotted and wound around the tree. The rest was left to the sap and time. When the former had fixed the stone ax unshakably, the tree was cut at its base, the top as removed and one found oneself in possession of a weapon whose solidity was proof against anything.

  In addition, provisions of dried meat, acorns, fruits and roots ensured and abundance of food for the winter. Every day, new and ingenious ameliorations discovered by the women added to the comfort of the households; every day, children were born; the children, raised by their mothers, became adolescents, and the adolescents became men and warriors.

  In the morning, the old man prostrated himself in the midst of his numerous subjects before the Sun, the only deity that they worshiped, blessed the star for the peace and happiness that it dispensed to those whose defeat and exile had previously tried them so cruelly.

  To ensure that happiness and give it further duration, everyone wore on the breast a talisman formed by a bone on which an image of the Sun was engraved. That image consisted, as we have already said, of a neatly-drawn circle surrounded by radii depicting its rays.

  Sometimes, beside the star, the moon was placed, with the eyes and nose that our almanacs give it; sometimes, they added depictions or snakes, or even crocodiles, with their open mouths ornamented with teeth. Does that mean that the exiles from the Dordogne were familiar with the crocodile, that child of hot countries? Whence came, similarly, those little axes made of syenite, sardonyx or jade, kinds of stone that are not found in Europe, which come from India, but of which one encounters rare specimens in archeological digs, in stages all the way from the Orient to the middle of Europe? Is there not a considerable probability that the races of the North originate from emigrations of eastern races? A circumstance no less strange is that the Chinese still call jade the Yu stone, or “stone of the Sun.”

  One day, the old man assembled around him the principal warriors of the tribe and held a long council, after which two of them crossed the Seine and went into the forest that covered the other bank. That same evening, the warriors came back, went to find the chief in great haste, and the following day, the latter summoned all the men of the tribe, in order to construct, from the shore of the island to the opposite shore, with enormous tree-trunks, a bridge of great solidity. The surface of the bridge was subsequently covered with a thick layer of stones, cemented in place with moist clay.

  While the bridge was being built, other workers dug a trench on the opposite bank, in the middle of which they established a rather steep slope. They slid down that slope three enormous blocks of sandstone, which rebounded and came to rest, one by one, at the end of the bridge. They were pushed on to the bridge, across which they were guided by wooden levers, and finally brought to the middle of the island, after which the bridge was demolished.

  That initial labor lasted nearly two months.

  One of the ends of the two less massive rocks was then buried in the ground. Once they had been planted, a kind of earthen terrace was built with a gentle slope, which rose from ground level to the top of the two rocks. After that, the third stone, which was flat and about three meters long, two meters large and forty centimeters thick, was slid up that slope and solidly established on the other two, in such a way as to fashion a kind of table. When the work was finished the job of clearing away the terrace that had served to raise the flat stone was entrusted to the children. The procedure was imitated four thousand years later by Monsieur Lebas87 to raise the Luxor obelisk on to its pedestal in the Place de la Concorde.

  While it lasted, the erection of that monument, constructed at the coast of such much long and hard labor, preoccupied the tribe keenly. It was the object of all conversations, and even the children gazed from afar, with a kind of fearful respect, at the three heavy rocks with which an enormous stone table had been formed.

  One morning, before the Sun appeared, the old man came out of his hut and, surrounded by warriors, undertook a kind of bizarre consecration of the table. After having remained prostrate before the star for a long time, he took dry aromatic herbs, which he ignited and allowed to burn in the midst of the swirls of smoke they produced. With their ashes, still warm, he traced a long gray line in the middle of the stone. Immediately, the warriors, guided by that line and with the aid of flint tools, hollowed out a groove five or six centimeters deep, and carefully threw the debris produced by that work into the Seine.

  When the strange ceremony was over, the chief and his warriors went back to their dwellings and resumed their ordinary routines.

  From then on, every morning, when the sun rose, the old man burned thyme and other plants in the gutter on the stone table—in which, no doubt, you have recognized one of those dolmens that are encountered in such large numbers in Brittany, and which are found in various other parts of France, Europe and Asia.

  He examined the capricious swirls of the smoke attentively, and, according to whether they developed peacefully or the wind interrupted their vaporous evolutions, the old man, who fulfilled the functions of chief and pontiff, went away serene or preoccupied.

