Urien's Voyage (2 page)

Farther away were the town's ice-houses which were supplied by the Norwegian vessels returning with their rimy cargos. Some cellars were very deep, but all had been replenished, and this ship was unloading its burden on the deck. A mountain was rising, green, diaphanous and cool; thirsty sailors were coming there to enjoy its shadow and to put their burning hands and lips against its moist exterior. Saffron-skinned men in blood-stained cotton breeches were still carrying loads of snow on sagging boards and chunks of pure ice that they had recovered from the sea; snow and pieces of ice were being cast overboard; snow, ice and foam were borne along with the purple on the blue water which turned almost violet as waves dissolved the purple.

And now came the evening; the crimson sun was hidden by the cordage; crepuscular sounds arose; and in the becalmed port rocked the fabulous vessel that was to bear us away! Then, since this day had given us a foretaste of all that the future held in store, we ceased to look back and turned our eyes to the future; and the extraordinary ship, leaving behind it the port, the fair and the sunken sun, plunged into the night toward dawn.

*
The similarity between the opening paragraph of the allegory and the first scene in
Faust
is not surprising in view of the influence which Goethe exerted on Gide during the period of the composition of
Urien's Voyage.
[All notes are by the translator unless otherwise specified.]

II

Night at sea. We have been discussing our destinies. The night is clear; the
Orion
is sailing between two islands. The moon lights the cliffs. Blue sharks have come into view: the night watch called attention to them and to some dolphins; they were playing in the moonlight; near the sharks, they submerged and did not reappear; blue rocks glow dimly beneath the waves. Luminous jellyfish rise slowly from the deep and blossom in the night air, tossed by the waves like sea-flowers. The stars are dreaming. Leaning over the bow of the ship, near the cordage and above the waves, we turn our backs to the crew, to our companions, to all that is being done, and we look at the waves, the constellations and the islands. “We are watching the isles passing by,” say the crewmen, who are somewhat contemptuous of us, as they forget while looking at each other that they are moving while these things are motionless and unaffected by our passing.

Changing aspects of massive cliffs, elongated promontories that vanish from sight! Precipitous banks! Metamorphoses of mountains! We know now that you remain; we look upon you as transient because we are moving; your aspect changes in spite of your constancy as we sail by. The night watchman calls attention to ships. We, leaning over the waves from dusk to dawn, learn to distinguish transient things from the eternal isles.
*

That night we talked about the past; none of us knew how he had managed to come to the ship, but no one regretted the bitter night of meditation.

“From what obscure sleep have I awakened?” asked Alain. “From what tomb? I never stopped thinking and I am still sick. O becalmed, oriental night, will you at last bring relief to a tired brain obsessed by thoughts of God?”

“I was tormented by a desire for conquest,” said Paride; “I paced my room, valiant but sad, and more exhausted by dreams of heroic acts than by their performance. What conquests lie before us now? what noble deeds? where are we going? Tell me! Do you know where this ship is taking us?” Not one of us knew, but all of us trembled on sensing our courage.

“What are we doing here,” he continued, “and what just what is this life if the other one was our sleep?”

“Perhaps we are living our dream as we sleep in our rooms,” said Nathanael.

“Or perhaps we're searching for regions to satisfy our souls,” said Mélian.

But Tradelineau shouted: “Without a doubt, the fallacy of using vain logic and believing that you can do a thing well only if its causes are known, still enslaves you and motivates this pointless discussion. Why try to imbue our presence on the
Orion
with highly mysterious motives? We left our books because they bored us, because an unconscious remembrance of the sea and the real sky destroyed our faith in study; something else existed; and when warm, balsamic breezes came to stir the curtains on our windows, we descended willy-nilly toward the plain and began our journey. We were tired of thought, we wanted action; did you see how our souls turned joyous when, taking from the rowers their heavy oars, we felt the liquid blue resist! Oh, the
Orion
will surely carry us to distant shores. The spasms of courage that we experience will of themselves elicit feats of valor; let's hope for the best as we wait for our glorious destinies to unfold.”
*

That night we also spoke of the tumultuous town where we had embarked, of its fairs and of the crowd.

