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Deacon Van Winkle’s Dream (Looking Backward)(1889)

I’m in the midst of a Sequels of Looking Backward marathon, working my way through as many of the early responses to Edward Bellamy’s novel as I can get my hands on. In the process of tracking these down, I’ve come across a couple of short pieces that are worth a look. “Deacon Van Winkle’s Dream,” by George H. Hubbard, is a sharp Christian response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, centered on Thanksgiving Day. The author appears to be the George Henry Hubbard (1857-) who wrote The Teaching of Jesus in Parables, and who was a persistent, relatively conservative voice in the discussions of reform. (As he was an fairly eloquent proponent of his position, I have included links to a number of his articles below.) However moralistic, the “Dream” is a clever piece, well constructed as a sequel to Bellamy’s novel.

Deacon Van Winkle was proud of his pedigree. He delighted to talk of the old Van Winkle family in Holland, and pointed with satisfaction to various characteristics in the children which, he said, indicated their Dutch ancestry. Again and again in the long winter evenings he would take down a well-worn copy of Irving’s “Sketch Book,” and read the story of Rip Van Winkle, and none of the family ever seemed to tire of hearing it.

Not long since, however, the deacon was seriously startled, not to say grieved, by a rumor that his famous ancestor had found a formidable rival in the person of one Julian West, whose story had just been placed before the public. Filled with jealousy, not a wicked, worldly jealousy, but a mild and righteous jealousy becoming to an orthodox deacon, he determined at the first opportunity to purchase a copy of “Looking Backward” to see if it was anything more than a weak imitation of the old story of Rip Van Winkle’s sleep

He happened to find it on the day before Thanksgiving Day, and brought it home to read in the evening.

At the supper-table the conversation turned on the plans for the next day. Heretofore it had been the custom for the Van Winkle family to attend church on Thanksgiving Day; for they were somewhat conservative in their ideas, a became a family with so long a pedigree. This year, however, a revolution seemed imminent. The younger members of the family pleaded for a change. They couldn’t see the use of going to church to hear a political or historical sermon. There would be only a few there, and the service would be dull. Besides they really ought to stay at home to prepare for the grand family gathering of Van Winkles that would be with them to take dinner. Finally it was decided that the church service should be given up, and the whole force of the family should be concentrated on the dinner.

Immediately after supper the deacon sat down to read his new book, and so absorbed did he become that, notwithstanding sundry admonitions from Mrs. Van Winkle, he refused to retire till he had finished the very last page. Then, hastily closing the book, he went to bed and quickly fell asleep. As a result of his unusual mental exertion of the evening he began to dream.

It was Thanksgiving Day, but he was not in the old house. His surroundings were strange. He was in a well-furnished parlor, and opposite to him sat a pleasant looking old gentleman, whom he at once recognized as Dr. Leete. With as little surprise as dreamers usually feel, he realized that he, too, had dropped into the twentieth century, and he determined to make some investigations on his own account.

With what seemed quite a natural transition from preceding conversation, he said: “By the way, Doctor, as this is Thanksgiving Day, shall we go to church, as has always been the custom in my family?”

The doctor looked at him thoughtfully, and replied: “You speak of something that few would understand at the present day. I remember, however, having read about it in history. This is one of our public holidays; but we do not call it Thanksgiving Day, altho it takes the place of that ancient festival. We call it Social Day. We attribute all the blessings that we enjoy not to a mythical being called God, but to our refined and perfected social system. Hence we devote the day to feasting and pleasure in honor of our social system.”

“This is indeed a great change from the old idea,” said the deacon. “How did it come about? Were there not very many who protested when the change was made?”

“Oh no,” replied Dr. Leete. ”The change was so gradual that it would be hard to say just when it took place. In fact, it was but the expression of a gradual development in public thought and feeling. If I mistake not, you yourself saw some of the beginnings of the movement. Do you not remember how few people cared to attend church on Thanksgiving Day? Half a dozen churches by uniting, could not secure as large an audience as would be found in any one of the churches on the Sabbath, These gatherings grew smaller each succeeding year until at length they were wholly abandoned.

The next step was the inevitable decay of the sense of gratitude in the heart. Such emotions unexpressed soon cease to exist. All the while the popular mind was developing and men began to see the folly of looking for help and blessing to an external and mysterious power utterly beyond their ken. It gradually dawned upon them that the secret of all good or evil lies in the make up of society. Given a correct social system and all evil will disappear as if by magic. Viewed in its true light, sin is atavism, suffering is error, and gratitude is superstition. Social reforms have saved the world; they have regenerated humanity. How foolish then, to talk of gratitude to God for these things! I see you are somewhat shocked; but when you have time to think it over carefully I am sure you will acknowledge the present state of things to be the natural outcome of the tendencies of your own time.”

“It seems to me,” said the deacon, “That religion itself has become a thing of the past. I see no place for it in the present order of things.”

“That is a mistake naturally arising from the narrow and distorted views in which you were educated, if you will pardon the adjectives,” replied Dr. Leete. “Religion has not ceased to exist. On the contrary, it has grown broader, more practical, more consistent with itself, and as a natural consequence it is universally accepted. We have no infidels or skeptics now except among those who are recognized as unworthy members of society. In your day skeptics were the result of the inconsistencies of your religion. You preached one system of truth and practiced another. You said a great deal about God and his Word In your pulpits: but expediency was usually the controlling motive of your life. You seldom brought the Bible into direct contact with practical affairs. When you urged men to keep the Sabbath, it was seldom on the ground of sanctity, or because it was God’s day. The all-powerful arguments were personal profit, physical health, and other economic advantages. And even the most devout Christians looked for greater practical blessings from proposed social reforms than from the preaching of the Gospel. How many of your ministers, for example, gave over the preaching of Christianity to become advocates of political prohibition, the single tax doctrine, and various other schemes of reform.

“We have merely carried out their ideas in a more logical fashion. Dropping the purely sentimental ideas of God and spirituality, we recognize the essence of religion in love for mankind and a true devotion to the interests of society.”

“Can this be the end of that which seemed so slight at the beginning?” said the deacon. “The edge of the wedge was very thin. Only a slight indifference to duty, only a little yielding to worldly principles, only a trifling lack of faith in the power of God: and the result has been the dethronement of God from his place in the universe.”

Just at that moment the doctor accidentally touched an electric button connected with the machinery of the National Orchestra, and the sudden ringing of a peel of musical bells gave the deacon such a start that he awoke to hear the last tones of the breakfast-bell reminding him that he had overslept in consequence of sitting up so late the previous evening,

At the breakfast-table he related his dream to the family and concluded by saying: “I’ve made up my mind to stick to the old custom and go to church today whatever the rest of you do. You know,” he added, addressing his wife, “We’ve really more than usual to be thankful for this year. Tom and Mary were brought out of the fever almost by a miracle. And I shall not easily forget how providential it was that I missed that train that was wrecked. Besides my business has been more prosperous this year than ever before.”

As be spoke of these things the other members of the family were reminded of numerous unusual blessings enjoyed during the year, and soon the old superstition of gratitude got the better of their progressive ideas, and they unanimously voted that the dinner would taste better and the family gathering be all the more jolly if they went to church first.

George H. Hubbard in the New Englander and Yale review:

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Filed under 1890s, Sequels to Looking Backward

Jack London, “The Enemy of All the World” (1908)

Jack_london_nd_2 The Enemy of All the World

It was Silas Bannerman who finally ran down that scientific wizard and arch-enemy of mankind, Emil Gluck. Gluck’s confession, before he went to the electric-chair, threw much light upon the series of mysterious events, many apparently unrelated, that so perturbed the world between the years 1933 and 1941. It was not until that remarkable document was made public that the world dreamed of there being any connection between the assassination of the King and Queen of Portugal and the murders of the New York City police-officers. While the deeds of Emil Gluck were all that was abominable, we cannot but feel, to a certain extent, pity for the unfortunate, malformed, and maltreated genius. This side of his story has never been told before, and from his confession and from the great mass of evidence and the documents and records of the time we are able to construct a fairly accurate portrait of him, and to discern the factors and pressures that molded him into the human monster he became and that drove him onward and downward along the fearful path he trod.

Emil Gluck was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1895. His father, Josephus Gluck, was a special policeman and night-watchman, who, in the year 1900, died suddenly of pneumonia. The mother, a pretty, fragile creature, who, before her marriage, had been a milliner, grieved herself to death over the loss of her husband. This sensitiveness of the mother was the heritage that in the boy became morbid and horrible.

In 1901, the boy, Emil, then six years of age, went to live with his aunt, Mrs. Ann Bartell. She was his mother’s sister, but in her breast was no kindly feeling for the sensitive, shrinking boy. Ann Bartell was a vain, shallow, and heartless woman. Also, she was cursed with poverty and burdened with a husband who was a lazy, erratic ne’er-do-well. Young Emil Gluck was not wanted, and Ann Bartell could be trusted to impress this fact sufficiently upon him. As an illustration of the treatment he received in that early, formative period, the following instance is given.

When he had been living in the Bartell home a little more than a year, he broke his leg. He sustained the injury through playing on the forbidden roof—as all boys have done and will continue to do to the end of time. The leg was broken in two places between the knee and thigh. Emil, helped by his frightened playmates, managed to drag himself to the front sidewalk, where he fainted. The children of the neighborhood were afraid of the hard-featured shrew who presided over the Bartell house; but, summoning their resolution, they rang the bell and told Ann Bartell of the accident. She did not even look at the little lad who lay stricken on the sidewalk, but slammed the door and went back to her wash-tub. The time passed. A drizzle came on, and Emil Gluck, out of his faint, lay sobbing in the rain. The leg should have been set immediately. As it was, the inflammation rose rapidly and made a nasty case of it. At the end of two hours, the indignant women of the neighborhood protested to Ann Bartell. This time she came out and looked at the lad as he lay helpless at her feet. Also she hysterically disowned him. He was not her child, she said, and recommended that the ambulance be called to take him to the city receiving-hospital. Then she went back into the house.

It was a woman, Elizabeth Shepstone, who came along, learned of the situation, and had the boy placed on a shutter. It was she who called the doctor, and who, brushing aside Ann Bartell, had the boy carried into the house. When the doctor arrived, Ann Bartell promptly warned him that she would not pay him for his services. For two months the little Emil lay in bed, the first month on his back without once being turned over; and he lay neglected and alone, save for the occasional visits of the unremunerated and overworked physician. He had no toys, nothing with which to beguile the long and tedious hours. No kind word was spoken to him, no soothing hand laid upon his brow, no single touch or act of loving tenderness—naught but the reproaches and harshness of Ann Bartell, and the continually reiterated information that he was not wanted. And it can well be understood, in such environment, how there was generated in the lonely, neglected boy much of the bitterness and hostility for his kind that was later to express itself in deeds so frightful as to terrify the world.

It would seem strange that from the hands of Ann Bartell, Emil Gluck should have received a college education; but the explanation is simple. Her ne’er-do-well husband, deserting her, made a strike in the Nevada gold-fields, and returned to her a many times millionaire. Ann Bartell hated the boy, and immediately she sent him to the Farristown Academy, a hundred miles away. Shy and sensitive, a lonely and misunderstood little soul, he was more lonely than ever at Farristown. He never came home, at vacation and holidays, as the other boys did. Instead, he wandered about the deserted buildings and grounds, befriended and misunderstood by the servants and gardeners, reading much, it is remembered, spending his days in the fields or before the fireplace with his nose poked always in the pages of some book. It was at this time that he over-used his eyes and was compelled to take up the wearing of glasses, which same were so prominent in the photographs of him published in the newspapers in 1941.

He was a remarkable student. Applications, such as his, would have taken him far; but he did not need application. A glance at a text meant mastery for him. The result was that he did an immense amount of collateral reading and acquired more in half a year than did the average student in half-a-dozen years. In 1909, barely fourteen years of age, he was ready—“more than ready,” the head-master of the academy said—to enter Yale or Harvard. His juvenility prevented him from entering those universities, and so, in 1909, we find him a freshman at historic Bowdoin College. In 1913 he graduated with highest honors, and immediately afterward followed Professor Bradlough to Berkeley, California. The one friend that Emil Gluck discovered in all his life was Professor Bradlough. The latter’s weak lungs had led him to exchange Maine for California, the removal being facilitated by the offer of a professorship in the state university. Throughout the year 1914, Emil Gluck resided in Berkeley and took special scientific courses. Toward the end of that year two deaths changed his prospects and his relations with life. The death of Professor Bradlough took from him the one friend he was ever to know, and the death of Ann Bartell left him penniless. Hating the unfortunate lad to the last, she cut him off with one hundred dollars.

The following year, at twenty years of age, Emil Gluck was enrolled as an instructor in chemistry in the University of California. Here the years passed quietly; he faithfully performed the drudgery that brought him his salary, and, a student always, he took half-a-dozen degrees. He was, among other things, a Doctor of Sociology, of Philosophy, and of Science, though he was known to the world, in later days, only as Professor Gluck.

He was twenty-seven years of age when he first sprang into prominence in the newspapers, through the publication of his book, “Sex and Progress.” The book remains to-day a milestone in the history and philosophy of marriage. It is a heavy tome of over seven hundred pages, painfully careful and accurate, and startlingly original. It was a book for scientists, and not one calculated to make a stir. But Gluck, in the last chapter, using barely three lines for it, mentioned the hypothetical desirability of trial marriages. At once the newspapers seized upon those three lines, “played them up yellow,” as the slang was in those days, and set the whole world laughing at Emil Gluck, the bespectacled young professor of twenty-seven. Photographers snapped him; he was besieged by reporters; women’s clubs throughout the land passed resolutions condemning him and his immoral theories; and on the floor of the California Assembly, while discussing the state appropriation to the University, a motion demanding the expulsion of Gluck was made under threat of withholding the appropriation—of course none of his persecutors had read the book; the twisted newspaper version of only three lines of it was enough for them. Here began Emil Gluck’s hatred for newspapermen. By them his serious and intrinsically valuable work of six years had been made a laughing-stock and a notoriety. To his dying day, and to their everlasting regret, he never forgave them.

It was the newspapers that were responsible for the next disaster that befell him. For the five years following the publication of his book he had remained silent, and silence for a lonely man is not good. One can conjecture sympathetically the awful solitude of Emil Gluck in that populous university; for he was without friends and without sympathy. His only recourse was books, and he went on reading and studying enormously. But in 1927 he accepted an invitation to appear before the Human Interest Society of Emeryville. He did not trust himself to speak, and as we write we have before us a copy of his learned paper. It is sober, scholarly, and scientific, and, it must also be added, conservative. But in one place he dealt with, and I quote his words, “the industrial and social revolution that is taking place in society.” A reporter, present, seized upon the word “revolution,” divorced it from the text, and wrote a garbled account that made Emil Gluck appear an anarchist. At once, “Professor Gluck, anarchist,” flamed over the wires and was appropriately “featured” in all the newspapers in the land.

He had attempted to reply to the previous newspaper-attack, but now he remained silent. Bitterness had already corroded his soul. The university faculty appealed to him to defend himself, but he sullenly declined, even refusing to enter in defense a copy of his paper to save himself from expulsion. He refused to resign, and was discharged from the university faculty. It must be added, that political pressure had been put upon the university regents and president.

Persecuted, maligned, and misunderstood, the forlorn and lonely man made no attempt at retaliation. All his life he had been sinned against, and all his life he had sinned against no one. But his cup of bitterness was not yet full to overflowing. Having lost his position, and being without any income, he had to find work. His first place was at the Union Iron Works, in San Francisco, where he proved a most able draughtsman. It was here that he obtained his first-hand knowledge of battleships and their construction. But the reporters discovered him and featured him in his new vocation. He immediately resigned and found another place; but after the reporters had driven him away from half-a-dozen positions, he steeled himself to brazen out the newspaper-persecution. This occurred when he started his electro-plating establishment in Oakland, on Telegraph Avenue. It was a small shop, employing three men and two boys. Gluck himself worked long hours. Night after night, as Policeman Carew testified on the stand, he did not leave the shop till one and two in the morning. It was during this period he perfected the improved ignition-device for gas-engines, the royalties from which ultimately made him wealthy.

He started his electro-plating establishment early in the Spring of 1928, and it was the same year that he formed the disastrous love-attachment for Irene Tackley. Now, it is not to be imagined that an extraordinary creature such as Emil Gluck could be any other than an extraordinary lover. In addition to his genius, his loneliness, and his morbidness, it must be taken into consideration that he knew nothing about women. Whatever tides of desire flooded his being, he was unschooled in the conventional expression of them, while his excessive timidity was bound to make his love-making unusual. Irene Tackley was a rather pretty young woman, but shallow and light-headed. At the time she worked in a small candy-store across the street from Gluck’s shop. He used to come in and drink ice-cream sodas and lemon-squashes, and stare at her. It seems the girl did not care for him, and, merely played with him. He was “queer,” she said; and at another time she called him a crank, when describing how he sat at the counter and peered at her through his spectacles, blushing and stammering when she took notice of him, and often leaving the shop in precipitate confusion.

Gluck made her the most amazing presents—a silver tea-service, a diamond ring, a set of furs, opera-glasses, a ponderous “History of the World” in many volumes, and a motor-cycle all silver-plated in his own shop. Enters now the girl’s lover, putting his foot down, showing great anger, compelling her to return Gluck’s strange assortment of presents. This man, William Sherbourne, was a gross and stolid creature, a heavy-jawed man of the working-class who had become a successful building-contractor in a small way. Gluck did not understand. He tried to get an explanation, attempting to speak with the girl when she went home from work in the evening. She complained to Sherbourne, and one night he gave Gluck a beating, for it is on the records of the Red Cross Emergency Hospital that Gluck was treated there that night and was unable to leave the hospital for a week.

Still Gluck did not understand. He continued to seek an explanation from the girl. In fear of Sherbourne, he applied to the chief-of-police for permission to carry a revolver, which permission was refused, the newspapers as usual playing it up sensationally. Then came the murder of Irene Tackley, six days before her contemplated marriage with Sherbourne. It was on a Saturday night. She had worked late in the candy-store, departing after eleven o’clock with her week’s wages in her purse. She rode on a San Pablo Avenue surface-car to Thirty-fourth Street, where she alighted and started to walk the three blocks to her home. That was the last seen of her alive. Next morning she was found, strangled, in a vacant lot.

Emil Gluck was immediately arrested. Nothing that he could do could save him. He was convicted, not merely on circumstantial evidence, but on evidence “cooked up” by the Oakland police. There is no discussion that a large portion of the evidence was manufactured. The testimony of Captain Shehan was the sheerest perjury, it being proved long afterward that on the night in question he had not only not been in the vicinity of the murder, but that he had been out of the city in a resort on the San Leandro road. The unfortunate Gluck received life-imprisonment in San Quentin, while the newspapers and the public held that it was a miscarriage of justice—that the death penalty should have been visited upon him.

Gluck entered San Quentin prison on April 17, 1929. He was then thirty-four years of age. And for three years, much of the time in solitary confinement, he was left to meditate upon the injustice of man. It was during that time that his bitterness corroded him and he became a hater of all his kind. Three other things he did during the same period: he wrote his famous treatise, “Human Morals;” his remarkable brochure, “The Criminal Sane;” and he worked out his awful and monstrous scheme of revenge. It was an episode that had occurred in his electro-plating establishment that suggested to him his unique weapon of revenge. As stated in his confession, he worked every detail out theoretically during his imprisonment, and was able, on his release, immediately to embark on his career of vengeance.

His release was sensational. Also it was miserably and criminally delayed by the soulless legal red-tape then in vogue. On the night of February 1, 1932, Tim Haswell, a hold-up man, was shot during an attempted robbery by a citizen of Piedmont Heights. Tim Haswell lingered three days, during which time he not only confessed to the murder of Irene Tackley, but furnished conclusive proofs of the same. Bert Danniker, a convict dying of consumption in Folsom Prison, was implicated as accessory, and his confession followed. It is inconceivable to us of to-day—the bungling, dilatory processes of justice a generation ago. Emil Gluck was proved in February to be an innocent man, yet he was not released until the following October. For eight months, a greatly wronged man, he was compelled to undergo his unmerited punishment. This was not conducive to sweetness and light, and we can well imagine how he ate his soul with bitterness during those dreary eight months.

He came back to the world in the Fall of 1932, as usual a “feature” topic in all the newspapers. The papers, instead of expressing heartfelt regret, continued their old sensational persecution. One paper, the San Francisco Intelligencer, did more. John Hartwell, its editor, elaborated an ingenious theory that got around the confessions of the two criminals, and tried to show that Gluck was, after all, responsible for the murder of Irene Tackley. Hartwell died. And Sherbourne died, too, while Policeman Phillips was shot in the leg and discharged from the Oakland police force.

The murder of Hartwell was long a mystery. He was alone in his editorial office at home. The reports of the revolver were heard by the office-boy, who rushed in to find Hartwell expiring in his chair. What puzzled the police was the fact, not merely that he had been shot with his own revolver, but that the revolver had exploded in the drawer of his desk. The bullets had torn trough the front of the drawer and entered his body. The police scouted the theory of suicide, murder was dismissed as absurd, and the blame was thrown on the Eureka Smokeless Cartridge Company. Spontaneous explosion was the police explanation, and the chemists of the cartridge-company were well bullied at the inquest. But what the police did not know was that across the street, in the Mercer Building, room 883, rented by Emil Gluck, had been occupied by Emil Gluck at the very moment Hartwell’s revolver so mysteriously exploded.

At the time, no connection was made between Hartwell’s death and the death of William Sherbourne. Sherbourne had continued to live in the home he had built for Irene Tackley, and one morning in January, 1933, he was found dead. Suicide was the verdict of the coroner’s inquest, for he had been shot by his own revolver. The curious thing that happened that night was the shooting of Policeman Phillips on the sidewalk in front of Sherbourne’s house. The policeman crawled to a police-telephone on the corner and rang up for an ambulance. He claimed that some one had shot him from behind in the leg. The leg in question was so badly shattered by three .38 caliber bullets, that amputation was necessary. But when the police discovered that the damage had been done by his own revolver, a great laugh went up, and he was charged with having been drunk. In spite of his denial of having touched a drop, and of his persistent assertion that the revolver had been in his hip-pocket, and that he had not laid a finger to it, he was discharged from the force. Emil Gluck’s confession, six years later, cleared the unfortunate policeman of disgrace, and he is alive to-day and in good health, the recipient of a pension from the city.

