The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (12 page)

Who is to say that his insanity was not, in truth, the clearest-eyed sanity conceivable? Certainly, as he clambered up the face of the billboard, Dufrénoy had never experienced such a sense of pure, exhilarating omniscience. The higher he rose, the more apparent the patterns of existence became to him. The city was lines, London a vast page upon which forty million individuals wrote their life-poems, in their hearts, inside their heads, almost without being conscious of it. Bombarded from all sides by noise and demands on their time and their pockets, by advertisements perpetually clamouring for their attention and the relentless pressure to spend and buy and possess, by the panoply of capitalism arrayed in all its chrome and gilt splendour, by messages of want that undermined their self-confidence and made them feel incomplete,
still
they resisted, fighting a rearguard action in the depths of their souls as they struggled to cling on to that last vital, intact part of themselves that the moneymen and the corrupt bureaucrats and the avaricious plutocrats so badly wished to reach and conquer. You would not know it unless you looked deep and hard into their eyes. Even in the dullest of gazes, the deadest of expressions, you might find it. The Great Heat had tempered people, tested their mettle and forced them to rediscover an inner flame which had almost, almost gone out. In Dufrénoy the flame had continued to burn more or less constantly, although it had many a time guttered and nearly failed, for example back at Père-Lachaise cemetery, beside de Musset’s tomb. But it flared nonetheless, unquenchably, and now he understood that he was not alone; and he was not a poet. He was poetry. Everyone was poetry.

On he climbed, using the cigarette-smoking bas-relief figures on the billboard as his rockface, ascending by means of handholds and toeholds found in their pitted steel surfaces, the ridges of their fingers, the contours of their faces and hair, till at last he gained the summit and the whole of London seemed spread out at his feet, man’s fantastic creation, an epic of brick and metal and glass.

He wanted to shout his ecstasy across the rooftops but he was out of breath and dizzy with vertigo. He hung on to the billboard’s top edge while the shadows of whirring airships passed over him and the wind whipped at his clothes. He could let go, he could fall, he could die, and perhaps he would, but not now, not yet, not till this moment of triumphal revelation had passed, and maybe it would not, maybe it would never pass, maybe it would last forever.

For London was different now, new life crackled in its electric nervous system, new blood pulsed along its roadway arteries. One could tell. One could smell it. The citizens who had deserted the city were back in their droves, and more besides, foreigners who had ridden in with the returning wave, scenting a wiped-clean slate and fresh opportunities. Of the forty million and more who lived in the capital these days, a quarter at least were immigrants from other lands who brought with them their own mores and traditions. Now there were Turkish markets on the streets of Islington, Mongolian restaurants in the borough of Richmond, Latvian vendors hawking their wares on the paths of Hyde Park, Nigerians and Congolese playing music down at the Wapping docks and the Isle of Dogs, Polynesians setting up cafés on every bridge from Tower Bridge to Teddington, Argentines touting their services as rugby coaches to the children of the well-heeled, artists from Montmartre erecting their easels on the South Bank (coming to be known as the
Rive Sud),
and London was welcoming and subsuming them all, happy again to be a place where people wanted to be, glad to have a plenum of inhabitants once more.

Possibly no one saw this — truly saw this — but Dufrénoy. He alone of all Londoners, a one-time immigrant himself but now more of a native than most, understood his home city’s renaissance. This New Jerusalem! And the old man atop the billboard need never write another line of verse again, because all around him/

[
Editor’s Note:
There is no more. This last passage occupies the anteprepenultimate, prepenultimate and penultimate pages of the ruined manuscript. The final page is unreadably singed, with just a single word legible at the foot:
“Fin”.
It can only be speculated whether Dufrénoy throws himself from the billboard after all or else remains there in perpetual suspense at the novel’s close. The reader may choose Dufrénoy’s fate according to his/her own inclination.

Londres au XXI
^e
siècle
is barely even a footnote in the Verne canon. There are Vernian scholars who reckon it is not actually the master’s work at all but rather his son’s, for in Verne’s declining years Michel assisted with the writing of the novels and may well have authored some of them wholly by himself. In the light of this, the section which details the father’s being a disappointment to the son can be seen, perhaps, as a riposte by Michel to Verne’s anguish over the waywardness and lack of achievement of Michel’s early years — Verne junior getting his own back in literary form. In which case, one might go so far as to venture that it was out of guilt that Michel set fire to the manuscript, if indeed he was the culprit — guilt brought on by the death of his father in 1905, not long after
Londres . . .
was completed. Could Michel have come to regret creating that closing image of an elderly writer who has all but abandoned his craft, hanging on to a vast billboard by his fingertips while a post-apocalyptic vision of a “New Jerusalem” feverishly fills his head?

Were there more of
Londres . . .
in existence, one might be able to form a cogent opinion. As it is, an unmistakable whiff of mortality and remorse permeates the few crisp-edged clusters of pages we have. As with every burned work of art, it is as if the creator has been immolated along with the creation. This much, in the end, is all we can assume — that Michel Verne, grief-stricken, consigned the manuscript to the pyre and then had a last-minute change of heart and rescued what he could before the artefact was fully destroyed. He thereafter kept hold of the remnants as though they were relics of his own father. Even the loved ones whom we haven’t loved as much as we should, should be remembered as if we loved them completely.]

