The Givreuse Enigma

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  Dirk marched over to the Amdavas; the chief came to meet him, so small by comparison with the Dutchman that he might have been taken for a dwarf.

  “My son’s promises will be kept!” said the planter, in a loud voice. “And you shall each have an extra 25 cartridges.”

  In spite of their traditional impassivity in front of foreigners, the majority of the Amdavas manifested a slight excitement; nothing in the world, after improved rifles, delighted them as much as ammunition.

  “The Amdavas know that the family of the giant baas never lies!” replied the chief. “The Amdavas also do not speak two ways. They will fight as their fathers have fought since the trees first grew in this land…”

  IX. The Marshland

  After six days of navigation, the Carabao-Men disembarked. Since the previous day, the flow of the stream had relented; as broad as a river, it now ran without haste between flat and sinister banks strewn with marshes. There were poplars as tall as cathedral spires; monstrous willows reminiscent of enormous batrachians; innumerable hosts of mushrooms, often of colossal size; mangroves nourished by the mud; black reeds stained with red, like huge rusty blades, from which the breeze drew a strange susurrus; wild bamboos, banyans, teaks and an abundant population of lianas, orchids and epiphytes.

  On the waters there were nenuphar lilies with leaves as big as canoes, on which mating frogs assembled in myriads in the evenings. The mire of the marsh nourished lizards almost as immense as prehistoric saurians, foul and voracious fish, formless larval creatures as soft as oysters but deprived of shells, and pythons as long as tree branches.

  When the Carabao-Men had sheltered the raft among the mangroves, Hourv stood up before the ancestral land and extended his arms, proclaiming in a resounding voice: “Marshes, from which our forefathers emerged when the first suns rose in the blue water, we bring the salutary captive to the race of chiefs and the captive that will give his heart and his blood. Your strength, marshes, will be renewed in our breasts!”

  Having said that, he turned his heavy muzzle toward Frédéric and Corisande, who had been untied, and spoke to them gently. “Your descendants, daughter of Other Men, shall be mingled for generations with the descendants of chiefs, children of the earth and the Waters. Those to whom you shall give birth will be similar to the Sons of the Marsh, but you will live on in them when all the men of your race have long disappeared. Only the race of Carabao-Men will survive until the Last Suns…

  “You, foreigner, as white as the flowers of the water-lily, shall die at the Moon of Jade; your heart shall enter into the body of chiefs, your blood shall be drunk by the warriors, and your limbs will be shared among 20 warriors. Thus your flesh will live again in the flesh of Invincibles.”

  He fell silent. His companions intoned a slow and dismal chant, which their forefathers had chanted at the dawn of centuries, which resembled the croaking of giant frogs. Then the chief gave the signal to depart.

  Corisande and Frédéric were no longer hobbled, and were permitted to walk side by side.

  “They’re no longer afraid of anything,” said the young man. “Oh, Corisande, I bitterly regret having brought you to this odious land. I should have come alone.”

  “Who can tell, my poor Frédéric? Isn’t every moment of life a threat?”

  “Yes,” he replied, somberly. “We’re surrounded by traps from the moment of our birth—but at least you would have avoided this degrading peril. Oh, how ashamed I am of my weakness!”

  “You’re not weak,” she said, tenderly. “Haven’t you saved me once already, heroically? Even if you had been a giant, what could you have done during that storm? Even the dogs lost their sense of smell; the men were reduced to impotence. Don’t blame yourself, my dear brother. You have nothing for which to reproach yourself. The catastrophe was inevitable.”

  Corisande’s little hand sought the young man’s hand. A tragic gentleness was within them, the certainty of an affection born in the limbo of infancy, against which nothing could prevail. These poor creatures had always shared their vicissitudes and hopes; they would not have been boasting in affirming that each of them would have sacrificed their own life to save that of the other.

  “You see,” she continued, “it’s not necessary to despair yet. She will find us. I didn’t like her, Frédéric; I felt a rancor against her that seemed to have been born before me, but when I saw her pass by at the river, I understood all that she will do for us.”