Emil Gluck, having disposed of his immediate enemies, now sought a wider field, though his enmity for newspapermen and for the police remained always active. The royalties on his ignition-device for gasoline-engines had mounted up when he lay in prison, and year by year the earning power of his invention increased. He was independent, able to travel wherever he willed over the earth, and to glut his monstrous appetite for revenge. He had become a monomaniac and an anarchist—not a philosophic anarchist, merely, but a violent anarchist. Perhaps the word is misused, and he his better described as a nihilist, or an annihilist. It is known that he affiliated with none of the groups of terrorists. He operated wholly alone, but he created a thousandfold more terror and achieved a thousandfold more destruction than all the terrorist groups added together.

He signalized his departure from California by blowing up Fort Mason. In his confession he spoke of it as a little experiment; he was merely trying his hand. For eight years he wandered over the earth, a mysterious terror, destroying property to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and destroying countless lives. One good result of his awful deeds was the destruction he wrought among the terrorists themselves. Every time he did anything the terrorists in the vicinity were gathered in by the police drag-net and many of them were executed. Seventeen were executed at Rome alone, following the assassination of the Italian King.

Perhaps the most world-amazing achievement of his was the assassination of the King and Queen of Portugal. It was their wedding-day. All possible precautions had been taken against the terrorists, and the way from the cathedral, through Lisbon’s streets, was double-banked with troops, while a squad of two hundred mounted troopers surrounded the carriage. Suddenly the amazing thing happened. The automatic rifles of the troopers began to go off, as well as the rifles of the double-banked infantry in the immediate vicinity. In the excitement the muzzles of the exploding rifles were turned in all directions. The slaughter was terrible—horses, troops, spectators, and the king and queen, were riddled with bullets. To complicated the affair, in different parts of the crowds behind the foot-soldiers, two terrorists had bombs explode on their persons. These bombs they had intended to throw if they got the opportunity. But who was to know this? The frightful havoc wrought by the bursting bombs but added to the confusion; it was considered part of the general attack.

One puzzling thing that could not be explained away was the conduct of the troopers with their exploding rifles. It seemed impossible that they should be in the plot, yet there were the hundreds their flying bullets had slain, including the king and queen. On the other hand, more baffling than ever, was the fact that seventy per cent of the troopers themselves had been killed or wounded. Some explained this on the ground that the loyal foot-soldiers, witnessing the attack on the royal carriage, had opened fire on the traitors. Yet not one bit of evidence to verify this could be drawn from the survivors, though many were put to the torture. They contended stubbornly that they had not discharged their rifles at all, but that their rifles had discharged themselves. They were laughed at by the chemists, who held that while it was just barely probable that a single cartridge, charged with the new smokeless powder, might spontaneously explode, it was beyond all probability and possibility for all the cartridges in a given area, so charged, spontaneously to explode. And so, in the end, no explanation of the amazing occurrence was reached. The general opinion of the rest of the world was that the whole affair was a blind panic of the feverish Latins, precipitated, it was true, by the bursting of two terrorist bombs; and in this connection was recalled the laughable encounter of long years before between the Russian fleet and the English fishing-boats.

And Emil Gluck chuckled and went his way. He knew. But how was the world to know? He had stumbled upon the secret in his old electro-plating shop on Telegraph Avenue in the city of Oakland. It happened, at that time, that a wireless telegraph-station was established by the Thurston Power Company close to his shop. In a short time his electro-plating vat was put out of order. The vat-wiring had many bad joints, and, upon investigation, Gluck discovered minute welds at the joints in the wiring. These, by lowering the resistance, had caused an excessive current to pass through the solution, “boiling” it and spoiling the work. But “what had caused the welds?” was the question in Gluck’s mind. His reasoning was simple. Before the establishment of the wireless-station, the vat had worked well. Not until after the establishment of the wireless-station had the vat been ruined. Therefore, the wireless-station had been the cause. But how? He quickly answered the question. If an electric discharge was capable of operating a coherer across three thousand miles of ocean, then, certainly, the electric discharge from the wireless-station four hundred feet away could produce coherer effects on the bad joints in the vat-wiring.

Gluck thought no more about it at the time. He merely re-wired his vat and went on electro-plating. But afterwards, in prison, he remembered the incident, and like a flash there came into his mind the full significance of it. He saw in it the silent, secret weapon with which to revenge himself on the world. His great discovery, which died with him, was control over the direction and scope of the electric discharge. At the time, this was the unsolved problem of wireless telegraphy—as it still is to-day—but Emil Gluck, in his prison-cell, mastered it. And when he was released, he applied it. It was fairly simple, given the directing power that was his, to introduce a spark into the power-magazines of a fort, a battleship, or a revolver. And not alone could he thus explode powder at distance, but he could ignite conflagrations. The Great Chelsea Fire was started by him—quite by accident, however, as he stated in his confession, adding that it was a pleasing accident and that he had never had any reason to regret it.

It was Emil Gluck that caused the terrible German-American War, with the loss of 800,000 lives and the consumption of almost incalculable treasure. It will be remembered that in 1939, because of the Pickard incident, strained relations existed between the two countries. Germany, though aggrieved, was not anxious for war, and, as a peace-token, sent the crown-prince and seven battleships on a friendly visit to the United States. On the night of February 15, the seven warships lay at anchor in the Hudson opposite New York City. And on that night, Emil Gluck, alone, with all his apparatus on board, was out in a launch. This launch, it was afterwards proved, was bought by him from the Ross-Turner Company, while much of the apparatus he used that night had been purchased from the Columbia Electric Works. But this was not known at the time. All that was known was that the seven battleships blew up, one after another, at regular, four-minute intervals. Ninety per cent of the crews and officers, along with the crown-prince, perished. Many years before the American battleship Maine was blown up in the harbor of Havana, and war with Spain had immediately followed—though there has always existed a reasonable doubt as to whether the explosion was due to conspiracy or accident. But accident could not explain the blowing up of the seven battleships on the Hudson at four-minute intervals. Germany believed that it had been done by a submarine, and immediately declared war. It was six months after Gluck’s confession, that she returned the Philippines and Hawaii to the United States.

In the meanwhile, Emil Gluck, malevolent wizard and arch-hater, traveled his whirlwind-path of destruction. He left no traces. Scientifically thorough, he always cleaned up after himself. His method was to rent a room or a house, and secretly to install his apparatus—which apparatus, but the way, he so perfected and simplified that it occupied little space. After he had accomplished his purpose, he carefully removed the apparatus. He bade fair to live out a long life of horrible crime.

The epidemic of the shooting of New York City policemen was a remarkable affair. It became one of the horror mysteries of the time. In two short weeks over a hundred policemen were shot in the legs by their own revolvers. Inspector Jones did not solve the mystery, but it was his idea that finally outwitted Gluck. On his recommendation the policemen ceased carrying revolvers, and no more accidental shootings occurred.

It was in the early Spring of 1940 that Gluck destroyed the Mare Island navy-yard. From a room in Vallejo, he sent his electric discharges across the Vallejo Straits to Mare Island. He first played his flashes on the battleship Maryland. She lay at the dock of one of the mine-magazines. On her forward deck, on a huge temporary platform of timbers, were disposed over a hundred mines. These mines were for the defense of the Golden Gate. Any one these mines was capable of destroying a dozen battleships, and there were over a hundred mines. The destruction was terrific, but it was only Gluck’s overture. He played his flashes down the Mare Island shore, blowing up five torpedo-boats, the torpedo-station, and the great magazine at the eastern end of the island. Returning westward again, and scooping in occasional isolated magazines on the high ground back from the shore, he blew up three cruisers and the battleships Oregon, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Florida—the latter had just gone into dry-dock, and the magnificent dry-dock was destroyed along with her.

It was a frightful catastrophe, and a shiver of horror passed through the land. But it was nothing to what was to follow. In the late Fall of that year, Emil Gluck made a clean sweep of the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Florida. Nothing escaped. Forts, mines, coast-defenses of all sorts, torpedo-stations, magazines—everything went up. Three months afterward, in mid-Winter, he smote the north shore of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Greece in the same stupefying manner. A wail went up from the nations. It was clear that human agency was behind all this destruction, and it was equally clear, because of Emil Gluck’s impartiality, that the destruction was not the work of any particular nation, that whoever was the human behind it all, that human was a menace to the world. No nation was safe. There was no defense against this unknown and all-powerful foe. Warfare was futile—nay, not merely futile, but itself the very essence of the peril. For a twelve-month the manufacture of powder ceased, and all solders and sailors were withdrawn from all fortifications and war-vessels. And even a world disarmament was seriously considered at a convention of the Powers, held at The Hague at that time.

And then Silas Bannerman, a secret-service agent of the United States, leaped into world-fame by the arrest of Emil Gluck. At first, Bannerman was laughed at, but he had prepared his case well, and in a few weeks the most skeptical were convinced of Emil Gluck’s guilt. The one thing, however, that Silas Bannerman never succeeded in explaining, even to his own satisfaction, was how first he came to connect Gluck with the atrocious crimes. It is true, Bannerman was in Vallejo, on secret government-business, at the time of the destruction of Mare Island; and it is true that on the streets of Vallejo Emil Gluck was pointed out to him as a queer crank; but no impression was made at the time. It was not until afterward, when on vacation in the Rocky Mountains, and when reading the first published reports of the destruction along the Atlantic Coast, that suddenly Bannerman thought of Emil Gluck. And on the instant there flashed into his mind the connection between Gluck and the destruction. It was only an hypothesis, but it was sufficient. The great thing was the conception of the hypothesis, in itself an act of unconscious cerebration—a thing as unaccountable as the flashing, for instance, into Newton’s mind of the principle of gravitation.

The rest was easy. “Where was Gluck at the time of the destruction along the Atlantic seaboard?” was the question that formed in Bannerman’s mind. By his own request he was put upon the case. In no time he ascertained that Gluck had himself been up and down the Atlantic Coast in the late Fall of 1940. Also he ascertained that Gluck had been in New York City during the epidemic of the shooting of police-officers. “Where was Gluck now?” was Bannerman’s next query. And as if in answer, came the wholesale destruction along the Mediterranean. Gluck had sailed for Europe a month before. Bannerman knew that. It was not necessary for Bannerman to go to Europe. By means of cable-messages and the co-operation of the European secret-services, he traced Gluck’s course along the Mediterranean and found that in every instance it coincided with the blowing up of coast defenses and ships. Also, he learned that Gluck had just sailed on the Green Star liner Plutonic for the United States.

The case was complete in Bannerman’s mind, though in the interval of waiting he worked up the details. In this he was ably assisted by George Brown, an operator employed by the Wood System of Wireless Telegraphy. When the Plutonic arrived off Sandy Hook, she was boarded by Bannerman from a government-tug, and Emil Gluck was made prisoner. The trial and the confession followed. In the confession, Gluck professed regret only for one thing, namely, that he had taken his time. As he said, had he dreamed that he was ever to be discovered, he would have worked more rapidly and accomplished a thousand times the destruction he did.

His secret died with him, though it is now known that the French Government managed to get access to him and offered him a billion francs for the invention wherewith he was able to direct at pleasure and closely to confine electric discharges.

“What?” was Gluck’s reply. “To sell to you that which would enable you to enslave and maltreat suffering humanity”?

And though the war-departments of the nations have continued to experiment in their secret laboratories, they have so far failed to light upon the slightest trace of the secret.

Emil Gluck was executed on December 4, 1941, and so died, at the age of forty-six, one of the world’s most unfortunate geniuses; a man of tremendous intellect, but whose mighty powers, instead of making toward good, were so twisted and warped that he became the most amazing of criminals.—Culled from Mr. A. G. Burnside’s “Eccentricities of Crime,” by kind permission of the publishers, Messrs. Holiday & Whitsund. Published in 1982.

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Another view of Oz

Anyone who enjoys the material here should take a look at Roderick Long’s Yellow Brick Meat Garden: A Blog about Bodies in Oz. The mix of fun and scholarship is delightful.

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William Harrison Riley, “A Visitor from Luna” (1901)

I am a native of Luna. By what means I reached this earth I shall not, in this brief narrative, explain. It is evident that I am here, this writing being sufficient evidence thereof.
In the ancient, powerful and glorious kingdom of Dementia. (whose flag has braved, ten thousand years, the battle and the breeze) I was introduced as a native-born citizen by my parents (and by gracious permission of the Royal Clerics) in the year of Sanctity 72,942. One year previous to my birth, my parents had purchased a right to become parents from the above-named Royal Clerics; therefore I was legally introduced into Luna.
Before I was one month old, I was carried to one of the offices of the Royal Clerical Emporium, where my parents purchased the right to confer on me the name, Tcej Busa. The Royal Clerics performed a solemn ceremony suitable and essential to the occasion. They lubricated my nose with oil, and publicly informed Jupiter, Saturn and Mars that I was a legal person, with a legal name, and that the regular fees required to establish any person in such a legal position had been duly paid to, and pocketed by, the only genuine agents of the only genuine Emporium.
Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are (as all true Lunatics profess to believe) three persons of one substance, power and eternity. Saturn is the breath of Jupiter, and Mars is the breath of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars is of one substance, majesty and glory with Jupiter and Saturn, very and eternal Sol. There is but one living and true So], everlasting, without body, parts or passions; and this one Sol—having no body nor parts—is composed of three persons: Jupiter, Saturn and Mars. Such is the foundation of the simple, logical and sublime belief, of which the King of Dementia is the Protector.
When Sol created mankind he declared the work to be good; yet, strange to say, mankind are born physically imperfect. Of course, this is not Sol’s fault; but it is due to the obstinacy of mankind, who malevolently assume imperfect forms previous to their birth. I was no exception to this lamentable rule, for I had stubbornly caused myself to be born with two ears. In spite of the legality of my conception, I was born in sin and shapen in iniquity. I, alone, was to blame; for the marriage of my parents was sanctified by the Royal Clerics, and Sol, our Creator, cannot err (Pelttileno troflli newteh illimyt sloofno).
When I was six weeks old, an order was issued by the King of Dementia and delivered to my parents by one of his Detective Agents, commanding the removal of my left ear, according to law; and my parents (who were not associates of the “silly clique of anti-amputators”) obeyed the order, and paid the fees.
[It is necessary to explain, that a learned Royal Amputator had discovered that cutting off the left ear was a certain preventative of boils. A patient might suffer internally from poison or from the accumulation of waste matter, and might die in consequence thereof, but no boils or pimples could appear on the skin after the left ear had been amputated—successfully.]
My left ear having been (“successfully”) removed from my head, I had surmounted the third step of legal subjection. I was a legal inhabitant of Luna; I had a legal name; I had a legal constitution. If I died before reaching the age of discretion, I should be transformed into a miburehc—and I couldn’t die of boils.
When I was six years old, I was sent to a school, in which I was taught to spell, write and cipher. I learned how to spell my name, but was never told what I was or whence I came. After a time, however, I was informed by some boys that I was found in a cabbage field, and mother confirmed the statement. When I asked my Sunday-school teacher, he told me I was made of dust; and when I asked him who made me, he said it was Sol,
Now I was an exceedingly precocious boy, insomuch that I was often spoken of as the meddlesome question-asker, and I asked many questions about Sol. I asked where Sol was; and some told me he was in Heaven, and others said “he is everywhere.” Then I asked: “Is Sol alive?” and was answered, “Yes, He is the ever-living Sol.” “But,” said I, “he—he can’t move! There is no place to move to when he is everywhere to begin with.” Then I was reproved, and told that something very dreadful was sure to happen to me.
At another time, I asked: “Is Sol a person?Has he—has he got a head?” For that question I was punished, and was told to pray to Sol to give me faith and knowledge; but I retorted: “If you have prayed and got the knowledge, why don’t you tell me if Sol has got a head and legs and things like we have?”
Often, I wanted to pray; but I had no idea of the being I was told to address. Praying to the air, merely, seemed like praying to nothing. Then I reasoned—for, alas! I was an unregenerate boy and was tempted by the omnipresent, everlasting Serpent. I argued thus: “If Sol is everywhere, he cannot have any shape; and I cannot think of such a being.” Then I tried to pray, and I said: “Help me, oh Sol, of whom I know nothing—of whom I cannot even think.”
The fourth step of legal advancement was “Ratification.” At the solemn ceremony of nose-oiling, my parents had pledged their word that I believed all the articles of the Saturnalian faith; and in consideration of that pledge, and of other reasonable, faithful and veracious pledges (and a pecuniary fee) the Royal Clerics had declared me Regenerate. Alas! I was a miserable little sinner, a downright heretic!
The inhabitants of the kingdom of Sundia did not profess to worship Sol, as we did; but were idolatrous Heathen, who worshipped the universe; and therefore our king sent an army of our people to conquer the Sundians. Our soldiers killed many thousands of the Heathen, and burned their towns; but, after a few months, our army was driven from the country with the army of the enemy following closely behind. When our army in its retreat passed through the town I lived in they set fire to it, to destroy it, so that the enemy might not get possession of it. My parents died in the conflagration. I was having a day in the country, and thus I escaped.
The people talked of “the enemy” almost unceasingly; but I could not help thinking that our greatest enemies were the King of Dementia and his hired agents, and I laid to their charge the murder of my parents.
I was adopted by an uncle, for whom I worked several years. I toiled hard for scanty food, and was told that I should be grateful for the opportunity.
In Dementia, every square yard of land is owned as private property, except such portions as are occupied by roads, streets, prisons and a few other small government properties, and I found that I had no legal right to live anywhere, except in prison, unless some private owner of a portion of the land of my birth sold me permission to live on his portion. And how was I to get the means of purchasing such permission? I had no legal right to compel any private individual to hire me as his servant. I was a legal person, with a legal name and a legal constitution, but I had no legal right to live except in a prison, a poorhouse or a lunatic asylum. I hoped to find equitable statutes on this planet.
The legal right to own the land of Dementia as private property is based upon conquest. The proprietors are the heirs of foreign soldiers who invaded Dementia, drove the people off their farms and destroyed their villages. And our King (by the grace of Sol) claims to be a direct descendant of the chief of the invading, conquering, devastating army of murderers, and the lineage is considered honorable. I hoped to find wiser ideas on this planet.
During my nine years of servitude in Dementia I felt rebellious towards society and its statutes. I felt that I was under no moral obligation to respect the statutes. I had entered into no contract, and therefore could not break one. I had not even been asked or even permitted to endorse the statutes. They were not in conformity with the laws of Sol, as revealed by Nature, and were not even in conformity with the laws of the Book of Sol—the book which Dementian society professed to reverence and implicitly believe. The book emphatically recognised the right of the people to live by free labor. It commanded that the land should be equitably shared amongst the people. It forbade usury, and it denounced kingcraft and priestcraft. I hoped to find more honesty and less hypocrisy on this planet.
Loyal Dementians told me I should honor the King. But why should If He has never done anything of use to me, and I have never heard that he had ever done any noble or brave work, He has occupied much of his time in destroying innocent little animals, and in gambling and wine-drinking.
The only inventions I can remember that have been introduced by the royally-patented nobility are:
The Game of Spellakins.
The Game of Tiddledewinks.
The Game of Pony Polo.
The Game of Dove Killing.
The Game of Knocker Wrenching.
A Pipe to smoke in Bed.
Transparent Cards.
A Walking-stick, with a Dagger concealed therein.
A Double-headed Coin, for Tossing with.
The Game of shooting large animals from a Safe Place. There are other similar pastimes, such as the hunting of weak animals by troops of red-coated and red-faced men, assisted by many large dogs.
There are in Dementia two regular political parties, called the Tops and the Bottoms. In the Tops are nearly all of the land-usurpers, and the Bottoms party works for the interests of the money-profiters. Both parties are Royalists, and neither of them has any desire to emancipate the disinherited working people. I hoped to find the People governing on this planet.
I did not blame our King, or his gang of lords; he correctly represented a majority of the people, for most of the men drink, gamble and love cruel sports. When Dementia is fit to have a nobler representative as its figure-head, one will be peaceably chosen—not as governor, but as chief servant.
I have seen on this planet you call the Earth, some countries named “Republics” over which there should be imperial dictators until the people are better qualified to elect legislators than the people of England and America are today.
Some of your kings resemble our king of Dementia, and some of your Presidents are more oppressive than the most despotic of your kings. When the people are fit for freedom they will be free; and then they will not need either President or King. And I think that until you are fit for freedom you had better keep your kings and provide for them a larger revenue than their richest subjects receive; for it is well that your kings should be placed above the reach of bribery.
I have heard of a country in which the people live naked and unashamed; where there is no hypocrisy, no usurer, no spirit-dealer, no prison, and where there are no locks or bolts; a country in which all men and women do their share of the little work that is needed where there is no war or usury and all work and share equitably. I am going to that country, and I hope I may be permitted to live and die there.
Farewell, you people who are mad with avarice, boastful of robberies, saturated with superstitions, rioting in vicious luxuries, adulterators, peculators, pilferers, falsifiers, disguisers, equivocators—all you who fear the truth and who are ashamed of the light. Farewell, also, you who have been degraded by destitution and tortured by the scorn of the usurers. You will get your reward, and so will they. Farewell to you who are preaching the true gospel—to all the brave pioneers: your noble work will not be in vain. You are sowing the seed, and the seed will bear fruit, and multiply. If it were possible to stay with you, I would stay. But the gods are with you, and you will find some of the fruit of your work in the heavens that are not now visible to you.
Farewell, you hired Clerics, and you hired killers of men. Farewell, you most pitiful usurers. Farewell, you tinselled kings!
Tcej Busa.
[Translated by Wm. HARRISON RILEY, Lunenberg, Mass]
William Harrison Riley, “A Visitor from Luna,” Freedom 15 no, 159 (August, 1901): 41-42.

