In spite of everything, however, Rozal had not wanted to postpone his departure. The day before, he had replied to a reporter: “I’ll return to Paris for the general mobilization, if it has taken place. I’m due on day three, as a lieutenant in the artillery.”
The embankment of the fortifications and the surroundings of the drill-field of Bagatelle were covered by crowds. An important ceremony was directed by the Prefect of Police himself, Monsieur Hennion37—the former special commissioner attached to the security of the amours and travels of the handsome president, the former tanner Felix Faure. Hennion, an artful N.C.O., an ex-watchdog of a provincial commissioner, was attempting, in his grandiose gold-laden uniform, assisted by his tall stature, to look like one of Napoléon I’s marshals. He had cleared the terrain, with the exception of sporting personalities, representatives of the world press, the inevitable photographers and cinematographic journalists with their coffee-mills on tripods.
Naturally, though, Nasenberg was included in this privileged circle. Very proud, with a new red rosette glittering in his buttonhole—for he had just been promoted to officer rank within the order of the Légion d’honneur, on the fourteenth of July, by the Ministry of Public Works, for exceptional services to aviation—he was accompanied by his new advertisement, a cantatrice in the casinos of the Cote d’Azur and watering places, Yvonne Chazeil, not pretty, but very well-dressed, for whose portraits on the first pages and publicity in the stage periodicals he was paying.
An ingenuous and ambitious egotist, she was bored, paying no heed to the hero of the fantastic flight, harassing Nasenberg for an “arrangement” with the director of the casino at Deauville. “During August in Deauville I want to sing Thaïs, La Danseuse de Tanagra and Manon,”38 she repeated. “You hear, Richard—I want to!”
“Zut! For the moment, look to the sky, blonde star! Anyway, the weather’s very bad in Deauville in August…and besides...”
“What?”
“Zut, my kitten!”
Why had the ex-Boche, pestered by the intemperate thespian, said that? What did he foresee, for the month of August? Whatever it was, it was now less than five minutes before the exciting departure. Before getting into his aerial vessel, the hero of the day embraced Turner, while a little boy of seven, the son of Etienne, the foreman in the Nanterre factory cling to a workman’s trouser-leg, sang the opening lines of Marseillaise at the top of this voice, in order to express is enthusiasm for an event his father had celebrating in advance for a month, of which he wanted to make him a witness, in order that remember it and be able to tell the story later. The child sang, for Rozal, for the boss, over and over again:
Allons, enfants de la patrie.
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
The engineer was now in his iron cockpit. Having tucked his ears into his helmet and placed heavy leather-rimed goggles over his eyes, he was no longer anything but one with his apparatus, of which he became the guiding brain. He checked the time on a dial before him; master of his mind, his body and all his organs, a fully-fledged Nicéphore,39 he simply said: “It’s three o’clock in the morning. Au revoir, Paris!”
At the same time, he waved to the crowd with a single broad and cordial gesture, smiled, and started up the turbine. Formidable applause rang out then, immediately halted by the astonishment of the spectators on observing that the monoplane was no longer anything but a dot in the grey sky. Before the excitement had calmed, the metallic bird had disappeared into the light vapors that were floating in the far distance on the horizon.
Then the spectators looked at one another. For the man who has gone forth thus, a smile on his lips, toward uncertain glory, and, at any rate, into certain danger, there were outbursts of enthusiasm and naïve sympathy. All day long, they would be living in fear, for there would be no news, unless, by chance, a steamer sent some by wireless telegraph.
Even so, slowly, the crowd ebbed away, very proud that a Frenchman had realized the prodigy of wanting to tame space and conquer time. And as a train passed by, coming from the Invalides and going to Versailles, an urchin found a picturesque phrase—“Go on, earthworm”—with which to mock the heavy locomotive that was dragging its massive and noisy self along antique rails, modestly riveted to the ground.
VI. The Human Arrow En Route
For ten hours, the fantastic arrow, having left France with a powerful leap, has been flying through the interminable and dismal sky—beautiful and terrifying, even so, in its deserted grandeur.
