THE BLACK WARRIORS, standing en masse, had just picked up their weapons.
Reassembled under Rao’s direction, the original cortege, augmented by our group and most of the Incomparables, began filing quickly southward.
The southern part of Ejur was crossed at a brisk pace, and soon the plain appeared, bounded at left by the great trees of the Behuliphruen, a magnificent garden full of phenomenal unknown species.
Abruptly, Rao halted the immense column, having reached a great stretch of land whose very dimensions made it propitious for certain long-distance phonetic experiments.
Stéphane Alcott, husky and barrel-chested, stepped from the ranks with his six sons, young men aged fifteen to twenty-five, whose fabulous leanness showed starkly through their simple, skin-tight red leotards.
Their father, dressed like them, took a stance at a given point, his back to the setting sun; then, carefully making a half-quarter turn to the right, he stopped sharply, adopting the rigidity of a statue.
Starting at the exact point occupied by Stéphane, the eldest of the six brothers walked obliquely toward the Behuliphruen, scrupulously following the path forged by his father’s line of sight and counting aloud along with his long, slow strides, making sure to give each a rigorously invariable length. He stopped at number one hundred seventeen and, turning around to face west, followed the paternal example by striking a studied pose. His youngest brother, who had accompanied him, made a similar trek toward the southwest and, after seventy-two mechanically identical steps, froze like a mannequin, his chest toward the sunrise. One by one, the four youngest performed the same movement, each time taking as departure point the conventional goal reached by the last measurer and bringing to the execution of this brief, marvelously regulated walk the mathematical precision normally reserved for geodesic surveys.
When the youngest was in place, the seven performers, placed at uneven distances, turned out to be staggered along a strange crooked line, each of its five whimsical angles formed by their two joined heels.
The seeming incoherence of the figure was intentional, due to the strict number of regular strides, the six respective totals of which varied between a minimum of seventy-two and a maximum of one hundred forty-nine.
Once standing in place, each of the six brothers, violently sucking in his chest and stomach with a painful muscular contraction, formed the boundaries of a wide, deep space, which the addition of his arms, rounded in a circle like supplementary edges, rendered deeper still. The leotards, thanks to a special coating, adhered tightly to every inch of the wearer’s epidermis.
Cupping his hands in a megaphone, their father, in a deep and resonant timbre, shouted his own name toward the oldest.
Immediately, at irregular intervals, the four syllables Sté-phane Al-cott were repeated successively at the six points of the enormous zigzag, without the others’ lips having moved in the slightest.
It was the family patriarch’s actual voice that had just echoed off the thoracic antrum of the six young men, who, owing to their extraordinary thinness, scrupulously maintained by a draconian diet, offered the sound waves a sufficiently rigid and bony surface to deflect its every vibration.
This first attempt did not satisfy the performers, who modified ever so slightly their positions and postures.
The fine-tuning lasted several minutes, during which Stéphane often bellowed his name, monitoring the results. These were increasingly perfected by his sons, who sometimes shifted their feet a mere centimeter in a given direction, sometimes leaned slightly to better facilitate the rapid passage of sound.
The ensemble looked like some imaginary, difficultly tuned instrument whose proper adjustment required meticulous and patient care.
Finally, the last attempt having seemed correct, Stéphane, with a brief word that echoed six times in spite of him, ordered the emaciated sentinels to hold absolutely still.
At that point, the real performance began.
Stéphane, at the top of his voice, pronounced a wide variety of proper names, interjections, and everyday words, infinitely varying their register and intonation. And each time the sound, ricocheting from chest to chest, was reproduced with crystalline purity, hearty and strong at first, then gradually fading down to a final mumble no louder than a murmur.
No echo in forest, cave, or cathedral could have rivaled this artificial combination, which produced a true miracle of acoustics.
Obtained by the Alcott family at the cost of long months of study and trials, the geometric layout of the crooked line owed its artful irregularities to the particular form of each chest, whose anatomical structure offered a resonant power of greater or lesser range.
Several audience members, having approached each vibrating sentry, could verify the absence of trickery. The six mouths remained hermetically shut, the initial utterance alone causing the multiple repetitions.
Wishing to give the experiment the greatest possible breadth, Stéphane rapidly emitted short sentences, slavishly reiterated by the sextuple echo; certain iambic pentameters, recited one after the other, were perceived clearly without overlapping or muddle. Various bursts of laughter, deep for “ho,” sharp for “ha,” and shrill for “hee,” created a sensation by evoking a lighthearted, mocking crowd. Cries of pain or alarm, sobs, pathetic exclamations, resounding coughs, and comic sneezes were registered one by one with the same perfection.