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Charlton King, “The Visual Telephone” (1904)

By Charlton King
I’M rather glad to see that, Edison’s going to have another show,” said the Commonplace Man, looking up from his paper.
“He’s been rather out of it lately, hasn’t he?” queried the Cynic. “Which is strange, seeing that people used to imagine that the faculty for invention was a close monopoly of the great Anglo-Saxon family. The discovery by mere aliens of the X-rays, wireless telegraphy, and radium, has rather exploded a theory which, whatever else might have been said for it, had the merit of being comfortably insular. What?”
“The foreigner is sometimes capable of putting out a solitary invention, I grant you,” said the Enthusiast. “But what of that? Edison has a whole string of them to his credit.”
His eyes kindling, he began to enumerate the list on his fingers. “ There was the electric light,” he said, “the kinetoscope, the telephone, the —”
“The phonograph!” broke in the Cynic, with a bitter sneer. “ That marvellous instrument which has brought a surfeit of music into the homes of the humble!”
“Say rather,” the Enthusiast returned impressively, “the instrument which has enabled the clarion voice of a Gladstone to reverberate down the ages! “
The Cynic laughed. “My dear fellow,” he said, “when you talk like that, it makes me feel there ought to be a phonograph handy to receive your own utterances. Still, I prefer to regard it as a musical entertainer on Suburbia’s lower slopes.”
“I’ve been seriously thinking about getting one,” said the Commonplace Man.
“Mind you choose one of the smaller, quieter kinds,” counselled the Enthusiast.
“Not so,” said the Cynic. “That would be arrant selfishness. He who lays in a low-pressure phonograph benefits only his own household; but he who buys its enlarged, trumpet – tongued edition, the gramophone, is a benefactor to the whole street and a part of the next. Let others participate in your pleasures, and your own enjoyment of them becomes all the keener. I am a convert, you see, to the communal idea with regard to phonographs. They should be as ‘free’ asour baths are free, our libraries, and our schools.”
“Haven’t we had enough of them? “ inquired the Commonplace Man, plaintively.
“Enough of the phonograph P” replied the Cynic, promptly. “I quite agree. Ve’ve had more than enough of it, although it’s only been before the world for a matter of ten years or so. But what about this latest scheme of Edison’s?”
The Enthusiast, grasping the Commonplace Man’s paper, read as follows :—
“Mr. Edison hopes soon to invent a telephone which will carry not only sound, but sight—that is, it will bring, not only the human voice along the wire, but the image of the speaker as well. It may yet be that we shall sit by our own firesides and see our kin across the sea, that we shall be ‘switched on’ from our drawing-rooms to be present at some great battlefield, and that the streets of all the world’s capitals will be familiar to those who never leave their London.”
“Well, that beats all,” was the Commonplace Man’s commentary, but the Cynic only muttered, “Worse and worse.”
“Why worse?” asked the Enthusiast, impatiently.
“Give me time, and I might love the phonograph with all its faults, but this never!” the Cynic replied.
“But consider its possibilities, man,” the Enthusiast protested.
“That’s just what I am doing,” was the Cynic’s sorrowful response. “ Here is one of them. Suppose one has to transact business with some prolix, boresome, unspeakable fellow, one is always careful, under the present régime, to impress him with the fact that the telephone is a highly convenient and absurdly accessible mode of communication. This avoids a personal contact which could not be otherwise than distasteful. But now Edison’s perverted ingenuity would rob us of this blessed security, and we shall not only have the piping, ungrammatical voice of the fellow transmitted along the wires, but his dull, vacuous face will be projected at us as well.”
“Pure misanthropy,” said the Enthusiast.
“Nay, only partial,” the Cynic replied, “which, paradoxical though it sounds, always constitutes the truest practical philanthropy, for that involves, above all things, a method of selection. Surely you don’t believe that the love of the philanthropist, however abounding it may be, embraces every prig and bore who seeks his friendship or taps his bounty?”
“This is all very relevant to visual telephony!” sneered the Enthusiast.
“It’s not so remote from the subject as you fancy,” the Cynic replied, with great seriousness. “I observe the newspaper man there speaks of ‘our kin across the sea.’ While I admire his novelty of phrasing, I can’t agree that the flashing of instantaneous photographs across the wires would be a beneficial thing either for Englishmen or Colonists. It might, indeed, tend to snap rather than to strengthen the links of Empire.”
“What unredeemed nonsense!” the
Enthusiast retorted. “Little Englandism in its most naked and shameless condition.”
“Now, don’t try to crush me with a party Shibboleth,” the Cynic cried, with reproach in his voice. “Take the trouble to understand my point of view, and you will discover that I am the soundest of patriots, the very biggest of Big Englanders. For what, after all, is the main object of the cult of Imperialism? What, but to keep the straggling masses of the Empire together. And, how can this be effected if, every time the Englishman is rung up to receive a message over the Antipodean cable, he actually sees the Australian who happens to be speaking to him?”
The Commonplace Man sniffed contemptuously. “Even if it were possible to telephone to Australia,” he said, “which, of course, it isn’t, I don’t understand how the visualisation of the speaker could have the effect you pretend to foresee.”
“Don’t you,” said the Cynic, patiently. “Then let me explain. All Englishmen have an impression of what the Australian is like, or what he ought to be like. Clad in picturesque red shirt and slouched wide-brimmed hat, he is usually discovered sitting listlessly over a bush fire. That yearning, pensive look in his eyes tells you clearly enough that his thoughts are stealing back to the dear homeland—the little English village, the weathered farmstead, the ivy-covered church tower. It is a highly-sentimentalised picture, and not entirely devoid of the romantic element, but an Australian friend of mine assures me that it hasn’t the advantage of being true in the slightest particular. The red-shirted Australian has no more tangible existence than the comic rustic of melodrama.”
“Let’s have the truth, then,” growled the Enthusiast. .
“I assure you, my friend,” the Cynic replied, “the truth isn’t always so desirable. Illusions have a greater value than you perceive. It is only the rash man who attempts to dispel them.”
“But it may be that the real Australian,” said the Commonplace Man, “is a much finer product than our sentimental conception of him.”
“Undoubtedly he is,” said the Cynic, “but that is hardly the point. It is not the quality of the Australian that we are discussing, but the dangers that might attend the too sudden dissipation of an insular illusion. That kind of thing wants doing very gradually.”
“Setting the Colonies aside, I suppose you’ll admit that the visual telephone has what I may call its domestic advantages?” timidly ventured the Commonplace Man.
The Cynic laughed outright “Domestic!” he cried. “With that awful word you expose the very worst side of Mr. Edison’s latest wonder. Can’t you see? At present, when a friend calls at one’s office and suggests a night of—well, relaxation, it is so easy telephone to an expectant spouse that so often successful excuse for one’s absence which is based upon the high pressure of our modern commercial system. The tedium in the voice convinces by adding the needed touch of verisimilitude. But when not only one’s words, but one’s lineaments, are shot over the wires into the domestic fastness, who but a consummate actor could conceal the look of elation, the sense of pleasure anticipated, the —”
The Commonplace Man shuddered. “I see what you mean,” he said.
“In spite of your trivial arguments,” the Enthusiast remarked decisively, “the sight telephone has some excellent features about it.”
“I fear you’ll discover some ‘features’ in it which are not exactly excellent when it’s in actual operation,” was the Cynic’s final rejoinder.
Charlton King, “The Visual Telephone,” Horlick’s Magazine and Home Journal for Australia, India and the Colonies 1 (1904): 215-217.

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Fourier, “Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy”

Intermeshing of the Series by Cabalistic Gastronomy.
In the course of the preceding sections and the Preface, we have had occasion to jest about a thesis several times repeated and laughable at first glance; it is that (224) in the societary regime gluttony is a source of wisdom, insight, and social accord. I can give that strange thesis the most regular proofs.
No passion has been more badly esteemed than gluttony. Can we presume that God considered as a vice the passion to which he gave the greatest influence? (There is none more generally dominant among the people.) Other passions, such as love and ambition, exert much more influence over the adult and virile ages, but gluttony never loses its sway over the various ages. It is the most permanent of passions, the only one which reigns from the cradle until the end of life. Already very powerful among the refined classes, it reigns as sovereign over the people and over children, who we see everywhere as slaves of their muzzles. We see the soldier make revolutions for whoever will get him drunk; and the savage, so scornful of the civilized, joins in their industry for the price of a flask of eau-de-vie, or sell his wife or daughter if need be, for a few bottles of strong liquor.
Would God have so enslaved humans so urgently to that passion, if he had not assigned it an eminent role in the mechanism to which he predestined us? And if that mechanism is Industrial Attraction, must it not be intimately linked with the gastronomic attraction called gluttony? In fact, it is gluttony which must form the general link in the Industrial Series, and be the soul of their emulative intrigues.
In the civilized state gluttony is not linked to industry, because the laboring [manouvrier] producer does not taste the exquisite goods that he has cultivated or manufactured. So among us that passion becomes the attribute of the idlers. For that reason alone would be vicious, if it were not already so because of the outlay and the excesses that it occasions.
In the societary state gluttony plays an entirely opposite role: it is no longer the recompense of idleness, but of industry; for the poorest grower takes part in the consumption of the precious goods. Moreover, it will influence only in order to preserve from excess by means of variety, to stimulate labor by uniting the intrigues of consumption with those of production, preparation and distribution (263). Production being the most important of the four, let us first pose the principle which must direct it; it is the generalization of gluttony. In fact:
If we could elevate the whole human race to gastronomic refinements, even of the most common dishes, such as cabbage and turnips, and give to each an ease which would permit them to refuse any foodstuffs that are mediocre in quality or preparation, each cultivated country would be, at the end of a few years, covered with delicious creations; for (94) there would be no place for the mediocre, such as the bitter melons, and bitter peaches, produced by certain soils where we will cultivate neither the melon nor the peach. Each canton will settle on the products that its soil can elevate to perfection; they will bring soil to the places that give bad qualities, or else they will plant the place in forests, in pastures or put it to other uses which can produce a product of good quality. It is not that the Passional Series does not consume the common sorts of food and fabric; but they want, even in the common things, such as broad beans and coarse cloth, a quality as perfect as possible, conforming to the proportions that nature has established in attraction in manufacturing [attraction manufacturière] (see 152).
The principle from which we must begin is that we will arrive at a general perfection of industry, by demand and by the universal refinement of the consumers, with regard to food and clothing, furniture and enjoyments. This principle is recognized even by the moralists; for we see the classics thunder against the bad taste of the public, given over to the melodramas and monstrosities that a society with uncluttered taste would scorn.
On this point, as on every other, morals is in contradiction with itself, for it wants us refined in literature and the arts, but it wants us coarse on the essential branch of the social system, that of the subsistences which are the part of relations (139 and 224) from which Industrial Attraction must sprout, in order to spread out from there in all the other branches. Thus the moralists, always as unfortunate in theory as in practice, have applied the principle of improvement, or the necessity of refined taste, to the last object to which we would apply it to, to the fine arts; and I place them at the last level in social politics, because the refinement that we have introduced there falls into a double vice:
1) It pervertsthe same arts which, by mercantile speculation, engage more and more in [the production of] fake diamonds, exaggerated romanticism, deviations of all sorts; this is a depravity that spreads to a genius given over more than ever to the spirit of system, and the scorn of nature or attraction.
2) If refinement reigns more or less in the arts, it is confined there, it does not spread into the primordial relations, those of consumption and preparation, from which it will be communicated to production (139 and 224). Thus the advance of good taste or refinement is completely distorted or neutralized by that moral blunder which wants to limit it to the arts before introducing it into gastronomy, from which it will spread everywhere, apart from the employment of the Passional Series.
In support of this double reproach, let us observe that Paris, which is the home of the fine arts, is also the home of bad taste in gastronomy. The Parisians consume the good and the bad indifferently; [1] it is an anthill of eight hundred thousand philosophers who only nourish themselves in order to curb their passions and promote the cunning of the merchants by a servile resignation to all the frauds, and all the poisons that commerce delights in inventing.
Another sort of depravity particular to France, which is also of Parisian origin, is the scorn of the feminine sex for gastronomy, a disdain that will grow. This will be a very great vice at the beginning of Harmony; for we cannot be keenly passionate about cultivation, fervently adopting the intrigues of the agricultural series, if we cannot be passionate in gastronomy, the initial path of Industrial Attraction. Preachers of morals and good taste persuade French ladies that gluttony is a passion of the bad sort; they must change their tune in Harmony, so they elevate themselves to cabalistic refinement, at least with regard to the ten passions allowed by civilized customs. The feminine sex is less corrupted in Germany, where it gives itself more frankly to the gluttony, even with regard to wines, that the fair sex in France hold it an honor to scorn.
All these tastes for moderation are only twistings of nature: it has prepared, in solid or liquid foodstuffs, a proper assortment to excite the three sexes; and what’s more an enmeshing of tastes, moving into the male tastes an eighth of the women, and in the female tastes an eighth of the men. That enmeshing exists even if it is disguised. I knew a maiden of nine years who loved garlic very much and ate cloves of it greedily. Doubtless as fifteen she would have weaned herself from this treat; but it proves that despite the judgments of fashion, women are endowed, in a suitable proportion, with all the tastes necessary for the intermeshing of the passional Series, according to the roles posited in the first section.
So it will be necessary to develop these tastes in the trial phalanx, to make their natural penchants bloom among women, who are often strongly opposed to good taste. It will be first with regard to gastronomy that we must recall them to nature, if we want to attain without delay the intermeshing of the industrial series and the balancing of the passions. A young girl loves garlic despite teasing; speculate on this taste for a double intermeshing. We could see the workings of:
1) The alliance of the sexes in a series; for the series which cultivates the bulbous legumes, onion, garlic, shallot, leek, and scallion, will usually be masculine. It is necessary, by intermeshing, to introduce there at least 1/8 women; and it is in youth that we must seek them, for it is at not much more than six that girls develop a taste for garlic.
2) The alliance of labors in the individual;. A young girl loves garlic and does not like to study grammar. Her parents want her to renounce garlic and devote herself to study; this will doubly vex her nature; seek rather to develop it in a double sense. After having placed her in cabalistic connection at the table and in the garden with the enthusiasts of garlic, present to her the ode in honor of garlic, by Count Marcellus: she will hasten to read it, if she is strongly aroused against garlic’s detractors. Take advantage of this reading to acquaint her superficially with lyric poetry, with the distinctions between stanzas and free verse; perhaps she will become interested in poetry before grammar, and one will soon lead to the study of the other. Thus societary education combines the cabalistic spirit and odd penchants to awake in the child the taste for study, and leads her indirectly to what she would have stubbornly rejected without the support of some stimulation by intrigue.
I insist on the principle of linking all these intrigues to gluttony, which is for children the natural path of initiative and intermeshing in industry. Doubtless there are other resources to put in play, but that one is of the first rank in childhood. The trial phalanx, being unaware of this principle, will go down a false road: it will only advance by tortoise’s steps; and, if it commits one other serious fault, it will fail.
[1] The assertion may seem insulting to the Parisians, but I will support it with decisive facts.
Since 1826, the bakers and pastry chefs of Paris have only half-cooked all their dough. So Paris was very uncultivated in gastronomy, at a time when we fully cooked bread and pastry! Those times, however, those of Grimods and Berchoux are found guilty of gastro-stupidity, if the present fashions are consistent with sane doctrines. Must we tell the secret of that monstrosity? It is that half-baked dough retains more water, is heavier and keeps better in case of slumps. This half-baking serves the interests of the merchants, but not that of the consumers. If the Parisians were not Vandals in gastronomy, we would have seen the great majority rise up against that mercantile impertinence, and demand the necessary baking; but they have been made to believe that this is the good sort, the English variety which comes from England.
In 1797, they were also accustomed, by English fashion, to eat meat half-raw, with forks bent backwards and nearly impossible to handle. It is again Anglomania which accustomed them to banish at lunch the fine dishes of their country, and replace them with a vileness called tea, a drug to which the English necessarily accustom themselves, because they have no good wine, or good fruit, except at enormous expense. They are reduced to tea, like the sick, and butter, like the little children to whom a poor mother gives buttered toast.
Can we call these beings “gastronomes” [who are] without distinct taste, submissive to all the stupid ideas suggested to them by fashion and mercantile cunning? Witness the vogue of the rancid paste called vermicelli, which has become the popular soup in Paris, because it makes money for the grocer and saves time for the cook. That is the knowledge of Parisians in gastronomy, submission to every rascal who wants to dupe them; and nowhere do we see so many falsifications of liquids, wine, vinegar, liqueurs, beer, milk, oil, sugar, etc.: their meat is heated and corrupted by the forced courses of the animal that the merchant wants to make skip a step; their pastures are steeped with the perfume of a certain product with which one manures the gardens of the suburbs; they have some good fruit because commerce cannot counterfeit them like their wines, made with wood-dye, potash mercantile, litharge, lees, esprit 3/6, cooked wine, molasses, licorice, alum honey, iris and other poisons of which the worst is the wine of Languedoc St.-Gilles. What’s more, their farmer are ignorant to the point of spoiling half of the potatoes from the day of the harvest: of twenty baskets taken to the market, you will find ten of them inedible from bitterness, acidity, or viscosity. Is there a nation more profane, more barbaric in gastronomy? A child of five, raised in Harmony, will find fifty shocking faults in the dinner of a so-called gastronome from Paris. What is there to say about their other Anglomanias, their writing where we only see some “u”s, uuuuuuuuuuu…?
[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

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Charles Fourier, “Melons that Never Deceive”

VOLUME 3, pages 47-50.

Melons that never deceive, or prodigies of composite serial Gastronomy.

Let us give some articles to each of the classes of readers. There are those who love amusing demonstrations, connected to their favorite pleasures; the gastronomes are among this number: I attempt, in this mediant, their conversion. I suppose that they are already moved by the depictions of the refinement that the Passional Series introduces into good food. I will give gormandizing some more nobles colors, and present it as the principle aide of the economic views of Providence, provided, however, that this passion is developed in Grouped Series.
A little gastronomic debate will prove that by learning the theory of the Passional Series, we acquire the gift of explaining all the apparent eccentricities of nature, tearing down all the veils of brass. It is the melon which will serve as our interpreter.
Everyone knows the dictum, that melons are as hard to know as women and friends. it would be a true wonder if we could find a means of never being fooled by this fruit which bewilders the most expert judges. We often ask ourselves why nature has not attached to it some sure sign of quality and maturity; does it intend to make light of man? I will explain that enigma, and show a sure means in the societary regime of never committing any error in the choice of melons.
That would be a slight advantage, if it did not lead some something more precious: but if the method which will avoid all deception about melons can preserve the advantage in a hundred more important relations, it becomes very interesting to learn how we can introduce this judgment into the distribution of melons, this appropriateness that the Civilized order cannot establish either in little things or in great ones.
There is no fruit more generally suitable for all tastes than the melon of high quality, like the muskmelons of Persia, Astrakhan, Lower Provence, etc. Men, women and children, even animals, from the horse to the cat, are fond of the melon, which, for that reason, is a fruit of high harmony and unitary affinity.
However, this vegetable so eminently destined for man and his domestic animals is the most deceptive, as to appearances: it seems that nature has created it to mock the human species. Whatever care we bring to the choice of the melon, we are constantly fooled, especially in cold countries; and the tables resound with jeremiads on the unpleasantness of having paid amply for a good melon and only encountering a squash.
We take, however, when purchasing this fruit, some extraordinary precautions: we exclude women from it, as incompetent and uninformed in gastronomy; and in every country, it is not the housewife, but the husband who is charged with the purchase of the melon. Despite so much care, blunders are so frequent, that we joke about the one who carries a melon, it is so well known that the most deft buyers often find they have miscalculated when it comes to the opening of them.
What then was the intention of nature, when it covered that fruit with an enigmatic husk, made to mystify civilized diner? Did she want to fool these legions of double-dealers; to pay them in their currency, which is falsity? Yes: but that calculated irony is linked to some arrangements of distributive justice, impracticable in civilization.
In the societary order, the choice of the melon is as exempt from error as if we bought it already sliced. Let us explain the mystery.
Every agricultural Phalange establishes seven classes in its distributions of comestibles, which are,

1st. The command,             approximately 50 individuals
2nd. The sick and the patriarchs,  approx. 50
3rd. The 1st class,                       approx. 100
4th. The 2nd class,                       approx. 300
5th. The 3rd class,                       approx. 900
6th. Children from 2 to 4 ½        approx. 100
7th. The caravanserai, unlimited number
!K. A lot of animals containing the coarse dishes and waste.