“Why keep thinking about those people whose eyes saw only things and who were not even astounded?” said Angleval. “I liked the way Bohordin was sobbing during the circus acts; everything should be done as a rite; those people were watching the performances unceremoniously.”

“What do you think of all this, Urien?” Angaire asked me.

And I replied: “One must always represent.”
*

Then, since the discussion was becoming unbearable for all of us and since thinking exhausted us, we promised not to speak further of the past or argue about things. Morning was approaching; we parted to sleep.

We had lost sight of the coasts and had been sailing on the open sea for three days when we came upon these beautiful floating islands that a mysterious current had been moving toward us for a long time. And our parallel flight in the midst of the incessantly agitated waves at first made us think the
Orion
motionless, stranded perhaps on the sand, but our illusion vanished when we examined the islands more closely. A boat brought us down to one of them; they were all almost identical and equally spaced. Their regular shape made us think that they were madrepores; they would undoubtedly have been quite flat without the luxuriant and magnificent vegetation that covered them; toward the front the slightly uneven coral reefs, wherever their roots were exposed, were as gray as volcanic stones; toward the rear they floatedlike tresses, their roots reddened by the sea. Trees of unknown species, exotic trees bent under the weight of heavy bindweeds, and delicate orchids blended their flowers with the leafage. These were sea-gardens; flights of insects followed them; pollen trailed along on the waves.

The impenetrable underbrush forced us to walk along the edge of the shore, and often, when branches overhung the water, to crawl between them, clutching roots and vines.

We wanted to remain to the rear for a while and watch the huge insects fly, but the stifling perfumes that arose from the whole island and were carried to us on the wind, the perfumes that were already making our heads swim, would have killed us, I believe. They were so dense that we could see the aromatic dust spiraling upward.

We made our way to the other shore; startled pink flamingos and ibises took flight. We sat down on a coral rock; wind from the sea wafted the perfumes away from us.

The island must not have been very thick, for beneath it, in the deep sea, under the shadow that it cast, we could again see the light. And we thought that each such island must have become detached, like a ripened fruit from its stem; and when they were no longer held fast to the natal rock by anything, then, like insincere actions, they were at the mercy of the waves, borne along by every current.

On the fifth day, to our regret, we lost sight of them.

As soon as the sun had set, we bathed in water that was pink and green; and, since it reflected the sky, it soon became reddish brown. The warm, pacific billows were soft but penetrating. The oarsmen were awaiting us. We climbed back into the boat just as the moon was rising; there was a slight breeze; tacking our sails, we forced the boat into the wind. And sometimes we saw clouds, mauve-colored still, and sometimes the moon. In the silver wake that it left on the calm sea, the oars dug eddies of light; before us, in the wake of the moon, the
Orion
moved along, mysterious. The moon appeared first behind a mast, then alone—then by morning it had again fallen into the sea.
*

*
“My kingdom is not of this world,” is the Gospel statement that most impressed Gide. He could never manage to believe completely in the real world which always seemed “somewhat fantastic” to him, nor in eternal life. He did believe “in another facet of this life, which escapes our senses.”

*
Two previous works (
Narcissus
and
André Walter
) reveal Gide's views on art and the relation of art to the two other poles which alternately attracted and repelled him—sexuality and religion. In the present work he effectively combines the three elements deemed essential for any work of art—sensuality, sexuality and pride.

*
According to the Symbolists a man is born to make manifest an Idea. Gide wanted to represent, to manifest to others his truth which was his inmost self. His task was complicated by his inability to conciliate morality with sincerity in his own life.

*
Gide's early works, written under the influence of the Symbolist movement, reflect not only his acute sensitivity but his belief in the supremacy of art over other means of cognition or expression. The Symbolists stressed the fusion of sensations and the use of concrete phenomena to suggest Ideas. From his earliest writings we learn that Gide in his solitary walks felt that “The landscape was but a projected emanation of myself … I created it step by step as I became aware of its harmonies … and I marveled as I walked through my dream-garden.”