  “I too felt an animosity toward her, but only an animosity. Yes, she will do anything, nothing can intimidate her. She’s indomitable, Corisande—and very resourceful.”

  He turned his gaze toward the men leading them. The chief was marching at the head, a stout human being with the muscles of a bull and a bestial head—but one might have thought that returning to his marshy fatherland gave him a kind of serenity. The others also seemed placid.

  “Perhaps these people are not as cruel as they say?” she murmured.

  But he, remembering the war, thought of the atrocious actions carried out by men accustomed to the peaceful life of cities. He knew, too, that savages and barbarians kill without ferocity, with the simplicity of a carnivore killing its prey, and that even tortures, when they are rites, require no malevolent emotion.

  Toward evening, they perceived a strange multitude of stone blocks reminiscent of the ruins of a fantastic city. They were not ruins, but the intact work of the Ancestors. Some of the blocks resembled columns, some confused statues of men or animals; each of them was hollowed out at the base and enclosed a cavernous dwelling. Around that sort of cyclopean city were marshes traversed by stone causeways, which were also the work of men of ancient times, maintained by their descendants.

  As the expedition arrived, a crowd of men, women and children appeared, which soon formed a coherent mass of 500 or 600 individuals. At first, they uttered clamors similar to the bellowing of buffaloes and the howling of wolves; then a chant went up, which must have been as old as the primitive city.

  It’s a sort of brutal civilization, Frédéric thought, perhaps comparable to the civilization of the Stone Age.

  The chant ended. A moment later, the captives were surrounded by the crowd. They were stared at without hostility, and with evident joy.

  We’re their Prey! the young man said to himself—and as Corisande repeated “Perhaps they’re not so very cruel!” he shuddered, for he guessed that the absence of hostility would not prevent a fatal outcome for him, and perhaps worse for Corisande.

  In response to a signal from an old man, whose head seemed to be encrusted with lichen and whose face was pitted like a frost-split stone, the crowd parted. Then, four men silently surrounded Frédéric and separated him from Corisande.

  An atrocious presentiment and an irresistible instinct made him raise his fists, but his arms were immobilized by four enormous hands, and he saw three women, even more hideous than the males, lead the young woman away. She turned to her brother, trying to smile at him; a terrible emotion tightened his muscles.

  The crowd remained calm; even the men restraining Frédéric did not manifest any ill-humor.

  “Corisande—my dear sister!” he cried, with a sob.

  “Nothing is lost yet, Frédéric,” she said. Her voice trailed off; she looked at him dolorously, with an expression in which affection overcame fear. Soon, she was out of sight.

  Meanwhile, the four men dragged Frédéric away. They led him over a granite causeway across a marsh. The ground on the other side was black; a strange forest of stones, also black—enormous columns of basalt—extended as far as the eye could see. Frédéric’s guardians and the crowd following them stopped, while the old man, his arid head lowered toward the ground, resumed the ancestral chant, which the crowd hummed in subdued voices.

  They all went into the basalt forest. The further they went the more sinister it seemed; one might have thought that they were in an Archean world, in which no plant had yet assaulted the mineral world.

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nbsp; Finally, a kind of clearing appeared, surrounded by immense rocks; in the center, there was a funereal block, rectangular in form, about six meters high. Next to that stone, which the crowd surrounded in silence, nine short, thin Sumatrans appeared, as if they had sprung from the ground, led by colossal guardians. A rapid dusk was dying away in the western forges when the old man approached the captives and, raising both hands, spoke to them in a slow, soft voice.

  “The Men of the Marshes are the strongest of men. One day, they will chase all the others from the mountains to the plain, and from the plain to the sea. How will your people be able to resist? Your warriors have the bodies of dogs, ours have the strength of buffaloes. Even those who have come from distant isles, the men with the silver faces, will be exterminated.”

  Some distance away, three large fires were lit. An immense bellowing rose up. The old man made a sign, and one of the captives was hoisted up on to the rectangular block. He was lain down upon it after his clothing had been removed. The chant rose up again and, while an enormous Sun disappeared in the west, a red Moon rose above the granite forest.