Let us examine how none of these classes can be fooled about the melon or other comestibles.
Each day the groups of melonists, the cultivators and distributors of melons purchased or gathered, lay out the quantity necessary for the day’s consumption.
Moments before the meal of each of the classes, one carries out the probing and tasting of the melons for the day: we begin with the lot considered superfluous, and intended for the companies of the command and the first class, for the sick and the patriarchs.[1]
From these melons probed and chosen from among the best in appearance, we separate all the inferior for the tables of the 2nd class, who, paying less, should have the average quality. We then probe a mass of melons estimated as 2nd class, of which we accept only the precious portion to be mixed with the remnants of the 1st class. Then for the 3rd tables of 900 persons, whose meal is later, we probe the entire mass of melons to be consumed, the best of which is added to the remnants of the 2ndclass. Thus all the melons served at the tables of various degrees are not only well suited to the degree, but adorned with a mark indicative of their qualities; so that, far from having any error to fear, we see by indicative marks the real value of each of the melons placed at the buffet.
Let us conclude on the general conventions of that distribution. The pieces that are too small, the small bits of very good quality, which would not be presentable to the companies of the 1st class, agrees wonderfully for the children of the aforementioned class. After all the choices completed, they find some melons spoiled or inferior, which are left to the horses, cows, sheep or other animals, along with rinds of various degrees. The comes the distribution of the scraps from the edges, neglected although good: they are distributed first to the cats, then to the poultry and fish as fertilizer. The scraps of an inferior sort are divided among the animals of lesser value, like the swine.
Thus, not a man, not a cat, can be deceived about the melon, a fruit so treacherous for the Civilized, because they do not regulate the distributive order according to the serial method desired by God; method with which he has made all the dispositions of nature coincide. It is quite right that the Civilized, in these distributive details, are dupes of their social division or familial regime; and God exercises an irony as fine as judicious, by creating certain products enigmatic in quality, like the melon, made to innocently mystify the rebel banquets in the divine methods, without being about to in any way deceive the gastronomes who line up in the divine or societary regime.
I do not mean to say that God created the melon exclusively for that joke; but it was part of the numerous uses of that fruit. Irony is never neglected in the calculations of nature; you will see the proof I the article Inverse Pivot, pollen of the lily. The melon has among its properties that of harmonic irony, independently of other more important [properties], which there is no time to mention. It will suffice for this description of the combined uses of the melon, to disabuse ourselves of so many apparent/related eccentricities of nature. It is only bizarre in civilization, which is not compatible with the views of the Divinity, nor with the distributive system ruled prior to creation, and adapted to the societary state or regime of the contrasted, rivalized, enmeshed Passional Series.
It is, I feel, very humiliating to give way to such an opinion, when we have piled up 400,000 tomes to prove that civilization is the aim of God, and that is why the Buffons, the Senecas and other beautiful minds, prefer to claim that nature has erred in creatingthe passions and kingdoms, that to put into question if the passions and passions do not have another destination, and by what means one can determine that unknown destiny, of which the whole material and passional creation makes us suspect the existence, by its impropriety with the civilized and barbaric order.
Obliged to reproduce the different aspects of the fundamental truth, that neither man, nor the products of the various kingdoms are made for civilization, I have recourse, in this article, to the familiar dissertations, like the induction drawn from the uses of the melon in the societary state. I could support it with other examplesof the same kind, furnished by these products, like the melon, which appear made to mock men, only mocks the civilization incapable of using them.
Let us conclude by observing that in the civilized order where the work is repugnant, where the people are too poor to participate in the consumption valued dishes, and where the gastronome is not a planter, his love of good food lacks a direct link with cultivation; it is only simple and ignoble sensuality, like all those that do not attain the compositemechanism, or influence of production and consumption acting on the same individual.
I will take up this argument again in thetrans-amble, where gastronomy, which is only examined here in compositeuse, will be treated in bi-composite on another subject. It is enough, for “the moment,” to have demonstrated on this gastronomic trifle the disagreement of the civilized order with the dispositions of nature, the essential connection of the passions and the kingdoms with the series of industrial groups which we are going to deal with, and the impossibility of explaining other than by the societary destiny, all the apparent eccentricities of creation such as the rebellion of a couple of magnificent porters, the zebra and the quagga, more precious than the donkey and the horse, and which, uncontrollable for the Civilizees and Barbarians, will become mounts as docile as they are precious for the societary state. Nature, in refusing us the possession of these superb quadrupeds, mock us still more bitterly than in the traps of the melon.

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

[1] Nota. The first class, although the wealthiest, is seated first, contrary to the civilized custom which, by sedentary labors and an apathetic life, takes away the appetite of rich people, or hardly leaves them enough for a diné at nightfall. The opposite takes place in Harmony, where the rich, by a life which is still more active than that of the poor, enjoy a thriving appetite at their five meals, and will not put up with a diné that will take the place of the soup, according to the custom in Paris.

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Charles Fourier, “Major or Gastrosophic War”

[A colleague and I have been working on a translation from Fourier’s New Amorous World, which focuses on the “wars” between the armies of Harmony to determine the most generally pleasing series of means of preparation for petits pâtés. This is a companion piece from The Theory of Universal Unity, which describes variations on the same process.]

Major or Gastrosophic War.

Let us banish calculations from an article dedicated to beautiful subjects, to nice tastes. Let us not, however, entirely neglect method.
We call nice tastes those with which we can form at least a regular series of about thirty persons at minimum in each Phalanx, according to the following table, with 2 pivots, 4 transitions and 9 sub-groups.
Y : [K rotated 270°] : 3. 4. 2: K : 3. 5. 4 : [K rotated 180°]: 2. 3. 2: [K rotated 90°]: [Y rotated 180°].
These nice tastes are of various degrees, depending on whether they include 1/12, 2/12, 3/12, 4/12, etc., of the Phalanx: let us give two extreme examples at 1/12 and 12/12.
Good musk melonsare a fruit which pleases nearly everyone, the three sexes[1] all together, and without culinary preparation. As to squash, despite the interventions of the cook, they are a poor sort of food, good for the present populace, but they will not reach well-stocked tables.
Thus the melon, in Harmony, will easily bring together in series twelve twelfths of the Phalanx; it will be a nice taste of a high degree. The squash will barely assemble the series of one in twelve, as tabled above: it will be a nice taste of a low degree, and not a pleasing taste which would gather a sub-series or regular group (343).
The nicest tastes, in high degree, relate to good food and love. These pleasures, for which the taste is most general, are the principle mechanisms which Harmony uses to involve the armies in intrigues by infinitesimal series. From this arises three sorts of military rivalries or wars, namely:
The pivotal [X rotated 270°], war of intrigues in industry.
The major Y, war of intrigues in gastrosophy.
The minor [Y rotated 180°], war of intrigues in love.
I will not speak of the wars of love, which will not be compatible with our customs; a table in the gastrosophic regime will suffice to make known the intrigues of the Harmonian armies. (Trap for the censors; I warn them of it.)
Let us suppose a great army of the 12th degree, bringing together divisions from a third of the globe, about 60 empires thathave each provided 10,000 men or women. The 60imperial divisions or armies are gathered at the Euphrates, having their headquarters at Babylon.
This great army has chosen two campaign-theses[2], one of which, in industry, involves the art of embankment. It must embank one hundred and twenty leagues of the course of the Euphrates, by some method or methods.
The army being of the major order, it also has a gastrosophic thesis: the determination of a series of petits pâtés in the hygienic orthodoxy of the 3rd power, with 32 varieties of petits pâtés, plus the foci, all adapted to the temperaments of the 3rd power, conforming to the table on page 314.
The 60 empires which want to compete have brought their materials, their flours and garnishes, and the sorts of wine appropriate to their varieties of pâtés. Although the costs are paid jointly by the whole world, each empire assembles its provisions as it wishes for the thesis of battle.
Each of these empires has chosen the gastrosophers and pastry chefs most apt to defend their national honor, and to make prevail the sorts of petits pâtés that they want to have admitted into the orthodox series of the 3rd power.
Before the arrival of the 60 armies, each of them have sent their engineers to arrange battle-kitchens which are appropriate for the object of the challenge and for the accompanying dishes. The battled-kitchens do not provide the daily service of sustenance; each army is fed in the caravanserais of the Phalanx where it is camped.
The oracles or judges who sit in Babylon are drawn, as much as possible, from all the empires of the globe, and not exclusively from the 60 empires which figure in the competition.
The army, 600,000 combatants strong, with 200 systems of petits pâtés takes a position on the Euphrates, forming a line of about 120 leagues, half above and half below Babylon.
Before the opening of the campaign, the 60 armies choose 60 cohorts of elite pastry chefs, which they send to Babylon pour to serve in the high battle-kitchen serving the great gastrophical Sanhedrin. It is a high jury which functions as an ecumenical council in this matter.
At the same time one detaches from the 60 armies one hundred and twenty battalions pastry chefs of the line, who are split up by squads in each army, so that each has 59 squads drawn from 59 other armies, making the petits pâtés according to the instructions of the competing chefs of their empire.
Each of the 60 armies is positioned in the center or the wings, depending on the nature of its claims in the series:

The right wing, on stuffed petits pâtés,   20.
The center, on vols-au-vent[3] with sauce,  25.
The left wing, on garnished mirlitons,[4]     15.

 (I may be mistaken in this distribution, for I am a complete intruder in gastronomical matters. )
The affair is engaged with some batches from one of the corps, the left wing, of the mirlitons, which are tasted at Babylon by the great Sanhedrin or congress of oracles et oraclesses. No more than 2 or 3 systems can be presented per day. The tasting would become confused if the number exceeded three.
Each day, in the 60 armies, the battle-kitchens make and serve to their army the varieties presented to the judgment of the great Sanhedrin, in order that those armies have a fresh memory of it, and the aftertaste still, at the moment when the bulletin of Babylon arrives which will relate the opinions of the Sanhedrin on those varieties.
At the end of a week employed for the tasting of the systems of the left wing, the Sanhedrin renders a provisional judgment, and the bulletin of Babylon makes known to the 60 armies, and to the entire world, that the three empires of France, Japanand California have won a first advantage; that some systems of mirlitons presented by them have been accepted provisionally into the left wing of the orthodox series, or adapted to the conveniences of temperament.
So far, the struggle is competition and not battle, which can only begin after the admission of the entire series. A month would have to pass before the Sanhedrin could form a provisional cadre of orthodox systems of 12 varieties, distinguished into groups of 3, 5 and 4 for the center and the wings, plus a pivot.
This is only a preparation for battle, during which each army has other, more active intrigues: but this one, being the principal, must occupy the entire campaign, 5 or 6 months.
The cadre being formed at the end of a month and announced to the world, the battle is engaged along the whole line and in triple struggle; for each of the 48 empires which have failed in the competition of the cadre, preserve their chances:
To drive out one of the accepted systems or even a corps from the wings or center, by producing new systems of petits pâtés which have not yet competed;
Of being accepted in the counter-octave, when it is necessary to form a complete gamut of 12 major varieties and 12 minor varieties;
Of taking place in the 4 transitions, the 4 sub-pivots and the great pivots still not admitted.
These three chances give an extreme activity to the leagues, and to the voyages of diplomats in the 60 armies. Each day we see new alliances form between the various empires which judge it convenient to associate their varieties of petits pâtésand of wines and other beverages, to form center our wing, and to give battle to a mass of systems already accepted.
The multiplicity of these claims oblige 3 juries to form in a sub-order for the tastings and presentations. These juries placed in the three great divisions, at 30 leagues from one another, are served like the Sanhedrin, each by 60 squads of elite pastry chefs. Their decisions are provisional and subordinate to the tastings of the Sanhedrin. From then the struggle becomes general, and more variable as each acceptance or rejection causes new plans, produces new cartels directed at one or more empires, and demands new negotiations between victors who have attacks to fear until the definitive fixing of the orthodox series.
In the meantime, the 64 battle-kitchens work wonders of skill; travelers rush from all parts in order to bear witness to these complex struggles which will decide the claims of so many empires; the bulletins of Babylon are read avidly around the globe, especially in the empires which took part in the combat.
Nonsense, it will be said, you promise a treatise on Association, and you reel off twenty fairy tales!!!Patience, until the commentary which will follow; and the alleged nonsense will become the thoroughly methodical solution of a problem of equilibrium in the infinitely small, necessary counterweight to the infinitely large: but let us conclude.
At the end of the campaign, there would be 24 empires vanquished and 36 triumphant; perhaps less, for a single empire can succeed in making adopted 2 or 3 varieties of its making.
However, the vanquished are not considered beaten; they will reproduce their petits pâtés for a new Sanhedrin which will form a series of the 4th degree, with 135 varieties: until then their methods are heterodox, not applicable in the gamut of the 32 temperaments, and not accepted into the gastrosophic hierarchy.
The armies battle over a lot of these theses in various degrees, and each day at the meals they have some struggles between the empires, the procedures of which they review, depending on the distributions of cooks that each army makes to the others.
They also have, for their evening sessions, some propositions regarding affairs of the fine arts and occasional sympathy. In these numerous intrigues, they engage in a whole campaign before reaching the outcome.
Their pleasures are still varied by various incidents, like the encounters of characters or legions of adventurers and adventuresses, who travel to spread a particular character in the sciences or arts, and which contain many virtuosos in that genre.
At the end of the campaign, the armies assemble for some time, first in sub-divisions, then in three divisions, then en masse, to give some unitary feasts in the cities of the headquarters, to render public homage public to the individual victors, to the authors of productions adopted in one or another of the gastrosophic Sanhedrins.
A capital, in Harmony, is always surrounded at some distance with a circle of shady paths, or boulevards with several lanes, which are used to shelter and table the armies.
On the day of triumph, the victors are honored with a military salvo. For example, Apicius is the pivotal victor; his petits pâtés are served at the beginning of the dinner; all at one the 600,000 athletes are armed with 300,000 bottles of sparkling wine whose loosened corks, held in by the thumb, are ready to pop. The commanders face the beacon-tower of Babylon, and at the moment when its telegraph gives the signal to fire, the 300,000 corks are released at once; their clamor, accompanied by shouts of “long live Apicius!” re-echoes far off in the caves of the mountains of the Euphrates.
At the same instant Apicius receives from the head of the Sanhedrin the gold medal, bearing the inscription: “To Apicius, victor Y in petits pâtés, at the battle of Babylon. Given by the 60 empires, etc.” Their names are engraved on the reverse side of the coin.
Such homage will be rendered to the pivotal inverse victor, man or woman, whose petits pâtésare adopted as term [Y, rotated 180°] of the orthodox series.
Gastronomic pygmies of our time, dare to compare your lowly trophies to those of a gastrosopher of Harmony, whose triumphs, in a single dish, ring out with so much brilliance throughout the entire world! Everything is just arbitrary in your science; the Beauvilliers and Archambaults are only confused guides, operating without the distinction of temperaments, without the avowal of competent authorities. Their laurels are as often the object of facetious remarks as they are a path to glory; those of Apicius will join interest and glory, for they will be for him a road to high honors, even to various degrees of magnature and scepters, by title of ambition *2, and of institution *3 (275).
I have given these details to support a principle, namely, that the armies of Harmony, of all degrees, have feasts so brilliant and intrigues so active, and so numerous, that acceptance into the army is a favor, and is obtained only on good titles. For example, in this campaign of the petits pâtés, we require half the applicants to have the ability to work as pastry chefs, and the other will be subject to the most minute questions of taste.
Similar battles will be established for all the nice tastes, whether in gastrosophy, the fine arts, or love. Now, the petits pâtésare a nice taste of a very high degree, and perhaps even the highest, for we find very few people—men, women, or children—who are not amateurs of some sort with regard to petits pâtés or mirlitons.
That army, aside from its theses on nice tastes, will have to work on the nasty tastes by a divergent series in reverse. The armies of Harmony have a large number of functions which always tend to form connections of all sorts between the regions of the globe, and to establish them in proportion to the degree of refinement; when the orthodoxies are established, we will see in every army of 10,000 men, some feasts in the 5th degree for example:
They will provide meals according to temperament, divided into 810 companies, which will prepare each dish in 810 ways, which are different, but still orthodox, for each of the 810 temperaments.
It is only in the armies that such feasts can be found; for 810 companies of 9 or 10 persons already make 8,000 persons at the table, plus the servants: it requires then gatherings of 10,000, to have celebration in the 5th degree of dishes or other objects. An army of 30,000 can hold celebrations of the 6th degree, much more refined and spreading more charm on the links of which they are the source.
One would thus be grossly mistaken about the purpose of the passions, claiming that they will bring uniformity of development. Their harmony, their equilibrium in the societary mechanism, depends on the extreme variety of developments given to a single passion.
Listen at a Civilized table as different tastes are expressed regarding a bagatelle, an omelet: a sober man will believe he speaks philosophically, saying that all the omelets are equal in rights, and that one must eat without distinction all those that are presented.
Far from that: it is necessary, in order to harmonize the passion for omelets in the 5th degree, to open 810 paths of development, by a classification of 810 varieties, applied to as many temperaments, and adopted by a Sanhedrin which will theoretically transmit to all the empires of the globe the rules of fabrication for 810 omelets, the practical science of which will be communicated to those empires by the legionnaires who have waged the campaign of omelets of the 5th degree.
If one noticed a delay in digestion in some series of temperaments, in those who those who devoted themselves to the omelette soufflée, that would be a thesis to propose to the armies. The unified congress seated at Constantinople would indicated an industrial struggle for the following year, linked to a battle of omelettes soufflées, to be engaged in somewhere, say at Paris, by an army from various empires, which would take positions from Rouen to Auxerre, to debate there both theoretically and practically the question of omelettes soufflées, and their orthodox assortment in the series of temperaments.
While seriously concerning itself with these apparent trifles, an army of Harmony executes immense and magnificent labors. What does it matter if it has, at mealtime, some intrigues involving pâtés and omelets? These apparently frivolous rivalries, are principal branches in the balance of the passions, and the more we manage to raise the refinements to a high degree (according to the table on page 336), the more we are assured of establishing a perfect equilibrium in the development of each passion. What a denial of that philosophy which wants to bring us back to the holy equality of tastes, to universal monotony, and which would claim to found on uniformity that equilibrium of the passions that we can only establish on the progressive and methodical development of the varieties of tastes, whether nasty or nice!

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

[1] Men, women, and children, according to Fourier’s reckoning.—Translator.
[2] The theses are competing methods of achieving some taste: preparing a particular dish, embanking a river, etc.—Translator.
[3] A hollow puff pastry.—Translator.
[4] Based on Fourier’s descriptions elsewhere, another small pastry, probably a meat-filled tartelette.—Translator.

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Gastrolatry / Gastronomy / Gastrosophy

These entries are from the Dictionary Of Phalansterian Sociology:

GASTROLATRY. — Ignoble role of the man who only knows how to play with his jaw. — New Industrial World, 259. Theory of Universal Unity, 109.
— See: Gluttony.
GASTRONOMY. — In civilization gastronomy can only play a very subordinate role, nearer to debauchery than to wisdom. — New Industrial World, 258.
— Conditions which render gastronomy honorable and praiseworthy.  X. 251.
— Gastronomy is a seed of attraction more effective than any other. N. 260, 382.
GASTROSOPHY. — Gastrosophy is gastronomy applied to industrial attraction and to hygiene.
— Gastronomy, which in civilization is only a simple and contemptible sensuality, becomes in harmony a science of high social politics, called Gastrosophy, high gastronomic wisdom, profound and sublime theory of social equilibrium. — Theory of Universal Unity, III. 139.
— Gastrosophy or hygienic wisdom engendered by the 4 functions: Gastronomy, Cooking, Preserving, Cultivation. — New Industrial World, 258.
— Graded gastronomy is the mechanism organized to work promptly as mechanism of attraction in a trial phalanx. — New Industrial World, 102. – Motifs by which the gastronomic passion has a strong influence for the success of the beginnings of Harmony. — New Industrial World, 261.
— Necessity of speculating on gastronomy to make industrial attractions bloom. New Industrial World, 300. Is disdained today by women. — New Industrial World, 206. — But will be the most powerful emulative mechanism in education in the combined order. Livret d’Annonce, 31.
— Gastronomy or gastrosophy will be the source of refinements in the quality of products, which will allow the poorest Harmonian to claim to be better served than the kings of Civilization. — New Industrial World, 273.
— Utility of the gastrosophic antiennefor classifying temperaments from an early age. — New Industrial World, 343.
— Combined gastronomy envisioned in its political, material and passional sense. — Theory of the Four Movements, 236, 243, 253.
— Wonders composite, serial gastronomy. Melons that never deceive. — Theory of Universal Unity, III. 47.
— Problem of bi-composite gastronomy. The triumph of the tough poultry. — Theory of Universal Unity, III. 135.
— Major or gastrosophic war. (The word “war” is used in the sense of rivalry.) — Theory of Universal Unity, IV. 352. See: Industrial armies.
Gastrosophy is derided by the Civilized, even though it is their guilty pleasure, for the love of good food reigns as much in the philosopher as in the prelate who rants against the pleasures of the table. — Theory of Universal Unity, IV. 418.
— Gastrosophy demands the cooperation of four sciences: chemical,  agronomical, medicinal and culinary. — Theory of Universal Unity, IV. 420.
— See: gourmandise, hygiene.

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J.-H. Rosny, “The Warriors of the Waters” (“Nymphée,” 1893)

The Warriors of the Waters.
By J.-H. Rosny.
[Published as Nymphée in 1893.]
Translated from the French by John W. Harding for THE ECLECTIC MAGAZINE.
I HAVE always been convinced that notwithstanding the discoveries made in all parts of the world by armies of explorers, there exist many things, many lands and strange beings that we wot not of, the like of which we have never dreamed in our philosophy. This conviction has been strengthened in no small measure by the extraordinary adventures that happened to me in Eastern Asia, and which I venture to recount in detail, partly from data committed to my diary, partly from memory; for though, as it will be seen, circumstances were not always favorable to the taking of notes, the events which befell in such rapid succession were of so startling a nature as to impress themselves indelibly upon my mind.
Yes, there are many mysterious places on the earth: swamp and forest land, mountains and subterranean regions with marvelous rivers that still remain uncharted. Travelers have no doubt skirted them, but have been headed off by bogs and stagnant waters breeding sickness and death, by hunger and thirst, and impenetrable brushwood. In regard to caverns, speaking only of Europe, Asia and America—for certain parts of Africa and Australia are still terra incognita, and no man has penetrated to the extreme Arctic and Antarctic latitudes—there are several wonderful grottoes, even in France itself, that have never been explored.
What I am about to relate is the plain, unvarnished truth, and inasmuch as I am inventing nothing, I make bold to say that it is one of the most stirring, most absorbing stories of travel and adventure ever told. Should the reader fall to indorse my opinion, it will be because I am unable to set down my exploits in a sufficiently attractive manner, but this will detract nothing from their phenomenal character.
I will refrain from unnecessary preliminary explanations. Suffice it to say that despite my comparative youthfulness, I accompanied, in the capacity of naturalist and physician, the geographical expedition sent out a few years ago by the French Government to the regions of the Amoor on the confines of Russia in Asia and the Chinese Empire. Our leader was Jean Louis Devreuse, captain of the cruiser Hero whose fame as an explorer of the Antarctic regions being universal, it is not needful for me to descant upon.
The story begins in the eighth month of our voyage.