Moving from spoken word to song, Stéphane emitted strong baritone notes, which echoed beautifully at the different bends in the line and were followed by vocal exercises, trills, parts of tunes, and snatches of lively popular refrains.
As a finale, the soloist, taking a deep breath, continuously scaled a perfect chord in both directions, using the full breadth of his voice and giving the illusion of an impeccably attuned choir, thanks to the ample and lasting polyphony produced by all the echoes blending together.
Suddenly, deprived of the musical source that Stéphane, out of breath, had just cut short by falling silent, the false voices faded one by one, and the six brothers, resuming their natural pose with visible relief, could stretch voluptuously while heaving great sighs.
The parade, rapidly reassembled, headed south once more.
After a short, easy walk in the gathering darkness, the head of the line came to the edge of the Tez, a great, tranquil river whose right bank was soon crowded by the deployment of the column.
A dugout canoe carrying native oarsmen received onboard Talou and Sirdah, who were ferried over to the opposite shore.
Then, silently emerging from a bamboo hut, the black sorcerer Bashkou, an ivory goblet in hand, approached the blind girl, whom he guided by the shoulders toward the ocean.
Soon both entered the riverbed, progressively sinking as they moved away from shore.
After a few steps, immersed to his chest, Bashkou stopped, holding aloft in his left hand the goblet half full of a whitish liquid, while near him Sirdah disappeared almost completely into the dark, babbling waters.
With two fingers dipped in the milky balm, the sorcerer gently rubbed the girl’s eyes, then patiently waited for the remedy to take effect; when enough time had elapsed he applied a thumb to each eyeball and with firm swipes cleanly detached the two blotches, which fell into the currents and were carried away to sea.
Sirdah emitted a cry of joy, proving the operation’s complete success, which had indeed just given her back her sight.
Her father answered with a delirious shout, followed by an enthusiastic clamor from the entire crowd.
Rushing back to solid ground, the overjoyed child threw herself into the emperor’s arms, while he held her in a long embrace of touching emotion.
Both again took their places in the dugout, which, crossing the river, let them off on the right bank, while Bashkou returned inside his hut.
Sirdah’s skin retained the precious moisture from the sacred waters of the river that had witnessed her cure.
Guided by Rao, the column climbed back up the bank over a stretch of a hundred yards and stopped before a huge device that, set amid four posts, hovered above the water like the arch of a bridge.
Night had deepened little by little and, on the shore, an acetylene beacon affixed to the top of a stake lit up, by means of a powerful and carefully positioned reflector, every detail of the astounding machine toward which everyone’s eyes now turned.
The contraption, made entirely of metal, immediately suggested a weaving loom.
In the middle, parallel to the river currents, stretched a horizontal warp composed of innumerable light blue threads, so remarkably fine that, placed side by side in a single thickness, they occupied a width of only six feet.
Several heddles, vertical strings each fitted with an eyelet, formed successive planes perpendicular to the warp, through which they crossed. Before them hung a batten, a kind of huge metal comb whose imperceptible and innumerable teeth smoothed the warp as if it were hair.
To the right along the edge of the warp, a large panel about three feet square was composed of numerous pigeonholes separated by wafer-thin partitions; each of these compartments housed a small fly-shuttle whose quill, a narrow bobbin attached at front and back, carried a supply of silk thread in a single color. The filaments inside the shuttles, numbering perhaps a thousand, represented every conceivable shade and variation of the seven colors of the prism. The threads, more or less unspooled depending on their position, converged at the first corner to the right of the warp, forming a strange and wonderfully multicolored network.
Underneath, almost at water level, many paddles of all sizes, arranged in a full square like a squadron, filled the entire base of the apparatus, supported on one side by the riverbank and on the other by two pilings sunk into its bed. Each paddle, suspended between two narrow rods, helped power a driving belt wrapped around an unoccupied portion of the thin hub to the left, its two parallel ribbons rising vertically.
Between the hydraulic paddles and the warp stretched a kind of long chest, no doubt containing the mysterious mechanism that drove the whole contraption.
The four posts supported at the top a thick rectangular ceiling from which hung the heddles and the battens.
Paddles, chest, ceiling, panel, shuttles, posts, and the ancillary parts—all, without exception, were made of fine steel of light gray hue.
