Laura (12 page)

There a prodigious surprise awaited us, or rather a bitter disappointment. For a long time, it had seemed to us that we were walking on the puffed-up volcanic crust, with the hollow sound of emptiness underneath. We saw then that this crust, suddenly interrupted, was an
enormous
distance from the peak and the subsoil, that we were walking on an increasingly thin vault, and that it was impossible to go forward without it breaking beneath our
feet like an earthenware plate. In his impatience, Nasias broke it five or six times and almost fell in. I managed to calm him down and talk to him. It was quite pointless to reach the cone, for it did not serve as an entrance to any cave, and it did not seem ever to have served as the mouth to a volcano.

On examining it at closer quarters, which we had not been able to do before, we saw that this formidable peak, crowned by a glacier with keen needles, was none other than a rectangular prism of pale green, dazzlingly bright olivine, but homogeneous and of one block from the base to the summit.

We ate some of the rope, and I made my uncle promise to take a few hours’ rest. As soon as the night had cooled our lake of opaline glass a little, we would cross it again, we would go and fetch our root-rope, we would come back before the heat, if possible, and we would decide whether to descend to the bottom of the invisible abyss beneath our feet. This reasonable proposition did not suit the fervent Nasias at all.

If I am to perish here, he replied, I want to see what lies between us and that accursed peak.

And leaping onto the fragile glass, he began to shatter it with furious kicks, picking up the largest fragments he could lift and throwing them with all his strength so as to break up a larger surface area.

Seeing that we were lost, I now thought only of
hastening
the moment of our destruction. I joined forces with my uncle in his wild enterprise and, shattering the last, undulating sections of the glass lake, I managed to detach a considerable mass, which tumbled down into the abyss
with the sound of windows breaking and at last enabled us to see the bottom.

What a strange and grandiose sight greeted our eyes! Beneath the vitreous layer stretched an ocean of colossal stalagmites: violet, pink, blue, green, white and
transparent
as amethyst, as ruby, sapphire, beryl and diamond. The great polar cavern my uncle had dreamed of was in fact a geode, lined with glittering crystals, and this geode extended for an immeasurable distance beneath the earth’s crust!

This is nothing! he said with perfect coolness. We are seeing only a small corner of the treasure, one edge of the earth’s colossal inner world. I aim to descend into it and possess all that it hides from men’s obtuse minds, all that it conceals from their vain and timid greed!

What will you do with it? I said with the same coolness, for we had arrived at that paroxysm of intellectual
exaltation
, which in him produced the triumphal calm of sated ambition, and in me the most complete philosophical
disinterest
. I do not know if the treasures we are glimpsing have a real value among men; but I assume that these are indeed mines of crystals the size of Egyptian obelisks, as you predicted: what use will they be to us in this deserted land, which we shall certainly never be able to leave?

We came here, therefore we shall be able to go back, said Nasias with a laugh; what is worrying you? Does the island lack wood to make new canoes?

But neither you nor I know how to make a canoe, and still less how to use one. So do you know where we shall find our Eskimos? Tell me, what have you done with those poor fellows?

The same as I did with the crew of the
Tantalus
and the same as I am going to do with you! cried Nasias, suddenly seized with convulsive laughter.

And, lapsing into utter madness, he leapt towards the edge of the great cavern, let out a great shout, and
disappeared
into the abyss, taking with him thin, sonorous shards from the lake of glass.

For a few seconds I heard crackling sounds. Then the noise made by Nasias and the crystals as they fell faded to nothing. I called to him, I could not believe what my own senses were telling me. My voice was lost in the desert’s horrible magnificence. I was alone in the world!

I stood there, petrified. It seemed to me that my feet were rooted to the spot, that my limbs were stiffening, and that I was turning into crystal myself.