The country through which we were traveling is remarkable for its fecundity. Few, if any, human beings live there. Profound silence reigns over the formidable marshes. The brute creation increases and multiplies undisturbed on land and in the water: birds fill the air to the very clouds; the rivers positively teem with aquatic life. There the soul expands. For months I felt the intoxicating joy of living, gave full freedom to the flights of my fancy and imagination.
At the outset we saw large droves of wild horses and packs of wolves and bears roving about, and great flocks of cranes and wood pigeons rose as we approached them.
Then we came to the marshes. A country of uncertain, uninviting appearance stretched away to the left, jutted with long capes upon which innumerable herons ruminated solemnly and the wind moaned among the rushes. We waded through several weed-covered lagoons, and crossed a deep swamp on a raft made from a tree that had been blasted and stricken down by lightning. And the black-looking country widened, heaving with feverish reptilian life: gigantic toads hopped along the banks, serpents wriggled in the mud and rotting herbage, myriads of insects burrowed in the soft soil. Insipid, sickly gases that became phosphorescent at night and flickered in countless wills-o’-the-wisp rose from the bogs. The sky cloudy and opaque, was so low that it seemed to rest upon the strips of earth that barred the slimy waters in the distance. It was grandiose, but frightful, and it filled us with awe. We pushed on, not having the courage to turn back, and daily expecting to reach drier and more salubrious country.
It was toward the end of August. For three weeks we had been roaming at hazard, trusting to luck to pull us through. In crossing some rapids we lost our tents, and our men were visibly discouraged; but the chief would not give up. Imbued with the restless spirit of exploration, endowed with stubborn energy, stern, implacable, almost cruel, he pertained to that race of aggressive fighters who scorn all obstacles, rule men with an iron hand and know how to die heroically, if necessary, but whose private life is morose, monotonous, devoid of interest. He held us under the yoke of his will.
Our Asiatic guide had lost his reckoning completely, and had not the remotest idea as to where we were. To all our inquiries he replied with the impassible sadness peculiar to Orientals:
“Me no sabe—land of bad men—me no sabe.”
Our men began to show signs of mutiny. I personally did not care. My only anxiety was for dainty little Sabine Devreuse, daughter of the captain. How ever she obtained permission to accompany the expedition I could never understand. Doubtless the captain, in capitulating to her pleading, had imagined that the journey would be a short one and fraught with no particular danger. It is a fact that those who wander about the world become in course of time inexplicably optimistic and place unbounded confidence in their lucky star.
Each day Sabine Devreuse had become dearer to me. She shed the light of grace over the company. Because of her our arduous journey seemed to me but a happy excursion, our halts in the evening an incomparable poem. Notwithstanding her delicate beauty and frail appearance she was never ill, scarcely ever weary.
One morning we thought we had reached a more promising territory. The captain was disposed to congratulate himself, for we were crossing a plain that was only dotted by a few ponds.
“We shall emerge to the east, probably on to prairie land, as I foresaw,” he said.
I confess I did not share his optimism. As I gazed toward the horizon I had the presentiment that we were far from being at the end of our troubles. It turned out that my apprehensions were well founded for we were soon floundering in the swamps again. To add to our discomfort a steady, interminable downpour of rain set in. The ground, where there happened to be any, was covered with spongy moss, and mucous lichens. We wasted days in going round deep swamps, while all kinds of paludinous creatures glided about and frightened our horses. Our water-proof overcoats were worn full of holes and we were drenched to the skin.
Our halt on August 30, on a small stony eminence that would not have afforded shelter to a rat and was bare of anything that could serve as fuel was one of the most disheartening episodes of the voyage. The captain, as stiff and stern as the Assyrians escorting their prisoners on the bas-reliefs of Khorsabab, spoke to no one. An abominable twilight was expiring in the deluge. The Implacable -humidity, the funereal greyness, exercised a still more depressing effect upon everybody. Sabine Devreuse alone summed up courage enough to smile. Dear girl! She symbolized the comfort of our Western homes; and in listening .to her silvery voice I forgot alike my sadness and lassitude.
Figure to yourself, if you can, our position, lying on the viscous soil in absolute darkness; for it was the period of the new moon, and the sky was covered from east to west with threefold curtains of clouds. Yet I slept, though my slumber was disturbed at intervals by frightful nightmares.
About an hour before dawn our horses began to stamp and snort with terror, and made frantic efforts to break their leather halters. The guide touched my arm.
“The man-eater!” he said.
You cannot imagine the horror these words inspired in the inky darkness and the cold, incessant douche. I sat up quickly and reached for my rifle, which was protected by a case of thick oiled leather. Then I peered into the darkness. I might as well have tried to look through a brick wall.
“How do you know?” I asked.
A muffled growl on the plain answered the question and left no room for doubt that the man spoke sooth. It was, indeed, the great man-eating tiger of the north, successor, if not the descendant, of the lord of the quaternary age, that crosses the frozen rivers to ravage the small cities of the Amoor.
It was not the first time he had tracked us, but previously twelve men, well armed, all good shots, and protected by a bright camp fire had nothing to fear. Now, however, it was different. Though he could see us, we could not see him in the dense night, blacker than the Egyptian plague of darkness, strain our eyes as we would, and could only await the attack in anxious suspense.
“Form a square,” ordered the captain.
We sprang to our feet. The horses were plunging more frantically than ever, and it would have been dangerous to seek to use them as a rampart against the enemy.
“He come—me hear him!” exclaimed the guide.
No one doubted that he was right for we all knew that the Asiatic’s hearing was wonderfully acute, and—oh! that wall of humidity, that pall of rain, the unspeakable mystery of the night! I in turn soon heard the monster creeping stealthily toward us. The feeling that he could see us, was preparing to spring upon us suddenly, without warning, filled us with dread. It was calculated to make the bravest quail, and it did.
There was a pause. The tiger was probably hesitating in the choice of his victim. He must have been astonished at the presence of men and horses in those endless solitudes. Then we could hear him moving again. He was somewhere to the left of my side of the square and nearer to us than the horses.
“Take a chance shot,” murmured Devreuse to me, for I was considered to be the best marksman of the troop.
A roar followed the sharp crack of the rifle, and then we heard the fall of a heavy body. Next we knew that the tiger was very near to us, for we could hear him breathing heavily, in short gasps.
“Shoot, Lachal, you, too, Alcuin!” cried the captain.
By the light of the two flashes we saw the monster crouching to spring, then, before Devreuse could give another order, there was a rush through the air, and in the impenetrable darkness arose the agonized shriek of a man.
For two seconds we were paralyzed with horror. No one dared to shoot. Another shriek, a crunching sound, and somebody fired. The flash revealed two men on the ground and the tiger preparing to strike down a third victim. A shower of blows with the butt end of the rifles descended upon the man-eater, and four reports rang out, answered by a prolonged, frightful howl.
“He wounded,” whispered the guide.
Hardly had he spoken when there was another roar, I felt a great mass hurled against me, and I was seized, rolled over, shaken as a rat is shaken by a terrier, and carried off.
“It is all up with me,” I thought.
An incredible resignation came over me, a sort of lucid hallucination. I gave myself up to death. I was not hurt and I still clutched my rifle.
After awhile the tiger stopped. I was dropped on the ground, felt a hot, fetid breath upon my face, and suddenly all my resignation gave place to extreme terror and regret of life. A great paw descended upon me, and I felt that I was about to be crushed, torn to pieces and devoured.
“Farewell!” I shouted feebly.
In my desperation I had instinctively raised my rifle. A flash, a report! The tiger howled and leaped into the air. I, extended on the ground, awaited death. I could hear a heavy grunting three paces from me. A glimmer of hope entered my breast: How is this? Am I to live, am I to die? Why is the monster grunting and rolling, instead of taking his vengeance?
He struggled up, fell down again,
there was a frightful gasp, then silence. The next thing I knew I was on my feet and heard the sound of approaching voices.
“He very dead!” exclaimed the Asiatic, and his hand seized mine in the darkness.
I responded with a vise-like grip. My mind was still filled with anguish, doubt as to whether the tiger was really dead, fear that he would bound upon me again. But I could only hear the monotonous trickling of the rain and the footsteps of my companions as they groped their way cautiously toward me.
“Robert, are you safe?” shouted the captain.
“Yes, all right,” I responded.
After several vain attempts I succeeded in striking a match under cover of my overcoat. The scene disclosed by the faint flicker was striking in the extreme. The tiger, lying in the blood-dyed mud, was a magnificent creature. Even in death it preserved a menacing attitude. Its lips were drawn back as in an angry snarl, baring the cruel fangs, and a paw raised showed the strong, sharp claws. How was It possible that I was among the living? I could scarcely realize that I had been snatched by a miracle from the jaws of dead.
“He very dead!” repeated the Asiatic.
We rejoined the captain and felt our way back to the knoll.
“Are you hurt?” asked a voice in sweet, tremulous tones that made my heart beat violently.
“No, mademoiselle,” I answered her; “or at any rate not seriously. The brute must have gripped me by the leather and india rubber of my clothing. But what about the others?”
“I believe I have got a nasty scratch on the chest—the tiger left me at once,” replied Alcuin.
Another and more plaintive voice exclaimed:
“And I am wounded on the hip, but the shock was even worse than the bite.”
We forgot all about our fatigue and the rain. Our escape from the deadly peril, in which we had been placed, filled us with an excitement that was almost joyous. Finally a faint greyness appeared in the Bast and lightened reluctantly until we were able to see each other. The cheerless day dawned upon a scene of desolation— the abomination of desolation—a scene of flooded marshes all around us; and our excitement was succeeded by gloomy foreboding, though, as far as I was concerned, I had only eyes and thoughts for Sabine, and would have put up with anything so that I could be near her. Our wounds were not serious enough to render a continuance of the halt imperative, and we pushed on.
Another day was spent in the horrible solitude and the rain that soaked all the energy out of us. The men began to grumble seriously. They kept at a distance and held whispered conferences among themselves. Whenever I happened to approach them they regarded me distrustfully. It was easy to see that they were plotting, and though I personally was prepared to follow the captain to the end of the world, I could understand their dissatisfaction and felt sorry for them.
About 4 o’clock in the afternoon Devreuse decided to call a halt. Apart from our excessive fatigue and the attention due to the wounded men, the halt was occasioned by the discovery of a shelter.
In the middle of the plain was a queer hillock of rock about ninety feet high. We entered a hollow that seemed to have been widened by human hands and came near the top to a plateau and a spacious grotto, fairly well lighted, and with a sloping and perfectly dry floor.
After being two days in the rain there seemed to be something providential in the discovery of this shelter, and the men manifested the intention of passing the night there. The chief could not refuse a demand so reason
able. Our horses easily made the ascent, and we found ourselves lodged with unhoped-for comfort. I say unhoped-for, because, branching from the grotto were a number of passages, and in a depression of the plateau a small lake that the rain kept filled with running water; so that we were able not only to perform much needed toilet operations, but to rinse a part of our clothing and hang it in the passages to dry, after which we ate the provisions remaining from our last hunt— a few cooked slices of moose. How glad we should have been to wash the food down with a cup of hot tea, I need hardly say; but alas! there was no means of making a fire.
“It would be advisable to cut a few branches,” observed one of the men.
“They wouldn’t have time to dry,” said the captain morosely.
The tone of the man’s remark struck me. I was standing at the entrance to the grotto with Sabine. We were gazing out upon the landscape through the melancholy curtain of the rain. But it was a blissful moment to me. Sabine, in her gray mantle, her hair caught up negligently, a glow of color in her cheeks, was the embodiment of youth, life and grace. She inspired me with an exquisite fear, a mystic palpitation. Her sweet smile banished all my homesickness and anxieties.
As I said, the tone of the man’s remark (it was Alcuin who had spoken) struck me, and I turned round. Devreuse had also noticed it, and demanded with severity:
“What is that you say?”
Alcuin, troubled at first, answered, after some hesitation, with respectful firmness:
“You see, captain, it’s like this: We are very tired. A rest of a few days is necessary—and Lefort’s wound wants a lot of nursing.”
His comrades nodded approval, which fact ought to have made the chief reflect; but, as usual, his unreasonable obstinacy asserted itself.
“We go on to-morrow morning,” he announced curtly.
“We can’t do it,” remonstrated Alcuin, and he ventured to add: “We wish for five days’ rest. The shelter is good, and we should be able to pull ourselves together in that time.”
The chief’s hard face betrayed a suspicion of indecision, but the man, decidedly, was inaccessible to kindly sentiments, too carried away by his belief in his absolutism and prescience. He had now decided that there was a passage to the southwest, and would not lose a day in attaining it.
“We go on to-morrow morning,” he repeated.
“But suppose we cannot?” insisted Alcuin mildly. Devreuse frowned
“Do you refuse to obey my orders?”
“No, captain, we don’t refuse, but we really cannot go any further. The expedition was only to last three months.”
Devreuse, agitated, evidently recognized that there was some justice in his subordinate’s demands, or he would not have hesitated before replying. I still hoped that he would have the good sense to accord the respite, but no, he could not make up his mind to give way.
“Very well,” he said, “I will go alone.”
Then, turning to me, he added: “You will wait here ten days for me.”
“No,” I retorted; “if the others intend to abandon you, it is not for me to judge their conduct. As for me, 1 swear that I will not leave you till we reach civilization again.”
The men remained impassible. Devreuse’s lips quivered with unaccustomed emotion.
“Thank you, Robert,” he said warmly, and addressing the others disdainfully:
“Taking into consideration the length and hardship of the journey, I will not denounce your conduct. But I order you to wait here for us for fifteen days. This time, unless compelled by uncontrollable circumstances, disobedience of my order will be treason.”
“Until the evening of the fifteenth day at the very least,” said Alcuin humbly, “and we regret”
Devreuse interrupted him with a haughty gesture, and a long and gloomy silence fell upon the company.
I rose at daybreak. The others were still sleeping soundly. I was nervous and racked with uneasiness on account of delicate little Sabine, whose father was about to expose her to new dangers. I regretted my resolution of the previous night. Had I sided with the men the captain might not have been so obstinate. I was worried by this idea, although I argued that, unbending, as he was, such action on my part would have made no difference. He would have gone all the same, taking Sabine with him, and separation from the latter would have been more bitter to me than death.
Thus I mused at the entrance of the grotto. Another dismal day had begun in the relentless rain. The whole country was under water. Water triumphed over earth and sky.
Suddenly I heard a slight noise, light footsteps behind me. I turned. It was Sabine. Enveloped in her little mantle she advanced with a charming air of mystery, and all my sadness vanished. Motionless, hypnotized, I could scarcely articulate a word of polite greeting.
“I want to speak to you,” she murmured. “I was greatly touched by your devotedness yesterday. My father, who will be eternally grateful to you, does not know how to thank any one. Shall I thank you for him?”
Her sweet voice sent the blood coursing madly through my veins. Oh! how I loved her! It was as much as I could do to restrain myself from taking her in my arms and blurting out the secret that my lips feared to tell. I would cheerfully, nay, eagerly, have laid down my life for her, gone anywhere, done anything, confronted any danger to merit a smile of approval from her.
“If in speaking as I did I but pleased you, the reward is too great,” I stammered.
“Too great?”
She gazed at me with her wondrous blue eyes, then lowered them and blushed. I was shaking like a leaf, almost irresistibly compelled to declare my love, dreading lest I should lose the consolation of accompanying her and being near her if I did.
“Yes, too great. Your thanks would more than repay any peril incurred, any devotedness.”
She kept her eyes lowered, and I felt that the supreme moment had arrived, that I was face to face with my destiny, that she represented Life or Nirvana to me.
“My devotion frightened you?” I faltered.
“I should be timid, indeed, were that the case,” she said with a tinge of irony, but an irony so sweet, so kind!
My doubt continued—the fear of losing all by a throw of the dice: a “yes,” a “no.”
“Will you not let me follow you always?” I ventured, hardly conscious of what I was saying.
“Yes, all my life!”
She became serious. I was desperate. There was no receding now. The die was cast. I continued:
“May I not ask your father whether he will take me with him as his son?”
An air of doubt passed over her visage; then with charming bravery she said:
“Yes, ask him!”
“Sabine,” I cried, choking with emotion, “can I dare to believe that you love me?”
“What, then, would you believe?”
This was said with a tinge of her former irony, delicious, tender Irony.
Oh! that beautiful rainy morning,
that paradise of swamps. Gently I had caught her hand, gently I had raised it to my lips. I was king of the world.

Two days had elapsed since we—the captain, Sabine and I—had quitted the men in the grotto. The country grew more dismal as we advanced, though it was not devoid of a certain sombre and grandiose beauty. Whether there was an issue or not it was certain that the journey was hourly becoming more painful. Luckily we had only brought Sabine’s little horse with us; our own mounts would have been an encumbrance rather than a help.
The rain had ceased, and we were trudging along a ridge of land that was surrounded in every direction by pools.
“Night is coming on. Another effort,” urged the captain.
And night was coming on. We made for what appeared to be a knoll. I do not know what came over Sabine’s horse, but it suddenly took it into its head to bolt, and away it dashed, passing to the left of the knoll like a streak of lightning. We heard Sabine scream, and running forward found that the animal had plunged into a bog. Without taking time to reflect I rushed to the rescue, and in an instant was floundering beside the girl in the treacherous soil.
“Our movements only make us sink deeper,” remarked Sabine.
There could be no doubt about It . Caught in a net of plants we could neither advance nor recede. We were in one of those traps in which inert Nature seems to suck under with slow but sure ferocity the living beings that fall into them.
The captain, however, had not lost his presence of mind. He approached by a round-about way along a narrow tongue of land that jutted obliquely in our direction. He had uncoiled a few yards of rope, and was gathering it up to throw us the end of it. Our only hope was in him, and we followed his movements with anguish. Suddenly he slipped, stumbled, tried to recover himself and draw back. The soil of the promontory, composed, doubtless, at the extremity where he was standing, of a decayed vegetable crust gave way. Devreuse flung out his hands trying to clutch at something to save himself, but in vain, and he found himself in the same position as we were!
Moreover, night had set in, and everything appeared vague and indistinct. In the penumbra of the vast solitude we could hear the sighing and wailing of the brute creation. Wills-o’-the-wisp flickered around us. We were prisoners of the slough. At the slightest motion we sank a little deeper. Every minute marked a stage toward the inevitable doom that awaited us, of being swallowed up by the earth. The moon, fuliginous and languid, made its appearance between misty banks of clouds, and hung like a great ball on a distant curtain of poplars. The horse was burled to the haunches, and Sabine gazed at me despairingly.
“Robert, we are lost!” she exclaimed.
Once more I made a desperate effort to extricate myself, but it only hastened the fatal hour.
“Well,” cried the captain, “unless help arrives—and I don’t see where it is to come from—it is all up with us, my poor children.”
There was an inflection of tenderness in his stern voice that went to my heart. Sabine’s eyes dilated with horror. They wandered alternately from her father to me, and all three of us felt our strength deserting’ us, realizing that the end was not far off.
“God help us,” sighed Sabine.
The moon, rending her misty veil, shone brightly over all. In the south a few stars twinkled solitarily, like a little archipelago on the bosom of the ocean. The wind swept slowly over the marshes with a heavy, poisonous sweetness.
The mud was up to my shoulders. In half an hour I should have disappeared. Sabine stretched forth her hand to try and keep me up.
“Let us die together, Robert,” she murmured.
• • • • •
A confused melody was wafted over the marshes. It was a weird, strange music, that belonged to no epoch, no country that I knew of, with intervals inappreciable to the ear, yet perceptible. We looked in the direction whence it came and in the refulgent light of the moon perceived the silhouette of a man standing on a strip of earth, a sort of elongated islet. In his hands he held an object the shape of which I could not discern.
All at once we saw an extraordinary sight. Giant salamanders clambered on to the islet and gathered about the man. They were followed by toads and water snakes. Bats fluttered over his head; grebes hopped around him; rats and other creatures crept up; water fowl and owls mingled with the audience. The man continued his bizarre music, and it diffused a great gentleness over the scene, a sentiment of pantheistic fraternity that communicated itself even to us, notwithstanding the horror of our position.
We lifted up our voices in a cry of distress.
The music ceased and the man turned toward us. When he noted the predicament we were in he leaped from the islet and disappeared among the weeds. Mingled anguish and hope kept us as motionless as statues. In a few minutes that seemed an eternity of time to us the man reappeared close by and came toward us. We were unable to follow his movements, but presently Sabine and I felt ourselves seized and dragged along. A few seconds later we were floundering through a less perfidious mire and soon were standing on solid earth once more. Devreuse, rescued in the same manner, rejoined us, and the stranger contemplated us with deep, but kindly interest.
He was almost nude, his sole garment consisting of a loin cloth of fibre. The hair of his head was thin and resembled barbated lichens, but he had no hair on the face or body, and his skin, which bore no trace of the mud into which he had waded was shiny, in fact appeared to be oily.
Devreuse thanked him in various dialects, but he only shook his bead. Obviously he did not understand. Overjoyed at our unexpected deliverance we grasped his hands warmly to express our gratitude. He smiled and said something, but his voice was not that of a human being: it was a moist, guttural croaking.
He noticed, however, that we were shivering with cold and signed to us to follow him. We passed along a natural road which, though narrow, was firm and hard. It widened and slanted upward until we came to a kind of platform in the middle of a lagoon. Here the man signed to us to stop and once more disappeared in the water.
“Has he abandoned us?” asked Sabine anxiously.
“What if he has, we have been saved.”
“And how miraculously!”
The moon was now high and almost white in its effulgence. As far as eye could reach spread the marshes, the Land of Dreary Waters. I was dreaming of all manner of things in a sort of hallucination, when I saw the man returning with Sabine’s horse.
“My poor Geo!” exclaimed the girl as she caressed the animal that had so nearly been the cause of our undoing.
The man, in addition, brought some dry weeds, wood and eggs. He tendered the eggs together with a few handfuls of nuts, after which he piled up the wood and weeds and started a fire. This done, he smiled upon us and again plunged off the platform. We ran to the spot where he had dived. The water was deep here, but he did not reappear. We looked at each other, stupefied.
“What is the meaning of this?” I cried.
“I cannot say,” replied Devreuse with a thoughtful air. “It is without question the most inexplicable, incredible thing I have met with in all my fifteen years of travel. But what is to happen, will happen. Let us have supper.”
We ate heartily, dried our clothing by the fire, and the weather being balmy soon dropped off to sleep. In the middle of the night I awoke. The queer music of our rescuer resounded a long distance away across the marshes, but the musician was invisible. Then the conviction came to me that I had entered upon a new life, a reality more fairy-like than the most extravagant fairy tale.
We all awoke at sunrise greatly recuperated by our slumbers.
“Captain,” I cried, and pointed to our outer clothing, of which, being heavy with mud, we had divested ourselves, and which was now clean and dry.
“It is the work of our Man of the Waters,” said Sabine. “I begin to think he must be some benevolent faun.”
We had a good breakfast of the nuts and eggs remaining from the previous night. The sun came out, and its sheen was reflected in the sombre, endless dreamland of marshes. We began to consider our position, and concluded that the outlook was anything but an encouraging one. We could not for the life of us see how we were going to get out of the marshes.
Suddenly Sabine uttered a little scream.
Something was floating rapidly toward us and we made it out to be a raft. It seemed to be moving through the green waters of its own accord, and this fact rather startled us. But presently a head emerged from the water, then a body, and we recognized our good genius. To our gestures of greeting the Man of the Waters responded with unequivocal demonstrations of cordiality.
His appearance astonished us even more than it had done in the moonlight. By the light of day we saw that his skin was a light green color; his lips were violet; his eyes strangely round and flat, with scarcely any white, the iris being the color of a carbuncle and the pupil indented and very large. Added to this there was a peculiar gracefulness and lithesomeness in his movements. I examined him at length and attentively, especially his eyes, the like of which I had never seen in any human being.
After tying Geo on the raft he signed to us to board it, too. We complied, though not without a certain distrust, which was accentuated when he disappeared under the water again, and the raft began to move off in the singular manner in which it had come to us.
We caught sight of our conductor now and then in the thick, slimy water, encumbered with vegetation, and although we had been floating along for twenty minutes he had not risen to the surface. Our camping ground of the previous night was left far behind. The scenery began to change. The water was clearer, and we skirted several delightful little islands.
The head of the Man of the Waters, as we had decided to call him, presently bobbed up. He pointed to the southward, and went under again. The breeze brought a cooler, purer air with it. Soon the stretch of marshes became narrower; we passed through a shallow channel and found ourselves scudding over a magnificent lake of cold, limpid water in an atmosphere that was positively heavenly.