GIANT DWARFS by Ian Watson

After his failure to sell
Paris au XX
^e
Siècle,
Verne returned first to the war novel, with
Les Forceurs de blocus
(not published until 1865), better known as
The Blockade Runners,
and to the adventure novel with
Les Anglais au Pole Nord
(1864), the first of the Captain Hatteras stories featuring a highly atmospheric journey into the far North. While writing this novel Verne became intrigued by the theory propounded many years earlier by Captain John Symmes of Ohio that the Earth was hollow and that there were entrances into the Earth at both the North and South Poles. The idea had led to a satirical science-fiction novel,
Syrnzonia
(1820) by the pseudonymous Adam Seaborn and, more importantly, had inspired Edgar Allan Poe, who used the idea in
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
(1838), which Verne had recently read and would later continue with the sequel
Le Sphinx des glaces
(1897). Verne approached the concept of a hollow Earth with his usual scientific thoroughness and produced one of his best novels,
Voyage au centre de la terre
(1864). Here Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew Axel follow clues left by the explorer Arne Saknussemm and descend into the bowels of the Earth via a volcano in Iceland. Far below the surface they discover a vast subterranean sea and witness sea monsters and a giant humanoid. For the first time Verne had allowed himself to go beyond the facts into the fanciful and produced his first great novel of science fiction. It launched what became known as Verne’s “Voyages Extraordinaires”.

The next two stories reconsider the novel from two entirely different perspectives.

Twenty-five leagues beneath the surface of the Earth, I certainly never expected to be rescued from troglodytes by
Germans.
My amazement would grow the greater as I became acquainted with those same Germans! Ah but whatever my reservations about Monsieur Verne’s character I should take a leaf out of his book and begin at the beginning of the tale . . .

In the Dordogne, some thirty-five leagues inland from Bordeaux, Pierre and I were cantering across grassy upland near the village of Montignac-sur-Vézères when all of a sudden his chestnut stallion Pompey collapsed and Pierre was thrown right over the horse’s head. Immediately I reined Diana in, jumped down and ran to Pierre, crying, “My love!” Pompey was squealing horribly. I could see that his front legs had disappeared into the ground, into a crevice that had opened up. Pierre was already scrambling to his feet.

“Be damned!”

He seemed winded, for he paused to collect himself — by stroking his moustaches. What an elegant figure of a man. I loved his wavy brown hair and piercing blue eyes. Captain Pierre Marc-Antoine Dumont d’Urville, soldier, —explorer, adventurer.

“Are you all right, my love? Your ribs, your everything?” “My pride is injured, that’s all, Hortense. Mark you, this was not Pompey’s fault.”

We’d had some spirited discussion about the respective merits, or demerits, of Pompey and Diana. Poor Pompey, he was suffering such pain.

So far as Pierre could tell by peering then reaching into the hole, both of the horse’s trapped legs seemed badly broken. Pierre stood up decisively.

“He’s ruined — and in misery.” He unholstered his bulky revolver.

Monsieur Verne was later to study that revolver with some interest, and it plays a subsequent role in this narrative too (all be it only as a cosh), so maybe I should say something concerning it. Our genius of an author loves to describe in detail technical and scientific matters. I should match my humble story-telling skills to his redoubtable ones. Seriously, I mean it. I’m always willing to learn.

A thousand of the unusual revolvers had recently been manufactured in Paris, where Pierre had managed to procure one. Although I wasn’t previously much interested in guns, Pierre had been keen to show off his acquisition to me, like a child with a new toy — and I have a very retentive memory for facts. The invention of a French-born doctor named le Mat — in support of the Confederate army in the civil war currently raging in America — the revolver in question sported two barrels. The larger central barrel would fire grapeshot. A slimmer barrel would fire bullets coming from a nine-chamber cylinder revolving around the central barrel. The nose of the hammer was movable to accommodate this double action. Should you happen to be faced by a mob, Pierre had explained, the spread of shot would cause multiple damage and cool ardour. Such a revolver would be valuable in penal colonies, not to mention should you suddenly come upon several partridges feeding together and wish to bag them all.

“Look away, Hortense!”

“Certainly not,” I replied. “Do you think I will faint or have hysterics, like your wife?”

Pierre shrugged and fired a single bullet. Some blood and tissue sprayed from Pompey’s head, which promptly slumped.

Just as well I did not look away, for it was as if the detonation was a trigger. Or the reason may have been that Pompey’s now dead weight shifted. The ground gave way more so. Pierre and I both needed to jump back. Pompey’s entire body slid into the widening hole, disappearing from sight. Moments later, a muted thump sounded from underground.

What I now know to be called a
doline
had opened up, a “swallow-hole” through which rainfall would in future drain into a subterranean cave. That is the geological explanation for what had happened: we had been riding the horses on top of a system of caves and part of a cave roof had given way.

Since no further collapse seemed imminent, Pierre lay down and inched forward cautiously to inspect. Of course I joined him in this.

“Go back, Hortense. Our combined weights may —”

“I wish to see.”

In fact there was little to be seen. The sun shone brightly from a sky containing only a few white woolly clouds, but below was darkness. Soon we both withdrew, stood up, and brushed our clothes. By now the dark brown mare had ambled over, and was staring at the hole from a safe distance. Diana pawed with one hoof. Her nostrils flared. What might she be thinking or feeling? At its best the Tarbenian breed is very intelligent as well as brave, with graceful action, elegance and endurance — quite like myself, perhaps? The trouble is that the breed requires constant infusions of English thoroughbred blood alternating with Arab blood, or else it tends to degenerate, retaining of its ancestral magnificence little but a thick heavy Andalusian neck. My grandfather bred horses, so I know more than a little about the matter, not to mention being acquainted with the saddle — a
nd
with bare-back riding — from an early age when most girls would play with dolls.