What are you doing here? Laura asked me, laying her hand on my brow. Are you sleepwalking? How could you believe that man Nasias’s lies? He has never been my father. He is a madman, fulfilling his destiny. God grant that he is gone forever, for his malign influence paralysed mine, and since you have been with him, I have rarely been able to make you see and understand me. Come, let us go, and have no more fears about food or shelter; with me, you shall no longer know those vulgar impediments to life and the mind: do I not have a dowry? Are you curious to enter this little geode we call the Earth? It is quite pointless, it is such a small thing! But if it amuses you, I shall happily lead you there, since it is an artist’s curiosity, a poet’s
fantasy
, and not base cupidity that drives you. I know the way to these subterranean splendours, and there is no need to break one’s neck in order to see them at close hand.

No, Laura, I cried, it was not a poet’s fantasy or an
artist
’s
curiosity that brought me here. It was your voice that called me, your gaze which led me, it was the love that I have for you …

I know, she said, you wanted to win my hand by
obeying
that man Nasias who is nothing but a miserable impostor and the worst kind of sorcerer, while my true father will certainly consent to grant it to you when he knows that I love you. You have travelled many roads and braved many dangers, my poor Alexis, to seek the
happiness
that awaited you at home. Do you wish us to return there immediately?

Yes, immediately, I cried.

Without seeing the inside of the geode? Without traversing the world of colossal gems, lit by the eternal radiance of its electrical light? Without climbing to the top of that obsidian or hornblende cone, taller than the Himalayas? Without verifying for yourself that the weather is tropical at the North Pole, and that the heart of the globe is agreeably cool? And yet it would be most curious to find out all these things, and most glorious to be able to state them before our Uncle Tungstenius and all the learned men of Europe!

Although it seemed that Laura was making fun of me, I did not want her words proved false.

I believe in the existence of all these marvels, I replied; but, though I am on the very point of seeing them for myself, I shall renounce doing so, if you so wish, and if by that sacrifice I can obtain your father’s consent to my happiness one hour sooner.

That is good, said Laura, holding out her two charming
hands to me. I can see that in the midst of your madness, you love me more than anything in the world, and that I must forgive you everything. Come.

She approached the gulf which had swallowed up Nasias, and telling me to “take the ramp”, she began to walk down into it as if a staircase had formed beneath her feet. I followed her as though down a ramp, which was no doubt imaginary, but which saved me from vertigo, and in this way we entered the Earth’s interior.

At the end of about an hour, Laura, who had
forbidden
me to speak to her, made me sit down on the last step.

Get your breath back, she said, you are tired, and you still have the garden to cross.

What garden was she talking about? I could not
imagine
it; my eyes, dazzled by the abyss’s radiance, could not make out anything. In a few seconds, this over-stimulation cleared, and I saw that we were in fact in a fantastical
garden
where—through crystallisation, metamorphism and vitrification—minerals had attained the most strange and wondrous forms, either by following their splendid whims or by obeying their formative laws unrestrainedly. Here, volcanic action had produced vitreous trees which seemed covered with flowers and fruits made from gemstones, and whose shapes vaguely recalled those of our earthly
vegetation
. Elsewhere, the gems, crystallised in enormous masses, simulated the appearance of real rocks whose plateaux and summits were adorned with palaces, temples, pavilions, altars, monuments of every kind and of all sizes. From time to time a diamond several metres square, polished by friction with other substances which had disappeared or been transformed, shone out, embedded in the ground like
a pool of water turned crimson by the sun. All of this was surprising, grandiose, but inert and mute, and my curiosity was sated in a few moments.

Dear Laura, I told my companion, you promised to take me home, and yet you are showing me a sight which I gave up without regret.

If I had deprived you of it, replied Laura, would you not have reproached me some day? Come, look for the last time upon this world of crystal you wished to conquer, and tell me if it seems worthy of all that you have done to possess it.

This world is beautiful to see, I replied, and it
confirms
my idea that all is celebration, magic and riches in nature, both beneath a man’s feet and above his head. I shall never say, like Walter, that shape and colour mean nothing, and that ‘beautiful’ is a pointless word; but I was brought up in the fields, Laura: I feel that air and sunshine are the delights of life, and that one’s brain
atrophies
in an enclosed space, no matter how magnificent or colossal that space may be. So I would give all these marvels around us for one ray of morning sunshine and the song of a warbler, or just a grasshopper, in our garden at Fischausen.

