The Children of the Crab

by André Lichtenberger

  Then Kouang goes to sleep too. From time to time, a faint groan escapes his monstrous breast—because Kouang, whether he is asleep or awake, cannot escape the terrible images engraved in his by the horror of his destiny.

  For this is the destiny of Kouang...

  II. THE STORY OF KOUANG

  It is an immense mysterious island where, amid the furnaces of the Equator, the secret reserves of life ferment in inviolate retreats.

  In vain has the insatiable curiosity of the white man attempted to penetrate therein. In vain has his need for knowledge, possession and lure precipitated his scientists, his heroes and his pirates therein. He has only been able to erect a few fragile outposts on its shores, where a handful of feverish functionaries wither and quarrel, to push on a few dozen kilometers up the black rivers with the oily waters; to fell a few square leagues of forest; to conclude illusory treaties with the fabulous wooly-haired monarchs with disquieting jaws; to attempt to turn spaces thus far left blank of the maps of geography red or blue. His obstinate perseverance and malevolent ingenuity have scarcely scratched the surface of the mysterious island. The island repels him and defends itself.

  Protecting it, there are numerous cannibal tribes. They are armed with assegais and poisoned arrows; their courage is indomitable. Frightful beatitudes are promised to the killers of white men. There are also bloodthirsty wild beasts and infernal reptiles. Here, Nature has sculpted her most ferocious tigers, her most deformed lizards, the entire spectrum of serpents with venomous fangs. There is a pandemonium of voracious spiders, scorpions, centipedes, mosquitoes, giant ants, flies and gnats of every shape and size. They assault humans relentlessly, giving them no truce by day or by night, penetrating into their eyes, their ears, their nostrils, attacking their flesh through boots and garments. Incessantly, humans brush, swallow, breathe in and absorb though every pore an animal population intent on draining their being, eating them away and impregnating them with its poisons.

  An inextricable vegetable barrier defends every yard of the forbidden kingdom, foot by foot. Arboreal phalanges whose trunks blunt iron extend over impenetrable thickets of ferns, entangled with creepers, cacti and reeds as dense as fields of wheat and as sharp as spears. Against their compact masses, axes are blunted, sabers break and fire expires, stifled by the suffocating moisture of the atmosphere.

  Here and there, at a prodigal cost in lives, humans have been able to force a breach, sketch out a trail. Then, putrid miasmas have sprung from the spongy soil, furious fevers and diseases that hollow out faces, crush brains and empty bellies. Scarcely traced, the paths are strewn with white skeletons, soon swallowed up in the mud beneath lush vegetation. All those who set out to conquer the forest are swallowed up by it, digested and dissolved.

  There, it is said, tracked by the ambitious biped, ineradicable Nature has sheltered its final alembic, hidden its ultimate treasures and—who can tell?—concealed obscure and surprising life-forms. Hence the ardor with which, since the first years of the twentieth century, the Fehlenbeck Company of Hamburg has besieged the isle. Wild beasts are a commodity more sought-after every day. There is no Duchy of Gerolstein8 that does not demand them for its zoological garden, no foundation established by a Yankee sub-billionaire that does not claim them for its museum. Prices rise in proportion to the abundance of customers, but the furnishing of tigers and alligators, baboons and hippopotamuses, although it brings in better dividends every day, is also becoming more arduous every day. The reserves of India and Africa are exhausted or decadent. German ingenuity, incapable of manufacturing ersatz elephants or orangutans is obliged to pursue the product where it exists.

  The Fehlenbeck Company has, therefore, established the largest of its trading posts on the shore of the large island. It has staffed it with an elite personnel, and does not withhold any means of action therefrom. If men die, others come running from the sandy steppes of Brandenburg or the romantic banks of the Rhine to pick up the torch. The tall blonde women of Germany with the robust thighs know their duty, and do not shirk it. For the grandeur of the Vaterland, they give birth to the necessary human raw material; German commerce and German science receive the required champions from them.