For ten hours, Rozal has been flying toward New York, but it seems to him that he departed weeks before, and that he will never arrive—never. The cries of the delirious crowd, the cheers raised at the moment of take-off, are still echoing in his head, and the sound of the Ocean, the interminable noise of the rising swell, mingled at present with that of the air streaming over the hull of his aircraft and the roar of the turbine, still accompany them, pursuing him, obsessing him to the point of suffering.
At times, he has a nightmarish premonition of the madness lying in wait for him, and he has to make terrible efforts of will to regain mastery of his enfeebled body and vacillating mentality. In moments of lucidity he returns to the past: he remembers the years of struggle, hope and suffering he endured in order to realize the marvelous dream. He has anticipated in advance the rare and unprecedented sensations of the incredible enjoyment of that dream—but now that he is living it, really and absolutely, he is astonished to feel nothing but a kind of torment, a heavy oppression: the nightmare of those ten hours of speeding through the emptiness, the immense emptiness, through the aerial steppes, and the Void...
It seems to him that he is not in command of the prodigious force that is transporting him; instead, he has the sensation of being pulled along, without the collaboration of his will, in the vertiginous flight of a bolide escaping the planet. At times, wearied to the point of exhaustion, and the most absolute despair, he thinks that it would be a release, an incomparable repose, to stop everything and fall into the watery abyss, whose murmur, down below, is driving him mad.
But he has the clear impression that what his thought desires, his limbs could refuse to execute; he is no longer the master of his destiny; enigmatic powers have taken possession of him. It is necessary that he continue, steering this demented, irresistible race through the atmosphere—for him, emptiness and more emptiness, through the blue above him, below him, ahead of him and behind him, blue everywhere, which changes its appearance at every moment, but is always and forever blue…as if for eternity.
In the beginning, before falling to this strange prostration, he had felt various emotions. The voyage over land, from Paris to the sea, had seemed to him an amusement. He had been going so fast, in fact, and flying so low, that the houses, fields, roads, rivers, meadows, hills, towns and villages went past with cinematographic rapidity. And when he had perceived the Ocean, he had exclaimed: “Already!”
At more than 400 kilometers an hour, terrestrial images are almost fugitive; he had no sooner perceived the first lines of moving waves than he was flying over the immense sheet of water, beginning the Atlantic crossing.
At that moment, he had experienced a shock in his heart; the irreparable was accomplished. He had clutched the controls of his machine in tremulous hands and had said to himself, in order that his voice might give him courage: “I shall reach America!”
He sensed the aircraft mastering its route, the master of the wind, the air, the enormous distance. His attentive ears perceived the regular purr of the turbine, fueled by a gas produced by a continuous, controlled deflagration. He had only to let it go, with no other preoccupation than consulting the compass indicating the course to be followed, the instrument indicating drift, and to make necessary gestures when the wind attempted, in spite of everything, to make the great bird deviate. By the end of the first hour, however, these gestures were no more than reflexes, and he carried them out unconsciously, like an automaton.
Ireland had disappeared behind
him long ago. He experienced the terrible anguish of solitude, almost of death. Only the purr of the engine gave evidence of life, for he was flying too high, now, for the sounds of the agitated sea, the impact of the breaking waves, to be perceptible. Beneath him, however, he had an unforgettable spectacle. As the Sun climbed into the sky, the wind freshened and soon he had deduced that there as a tempest beneath him. Oh, that didn’t worry him. At the altitude he had gained, he felt no more than its attenuated effects, for the drama of the elements was being played out far below, at the level of the waves. Then again, a projectile launched at that fantastic speed had no fear of being halted by atmospheric perturbations; it pierced the invisible forces of the air as a torpedo cuts through a submarine current.