The lake, which extended for miles and miles, was dotted with islands that were bordered with gigantic water lilies and thickly covered with flowers, grasses, bushes and trees. We were being propelled toward one of these islands. Our distrust had vanished with the drowsy, morbid vapors of the swamps. We breathed in health and vigor with the full power of our lungs, and our hearts expanded with hope and the poetry of the lake.
The raft stopped at the point of a promontory and the Man of the Waters emerged and signed to us to follow him. We did so, and witnessed a most extraordinary spectacle. On the shore a score of human beings were assembled, old and young, men and women, youths, maidens and little children. All were of a viridescent tint, with smooth skin, carbuncle eyes, violet lips and hair like barbated lichens.
At sight of us the children, young men and girls and a tall old man came running up and crowded around us, uttering croaking, batrachian cries and displaying an hilarious vivacity. More Men of the Waters emerged from the lake, and we found ourselves surrounded by this aquatic population, who appeared not only very human, but in their general features resembled the white race more closely than do certain terrestrial races. Even their greenish hue and the oily moisture of their skins were not displeasing to contemplate. The young people were of a pale green like that of nascent vegetation in springtime; the old people were of a deeper shade, like the velvety green of moss or of lotus leaves. Many of the girls were really prepossessing with their slender waists, tapering extremities and finely chiseled features.
It would be impossible for me to attempt to describe our wonderment . It was all like a delicious dream, and to the emotion of the captain and myself was added the pride of savants: what discovery had ever been made comparable to this? Here we found realized, shorn of all the mythical scaffolding of our ancestors, one of the most attractive traditions of every nation. Just as the gorilla, orang-outang and chimpanzee had justified the fiction of fauns and satyrs, so did the people before us transform into a visible, tangible reality the world-old legend of mermen and mermaids. What rendered our discovery especially and immeasurably valuable was that these people were real men and women and not merely anthropomorphous.
The first impression of astonishment passed, I experienced a kind of mystical intoxication which I observed was shared by Sabine and her father.
Our rescuer led us to a grove of ash trees, where there we’re a number of huts. Aquatic birds waddled about the place, ducks, swans and waterfowl, evidently domesticated. Fresh eggs and a grilled perch were brought to us, and after we had satisfied our hunger we returned to the shore.
The weather was warm, and all the afternoon we followed the movements of the Men of the Waters. They swam about like great frogs, dived and disappeared. Then a head -would emerge and its owner would leap on to the island. Moved by the happiness of their double life I continued to examine them with absorbing curiosity, seeking to discover some organ of adaptation which enabled them to remain so long under ‘water; but save that I perceived they were gifted with great thoracic capacity there was no indication that could enlighten me upon this point.
A group of them kept us company the whole afternoon, trying to converse with us and treating us with the greatest kindness. Notwithstanding the attraction these strange beings had for us, however, we resolved to leave the next morning, though we proposed to return as soon as possible after communicating with our men. In view of the superior interest of our discovery the captain had given up his Idea of seeking a southwest passage.
But destiny compelled us to modify our plans. In the night I was aroused by Devreuse who informed me that Sabine was ill. I jumped up and went to her. In the feeble light of an ash torch I saw my dear fiancé was shivering with fever. In great alarm I examined her and was thankful to find that she was in no particular danger.
“Is it serious?” questioned Devreuse.
“No, a few days’ rest and quietness will set her up again.”
“How many days?”
“Not less?”
“Not a day.”
An expression of helplessness came over his face and he said:
“Robert, I can confide your fiancé to you. I have no doubt that I shall be able to persuade the men to wait a couple of months, and you can expect me back by the end of the week.”
He spoke with considerable agitation, and after a pause went on:
“Besides, if the weeks I purpose to pass among these extraordinary people do not suffice, we can organize another expedition. We have plenty of time. I will resign my commission, if necessary, so that I can spend years in pursuing my discoveries. All the more reason why I should not abandon my men.”
“But,” I protested, “it is I who ought to go and tell them.”
“Not at all. Your care as a medical man is indispensable to Sabine. I should be of no more help to her than a log.”
He placed both hands on my shoulders as he added:
“Is that not so?”
“I am at your orders,” I replied.
Sabine, though a little delirious, had perfectly well understood what we had been saying. She raised herself on her elbow.
“I shall be strong enough to go with you, father,” she exclaimed.
“Little girl,” said Devreuse authoritatively, “what you have got to do is to obey the doctor. I shall be back in six days, and I shall have done my duty. Do you presume to prevent me?”
Sabine, cowed, made no reply, and for a time nobody spoke. Then the girl began to shiver from the fever again and finally fell into an agitated slumber, while I watched beside her in the feeble light of the torch. I was aroused from the reverie into which I had fallen by the captain.
“You are quite sure it is not dangerous?” he insisted.
“In medical cases one can never be quite sure, you know.”
“But as far as it is possible for you to tell?”
“I have every reason to believe that she will be well and about again in a fortnight.”
“Then I will start this very morning.”
I knew that he had made up his mind and did not therefore attempt to dissuade him. Accordingly, a few hours later he set out upon his journey.
Sabine’s illness was even less serious than I had supposed. In three days she was convalescent and able to get up for a few hours. The weather was charming, and the beauty of the island and lake seemed to increase as we became familiar with them. Our lacustrine hosts manifested the utmost sympathy and did everything they possibly could to help us.
The week passed and the girl had almost completely recovered, but she became very anxious, for there was no sign of the captain. One afternoon, seated on the shore, I was consoling her as best I could, but with indifferent success.
“I am afraid something has happened to him,” she kept repeating.
I was at a loss what to say when a shadow was thrown in front of us and looking over my shoulder I saw that the Man of the Waters, who had rescued us, and with whom we were on especially friendly terms, was approaching. He smiled and pointed to a large cinder-colored swallow, peculiar to those regions, which he held in his hand, and which, when he came up, he gave to me.
“What is it?” demanded Sabine.
I noticed a little quill tube tied to its breast. It contained a piece of tissue paper, tightly rolled.
“It is a letter from your father.”
I read it aloud. It ran:
“Have arrived. Leg dislocated by fall. Nothing serious, but am detained. Don’t be uneasy and wait for me where you are. Don’t quit the island.”
Sabine burst into tears, while I marveled that the captain should have thought to take the bird with him. A smile from the Man of the Waters made me suspect that the idea did not originate with Devreuse. Sabine’s distress continued.
“It is not dangerous, dear,” I assured her, “only his leg put out. He won’t feel anything of it in a week or two.”
“Are you sure?”
The Man of the Waters had disappeared. Sabine had ceased to weep, but she was very mournful. I put my arm round her neck and comforted her. Her eyes, blue as the heavens above us, gazed gratefully into mine, and, despite our tribulations, I never experienced a more blissful moment

The days went by, and we became more and more attached to the lake and its wonders. We visited the islands upon it in company with our amphibious friends. Troops of youths and maidens pushed our raft along and sported around it in the transparent water. We rested on cool banks in the shade of weeping willows or of tall poplars.
But our hosts themselves, whom we began to know, and with whom we were now able to exchange a few words, were the superior charm of this delightful existence. Let me hasten to say, however, that it was they who picked up these words from us. We were unable to catch a single word of their language, our ears being powerless to analyze the sounds by which they communicated among themselves.
Their manners were very simple. They had no notion of family life. The population of the lake amounted to about twelve hundred persons, as far as I was able to estimate. Men and women reared all the children without distinction, and we never saw one child neglected.
Their habitations were of wood, covered with branches and moss. They were erected principally as shelters during the winter, for there appeared to be no use for them in summer. All food was cooked in the open air. It consisted merely of fish, eggs, mushrooms and a few wild vegetables. They did not eat their domestic animals, or in fact any warm-blooded creature. We saw they were disgusted when we partook of the flesh of fowl or animal, and accordingly restricted ourselves to their food, and uncommonly well it agreed with us.
They possessed a few weapons, among them a helicoid harpoon which they were able not only to send skimming on the water in a straight line, but also in a series of curves, and cause to return to them like an Australian boomerang. They employed them to capture big fish. The fish in the lake were the most cunning and difficult to approach I ever saw. The presence of marine man among them had doubtless in course of time rendered them so. Our hosts had succeeded in taming some. These they never touched, though they collected their eggs. On the other hand, they were keen hunters of pike and perch.
Their industries were not complex, and, indeed, their mode of life, the simplicity of their material needs, afforded little scope for the development of handicrafts. They knew something about the potter’s art, and elementary carpentering. They used no metals, but a sort of very hard nephrite, out of which they fashioned harpoons, saws, axes and knives.
Their existence was more poetical than practical. Never have I met with a people more free from cares, encumbrances and possessions. They seemed to have retained the elements of happiness and set aside all vain suffering. Not that they were indolent. They adored exercise, swam great distances till they were exhausted, and like the natural denizens of the water were ever restless. Unlike savages, who indulge in prolonged spells of laziness after engaging in the excitement of the chase, they appeared to be indefatigable. But their activity had no productive aim. It was induced by a pure love of movement. They swam, sported and leaped as other people repose. Apart from an occasional hunting expedition in the water, solely after carnivorous fish, they moved for the sake of moving. I watched them solve miraculous problems of movement, a variety of attitudes and lines, and in comparison the suppleness of the swallow or salmon was clumsy. Their games were a continual deployment of art—swimming dances, complex and suggestive ballets. Seeing them darting, turning screws around each other, twisting, thirty at a time, in a whirlpool caused by their own gyrations, one could but feel that they were endowed with a sense of dynamic, of muscular thought unknown to other human beings.
They were especially admirable in the moonlight. I witnessed fetes under the water so beautiful, so dreamy, consisting of evolutions so varied that I can compare them to nothing in this world.
When the people were assembled in any number, these fetes were accompanied by a strange and delicious phenomenon. The lake agitated in rhythm with the ballet emitted a euphonious sound. It was a sweet, soft murmuring, a harmonious whispering, an indescribable melopoea that brought tears of exaltation to our eyes. It recalled the fabulous legends of antiquity. It reminded me of the seductive voices of the sirens heard by the navigators of old. It may have been these voices, to which we listened in the silvery night; but they breathed only fraternity and peace.
Thought expressed by movement was not merely general and poetical. By observing them closely I fancied I detected that they carried on conversation by action, and I succeeded in grasping a vague outline of their methods, not, assuredly, sufficient to follow the thoughts of the swimmers, but enough to enable me to understand that two particular persons were talking to each other.
During the aquatic lessons given to the children, at which I had the no small pleasure of assisting, my conviction became confirmed. Those teaching the little ones expressed their approval or disapproval by natatory inflections, and I managed at least to distinguish two of these. One caused the pupil to stop; the other to change his movement.
Love, naturally, also found expression. The Men of the Waters displayed an art of tenderness, supplication and pride that varied with the individual, but was very subtle, very delicate and far superior to our conversational idylls.
They did not appear to be in the least metaphysically minded, and I saw no evidence of a religion or belief in the supernatural, only an intense love of Nature. I have already referred to their gentleness with birds, animals and domesticated fishes. This gentleness placed them in intimate communication with the lower creation. They possessed the power of making themselves understood to a surprising degree. Thus, although the idea would appear chimerical to us, I have seen them give orders to salamanders, bats, birds and carp, instructing them, for instance, to go to a certain island or district of the lake. Swans at their order made journeys of many leagues, bats ceased to hunt for a given interval, carp temporarily ceased to shelter in their favorite haunts.
The scene we witnessed at our first meeting with the Man of the Waters was frequently renewed. By means of a little stone hook a melody, similar to that we had heard in the marches, was produced from a reed, in which grooves of different width and depth had been cut. The sound invariably attracted and cast a spell over reptiles, birds and fishes, and caused beasts of prey to accord a truce to their victims.
How often these scenes entranced us! How many hours we passed watching some musician with his rudimentary instrument renewing old-time fables! What extraordinary felicity was in all the sports, in the whole life of these aquatic people.
I said that their manners were simple and free, and that the notion of family life does not exist among them. But there is a reservation to this statement. Marriage between the sexes was governed by a tacit rule. The union lasted one lunar month, the new moon marking the period of choice. These unions were, of course, renewable at the will of the parties. They never occasioned the slightest trouble in the tribe, so far as I could ascertain. I certainly never saw the shadow of a dispute while I lived among them. The children belonged for a few months to the mother, but the whole community looked after their wellbeing.
As regards the organ of adaptation which could alone furnish an explanation of their ability to remain so long under water I never found any trace of it. It is true that my investigations were forcibly limited, inasmuch as I did not have the opportunity to dissect a body. The length of time they can remain below the surface is fully half an hour, and if the fact that they can swim at a speed of from thirty to thirty-five miles an hour be taken into consideration, it will be seen that they are the equals of whales and other cetacea. Moreover, they have a marked superiority over the latter in respect of their eyes, which are admirably adapted to aquatic vision.
This was easily apparent upon examination. Their large, flat eyeballs were as favorable to sight under water as the eyes of the falcon are to sight in the air. A posteriori the supremacy of this organ is amply demonstrated by the subtlety of their evolutions: they accomplish in bands marvels of precision, dashes which, were the distance not accurately calculated, would result in terrible shocks. In their piscatorial hunts they perceive the tiniest fish at hundreds of yards. Out of the water their sight is blurred, like that of presbyopes, within a distance of twelve yards, though beyond that they can see a very long way.
Their sense of hearing, too, is markedly different from ours. I have alluded to their music, which is intervaled as though punctuated by commas, and to their queer articulation of words. I concluded that their ears, like their eyes, are better adapted to an aquatic than to a terrestrial life. It is a well-known fact that the swiftness of sound is more than quadrupled in the water, and this would necessarily create wide divergencies between the acoustic apparatus developed in aquatic surroundings and that trained to catch aerial sounds.

One morning Sabine and I, seated on our raft, floated lazily about the lake. Our friend had at first accompanied us. He came and went, pushing the raft along and sporting around it like a dolphin. We stopped at an enchanting little island and sat down in the shade of a clump of ash trees. Before us white, wax-like waterlilies reposed upon their dark green leaves; the modest water ranunculus reared its head amid bowers of alguoe, and the fish in cohorts leaped in the sunshine. My arm was round Sabine’s waist and we were supremely, exquisitely happy, too happy to speak.
We were brought back to earth by a rumor of voices, and perceived about thirty men grouped upon a near-by island of poplars. They were joined by many others who emerged from the lake.
“The Men of the Waters,” I remarked, indifferently.
“Yes,” said Sabine, “but they are not like those we know.”
In effect, on noticing them more intently I saw that their skin was of a dark color, blue-black, it appeared to me.
Sabine, frightened, nestled closer and suggested that we should return to our friends.
“Perhaps it would be advisable,” I assented.
Before we could rise to our feet, however, the water surged and bubbled
near the raft and half a dozen men emerged. Like our friends, they had strangely round eyes with scarcely any white and with slightly indented pupils, but their hair, like their color, was very different, and their attitude was not reassuring.
They gazed at us from a distance, and one of them, a powerfully built, athletic young fellow, never took his eyes off Sabine. We saw that they were armed with harpoons, and Sabine turned pale.
The athletic man said something to us in croaking tones. I made signs that I did not understand him, whereupon they raised threatening cries and flourished their harpoons. The situation was becoming critical. I had my rifle with me, but when I had discharged both barrels they would be upon me before I could reload, and how could I make a successful defense against these beings familiar with an element in which they could hide and attack us with impunity? Besides, even if I managed to hold my own against the men confronting me, was there not on another island, 500 yards away, a multitude who would rush to their assistance?
The young athlete began to talk to us again, and I understood from his gestures that he insisted upon having a reply. I shouted at him, and for a moment the band stood dumfounded at the sound. They held a hurried consultation and then with angry cries began to flourish their weapons again. I raised my rifle. There was a moment of horrible suspense. I thought it was all over with us, and I determined to sell my life dearly and die gamely.
A cry arose from the lake. My antagonists turned about and a joyful shout escaped me. A troop of our hosts were speeding toward us, led by our rescuer who was making signs to the dark men. The latter lowered their harpoons, and soon after we were surrounded by our friends once more, saved from death—Sabine perhaps from a worse fate.
We then witnessed a ceremony in which our Men of the Waters welcomed the others. Prom the island of poplars the rest of the dark men came. Presents were exchanged, and arms interlaced in a peculiar manner. It struck me, however, that these demonstrations were somewhat lacking in sincerity, especially in the case of the dark visitors. The young athlete continued to stare at Sabine in a way that raised my wrath.
Our hosts had escorted us back to their island, and we were greatly relieved to find ourselves safe there again, though I still felt a vague uneasiness which I fancied was shared by the tribe. Our rescuer was especially troubled. He remained near us, showed his devotedness to us in every possible way, and, affection begetting affection, I came to love him like a brother.
The afternoon passed without incident, but an hour before sundown a deputation of the dark Men of the Waters arrived, among them being the strong man, who appeared to act as their leader. Our people rendered them every honor and offered them presents, after which there was a dance in the water in which light and dark men vied with each other in agility.
Sabine and I with our friend held aloof and watched the proceedings from behind a screen of lowering ash branches. interested at the spectacle in spite of our uneasiness.
When the dance was at its height two men emerged close to our retreat. Could they see us? Had they been spying upon us? However this may be, they came up to us. One of them was the young chief, but his face wore an amicable smile and he was gentleness itself. He said something to our friend, then moved off again, looking at Sabine as he did so with an avid, covetous look that made me shudder.
They returned to the lake. Then our friend, shaking his head, made no secret of his apprehension. He signed to me to look after Sabine, and intimated that he would also guard her.
The night was an anxious one for me, and I sat up and kept watch. Gleams of light flickered over the lake and among the foliage. The sound of strange music was borne to my ears. I caught glimpses of bands of swimmers shooting about in the water, in the uncertain light of the moon, which was on the wane.
About 1 o’clock in the morning the dark men came in a body to within a hundred yards of the island, and in response to their calls several of our young men joined in the nocturnal fete.
How charming, how profoundly interesting I should have considered these things, had Sabine not been there. With what joy I should have studied the customs of these beings, the remnant of an antique aquatic race that had in all likelihood ruled continents. Now and then I gave myself up to the poetry of the scene, but my worry soon returned, especially as I remarked that the two races distrusted each other, with a distrust born, may be, of old-time feuds. At all events their friendship appeared to be more tacit than sincere.
A bank of heavy clouds blotted out the moon and obscurity fell upon all around. I crossed over to Sabine’s hut and, rifle in hand, sat down before the narrow entrance. The fete had ended and silence reigned over the lake. Once or twice I fancied I heard some one prowling about, and it was broad daylight before I dozed off.