  And if, perhaps, behind the commercial décor and intellectual research, other objectives are hidden; if, around the huts, cages, stables and hangars other constructions are discreetly huddled or hollowed; if, from vessels fitted out for the transportation of animals, every time they return to the mouth of the Elbe, an entire menacing metalwork is unloaded by night, which is already invisible by morning; if, more directly and even more ambitiously, the trading-post of Wilhemstadt collaborates in the surge of “World Politics”, what a surplus of excitement for its personnel!

  In appearance, it is a matter of furnishing anatomical specimens or experimental subjects to the laboratories of Dresden or Berlin, of sketching Sundays at the “Zoo” before a horde of marsupial London cockneys and their rosy-cheeked offspring. In reality, it is a matter of ensuring Teutonic emprise over the planet, of tightening the mesh of the net with which it intends to surround the world.

  At the head of the operation is Dr. Otto Klagenmeyer. Scarcely forty, robust, thickset, massive and bald-headed, with a scarred and clean-shaven face and gold-rimmed spectacles perched on a fleshy nose, his chin square and jutting, he devotes himself to his task with the studious zeal that attracted attention on the benches of the University of Bonn, the enterprising spirit that subsequently made him peerless among the agents of the company, and the patriotic fervor that reveals the heroic type of the sovereign people whose prerogative is to rule the world.

  His outpost is a combat station, a station of conquest. From the millenarian forest he extracts dividends that increase the wealth of the old Hanseatic city, discoveries that raise the prestige of the German University, and elements of strength that add something to imperial glory. The cargoes of wild beasts and snakes, collections of minerals and plants, bottles of insects, mollusks and fish, and notebooks of observations that every ship brings back are as many victories of Teutonic genius. It is not only humankind that he will enslave, it is Nature. She has been able to defend herself so long as humans were only human, but she will succumb to the hegemony of the Nietzschean hero. It is for him to violate her supreme arcana.

  Her supreme arcana are those whose enigmas are the most troubling.

  It is beyond doubt that the hinterland of the great Island constitutes the most prodigious cauldron of life in the terrestrial crust. Those explorers who have come back from their expeditions have reported bizarre vestiges. In spite of the powerful decomposing effects of the soil, they have collected fragments of bone, pelts and excrements that do not correspond to any known species, living or extinct. Enormous imprints hardened in the mud could not be identified.

  It is appropriate to connect these indications with tales long thought to be fantastic that circulate among the aborigines. According to them, extraordinary beings whose forms participate in those of apes and humans live in the impenetrable jungle bordering the marshes of Bang-Tao. Their stature surpasses that of orangutans, their strength that of a bear, their intelligence that of the shrewdest magicians. Hunters claim to have glimpsed them, but that it is futile attempting to catch them. Their cunning is only surpassed by their ferocity. Of all those who have attempted to reach their lairs, nothing more has been heard, or their cadavers have been found with the neck vertebrae crushed, the skulls staved in and the limbs broken.

  It would be naïve to base any credence on what the indigenes say. They are more than half-duped themselves by the fables created and incessantly modified by their puerile imagination. Partially corroborated by concrete evidence, however, the stories are not totally negligible. Is it entirely impossible that, protected by all the forces of equatorial Nature, by marshes, rivers, giant trees, unbreakable lianas, tigers, alligators, venomous insects, poisonous reptiles, quicksands, putrid mud, all the miasmas and all the contagions, a few specimens exist in the d
epths of the island womb of species vainly sought, or presumed extinct without leaving traces?

  Perhaps—who can tell?—one of those primates conjectured by anthropology, logical and thus far ungraspable links between human cave-dwellers and the great apes...

  A bold and extravagant hypothesis, certainly. It was even bolder and more extravagant to establish on the sandy heathlands of Brandenburg the basis of the monarchy that will, in future, wear the crown of Europe. Dr. Klagenmeyer has resolved that he will obtain proof of the existence or non-existence of the problematic monster. Such a discovery would be good publicity for the company, an incomparable trophy for German science and would guarantee worldwide celebrity for its maker.

  It is in vain, thus far, however, that the most tempting rewards have been offered to the Dayak hunters. The majority have refused, with a superstitious dread. Those who have allowed themselves to take the bait have never returned.