  Toward the end of autumn, when the nights were already drawing in and getting cold, the old man became increasingly somber after having studied the spirals of the sacred smoke. One evening, the hunters came back earlier than usual. Scarcely had they got out of the bark canoes that had brought them to the island from the other shore than they ran to the old man and told him with great agitation that another tribe had just established itself on the heights where Meudon now stands. They had occupied three caves and were beginning to hunt game in the forest, led by their chief, a grim-faced warrior who was still young and endowed with a prodigious strength—for he disdained, in order to do battle with a wild bull, to make use of a lasso. He faced up to it, griped it by the horns and dropped it at his feet. Even more astonishing, he as followed by six enormous dogs, which, tamed and submissive, obeyed his slightest gesture, indicating game trails and attacking wild beasts with him, including wolves, wild boar and aurochs.

  The old man listened to this story silently, while a profound sadness spread over his face.

  “May the day star protect us,” he said, finally, “for peace and happiness are perhaps going to desert us. Let us redouble our vigilance. Let n
o fires be lit between now and tomorrow, in order that their smoke will not reveal our dwellings at a distance. Tomorrow we will deliberate as to what we ought to do. In the meantime, let the warriors charged with watching over the security of the island keep their ears pricked and let everyone have his weapons ready.”

  While the old man was speaking thus, a man accompanied by two huge dogs was sliding and crawling through the long grass that grew along the river bank. That dense mass extended alongside the Île de la Cité, and by means of the moonlight the stranger was able to count the number of huts raised on piles. Like their master, the dogs lay down on their bellies in the reeds, attaching their gazes to him, and, obedient to a signal that he gave, followed him without making a sound when he drew away carefully, still hugging the ground.

  Once in the forest, the warrior got up again, and headed back to Meudon with large strides. Completely naked, his body tattooed with bizarre signs, he walked rapidly, guided by his dogs which indicated the easiest passages to follow through the trees and the brambles.

  When he arrived at Meudon he uttered a shrill cry that assembled all the warriors of the tribe around him.

  “You are in search of a favorable place to settle,” he said. “Hidden in the reeds this evening, I was able to study the situation and the means of defense of the people living on an island on the river’s edge over there. You will find what you need there. You lack provisions, they have plenty! The enemy is more numerous than we are, but they do not suspect our arrival and have no fear of our attack. Let’s take advantage of their sense of security. Tonight, as you see, the moon favors us; she is hiding behind clouds while the rain falls. Let’s go!”

  Immediately, the warriors took up their weapons and attached flint daggers solidly encased in deer-antlers to their waists. Each one loaded a bark canoe on to his shoulders, and they set out.

  A number of women followed them, carrying baskets attached to their backs, some containing embers divided into little pieces, and hollow balls of friable earth, similar to those still found in such large numbers in Switzerland, in the debris of lacustrian dwellings on Lake Zurich. The dogs went on ahead.

  The small army, which advanced silently, did not take long to arrive opposite the island. There it halted, while the women, after taking off their garments, filled the balls of earth they were carrying with lighted embers that they stimulated with their breath.

  When these preliminaries were terminated, each of the warriors took one of the women in a bark canoe that had been put into the water, and came as close as possible to the island. Immediately, the women launched their fiery weapons of war on to the roofs of the huts, covered with dry reeds.

  The reeds caught fire; the blaze took hold and the warriors charged on to the island, uttering cries, while the women dived into the water and swam back to the other bank.

  The attackers found themselves facing all the warriors of the tribe, with the chief at their head, who greeted them with spear-thrusts and blows from stone hammers and clubs, while the women, suddenly bringing flaming torches of resinous wood to the battlefield, allowed the small number of enemies to be seen and rendered the thrusts of their spouse and fathers more reliable.

  Thus, in spite of their fervor and their bravery, the men who were expecting an easy victory did not take long to succumb. One of them fell dying at every moment. Even their chief, struck on the head by a blow from a club, was removed from the battle. Those who remained beat a retreat. They ran into a living wall that blocked their passage, and after a desperate struggle, they were massacred, along with the dogs, which showed themselves no less valiant or any less ardent in a battle that lasted more than an hour.

  Some of the women, certain of their menfolk’s victory, had left their torches behind in order to go put out the fires stated by the fireballs thrown at the huts. Friable as the crude bombs were, only a few had caused serious damage when they broke on impact with the roofs, spreading the incandescent embers they contained; in addition, many of them had fallen from the rooftops into the water, which had put them out and swallowed them up in the mud.

  When not one of their enemies remained standing, the island’s warriors, several of whom had been killed and the majority of whom had been wounded, finished off the dying and threw their cadavers into the Seine. They only spared one of the wounded, the young chief; the women, on the old man’s orders, dressed his wounds as they did for their own wounded, except that they tied up his feet with strong leather thongs to make sure that he did not escape.