  The old man declaimed: “Thou, who rose from the Marsh before the birth of the Sun and who gave birth to the nurturing planets, thou who watched over our ancestors and will illuminate their victory, see the blood of the vanquished run over the stone where enemies without number perish.”

  Two men held the Sumatran down on the basalt; a third came forward, armed with a jade knife, plunged it into the victim’s entrails and split the skin all the way to the diaphragm.

  The howls of the Carabao-Men drowned out the screams of the victim, and the sacrificer, plunging the blade into the breast, brought out the heart, which he held out toward the Occident.30

  Frédéric saw himself already extended on the stone, his blood shed as the blood of innumerable humans, offered by their peers to the hidden forces of the world, had been shed before. Because the war had accustomed him to murder, he maintained his self-control, and thought about Corisande again. He knew only too well what fate was in store for her; his anguish at being condemned to death was mingled with a bitter and impotent revulsion.

  Meanwhile, the other victims were immolated and their hearts, still beating, extended toward the Star. After the torment of the last one, there was a frenetic clamor, and the Carabao-Men and Women precipitated themselves toward the Black Stone from every direction.

  Four men butchered the cadavers there; the chiefs presided over a kind of distribution.

  Isn’t it my turn, then? Frédéric asked himself, astonished.

  No one was paying any attention to him any longer, except for his guardians, each of whom went, one at a time, to claim the morsel of blood flesh that was due to him.

  Soon, the clearing was deserted; the men and women were assembled around the fires where they were roasting the meat.

  All right! I’m not to die yet! the young man said to himself.

  In the distance, the feast commenced. One might have taken it for a peaceful tribal meal on the evening after a hunt, when the warriors have brought back deer, tapirs or siamangs. There was joy, however—a grave and mystical joy—because the prey had been immolated on the Black Stone.

  If I’m not to perish, Frédéric asked himself, why have I been brought here?

  He had not forgotten Corisande. He remembered what the Grafina had said; he felt a great surge of distress and terror…

  The meal was coming to an end. The Moon was paler, smaller and brighter above the basaltic forest. At a signal from the old man, the diners rose to their feet; once again, the chant reverberated in the night. Then there was a great silence. In the distance, toward the marsh, lights were moving, and soon six women were seen, escorting Corisande. Her loose hair was floating magnificently over a wolf-skin with which the captive’s shoulders had been covered. As pale as a corpse, she was walking courageously, surrounded by her hideous guardians.

  Frédéric’s heart skipped a beat; he thought he was about to die of horror and pity.

  Is it possible that those things happen among human beings? Remembering soldiers disemboweled, asphyxiated and burned alive, however, skulls smashed and heads blown off by shells, he lowered his head with a sob.

  The multitude had returned to surround the Black Stone. It left a wide corridor for the six women who were bringing Corisande. The men were looking avidly at that abundant hair, which sparkled in the moonlight, and the face as white as the mountain snow.

  Behind the six women marched the leader of the band that had captured the young couple.

  Frédéric’s guardians had come back. At a sign from the Ancestor, they led the captive to within a few paces of Corisande; he believed that he was finally about to be immolated.

  She had turned toward him; they looked at one another with a terrible tenderness.

  “Adieu, my brother…my brother, whom I have always loved most of all.”

  “Corisande! Oh, beloved sister!”

  Three women took hold of the young woman and transported her to the black altar, where they laid her down after having removed the wolf-skin. Resigned, she prayed. The avid crowd gazed at her fine shoulders and brilliant torso.

  The Ancestor brandished his jade knife, then, leaning over, made an incision in the left breast. A red trickle ran down, which one of the women collected in a nacreous shell. Another woman was already dressing the wound.

  Then the old man cried: “May the blood of the woman with the face of a flower run in the veins of Hourv, the Red Eagle. And may that be done to her which is done to all the women consecrated to the Sons of the Marsh.”