Nothing of importance occurred during the remainder of the week. Every day deputations of dark Men of the Waters came to the island. Our people returned their visits on a neighboring isle where they had elected to encamp. The young men of both races continued to organize fetes in the water. His animation increased and the nights were spent in delightful dances and great aquatic ballets in the moonlight .
I ought not to have been worried, because. in the first place, we were well guarded, and, secondly, because the strangers had apparently forgotten all about us; yet I was, and greatly worried. It -was no good reasoning that the young chief, if he ever had entertained designs on Sabine, had, with the mobility characteristic of his race, probably abandoned them. A foreboding that I could not shake off tortured me continuously, and troubled my sleep. I would start up perspiring and every nerve strained to the utmost tension. It seemed to me that the distrust of our friends was increasing, instead of diminishing. They, I surmised, were not likely to be agitated by presentiments, and must have more serious reasons for their attitude.
One evening at moonrise the dark Men of the Waters came in unusually large numbers, accompanied by their old men. The visit was marked by more solemn demonstrations than customary, and the exchange of more numerous presents. I divined intuitively that the visitors were taking leave, preparatory to taking their departure for the regions whence they came.
The water fete was more marvelous than any that had preceded it. It was a harmonious reverie of movement. Light and dark bodies reflecting the moonbeams, throwing off spray of crystal and mother-of-pearl when they sped along the surface, darted upward and downward, to and fro, twisting, circling, entwining in arabesque full of an infinite sentiment of curves, in divine trajectory symphonies.
By 1 o’clock it was all over and the dark squadron scooted away.
“Ah,” said I to Sabine, “I believe they are off at last.”
“I think so, too,” she affirmed.
She raised her timid eyes to mine and I kissed her passionately.
“I was much frightened on your account, darling,” I murmured.
“If only my father would return now, I should be perfectly happy,” she sighed. “I am so anxious about him.”
“He will come soon, he is all right,” I assured her.
Nevertheless, I was not yet easy in my mind. I was oppressed by a vague fear that even the assurance, conveyed by signs, of our friend that the dark men had gone for good failed to calm.
However, about 2 o’clock I fell into a feverish slumber and, worn out by many nights of watching, slept for a couple of hours. Then I had a nightmare from which I awoke with a start.
“Sabine! Sabine!” I shouted in a paroxysm of terror.
Then, being fairly awake, I recovered my sangfroid and looked out of my hut. Day was dawning, and the ash grove was whispering in the morning breeze. Everything breathed calmness and confidence. I shook off the disagreeable impression left by my dream and sniffed the fresh air with elation.
“How nice it would be to live here always,” I thought.
I strolled over to Sabine’s hut. Horror—stupefaction—despair! It was empty!

My fury aroused the Men of the Waters, and especially our friend. Mad with despair I rushed toward him, frantically pointing to Sabine’s empty couch. Men and women crowded around me in the pale light of the breaking dawn, and their large, rigid, carbuncle-like eyes gazed at me with evident compassion.
Presently the sun rose, dispersing the morning mist; the horizon, save toward the East and West, became remarkably clear, and to the North I could discern an almost imperceptible moving speck to which I drew the attention of my brother of the waters. He took careful note of the direction, ran to the lake and plunged in. I followed him impatiently with my eyes and saw him heading northward under the crystal water, his body magnified and deformed by the ripples that ruffled the surface. At length he came up, uttered his batracian cry and vanished northward like a flash. A hundred of his companions, armed with helicoid harpoons, darted in his wake.
At the same time the raft upon which Sabine and I had been wont to make our excursions on the lake was brought to the bank. I installed myself upon it with my rifle and knife and was soon being towed along at incredible speed, but not, alas! more swiftly than the other raft that was bearing my terrified fiancé away.
The rapidity of movement and the somnolent, soothing calmness of wind and water gradually assuaged in a measure my anguish, and I began to examine the situation with greater coolness. From what I had seen of the dark as well as of the light Men of the Waters I felt pretty sure that the young kidnapper would not at the outset resort to force. I had frequently witnessed their long and patient courting, the graceful ruses, the gentle supplications of the lover to obtain the favors of his heart’s elect, and there was no reasonable ground for the supposition that the dark chief would adopt any other mode of procedure in regard to Sabine. Was not the romantic nature of the adventure calculated to excite the tendency of the race to overcome opposition by charming, rather than by using violence, toward such a captive?
Moreover, among primitive peoples the manners and customs of a tribe are rarely departed from, and even were his band to confer Sabine upon him, the young chief would probably have to submit to the customary rules governing marriage and go through the usual ceremonies. Finally, nearly a fortnight would elapse before the new moon, the period of choice, the only period at which the nuptials could be celebrated.

Whether or not we were gaining upon the other raft I could not say. It continued to be but a speck upon the horizon, and I was apprehensive lest it might be shut out of sight altogether by a mist. My fears, as it proved, were only too well founded, for about noon large clouds spread over the sky, and the vapor that rose from the lake under the heat of the sun becoming condensed hung over the water like a pall. The speed of my raft, however, in no way slackened, and little by little I gave myself up to my thoughts. I conceived the wildest imaginable scheme for rescuing my beloved Sabine only to dismiss them despairingly as impracticable.
Suddenly I was aroused by the batracian cry of the Men of the Waters and found that we were about three hundred yards from a low lying island covered with tall poplars, through the foliage of which the light played and quivered fantastically. We had after all been gaining on the raft, for, despite the mist, I could perceive it through an opening in the trees, though it continued to be but a black, indistinct speck.
My attention, however, was soon distracted from the raft by the cries of my amphibious allies who had risen to the surface and were excitedly calling each other’s attention to a long, thick clump of rushes, in front of which the water was frothing and bubbling furiously. The raft stopped, and I seized my gun ready for an attack. I could see by the agitation of the water that something was approaching us, and soon realized that the dark band was making a stand.
All at once the agitation ceased, the oncoming wave dispersed in a succession of circles and the surface became calm. In the limpid depths of the lake big water plants, like a submerged forest, could be plainly discerned, the air globules covering their broad leaves, stems and trailing tendrils with bright silver heads. The color of the mud at the bottom was a dull yellow.
Save for an occasional cautious snakelike gliding, nothing could be seen of the men. They must have been buried in the mud, eyeing each other closely, ready to take prompt advantage of the least opening afforded. Presently a slight cloudiness in the water, caused by a man changing position, afforded a mark. In an instant a helicoid harpoon flashed through the water and a body rose close to the raft.
This enabled me to locate the position of the contending forces. The light men were lying a short distance ahead of the raft; their dark enemies were assembled in front of the clump of rushes. Twenty harpoons were hurled in response to the deadly shaft that had killed one of our side, and it was with ferocious satisfaction that I saw a couple of dark corpses rise to the surface. Then all was still again. The mud that had thickened the water settled down and I was once more able to see the vegetation at the bottom. It was patent to me that an attack by either side would be extremely dangerous, and that every man was carefully keeping under cover. But they could not continue their present tactics indefinitely.
It soon became evident that before engaging in a pitched battle they were disputing a strategical advantage that would inevitably fall to the side able to remain longest under water. Those whose breath gave out would be compelled to rise to the surface for air and would thus become an easy mark for their enemies. I awaited the issue of this duel of endurance with the keenest anxiety, occasionally raising my eyes to glance at Sabine’s raft which, like mine, was lying motionless a long distance off toward the horizon.
Gazing down at the luxuriant vegetation that covered the bottom of the lake I saw what looked like a shower of burnished gold and silver; the wide-leaved plants and their mass of delicate tendrils covered with glittering air globules began to sway and innumerable shoals of fish invaded the battle ground. At the same time I heard a sound of distant music to which a nearer burst of melody responded.
The dark men, it was evident, were desirous of placing this living barrier between themselves and their light pursuers, in order that they might rise under cover of it to obtain a fresh supply of air. For some reason or other the lives of the fish appeared to be sacred. It may have been a pact, or a rule of war. At any rate, it was a graceful and marvelous episode in the poignant drama. The darting fish of all shapes and sizes, whose scales flashed with metallic lustre amid the dark green diamond spangled growth of the sub-lacustrine forest, seemed like the visible notes of a prodigious orchestration, the rhythm and harmony of which were enjoyed by the eye instead of the ear.
The struggle to keep them there and to lure them away lasted for some minutes, but one of our men, having succeeded in reaching the raft in safety, clambered on to it and began to play upon a grooved reed, whereupon the finny cohorts rose toward the surface and swam away.
The fish having disappeared, it could be seen that the dark camp was in distress. A few warriors who had tried to reach the surface during the passage of the fish were floating with harpoons through the heart. Three others made a desperate break for air and met with the same fate, whereupon the harpoons of their comrades flew through the water like a flock of migrating swallows and fell in a heavy shower among the plants beneath me, wounding two of our men, who came up near the raft.
Then before the light warriors could answer with a single lance the enemy darkened the water by stirring up the mud and rose to the surface en masse. But my friends, rushing through the thick curtain, took up position beneath them and the battle was won. The enemy vanquished and having exhausted their supply of weapons, had no course left but to seek safety in flight. In this many succeeded, but a large number were killed and an equally large number taken prisoners. Pursuit of the remainder was useless, for their rear guard veiled their retreat by stirring up great clouds of slime and mud as they fled.
The captives, carrying their dead, were being marched under a strong escort toward a number of huts on the island, when half a dozen light men, bearing a little dark boy who was moaning piteously, emerged from the water and laid the waif on the raft. They signed to me to take care of him and pointed with compassion to his left arm. I examined it and found that the shoulder was dislocated, but paid little further attention to the child, for at this moment Sabine’s raft was disappearing in the mist, while mine was being towed ashore.
Our band rested, but showed no joy at their victory. They appeared rather to be disgusted and saddened by the bloody strife in which they had been engaged, and from time to time would give way to violent outbursts of indignation and wrath. While they were cooking fish I meandered about the island, going over fully two-thirds of its length. It was covered with high grass. In one place I remarked a kind of furrow where the grass had been trampled flat, but thought nothing of the fact at the time, though it recurred to me later, like snatches of ideas recur in dreams.
A few steps further the ground became stony, and sloped to a yawning cavern whose dismal depth was shrouded in Cimmerian darkness. I thought it might be a sepulchre, and peered in, seeking to fathom its mysteries and comparing it to the gaping wound and the void in my heart.
Was it an hallucination? I thought I heard a cry coming from the pit . It was a cry that resembled in nothing the croaking, humid cry of the Men of the Waters. It was clear and vibrating such as none but a European could have uttered.
“Sabine!” I shouted.
Was I mad? Sabine was being borne away from me on the waters, yet I listened in the hope of hearing the cry again, listened so intently that I could have heard the fluttering of a night moth’s wings as it flitted through the wood; but my fancy refused to repeat it, and musing upon my misfortune I returned to the camp.
The halt was a brief one, for as soon as the fish were cooked we started off again, taking the food with us. My friends, as I had frequently seen them do before, partook of the repast under water. I, of course, ate my share on the raft I had offered a part of it to my little companion, but he had refused it. In the anguish of mind I was in myself I had at first been indifferent to his sufferings; but his refusal of food, his continual thirst and his moans finally moved me, and recovering my energy I succeeded in setting his shoulder. As I bent over him to terminate the operation I was struck by a peculiarity. His eyes to a certain extent lacked the characteristics of the eyes of the other Men of the Waters. The white was distinctly visible, the pupil had a pronounced outward curve and the iris, though inclined to redness, was of no precise color. I had seen more than one European with similar optics. Greatly surprised, I examined the other parts of his body and found that he was not like the aquatic people among whom he lived, either in skin, hair or extremities, the latter being much thicker.
Despite my cares, I was irresistibly agitated by conjectures and scientific hypotheses. Had I happened upon a specimen of a race that was a cross between the ordinary men of earth and the Men of the Waters? Was the boy’s resemblance to the former due to some phenomenon of heredity? Might not the process of transformation have been so rapid that a few centuries had sufficed to change the terrestrian into an aquatic man? I recalled scraps of what I had read in the works of ancient writers who asserted the ability of certain extraordinary beings to live under water.
Sabine’s abductors placed every possible obstacle in the way of pursuit by stirring up the mud over a vast extent of the lake, but my sagacious companions succeeded in keeping track of them, and about 2 o’clock, to my great joy, the sun having rent the mist on the horizon, I again caught sight of the raft. Thereafter I kept my finger pointed toward the moving speck, and the men towing and pushing me redoubled their efforts.
We were visibly shortening the distance between us. Sabine’s raft gradually became more distinct until I was able to make out the vague silhouette of a female form upon it, and shouted with glee. My delight, however, was suddenly dampened by a terrible doubt. Might not the young Chief, rather than abandon Sabine, drag her with him to the bottom of the lake? The thought was maddening.
Onward, nearer and nearer we sped, and my band of brave, tireless swimmers surrounding the raft, raised their voices in a weird, wild chant as they cleft the dancing water with their powerful strokes. Sabine’s adorable form now stood out so distinctly that I could easily discern her little cloak. Barely five hundred yards now separated us. I sprang. to my feet and my whole soul went out in yearning toward her. I was wild with hope and impatience. Yet she did not see me. Her back was turned toward me, and she was gazing fixedly before her over the lake. By what artifice was she prevented from turning her head?
When we were about three hundred yards off those of our swimmers who were not hauling or pushing my raft made a spurt for the other one. Instantly a man rose beside Sabine, and my blood froze with horror as I saw him throw his arms about her and drag her to the edge of the raft, though she resisted desperately. To describe my anguish as I watched the struggle would he impossible. It was too atrocious for words. My hair turned white in places and I felt the effects of it for years.
The resistance of my gentle, frail little sweetheart could avail nothing against the brute strength of her captor. He raised her bodily in his arms and leaped overboard. Frantic with grief and despair I plunged headlong into the lake, and heavily, slowly, as powerless as a fly in a glue pot, struck out toward the spot where my beloved had disappeared; but speedily realizing how useless were my efforts, and determined not to survive her, I threw up my arms and sank.

The next fact of which I was conscious was that I was lying alone on the raft, which was stationary. My little wounded companion had disappeared. Not a swimmer was to be seen. The lake, rippled by the breeze, danced in the glad sunlight; the bright-scaled fish streaked the crystal water with many colors as they flashed hither and thither in their sport.
I noticed these things in a languid, stupid way, and after a while became aware of the presence of a man in the lake. He was at too great a depth to be clearly distinguishable, hut I could see that he was moving slowly and with precaution. He presently came up bearing on his arm the boy captured among the rushes. In his disengaged hand he held my knife, which he had fetched from the bottom. I helped him to clamber on the raft.
These movements recalled the events through which I had passed, and broken-hearted, tortured beyond endurance, I fell into a stupor of grief and despair. I was aroused by a touch on the shoulder. The boy was standing
beside me, gazing at me compassionately, and making persistent signs of denial accompanied by a pantomime that I could not for the life of me understand.
This continued for some time, when he stopped discouraged and remained thoughtful. At last his face brightened and taking my knife he cut five pieces of wood from one of the logs of the raft and went through the following curious performance:
First clasping one of the pieces of wood to his breast, he caressed it with the greatest tenderness. He obliged me to do the same, afterward laying the stick beside me, and I wondered what fetish rite he was trying to initiate me into. He next laid a second piece of wood upon the water and made me understand that it was a raft. A third piece of wood was then made to seize the first piece and carry it to the miniature raft .
This aroused my interest to the highest pitch, for I now understood that the poor child was relating what had happened to Sabine. He saw that I followed him, and his face expressed consolation and hope as he continued the experiment.
The raft bore Sabine away and stopped at an island. Sabine landed, accompanied by the dark chief and a fourth piece of wood took Sabine’s place on the raft.
It was all as clear as daylight to me now. The child laughed gleefully and went on while I followed his performance with more thrilling interest and excitement than if I had been witnessing one of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Sabine and the chief remained on the island. The fourth piece of wood continued on its way on the raft. The fifth piece, seizing it, plunged into the lake, and again the boy laughed delightedly.
Sabine, then, was alive! It was all a ruse of her dark captors! The female figure I had seen on the raft had been substituted for her while she had remained behind on the island. The certitude of it filtered into my heart more softly than the rays of the rising sun through the dense verdure of a dark African forest. My love was alive, but where was she? Did the intelligent child know, and, if so, would he be able to make me understand?
He showed that he was able not only to do this, but to accompany the story with a wealth of detail that astonished me. We had found a language in which we could converse. One success led to another until it became possible to express not only delicate sensations, but even a few elementary abstract ideas.
In this way I learned that Sabine was landed on the island near the clump of rushes, and that she had been hidden in a deep cavern a short distance away—a fact that I should easily have guessed for myself.
My supposed hallucination, then, was nothing of the kind. The cry that I had heard at the mouth of the dark cavern into which I had peered really was uttered by my hapless fiancée. Prom this cavern she must have been conveyed to the land of the black Men of the Waters, which the boy gave me to understand lay to the westward.

Resolved to rejoin Sabine at all hazards, I raked my brains in an effort to devise a means of accomplishing my purpose. Out of one of the small logs of the raft I fashioned a scull or paddle with my knife, and having been familiar with the use of it from my childhood up managed to attain a speed of fourteen or fifteen yards a minute. It would take many hours at this rate to reach the invisible shore I was heading for, but the labor was infinitely preferable to inaction. Hope gave courage to my heart and strength to my arms, and I worked the paddle hour after hour, while the boy slept.
The sun was setting when I sighted land. Undecided where to disembark I awoke my little companion. He pointed
out a spot about three-quarters of a mile to the right on the outskirts of a large forest. I made for it and came to the entrance of a wide channel into which, in accordance with the boy’s instructions, I turned the raft.
The stream flowed so sluggishly that it seemed to come from a lake rather than a mountain. To right and left, like colossal pillars, the trees rose in gigantic colonnades, and their spreading branches cast a shadow over the water that deepened as we progressed, and was lightened at intervals by blood-like splashes caused by the crimson glow of the sunset as it glinted through the verdant canopy.
In the water beneath me I could see big, sightless, odd-shaped fish swimming lazily, mammoth Crustacea, green with slime and weeds, crawling on the bottom, and cephalopoda of an unknown species with enormous eyes. The atmosphere was dank and chilly, and all around was manifest the pallid fecundity of creatures and plants that shun the blessed light. Weeds, many yards in length, carpeted the bottom of the channel where the water was shallow and trailed in the direction of the current; banks of luxuriant, variegated lichens formed feeding grounds for insects that resembled turtles with their great oval bucklers; a spider, as big as a man’s fist, hanging from a branch, dropped to seize its nerveless prey; big white flies lighted upon livid fungi; my paddle disturbed a mammal with a beak like a bird’s, and hundreds of bats of all sizes circled overhead.
The banks of the channel became higher, the trees bent toward each other over the waterway until their tops mingled, and the last distant blood-splash waxed fainter and fainter until it became merged in the appalling blackness. The child had fallen asleep again, and I, quaking with a nameless terror, but buoyed up by the hope of seeing my Sabine once more, stationed myself forward on the raft and paddled steadfastly on through the night.

It must have been about midnight when the boy awoke. His shoulder was better. We were ravenously hungry, and he succeeded in finding some edible nuts, after partaking of which I fell into a light slumber. When I awoke, I perceived a pale ghostly glimmer through the trees in the distance on the left which I took to be moonlight. It outlined the leaves and the delicate drapery of the pendant creepers with a nebulous whiteness, as though the forest were covered with hoarfrost.
Along the colonnade of trees that lined the banks of the channel a profound darkness reigned which at intervals was splashed with light by the passing glow of the phosphorescent scales of a fish. I took to the paddle again. I had to advance with extreme caution, so that it took fully three hours to cover a mile and a half. An obscure cliff rose in front of me at a bend of the stream, while to the left it became singularly light. Could it be the sun already, and could its rays possibly penetrate through such a dense mass of verdure as that by which we were surrounded? Ten minutes later I rounded the bend and my eyes were almost blinded as I gazed upon a vast landscape that shone more brightly than snow-covered country in the moonlight. And yet it was Illumined neither by the sun nor moon.
A mobile, wavy luminosity was upon the waterway that now expanded into the proportions of a lake. The water, which extended away into an inundated forest, was shallow, for the upper forks of the tree roots were visible. From these roots the luminosity emanated in dense circles that became thinner as they expanded. But it was without shadow, and everywhere it floated, undulated, went out, revived. It trickled from the brushwood in little cascades and was borne on the breeze in flakes of light. In the very few places where the water could reflect it, it oscillated widely. Not the slightest sound disturbed the profound silence that reigned over the scene.
I stood motionless, petrified at the fairy-like spectacle. I passed in turn through the naive admiration, the mysterious terror, the invincible curiosity and the hair-raising dread of the occult it would have inspired in a little child. I fancied that I was in some fabulous town, in which the Men of the Waters had found means to illuminate the bottom of the lake. I, the representative of the superior races, experienced the shy, melancholy resignation of the races that have been vanquished; the innate pride at the conviction that I appertained to the highest form of humanity crumbled within me! I understood how our poor rivals resignedly allow themselves to glide into the abysm of nothingness, excluding dreams and confused theories from their lives, understood the consolations of Nirvana.
This spell was broken by the appearance on a distant islet of a man whose form was outlined on the background of light. He was incredibly tall and thin. His head reached to the lower branches of a neighboring ash tree that were more than nine feet from the ground, and he appeared to be more legs than anything else. Four similar men joined him, and they entered the water, which came up to their waists. They advanced toward us with rapid strides, and I awoke my companion.
Bewildered and dazed by the light he rubbed his eyes and shaded them with his hand, the better to examine the approaching giants, but the cry he uttered betokened neither fear nor surprise. On they came, sometimes immersed to the bust, sometimes with their ankles barely covered, and I had time to note that their arms, like their legs, were ridiculously long, as thin as a pipe stem, and covered with yellowish scales instead of hair. The body, on the other hand, was white and covered with soft hair, the head small and narrow, with large, cold and excessively mobile eyes.
The boy seemed to take pleasure in their presence, a pleasure tinged with banter. He called to them, and I listened eagerly for their response. They did not speak with the batraclan, rippling voice, the humid accent of the Men of the Waters. It was a sharp, hard cackling, and their jaws worked rapidly, chopping the syllables, as it were. Gravely they surrounded the raft . Their whole being bore the stamp of a joyless race, doomed to a precarious existence in an unproductive land. Their pallor was that of subterranean life. The hair of their heads was ash-colored; that on their breasts was of a lighter shade than that on their backs.
I felt a vague pity for them, I scarcely knew why. Maybe the patronizing attitude of the child inspired it; maybe I recognized intuitively that these narrow-headed people were pariahs. I fell a-theorizing, and it seemed to me that they were metamorphic abortions: Originally driven by powerful Mongolian nations into these paludal regions, inaccessible to the rest of mankind, they must have led a shy, hand-to-mouth existence. The ceaseless search for food in the marshes and ponds must in the course of centuries have elongated their limbs and rendered them dry and scaly. Then other peoples of the same origin probably made their advent . Having pushed through to the great lakes, or time having effected an improvement in the region, the newcomers must have boldly adapted themselves to an amphibious life, thus leaving far behind them their saddened precursors, the Men-Wading-Birds, thenceforth relegated to the shallow waters of the forest land.
I gathered that the child was requesting them to push the raft along, though from the tone of his voice it seemed to be more of an order than a request. Gently, melancholy, with, I thought, a consciousness of their weakness, they obeyed, and the raft glided through the wondrous luminous forest. It was like a dream, and I could scarcely persuade myself that I was really awake.
The water thrown off by the raft swelled away to right and left in waves of light that in the distance formed beautiful and radiant strata of mother-of-pearl, into which the dull trail behind us gradually merged and became transformed. I plunged my hand over the side and it dripped light. I examined the water closely and found a number of minute vegetal cells, which from subsequent investigation I learned contained phosphorescent zoospore of certain species of water weeds that became animated, probably at the period of reproduction, by a movement similar to that of tadpoles.
After we had been journeying for some hours the channel became narrower and the water rose to the necks of our poor, panting escort, Who, after swimming for a few minutes, gave up exhausted and made for the bank. We were on the confines of the land of light, and darkness once more lay before us. I shouted my thanks to our bird-like friends and the boy also cried out to them in cordial tones. They cackled something in answer and strode off along the shore. Nothing could be imagined more humble, more pitiable than these melancholy skeletons, and I gazed after them with deep and sympathetic interest as they trotted away until they were lost to sight among the trees.
I then began paddling again, and the water becoming deeper and the trees scarcer, I made good progress, in spite of the obscurity. The boy, I think, had fallen asleep again. I grew despondent in the gloom and loneliness. I imagined that the raft was being drawn into a bottomless pit, and that I should nevermore set eyes upon my beloved. I remembered that I had passed through trials and dangers almost as terrible in the course of the voyage, but on those occasions I had been encouraged by Devreuse’s energy, the presence of Sabine, of European companions, and the perils we encountered had been more or less foreseen and provided against . Now, alone, I was facing the awful solitude and darkness of the interminable forest, beset by the fear of falling into an ambush laid by men of limitless power and totally different from us, in momentary anticipation of encountering some adventure, more weird, more marvelous than those I had already gone through, and which I felt my reason would not be able to withstand.
A great lassitude and dizziness came over me. I ceased to work the scull except spasmodically, almost unconsciously. Sometimes I did not know
whether I was paddling or not, could not tell whether the raft was moving or stationary. I fancied that I was walking through a country lane, then that I was seated high up in a lighthouse. I began to babble incoherently, and it was only by an immense exercise of will power that I was able to bring my thoughts back to the river, the darkness and the raft. I felt, however, that 1 could not long stave off the inevitable, that 1 was slowly but surely lapsing into unconsciousness, and I remember that my last effort before I succumbed was to keep the raft headed toward a glimmer of daylight that appeared in the distance like a white speck on the channel.