After placing Sirdah in the front row so she could watch the automatic creation of a certain coat he wished to bestow on her, the inventor Bedu, the hero of the moment, pressed a switch on the chest to activate the precious machine born of his industrious perseverance.
Immediately various paddles plunged halfway into the river, exposing their blades to the powerful currents.
Invisibly moved by the driving belts, the upper portions of which disappeared into the shadows of the chest, the box of shuttles slid horizontally in the axis of the current. Despite their displacement, the countless threads attached to the corner of the warp remained taut, thanks to a system of retrograde tension with which all the shuttles were furnished; left to itself, each spit, or pin supporting the quill, turned in the direction opposite the unwinding, owing to a spring that offered a very slight resistance to the extraction of the silk. Some threads automatically contracted while others stretched; the weave preserved its original purity, becoming neither limp nor tangled.
The shuttle-box was held in place by a thick vertical shaft that, after a sharp bend, horizontally penetrated the chest; at that point, a long slot that couldn’t be seen from the shore evidently permitted the silent horizontal adjustments that had begun only moments before.
Soon the shuttle-box stopped to change height. The vertical portion of the shaft extended slightly, revealing a system of collapsible sections like those of a telescope; a powerful corkscrew spring, triggered by the interaction of an inner rope and pulley, was the sole cause of this subtle ascent, which soon ended.
The movement of the shuttle-box had coincided with a slight shift in the heddles, certain strings of which had lowered while others rose. The work continued out of sight in the heights of the ceiling: only narrow slits were needed to allow passage of the immense fringes pulled earthward by a legion of thin lead weights, which reached nearly down to the chest. Each silken thread of the warp, individually crossing the eyelets of one of the heddle strings, was accordingly raised or lowered by a few centimeters.
Suddenly, quick as a flash, a shuttle launched by a spring in the shuttle-box passed through the open shed of the warp, flying across the entire width of silk threads to smack against a single compartment fixed at a predetermined and calculated spot. Unspooled from its fragile casing, a shoot, or weft thread, now stretched transversally across the warp and formed the beginning of the weave.
The batten, lowered by a movable shaft in one of the slots in the chest, struck against the shoot with its countless teeth, then immediately resumed its upright position.
The heddle strings, adjusting once more, provoked a complete change in the arrangement of the silks, which, moving swiftly back and forth, made a significant shift up or down.
Propelled by a spring in the left-hand compartment, the shuttle sped across the warp in the opposite direction and returned to its pigeonhole; a second shoot, unspooled from its bobbin, received a sharp chop from the batten.
While the heddles pursued this curious back-and-forth motion, the shuttle-box, keeping to a single plane, used its two means of displacement simultaneously to move on a diagonal; aimed at a predetermined spot, a second pigeonhole used a brief pause to expel a shuttle that, flying like a projectile into the collective corner of the silks, lodged itself in a compartment on the opposite side.
A blow from the batten onto the new shoot was followed by an ample movement of the heddles, which prepared the return path for the shuttle as it shot rapidly back to its socket.
The process continued, following an invariable path. Thanks to its marvelous mobility, the shuttle-box positioned shuttle after shuttle opposite the fixed compartments, their two-way voyage coinciding perfectly with the work of the batten and heddles.
Gradually the warp increased on one side, pulled by the slow rotation of the warp beam, a large transversal cylinder to which all the threads were attached. The weaving happened quickly, and soon a rich textile started appearing before our eyes, in the form of a thin, even band with finely gradated tonalities.
Down below, the paddles kept everything moving with their complex and precise operation—some remaining almost constantly immersed while others dipped for only a few moments in the current; the smallest paddles, for their part, merely brushed the waves with their blades for a second before rising again, only to lower in the same fleeting way after a short pause. Their number, the staggering of the various sizes, the disparity or simultaneity of the brief or lengthy dips, provided an infinite number of combinations, allowing for the creation of the boldest motifs. It was like some mute instrument plucking chords or arpeggios, sometimes slight and sometimes phenomenally lush, their rhythm and harmony constantly renewed. The driving belts, owing to their supple elasticity, lent themselves to these constant alternations between expansion and contraction. The entire apparatus, a wonder of design and lubrication, operated in silent perfection, suggesting a flawless mechanical marvel.