As far as his eyes could see, he perceived a uniform moving realm, like a sapphire Sahara, over which thousands and thousands of fleecy white tufts were being rolled, chased, driven and shoved toward invisible distances by a mysterious and brutal force. He wanted to see that gripping image at closer range—and he descended over the Ocean, drawing closer to the sea. Then, tumultuous currents collided with his armor and his wings of steel; those two opposed powers gave rise to a sort of long whistle, like the one mariners hear when the sea-wind passes through the rigging. He felt the shell of his apparatus vibrate beneath him—and sometimes, when the tempest increased, the arrow seemed to be plunging through a dull and prolonged noise, like the roaring of a wild beat.
But how magnificent the Ocean was! Enormous masses of water suddenly rose up, growing vastly, like mountains, and he had the impression that they might rise even further, reach him and swallow him. Then there were great crests, suddenly formed. He flew over abysms, black or glaucous gulfs that opened in monstrous mouths: liquid maws, fluid craters that broadened out, deepening further, fascinating him. What if he were to fall into one?
He experienced an icy shiver, a start of fear. Then the gulfs closed, giving way to an astonishingly transparent green chain of moving summits, standing up straight, like a wall on which yellow rays of sunlight were playing. Suddenly, a fringe of surf ran along it, rolled over and dissolved into silvery sparks—and the infinite wall soon set off on the march! It crouched down in order to run, and overrode smaller masses, which it absorbed. Then at the end of the rapid race, it encountered a formidable eruption of suddenly-uplifted depths, as if another chain of oceanic mountains were emerging from the abyss, and crashed over it with the roar of a cataract.
Long afterwards, fragments of the collapsed mass still remained in the air: light white flecks borne away by the tempest, whirling for a few minutes, following the crests of the reformed waves, and finally tumbling into enormous eddies, with a patter like raindrops, or bullets.
The contemplation of this animated spectacle put Rozal in real danger. His senses overexcited, his consciousness almost abolished, he was almost unaware of the kind of intoxication—of fascination, rather—that the contest of the wind and waves induced in him. He was very near to falling into an abyss to which he had imprudently an involuntarily come too close. Then he straightened his apparatus up and climbed back up toward the clouds.
They were thick and black, laden with cold water, and their imposing extent blocked the sky. He engulfed himself therein, and thought to begin with that he was in eternal darkness, when two bolts of lighting, one a zigzag and the other a sheet of flame, illuminated it. In order not to be struck by these electric conflagrations in his iron eagle, he made haste to climb higher—but the clouds were dense, and it took two minutes, in spite of his maximum speed, to escape their humid darkness.
Finally, he perceived daylight, a calm blue immensity—too calm—bordered below by the floating armies of dark clouds that he had just traversed. And in that infinity of silence, emptiness and forgetfulness, he flew and flew, like a migratory bird crossing a desert, hastening as fast as it can toward the land to which its instinct is guiding it.
After six hours, he felt hungry. Equipped with food supplies and a bottle of cordial, he had been able to eat and drink a little, one-handed, always keeping the other on the controls of the fabulous machine that was violating spaces though which no human had ever passed before. For a few minutes, then his ideas were clear and lucid, and—the experiment that had lasted for several hours guaranteeing his success—he had felt a sort of wellbeing, the satisfied pleasure of thinking that he would soon reach his goal.
But more hours passed, and he felt physical fatigue arrive, because of his prolonged effort and the enormous mental stress required. Between the ninth and the tenth hour, he felt faint, and it was necessary for him to make a violent effort of will to recover himself.
He was possessed by anguish, though; until then, he had been solely preoccupied with one question: that of finding the machine capable of accomplishing the fantastic flight non-stop. All of his time, his intelligence and his labor had been directed toward that objective, toward the realization of the prowess that others dared not attempt. But he had forgotten to take account of the human, the pilot of the machine; he had not thought that it would require a superhuman effort of him: an athletic struggle for twenty hours, during which it would not be possible, without risking death, to take a minute’s rest, even to slow down, to abandon what he had started. It was necessary, since there were no ports of call on the route mapped out in advance.
On approaching the sea, on two occasions, he had perceived moving black dots that were ships. Not being equipped with floats, however, if he had descended in close proximity to one of them, it would have meant the loss of his bird and, in any case, the failure of his attempt.
He had to succeed.