  While their companions carried out these tasks, others, torches in hand, went over the battlefield silently picking up the dead, whose corpses they arranged around the stone table. There were daughters, wives and mothers there who recognized the bodies of fathers, husbands or sons, but not one betrayed her grief other than by silent tears that ran down her pale cheeks.

  In the meantime, a small number of warriors had gone silently over to the other bank in order to surround and trap the enemy women hiding in the forest. After a brief and desperate resistance, using no weapons other than lassos, which they threw at them, the women were all taken prisoner, tied up and taken to the island. The warriors then went to Meudon, where they similarly rounded up the children and old men.

  When they got back, it was broad daylight. The women of the tribe were weeping over the cadavers, and the prisoner chief, unconscious until then, began to come round thanks to the care lavished on him.

  Then the old man came out of his hut and prostrated himself before the Sun.

  “You have made us victors,” he said. “Receive your part of the booty and the victory.”

  He gave the orders to stand the enemy chief up, who was supported so that he would not fall over, for his wounds and the consequent loss of blood had robbed him of all his strength.

  “Look!” the old man said to him. “You have attacked us treacherously and have been defeated. Look! The women of your tribe are our women’s slaves. Look! The old men and male infants of your tribe, like yourself, will be sacrificed to the Sun.”

  The horrible sacrifice began immediately. Each of the victims was laid on the stone altar, and the old man plunged a trenchant flint knife into their throats. The enemy chief was the last to submit to that fate, and the gutter excavated in the table of the dolmen spread out so much blood that it covered the ground with a large and horrible red sheet and ran all the way to the Seine, the waters of which it tainted for some distance.

  Slavery, among the barbarian hordes that first took possession of Paris, was exercised with much less harshness than one might be tempted to believe. It was somewhat similar to the manner in which it is still practiced today in the Orient, in which it consists of a sort of inferior degree of the family. It bore no resemblance to the miserable fate of black people, always under the overseer’s whip and treated like beasts of burden. In order for it to become that, and for there to be abuse of force, it requires an ignorant race to be dealing with a civilized one; outside of that circumstance one scarcely ever finds oppressed individuals or, more particularly, oppressors.

  The slight difference in condition, mores and habits that separated the first inhabitants of Paris and their prisoners was too scantly visible not to be gradually effaced. Initially treated rigorously during the early days in which the pride of triumph and the excitement of victory lasted, the women and female children of the vanquished soon saw their lot ease and gradually began to occupy a rank almost equal to that of their mistresses. They lived under the same roof, shared in the same work and led the same life.

  More industrious that their new companions, they made themselves useful by means of a host of petty services and ameliorations that they brought to communal existence; they understood a great many things more thoroughly and taught others the way to practice them. It was not long before the tribe owed them more supple fabrics more easily prepared, the secrets of dyeing furs in various colors with the aid of vegetable or mineral substances, better-fashioned and more convenie
nt baskets, less fragile pottery, elegant forms of dress and, most especially, the art of arranging the hair of women into silky sheets, interlaced in such a fashion as to give a new charm to beautiful faces, fine features, pale complexions and fresh cheeks of the island women.

  Two months had not gone by before it was impossible to distinguish the mistresses from the slaves.

  The latter, for their part, submitted with resignation to their new condition; insensibly, they felt their resentment of the massacre on the dolmen lessening. It was, after all, an inexorable consequence of the customs of war in ancient times, and they had seen it committed many times by their own menfolk. If the inhabitants of the Cité had been defeated, they would have been similarly put to death by the victors. So the eyes of the slaves, which moistened with tears to begin with, and their brows, which furrowed with hatred at the mere glimpse of the bloody altar, ended up getting used to the terrible sight; the impression they experienced faded and weakened, and they ended up passing the dolmen without a sigh, almost without any memory.

  In any case, among primitive races the manner of feeling bears no resemblance to our excited and nervous sensitivity—which, however, is no less subject to the effects of time and forgetfulness. Confronted by austere labor and manual tasks at every instant, thought is not very active, especially in a robust race struggling incessantly against necessity.

  Meanwhile, the greatest calm reigned in the vicinity of the island. Nothing troubled the hunters in their long excursions through the forests, and they came back so laden down with game that one day, the old chief of the tribe wanted to accompany them himself, in order to give his still-valiant hands the pleasure of unleashing his arrow upon some ferocious beast one last time, or piercing a wild boar with his flint-tipped spear.