  Three expeditions commanded by Europeans have had no more success. Dr. Karl Schmidt, who led the first, was torn to pieces by a tiger, and Hugo Vogt, who accompanied him, died within twenty-four hours of a pernicious fever on the banks of the Guinga.

  The second had a more macabre outcome. Karl Müller, having gone mad, murdered his two companions before blowing his own brains out. Dr. Klagenmeyer has kept to himself the incoherent notes of his travel log, brought back by a native guide. Master of his nerves as he is, their horror—the corrosion of that brain, of that human will gradually disintegrated by solvent effluvia—caused him to grind his teeth for several evenings.

  Perhaps, had it not been for the youthful impetuosity of Julius Strassberg, fresh out of Tübingen, he would have hesitated to give him the order to depart. He would have been wrong. After three months, the Malay porters, working in shifts, brought back a delirious skeleton on a stretcher, whose bones were breaking through the black, scaly and bloody skin. Before dying, however, Strassberg recovered a few minutes of lucidity. His eyes clear and his words distinct, gripping the hand of his superior in his final spasms, he murmured: “It exists.”

  Strassberg had penetrated as far as the abode of the prodigious anthropopithecus.9 He had contemplated with his own eyes a kind of primitive hut, the walls of which were made of bamboo, reeds and twigs, interlaced with a commencement of artistry. A litter of foliage conserved the imprint of two bodies. There were calabashes of different sizes, a couple of gourds, a kind of blanket of woven leaves and rushes: the embryo of a furniture. It was no longer the shelter of an ape. A human, then?

  Julius Strassberg closed and reopened eyes in which life was flickering one last time.

  “I saw it prowling under the lataniers. It’s not a man. It’s…a great Hairy Thing. The one we’re searching for. The link... All the details…in my journal... For science and for the Kaiser…send my ring back to Fraülein Frieda, my back-pay to my mother. I hope that the Company will add an extraordinary gratification. Goodnight...”

  No hesitation is permissible. Scarcely have Julius Strasberg’s remains been buried in the murderous soil than Otto Klagenmeyer has prepared his revenge. For two months, he studies the dead man’s documents, assembles weapons, food, clothes, footwear and medicines. Willingly or by force, he obtains the best guides and the most robust porters.

  On the appointed day, the imperial flag is hoisted on the roof of the trading-post before the assembled employees. A salvo of cannon-fire salutes him. Dr. Klagenmeyer gives his orders to his deputy, and, in the midst of the personnel’s cries of “Hoch!” and the prostrations of the indigenes, he takes personal command of the expedition that moves off. If the Great Hairy One exists, Herr Klagenmeyer will bring it back, or will not come back himself.

  But he will come back.

  In the heart of the maternal forest, Kouang the giant and his companion Koua are placidly stringing out the identical days that the caprice of Nature has been pleased to provide for them.

  Beyond the thorny thickets and pestilential pools that surround the great retreat, amid prodigious forests, impenetrable foliage with extravagant fruits, in the accumulation of reeks and odors, in the bosom of the undergrowth where the kiss of the sun and the decomposed humus give birth to fantastic flowers, in a dense and vertiginous pullulation of forms, sketches, existences, agonies and putrescence, Kouang is king and Koua is queen.

  Their mighty torsos delightedly breathe in the miasma-charged air that makes their blood thicker and their limbs, as stout a tree-trunks, more muscular. Before them, the tiger lies down in the grass, its ears flat, and the stupid rhinoceros turns away. Elephants salute them amicably with their trunks, and alligators beat a retreat. One evening, Krawac, the doyen of the long-jawed brutes, dared to attack the huge couple when they went down to the river to bathe. With one bound, Kouang climbed on to his shoulders and clenched his knees, took hold of his muzzle with both hands, and dislocated the reptile’s crushing apparatus, with frightful cracking sounds, in a matter of seconds.

  Against the hairy pelt of the giants, all vermin are impotent, including human vermin. One evening, when their whim had taken them a few leagues from their lair, swinging from tree to tree, they had encountered a Dayak hunter. He had fled in fear, after having released a dart that they had sniffed and palpated disdainfully, as inoffensive as that of mosquitoes.