He stiffened himself then against the numbing of his will, of his thought—but whatever he did, he was overtaken by a dangerous somnolence; by the tenth hour, he no longer knew how he was guiding his monoplane; he was carrying out reflex actions instinctively, without his mind being conscious of it, and he flew on and on. He would have to fly like that until his strength was completely exhausted, until his weary nerves collapsed.
The air he is flying through now is calm. The sea beneath him is no longer tumultuous, as if was a while ago; a measured swell scarcely hollows out little valleys in the magnificent plain—and when he descends, to restore contact with life, animate nature, to hear a sound other than that of the engine, he finds the elements of courage that revive his failing energy. But these are rapid oases, almost immediately fled. The vertigo of the speed is in his head; the spectacles contemplated, of the water, patches of mist, a steamer, pass before his eyes too quickly.
While steering—by virtue of a vital instinct that persists in his hallucinated brain, as when, in times of war, exhausted soldiers forced to march through the night, are able to sleep with their packs of their backs while they march—he dreams, in the midday brightness that he is a cannonball with an interminable trajectory… interminable… interminable… interminable: a human arrow in endless flight, and that he will fly on in this way, without pause and without rest, through an invisible and dismal ether, where the Sun never sets and the stars never shine.
The immense sky stretches as far as the eye can see, the sky without limits. The arrow draws him along vertiginously at thousands of kilometers an hour. He encounters, collides with and knocks down bats similar to great antediluvian ichthyosaurs, creatures of the dusk, screech-owls and long-eared owls with eyes like moons. Everywhere, ahead of him, a wall of varied clouds looms up and extends: darkness. He plunges into it, and imagines that he is rolling, noisily, through a tunnel with no other extremity.
Here, finally, is light, feeble, then dazzling! He is in paradise, flying among the angels, all white and rosy, who race away, frightened as soon as they see him.
God has suddenly precipitated him almost into the waves of the vast, entirely tempestuous Ocean; he plunges into the hollows of green, glaucous and black waves. Masses of swirling foam unfurl over his head cataclysmically.
He climbs again, driving through the wind, the tenebro
us mass, irradiated with lightning flashes and deafening thunderclaps, of the storm that does not want to be vanquished. Around him, hundreds of seabirds with scissor-like wings and piercing beaks, even albatrosses from the Cordilleras, which sheep in the sunlight, their wings widespread, scream in his ears, accompanying the whistling and howling of the hurricane in a rightful concert.
Then he hears Turner’s voice, calling out to him in friendship, encouraging him; he remembers Marcelle Fougerette, on his departure, politely asking him to sign a postcard. Cheers, shouts, calls at Issy-les-Moulineaux, the whistle of a nearby factory…everything resounds at the same time in his overheated skull. And above all the painful cacophonies of that deafening racket, the voice of his foreman Etienne’s little boy, singing for him, the boss:
Allons, enfants de la patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
Suddenly, in front of him, a round monster, rolling of its own accord, advances toward him, growing in size. It is a planet surging abruptly from the sunlight. Terrified, Rozal passes his hand over his brow, and recovers a little of his composure.
Another two hours, three hours, go by. His legs paralyzed, it seems to him that he has covered thousands and thousands of kilometers in space—and always, ahead of him, that kind of void, which terminates the horizon, that desert which recommences, which he enters incessantly and which immediately appears further on, always further on, on that monotonous, vague, uncertain horizon that renews itself continually and never changes.
He no longer has any notion of anything—neither time, nor place, nor distance. It is impossible for him, in the prostration that grips him, to discern what remains of resistance—and he knows that he will soon fall somewhere, nailed to his seat, his hand clenched on the controls, when he falls unconscious! Furthermore, he is frozen. In spite of the precautions he has taken, he has been unable to protect himself from the cold, whose intensity, multiplied a hundredfold by the fearful speed, will son mummify him. And for hours, his excruciating eyes have been shedding tears that cause him to see the spectacle of the sky and the sea through a mist that renders the nightmare into which his thoughts have fallen more gripping.
The Human Arrow Page 23