Let it be as you wish! said Laura; but listen, my dear Alexis: as I leave the crystal world with you, I sense that I am leaving my glamour there. You have always seen me as tall, beautiful, eloquent, almost magical. In
reality
, you will find me as I am, small, simple, ignorant, a little middle-class, and singing the
Ballad from Saul
out of key. Outside the crystal, you feel only friendship for me, because you know I am a good nurse, patient with your
hallucinations and truly devoted. Will that be sufficient to make you happy, and am I to break off my engagement to Walter who, although he does not love me, accepts me as I am, and asks of a wife only that she should be an
inferior
being in need of protection? Think of the difficulties, the responsibilities of the role your unequal enthusiasm has assigned to me. Viewed through your magic prism, I am too much; through your disillusioned, tired eyes, I am not enough. You turn me into an angel of light, a pure spirit, and yet I am only a good little woman without pretensions. Think: I would be very unhappy if you
forever
consigned me either to the firmament or the kitchen. Is there not some boundary possible between these two extremes?

Laura, I replied, you speak with your heart and your reason, and I sense that you embody that boundary between the heaven of ideal love and the respect for
reality
that constitutes everyday virtue and devotion. I was mad to cleave asunder your dear, generous individuality, your honest self, loving and pure. Forgive me. I was ill, I wrote down my dreams, and I took them seriously. At heart, I was perhaps not absolutely duped by them, for, in the midst of my most fantastical excursions, I always felt that you were near me. Give up Walter, I wish you to, for I know that although he esteems you he does not appreciate your true worth. You deserve to be adored, and I mean to become accustomed to seeing you at once through the enchanted prism and in real life, without one detracting from the other.

So saying, I stood up and saw the vision of the
underground
world disappear. Before me, through the open
door of the house in which I live at Fischausen, I saw the beautiful botanical garden, flooded with June sunshine; a warbler was singing in a
syringa grandiflora
, and my cousin’s favourite bullfinch came and perched on my shoulder.

Before walking out of the door, I gave an astonished, fearful glance behind me. I saw the abyss filling with
darkness
. The electrical radiance was fading away. The colossal gemstones now gave out only a few reddish sparks in the gloom, and I saw something crawling: something formless and bloody which seemed to me to be the mutilated body of Nasias, trying to reassemble itself and stretch out one livid, dismembered hand to hold me back.

My brow was bathed in a cold sweat. Laura mopped it with her perfumed handkerchief, giving me back life and the strength to follow her.

As we crossed the garden, I felt as sprightly and
well-rested
as if I had not covered eight or ten thousand leagues since the previous day. Laura ushered me into Uncle Tungstenius’s drawing room, where I was received with open arms by a good, fat, red-faced man with a
pot-belly
and the most benevolent of faces.

Embrace my father then, Laura told me, and ask him for my hand.

Your father! I cried, beside myself. Then this is the real Nasias?

Nasias? said the fat man with a laugh. Is that a
compliment
or a metaphor? I am not erudite; I warn you of that, my dear nephew; but I am a decent man. I have made my little trade honestly in clocks, jewellery and the goldsmith’s art. In this way I have earned enough to set up my
daughter
and give her the husband she loves. I am going to settle
in the country house where you were brought up together, and where you will come and see me as often as you can, and every year, I hope, during the holidays. Love me a little, love my daughter a great deal, and call me Papa Christophe, since that is my only and true name. It is less fine-sounding than Nasias perhaps; but I shall not hide from you the fact that I like it better, I don’t know why.

I put my arms around this excellent man who accepted me as a son-in-law, young, poor, still without a profession, and, in the first flush of my gratitude, I thought of offering him a diamond as big as my two fists which, before
leaving
the polar abyss, I had mechanically detached from the rock and put in my pocket. This diamond, of insignificant size compared to the size of the deposit, represented in the world where we live a peerless specimen and an
unrivalled
fortune. I was so moved, that I could not speak; but I drew this treasure from my pocket and placed it in the hands of my uncle, clasping them with my own, to make him understand that I intended to share everything with him without counting.