  In any case, their temperament is peaceful. They nourish themselves on fruits, herbs, roots and honey. No ambitious dreams or complicated curiosities are sketched within their skulls. Their thoughts circulate around the sun, water, shadows, odors, tastes and sounds. And they love one another. They love one another delicately and powerfully. They do not care about anything else. Only rare reminiscences occasionally pass through them. Once, other hairy giants roamed the great forest, and it was appropriate to crouch down together while exchanging clusters of fruit or tubers, but the great siblings have disappeared. Why? Since Kouang has Koua, and since Koua is Kouang’s, what does it matter? They love one another...

  They love one another. They do not know evil. They do not know fear. They live insouciantly, cradled in immense Nature, known, proven and fraternal.

  However, the mistrust subsists within them that permits an individual to endure in the concurrence of instincts and appetites. Meticulously, every morning, at first light, they beat the bush, explore the treetops, and inspect the marsh. It is less to seek provender than to verify that nothing new and nothing strange has insinuated itself therein. Perhaps their memories have retained distant images, disconcerting effluvia, suspicious imprints. Everything known to them is friendly; unknown, everything is suspect, everything potentially hostile...

  Everything unknown is suspect—hence, this morning, the troubling apprehension that is tormenting Kouang, extracting hoarse groans from him. For three days, torrential rain has wiped out all tracks and all fumets. In addition to sight, hearing and smell, however, existence in the woods develops in their denizens a special sense, a sharp and distant tactile sense, a prescience of any disturbance in the order of things.

  This morning, breaths and rustles are quivering in the jungle, which are in violation of custom. In the foliage, the chatter of parrots has a shrill tone; they are flapping their wings, calling to one another, flying toward the sun. Flattening their trunks and ears, a herd of elephants emerges from the west; they bathe, drink, spread mud on the napes of their necks and resume their march. In the gusts of the heavy breeze that escorts them, are not indefinable warnings floating? In the distance—far in the distance—a rumor is propagating.

  Kouang hesitates, grinds his teeth, and grips his club harder. There is a threat. Naïve anger is born in him, and increases, deepening. Who, then, dares…? But beside him, Koua is frolicking, cheerful and charming. She looks at him in surprise and mocks him impishly. He contemplates her, irresolute. No harm must come to her. Perhaps it would be best to flee—but where? Nostrils flared, Kouang sniffs the surroundings. Now Koua also has an intuition of danger, and formulates an anxious interrogation. Kouang grabs her wrist and dr
aws her toward the thicket...

  He stops, coughs with rage and strikes his chest...

  Three or four sickly beasts with an indescribable odor dare to bar his way, making anxious gestures...

  Then, rendered furious, Kouang charges, howling. Thunder, blinding lightning and biting pain fall upon him, stupefying him...

  What has happened? Koua, collapsed in the grass at his feet, is exhaling moans. There is the atrocious odor of her streaming blood. In spite of his wounds, Kouang takes hold of one of the hunters in one hand, another in the other, whirls them around, and smashes their skulls against rough tree-trunks, to which their brains adhere. The rest flee.

  Kouang picks up the inert Koua, whose eyes are capsizing, and hugs her to him. He will save her from harm. But extraordinary bonds fall over his shoulders, strangling him and entangling his limbs. An infamous horde rushes forward. In vain he struggles, strikes out, bites and runs. Things pierce him, enchain him, and pin him to the ground.

  Drunk with pride and wrath, Dr. Klagenmeyer congratulates and scolds his men feverishly. But for their cowardice and precipitation, he would have captured the anthropoid couple alive. No matter; it is a triumphal day. Kouang’s wounds are slight; he will recover. In Hamburg, the cyclopean captive will be the star attraction at the Fehlenbeck Park, and will amaze the crowds. The dissection of the female promises the most instructive revelations. Her remains, duly stuffed—a gift from Professor Klagenmeyer—will constitute the jewel of the Berlin Museum.

  Back there, in an elegant house in Wilmersdorf, with a Louis XV façade adorned with stucco giraffes and Medieval ironwork, he glimpses a tall blonde maiden with flaxen tresses. Embroidering the initials of her beloved fiancé on the cushions that she is stuffing with her own hair, Lina Wagenroth is quivering with love and pride.