When I awoke the raft was moving at a good rate. We had passed through the channel and were out in an open lake. It was fearfully hot and oppressive, and big ominous clouds, heavily charged with electricity, occasionally veiled the sun. I looked around for the boy. He was swimming in rear of the raft and pushing it along with his valid arm. He smiled at me and pointed northward toward some rocky and cavernous hills. “Is it there?” I asked. He nodded affirmatively and placed his hand upon his breast, a sign which in our language signified Sabine. I invited him to come on the raft and rest, but he refused; so, picking up the scull, I resumed my paddling. I was bathed in perspiration. Though there was not much wind, the lake began to get very rough and choppy. On the right the sombre mass of the forest was enveloped in gathering gloom, and from a kind of desert whirlwinds of sand came through a pass in the hills and filled the air. I felt myself imbued with a strange spirit of emulation, of rivalry against the elements. I worked the paddle steadily and powerfully, the boy pushed with all his strength and under our combined efforts the raft sped swiftly toward the shore.
We were little more than a hundred yards from it when the tempest broke upon us. It lashed the lake instantly into gigantic waves that reared and tumbled furiously over each other. A tremendous downpour of hail shut the surrounding landscape from sight, and the big stones stung my face and hands like slashes with a whip and almost stunned me. Then a waterspout lifted me, sucked me under the lake and whirled me to the surface again, where, bewildered though I was, I was able to catch hold of and cling to one of the logs of the little raft, which threatened to break up as each wave struck it. The boy had disappeared, and I conjectured that he had sought refuge several feet below the surface and was keeping watch upon me. This proved to be the case. The tail end of the waterspout having caught the raft, the latter went to pieces, and I was hurled into the lake, but was immediately seized by my young friend and borne safely ashore.
At the first clap of thunder that rumbled sullenly in the distance, stifled in the heavy clouds, the boy manifested great alarm. His terror increased when the lightning shot its forked javelins over the lake and tore great vivid rents in the darkened heavens. The thunder that followed, crashing and roaring incessantly, seemed to paralyze him, and I signed to him to take shelter in the lake. He needed no second bidding, and vanished into the boiling waves.
The rain fell in torrents and ran from my clothing like a tarn down a mountain side. I divested myself of my coat and waistcoat and leaving them to serve as a landmark set out to explore the environs. I could not see five yards before me, when the lightning was not playing, which, however, was only at rare intervals, for the air was filled with electricity. Twice the shock of the discharge threw me down and each time I picked myself up with a cynical rictus. I had reached the lowest depth of adversity and misfortune and experienced the sombre voluptuousness of the utterly desperate. I braved the tempest and its threats, its infernal tumult and cutting hail with the spirit of a fanatical Hindoo or of a holy martyr of the primitive Church.
Through the deluge and the vapors that rose from the wet and overheated soil I could just see the caverns, and made toward them. I had hardly advanced fifty paces when a brilliant flash of lightning lit up the scene, and I dropped to the ground, not from the electric shock this time, but because I had seen Sabine. She was seated on a big stone at the entrance to one of the caverns, and watching the storm. She had not seen me.
I determined to act with the greatest prudence, for the dark Men of the Waters, I argued, must certainly be in the cavern. Then suddenly it occurred to me that, like my boy companion, Sabine’s abductors, in fear of the thunder, might have taken to the lake. The more I reflected upon it the more was I convinced that I was right. But if this were the case, how was it that Sabine made no attempt to escape? On a closer scrutiny the reason was plainly apparent: She was bound hand and foot.
Wild with joy I remained for a moment breathless, and then rushed toward her. She recognized me instantly, and struggling to her feet fell swooning into my arms. I quickly cut her bonds, and when she revived, which she soon did under my caresses we fled away through the storm.
Everything in the universe appeared good to us now. The lightning flashing and the thunder cracking overhead no longer held any terrors for us: it was the artillery of heaven firing a salvo of victory and jubilation. Sabine, her sweet face streaming with rain, clung to me, and her blue eyes smiled lovingly into mine. Delicious with happiness, melting with tenderness, I pressed her to my heart, and amid a peal of thunder that made the earth tremble our lips met in the ecstacy of a long-awaited kiss. Then, her little hand clasped in mine, we ran to where I had left my coat .
The boy came out of the lake as we reached the place. Sabine, who had at first taken him to be one of our allies, was so frightened when she saw that he was black that I had considerable difficulty in reassuring her. There was no time to lose. The only obstacle to our flight was the boy’s fear of the thunder, but as he managed to overcome it sufficiently to accompany us, I was thankful that the storm continued, for I knew that while it lasted, there was no danger of Sabine being missed and, consequently, of our being pursued.
When the child caught hold of my hand to lead us he at once became calmer, and I felt instinctively that his trouble was more physical than moral. He was shaken by veritable undulations of electricity which abated at the contact with me. We walked along in silence for half an hour and then, to my astonishment, he conducted us toward a dark and spacious grotto.
“Where are you taking us?” I demanded.
The boy’s look appealed to Sabine to speak.
“Did you, then, not come here through a grotto?” asked the girl, turning to me.
“No,” I replied. “We came by a sort of river.”
“I was brought through a series of immense subterranean passages,” she explained.
“Do you think we ought to risk it? I don’t like the Idea of it myself,” I said.
Then, addressing the boy, I signed to him that we desired to take some other route. He made me understand that it was impossible, that the grotto was our only road to safety. He wore an air of assurance that showed that he knew perfectly well what he was about, and I concluded that the best thing to do was to trust ourselves to him.
Sabine clinched the argument by the very pertinent remark that any risk, however great, was preferable to that of being recaptured. So, clasping hands again, we entered the darkness.

In the grotto the thunder rumbled away in endless echoes. It was in itself an awesome thing to grope our way through the vast and dark passages, but the flashes of lightning that illumined them kept us in perpetual fear of an impending cataclysm. And the danger was by no means imaginary. Once the mountain, struck, I presume, externally, trembled to its base, and after the last echo of the roar that followed the flash had died away we heard with a terror that almost paralyzed us the fall of a mass of rock so near that a fragment struck my shoulder.
I clasped Sabine’s hand tightly, and we pressed forward in the silence and obscurity, our hearts beating high with mingled anxiety and hope. Our guide walked on as though perfectly familiar with the way, and I concluded that there was only one passage with no lateral branches, but in this I was mistaken for we presently came to a place where several other tunnels converged. At the end of one (which we did not take) was a silvery orifice.
“I wonder how he is able to find his way among so many different roads?” I remarked to Sabine.
“I cannot say,” she replied. “The same thing struck me when they were
bringing me through these endless passages. These Men of the Waters seem to be endowed with the same faculty as carrier pigeons.”
“Yes, dear, their science of movement, the long distances they are able to go under water may in course of time have developed this faculty.”
“I believe, too,” she added, “that they see better than we do in the dark.”
After two hours’ further progress the grotto became wider. In the distance a bronze-like reflection indicated the presence of water. It became larger, greenish and vaccinating. Then we found ourselves in the dim, uncertain vertical light that suffuses the entrance to caverns. We were in a spacious, lofty cave, the roof of which we could hardly discern. The water extended deep and wide along a gallery on the right through which the daylight streamed. Several large birds rose noisily as we approached, and we saw them for some time hovering in the tunnel. Sabine and I stood motionless in the light, feeling as though we had just awakened from a horrible nightmare. The child looked pleased at our relief and motioned to us to repose ourselves, and we gladly acquiesced while he vanished under water.
“Sabine,” I said, as she nestled In my arms, “we shall love each other the more for sharing such prodigious perils and adventures. Our love will preserve the trace of so many terrible emotions. As long as life lasts, we shall never forget our flight through these majestic subterranean galleries.”

After following a narrow path we entered an obscure passage that must have bridged water, for we caught the vague glimmer of it through a crevice in the rocky floor. We tramped on for a couple of hours a good deal more light-heartedly than in the morning, notwithstanding that the darkness was, If anything, deeper, the atmosphere damper and the passage narrower. !At length we issued into a valley and daylight. The storm was abating, and glimpses of blue sky could be seen through the mass of fleecy clouds.
The valley was a part of the grotto, the roof of which had caved in during some great upheaval. The sides were bare and almost perpendicular for about ten feet, then creeping plants and brushwood covered them In luxuriant profusion. Below ‘were piled immense jagged masses of the rock that had fallen in and which the elements had carved into rough fantastic shapes of monsters.
Skirting these we crossed the valley and descended into the bowels of the earth again, only to issue after a twenty-minutes’ tramp. into another valley. For two hours we went on alternately passing through dark galleries, marvelous caverns and verdant valleys. Finally we came to the end of the galleries on the bank of a gigantic basin, into which a river emptied itself by a waterfall 250 feet wide and 60 feet high.
Then the boy shouted gleefully and motioning us to follow him rushed on ahead. This we did as fast as we could, and on rounding a cape of high rocks found ourselves close upon a number of human habitations similar to those of the Men of the Waters. At the cries raised by some women, a crowd of people emerged from the water and came running toward us.
They were of the same type as the boy. Their hair was long and fine, and their extremities thicker than those of the Men of the Waters. Their greater resemblance to us, however, demonstrated a backwardness in evolution, an inferiority to the former, and accounted for their relegation to the subterranean lakes and rivers. My first hypothesis that they were the latest arrivals in the country was disproved by ulterior researches. They more probably were among the first peoples who found their way here a few centuries after the Men-Wading-Birds, and the latter defended their marshes with sufficient energy to compel the newcomers to take to the interior valleys, where the depths of the lakes rendered them amphibious. It is equally probable that the dark Men of the Waters are but a detached branch, become perfected for an aquatic existence of the races inhabiting the valleys, and that the light Men of the Waters, on the other hand, came straight from the plains and adapted themselves to their new condition of life out of pure imitation. Intermarriage between the different species of these aquatic peoples is very rare, and if traces of fusion between the dark and light elements are occasionally to be found, there is no reason to suppose that either has ever contracted a union with the Men-Wading-Birds, the latter being regarded as an inferior race, fallen into the melancholy of the outcast and hopeless, and rapidly becoming extinct.
No longer worried in regard to Sabine, I gave myself up to enthusiasm over my marvelous discoveries. I promised myself a long sojourn among these aquatic populations in the hope of solving the mystery surrounding them, from the historical, ethnological and other scientific points of view. I was saddened, however, by the thought that other expeditions would follow ours, that peradventure colonies of terrestrial men would ferociously destroy the admirable work of centuries and annihilate the various species of amphibious man. I derived some consolation, though, from the thought that it would be next to impossible for the invaders to cross the swamps where we came so near perishing; that it would be many years before the scanty surrounding populations would dream of confronting the perils of emigration and that a century hence the Men of the Waters might be organised sufficiently to be able to defend their territory against all aggressors. Finally, these regions, though admirable and perfectly salubrious, were, nevertheless, essentially lacustrine and, therefore, little accessible to terrestrial man.
We received a most hospitable welcome. In accordance with the custom of these peoples, after we had been served with a delicious repast a grand aquatic fete was held in our honor. They displayed remarkable agility and great resistance to asphyxiation, though in a lesser degree than their flat-eyed rivals. After our fatiguing experiences it was good to rest and refresh ourselves. . Sabine was worn out and slumbered on my shoulder. Twilight descended upon the valley, everything breathed peace and tranquillity and I resolved to pass the night among our cordial hosts.

Sabine was installed in a cabin and I, closing the door and placing my couch against it, lay thankfully down, while the boy curled up outside under a covering of plaited rushes. Through a crack in the door I could see that several men of the village were mounting guard, and confident that all was well I fell asleep.
We must have been sleeping for about five hours, when I was awakened by a tumult outside. I peeped through the crack. It was a beautiful moonlight night. Around a brazier that was burning briskly a score of old men squatted. With them were several young men, who from their flat eyes, barbated, weed-like hair and dusky color I saw were our adversaries. Moreover, the dark athlete immediately attracted my attention. My breast was bursting with jealous rage, and I could hardly refrain from rushing out and measuring myself against him. I reflected, however, that Sabine might be made the prize of the contest by the tribe, and resolved to act with diplomatic prudence and only to resort to violence in the last extremity.
The gathering around the brazier was obviously a council of the elders of the hospitable tribe, and the tumult was caused by the young strangers who were trying to intimidate them. Suddenly the young braves burst through the circle and rushed toward our cabin, but over a hundred Men of the Valleys appeared as by magic and drove them back. The braves then attempted to resume the conference, but the most imposing of the old men, who appeared to be the president, scattered the flaming brands with a kick and spoke long and loud and angrily in the light of the moon. Then our cabin was surrounded by the whole population of the village, and the braves withdrew and camped on the bank of the lake.
Sabine slumbered peacefully through it all. I went to her couch and bent over her. The moonbeams played upon her hair that encircled her head like a halo of gold and her lips were parted in a happy smile. Invoking a blessing upon her, I lightly kissed her pure brow and returned to my post at the door.
The dark men by the lake seemed to be waiting for the day to break. Uneasy at their presence there I opened the door. The multitude gazed at me in mute consternation. My gentle little friend was weeping. I called to him and he came, but could not make me understand what caused the consternation of the crowd, nor why he was weeping. All that I could gather was that we must not quit the cabin, and that the dark men were awaiting reinforcements.
What was to be done? Would the proud old men, who had refused to surrender us just now, give way when the reinforcements arrived? Why were the dark athlete and his companions allowed to remain there unmolested? Gloomily I kept watch. The sleep of my beloved reminded me of the last sleep of a prisoner condemned to be executed in the morning. I realized with bitterness how utterly helpless I was, that any attempt at escape would be useless and might end in disaster.
I was engrossed in my dismal reverie when Sabine awoke. She read my trouble in my face.
“Robert, you are suffering. Are you ill?” she exclaimed.
I explained the situation to her, and she peered through the door at our enemies.
“So you think, Robert, they will give us up?” she said.
“In all probability,” I answered.
Like a frightened gazelle Sabine threw herself into my arms and I pressed her to my heart fiercely, passionately in an access of love, pride and pain. I knew that she would die rather than fall into the bands of her abductor again.
I was still folding her in my arms, when there was a noise from the crowd outside, and we went to the door. The first faint streak of nascent dawn was struggling for supremacy with the pale light of the waning moon. Facing the old men was a form which we speedily recognized as that of our friend, the light Man of the Waters, who had saved up from the bog.
Opening the door, amid the sympathetic murmurs of the crowd, and elated with a new-found hope we joined him. He greeted us with demonstrations of joy and affection. All, save the group by the lake, were visibly touched at our gratitude and his kindness, and they became positively enthusiastic when, taking the little dark boy in my arms, I presented him to my aquatic brother.

We awaited daylight in company with the old men, the boy and our benefactor. The sun was just rising above the hill tops when a great wave came sweeping up the river and hundreds of swimmers tumbled over the waterfall into the lake. Sabine shrieked and clung to me, but I could see from the smiles of our friend that there was no cause for alarm.
The swimmers issued from the water, and I saw that there were light as well as dark men among them. On the shore they formed into two divisions. according to color. At the same time the Council of the Men of the Valleys assembled upon a neighboring knoll, which was solemnly surrounded by the whole tribe. Then the dark athlete and three old men of his race placed themselves in front of and a little to the left of the Council, while our rescuer and three old men of his people stationed themselves on the right.
The events of the night and the reason the consternation of the multitude and grief of the boy had been changed to enthusiasm and rejoicing were now clear to me, and Sabine shared my belief when I made it known to her. It was certain that before the opportune arrival of the light Men of the Waters the Council of the Tribe, now acting as judges, had, in view of their weakness and fear of their powerful rivals, decided to hand us over to the tender mercies of the dark athlete.
We watched the proceedings with an anxiety easier to be imagined than described. Not only did the judges receive the reclamations favorably, but the dark Men of the Waters, probably weary of the war, approved what he was saying, and in face of the overwhelming odds against him the dark athlete sulkily withdrew and all his companions quitted him. We were given into the care of our dear friends, the light Men of the Waters, amid the most touching demonstration of sympathy and satisfaction from the population of the valley.
The boy remained with us, caressed by Sabine, our friend and myself. He was suffering somewhat from Ms shoulder and his eyes, burning feverishly, gazed at us with the deepest affection. Owing to the pain in his shoulder, the lad was unable to take part in the general rejoicing, which took the form of marvelous aquatic performances by the three peoples.
Our rescuer was the first to dive in the lake. Sabine and I both sought to distinguish him among the others, but were unable to do so and he did not issue again, though nearly all the swimmers emerged, one after the other, to salute us. We soon forgot all about him, however. We were so happy in our love, so confident of a bright and glorious future. We thought only of finding Devreuse and the other members of the expedition and returning to Europe.
Two hours passed in this way, and we were still watching the sports, when I was suddenly thrown to the ground with great violence and Sabine was seized and carried off like a leaf caught up by a cyclone. When I scrambled to my feet the athlete with Sabine in his arms was speeding toward the river as fast as his legs would carry him, along a narrow path on the cliffs that circled our side of the lake and sheered almost perpendicularly to the water.
The boy was running after him, and screaming loudly. Once the man turned savagely upon him and ordered him to go back, but the lad kept after him. I started in mad pursuit, and when he saw me, and that the whole lake was in an uproar he stopped a moment, and his flat eyes blazed with jealous hate and fury.
Above the path a cornice projected, access to which could only be had by climbing a shaky, undermined mass of rock. The athlete’s purpose, it was evident, was to reach this cornice, but, hampered by his beautiful burden, he was overtaken by the boy, and I was close behind.
He snarled something at the child, who responded with intrepid anger. Then, quicker than it takes to recount the crime, the man grasped the little fellow with one hand and hurled him against the rock below, smashing his skull. Insane with grief and wrath, I bounded toward my formidable adversary, followed by the howling, vengeful crowd, but the murderer, clambering to the cornice, placed Sabine upon it and, exerting all his strength, displaced the shaky rock which fell with a crash, cutting off all immediate means of following him. We were unable to reach the cornice even by clambering upon each other’s shoulders, and I wore the flesh from my fingers in my vain efforts to scale the rocky wall.
Clever marksmen though they were in the water, none of my friends would venture to hurl a harpoon at the fugitive for fear of killing Sabine. Meanwhile he sped upward toward the dark gallery by the river. I knew that if he reached it I should never see my darling alive again, for I had read his terrible purpose in his eyes.
He was disappearing into the yawning grotto, and I was struggling furiously in the bands of a dozen men who were trying to prevent me from hurling myself over the cliff, when there was a shout from the other side of the lake and the sharp crack of a rifle rang out, followed almost simultaneously by another report.
The dark athlete dropped his precious burden, reeled backward, and his body turned over and over as it fell on to the rocks below. On the other side of the lake, their smoking rifles in their hands, stood Jean Louis Devreuse and Lachal, after myself the best shot of the expedition. With them was my aquatic brother.
• • • • •
We returned to the lake inhabited by our friends, the light Men of the Waters, and enjoyed their cordial hospitality for more than a month. We did not see anything further of the dark Men of the Waters or the Men of the Valleys. Devreuse told me all about the role played by our rescuer in the events I have narrated. Sabine and I could not forget the tragic death of our gentle little friend, and always shall grieve for him.
The expedition, commanded by Jean Louis Devreuse, returned to Paris early in April last with documents from which an important and valuable work will be compiled. In May Sabine and I were married and we are superlatively happy; but in the soft, dreamy twilight our thoughts often wander with a vague regret to the wonderful land where we passed through so many stupendous adventures.
Source: The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, Volume 148 (1907.)

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