III

On the seventh day we came upon a sandy shore interrupted by arid dunes. Gabiler, Agloval, Paride and Morgain went ashore; they kept us waiting for twenty hours; they had taken leave of us around midday, and we saw them returning the following morning, running and gesticulating. When they were quite near, Paride shouted to us:

“Let's go,” he said. “There are sirens on the island and we have seen them.”

After they had caught their breath, while the
Orion
was sailing at full speed, Morgain related:

“We had walked all day among the blue thistles on the shifting dunes. We had walked all day without seeing anything but the hills that loomed before us, their crests wavering in the wind; our feet were burned by the sand, and the flashing dry air parched our lips and made our eyes smart. (Who can describe your pomp and plenitude, suns of the East, suns of the South on these sands!) When evening came, having reached the foot of a high hill, we felt so tired.… We slept in the sand, without even waiting until the sun had set.

“We did not sleep long; the coldness of the dew awakened us long before the dawn. During the nightthe sands had shifted, and we no longer recognized the hill. We set out once again, climbing always, without knowing wherewe were going, whence we had come, where we had left the ship; but soon behind us appeared the light of dawn. We had reached a very wide plateau—at least it seemed to us very wide at first—and did not realize that we had traversed it until suddenly the plateau ceased and there opened before us a mist-filled valley. We waited. Soon the light of dawn appeared behind us, and as the sun rose the mists disappeared.

“Then it appeared, this prodigious city, not far from us in an immense plain. It was a gold-colored Moslem city with fantastic minarets; flights of stairs led to hanging gardens and, on terraces, mauve palms swayed. Above the town hovered fog banks penetrated by pointed minarets. The minarets were so high that the clouds remained imprisoned by them, looking for all the world like oriflammes, like oriflammes fully distended, without a wrinkle, in spite of the fluid air untroubled by the slightest breeze.

“Such, then, is our uncertainty: before high cathedrals we used to dream of mosque towers; before the minarets today, we dreamed of church steeples, and in the morning air we waited for the angelus. But in the still too cool dawn there was no sound save the unknown tremors absorbed by the empty air; suddenly with the appearance of the sun, a chant went up from a minaret, from the minaret nearest the rising sun—a strange, pathetic chant that almost made us weep. The voices quavered on a piercing note. A new chant resounded, then another; and one by one the mosques awoke melodiously as each was struck by a ray of sunlight. Soon all resounded. It was an uncanny plea brought to an end by a burst of laughter only to begin anew. Like larks, the muezzins answered each other in the dawn. They proffered questions followedby other questions, and the tallest, on the tallest minaret, lost in a cloud, said nothing.

“The music was so wonderful that we were spellbound, enraptured; then, as the voices became lower and softer, we wanted to draw nearer, unconsciously attracted by the beauty of the town and by the moving shadows of the palms. The voices became lower and lower; but as they fell, the city, staggering with the strophe, moved away from us and disintegrated; the slender minarets and palms disappeared; the stairway crumbled; through the discolored terraces of the gardens we saw the sea and the beach. It was a fleeting mirage that fluctuated with the chant. The chant ended, and this marked the end of the spell and of the fanciful city. Our frightfully constricted hearts had seemed on the verge of death.

“A vanishing vision tottering on a trill, a gasping for breath—and then we saw them lying on the seaweeds; they were sleeping. Then we fled, shaking so violently that we could hardly run. Happily we were quite near the ship; we caught sight of it behind a promontory: it alone separated you from the sirens. How dangerous it would have been for you if they had been able to hear you—and we dared not shout until we were quite near you for fear that the noise would awaken them. I don't know how we managed last night to walk so far and advance so little; I believe now that we marked time while these moving hills changed positions under our feet and that this plateau, this valley were but the effect of the spell cast by the sirens.”