  He handed the shell into which the blood had run to Hourv. The man drank the living fluid and, raising his arms toward the Stars, uttered three resounding cries.

  The female guardians took hold of Corisande again and, having dressed her in the wolf-skin again, gave her back to Hourv. The man lifted her up in his arms and carried her away.

  She had fainted.

  Frédéric leapt up frantically, causing one of his guardians to stagger and another to fall down, but ten formidable hands restrained him.

  Hourv, before whom the crowd parted, emerged from the granite forest and reached the other shore of the marsh. When he arrived at his cavern, he stopped to gaze at the unconscious young woman. The Moon enveloped her with a silvery light; her scintillating hair ran over the wolf-skin; the harmonious body, with its delicate bones and finely-sculpted face, symbolized the long evolution of races infatuated with beauty. The Red Eagle, with his thick skull and bovine muzzle, clad in thick fur, seemed to be the first sketch of man in times immemorial.

  With a joyful grunt, he went into the cavern and deposited Corisande on a buffalo-skin.

  X. The Escape

  Frédéric, immobile and extended on the bare earth, with his limbs tied up, could not stop seeing Corisande on the Black Stone, the Ancestor declaiming incomprehensible words and the bestial man carrying the young woman away.

  There was no uncertainty as to the meaning of the adventure! The pure daughter of Gaul had been delivered to the brute; the vile deed had been consummated.31 At the thought of that, his heart seemed to burst. Then a dolorous torpor extinguished his palpitations. He knew full well that Corisande would think about death, but he did not want her to die, and he was sure that she would not kill herself while she believed that he was still alive.

  While he got a grip on his thoughts, mournfully, one of his guardians lifted him up on to his shoulder. The crowd of Carabao-Men had already gone across the marsh. Frédéric found himself back in the cavernous city, and was thrown into a fissure, three feet wide and so low-ceilinged that he was not able to stand upright there. This burrow was closed by a wattle-and-daub barrier.

  The moonlight filleted in through the seal; Frédéric could see the inhabitants of the city circulating in all directions before disappearing into the bosom of the rocks.

  He tried to make his captive presence known, shouting “Corisande!” loudly.
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br />   A plaintive voice replied, seemingly from not far away. The door opened; he understood that he was about to be gagged, and hastily added: “It’s necessary to stay alive!”

  A violent hand closed over his mouth.

  Silence had fallen among the men; apart from a sentry, crouching in front of the cavern where the prisoner was lying, there was no other creature to be seen. In the distance, frogs were croaking, and an occasional hoarse cry or a muffled howl announced the distant presence of a carnivore.

  For the first hour, Frédéric remained motionless. Bound, gagged and guarded by a man with the hearing of a wolf, it seemed that any escape was impossible. It was, however, about escape that he was thinking.

  He thought about it more intently when, on moving his arms, he observed that his bonds were not holding his limbs very tightly. Then, with very slow movements—silent by virtue of that fact—he tried to free one of his hands. By groping around, he eventually discovered a sharp projection, against which he gently rubbed the cord around his right arm.

  The sentry became drowsy, still crouched down with his chin on his knees and his enormous face turned toward the cavern. Frédéric knew that the other had senses as subtle as those of wild beasts and that he would come to his feet at the slightest suspect noise. He had already raised his head two or three times, his phosphorescent eyes fixed on the plug—but it was natural that the captive would turn over and change position periodically, and the barrier could not be removed without colliding with the sentry.

  The erosion of the cord took a long time, as much because of the slow movements that Frédéric made as because of the frequent interruption of his work. In the end, the arm was liberated and it became possible to liberate his whole body.

  There was, however, plenty of time. Finally able to move freely, Frédéric examined the crude door with his hands. The seal was ensured by a branch whose thin ends were embedded, not very deeply, in cavities in the rock. The branch, whose thickness was mediocre—a stout stick—was flexible; an abrupt and energetic pressure, by bending it considerably, would almost certainly disengage it—but every action would have to be effective; if Frédéric did not get out immediately, the escape would be nipped in the bud.