Bedu directed our attention to the heddles, activated solely by the paddles, which were themselves powered by an electromagnet that transmitted energy from the chest to the ceiling; the wires were hidden in one of the two rear supports, and this method dispensed with the use of punch cards as on Jacquard looms. There was no limit to the variations that could be obtained by the alternate raising and lowering of certain groups of threads. In combination with the parti-colored army of shuttles, this infinity of successive figures in the spacing of the warp allowed for the creation of fabulous textiles on a par with master paintings.
Manufactured in situ by an anomaly of this extraordinary machine, which was specially designed to perform for an attentive audience, the band of fabric grew rapidly, its details powerfully lit by the beacon. The tableau depicted a vast waterway, at the surface of which men, women, and children, eyes bulging in terror, clung desperately to bits of flotsam in a sea of wreckage; and so ingenious were the machine’s fabulous gears that the result could have with-stood comparison with the most artful watercolor. The fiercely expressive faces displayed admirable flesh tones, from the weathered brown of the old man and milky pallor of the young woman to the fresh pink of the child; the waves, running the gamut of blues, were covered in shimmering reflections, their degree of transparency varying with location.
Moved by a driving belt that rose from an opening in the huge chest, to which it was clinched by two supports, the warp beam pulled the textile that was already wrapping around it. The other end of the warp offered stiff resistance because of a steel rod that, acting as a selvage for the silk threads, was fixed between two parallel barriers attached to the chest by a series of vertical bars. Bolted to the left barrier was the immovable compartment in which each shuttle made a brief halt.
The textile motif gradually took shape, and we saw emerge a mountain toward which groups of humans and animals of all species swam for safety. A host of transparent, diagonal zigzags streaked the entire area and allowed us to grasp the subject, borrowed from the biblical description of the Flood. Calm and majestic at the surface of the waves, Noah’s Ark soon lifted its regular, massive silhouette, embellished with finely wrought figures circulating amid a copious menagerie.
The shuttle-box drew our rapt attention by the marvelous steadiness of its alert, captivating gymnastics. One after another, the most varied hues were launched across the warp in the form of shoots, and all the threads together resembled some infinitely rich palette. Sometimes the shuttle-box made a wide movement so that two very distant shuttles could be used sequentially; at other times, several successive shoots belonging to the same area required only minimal shifts. The tip of the given shuttle always found its passage through the other threads, which, parting from nearby pigeonholes and stretched in a single direction, offered it a clear path with no possible obstacle.
On the textile, the half-submerged mountain was now visible to its peak. Everywhere, against its flanks, the condemned wretches, prostrate on this last refuge that would soon be taken from them, implored the heavens with great gestures of distress. The diluvial rain flowed in cataracts over every part of the image, littered with wreckage and islets where the same scenes of despair and supplication were being played out.
The sky progressively expanded toward the zenith, and huge clouds suddenly emerged, thanks to an amalgam of gray threads subtly assorted from the brightest to the murkiest shades. Thick curls of vapor unfurled majestically in the air, harboring inexhaustible reserves to endlessly replenish the horrific deluge.
At that moment, Bedu halted the apparatus by pressing another switch on the chest. Immediately the paddles fell silent, no longer transmitting life to the various components that now lay stiff and inert.
Turning the warp beam over, Bedu, with a finely honed blade, trimmed all the threads hanging loose from the soon detached cloth; then, with a needle previously threaded with silk, he made short work of gathering the upper portion with its border of streaming clouds. The fabric, wider than it was long, took the form of a simple, loose cloak.
Bedu approached Sirdah and draped the marvelous garment over her shoulders, its length enveloping the delighted and grateful girl to her feet.
The sculptor Fuxier had just approached the beacon, showing us in his open hand several lozenges of a uniform blue, which, as we knew, contained a host of potential images of his own devising. He took one and tossed it into the river, slightly downstream from the now inactive loom.
Soon, on the surface lit by the acetylene glow, swirls clearly took shape, tracing in relief a well determined silhouette, which each of us could recognize as Perseus holding the head of Medusa.
The lozenge alone, in melting, had briefly provoked this premeditated, artistic disturbance.
The apparition lasted for a few seconds, then the water, gradually growing calmer, regained its mirrorlike unity.
Skillfully thrown by Fuxier, a second lozenge sank into the current. The concentric circles engendered by its fall had barely dissipated when a new image emerged in fine, ample swirls. This time, dancers in mantillas, standing on a heavily laden table, performed amid the plates and tankards a rousing step punctuated by their castanets, to the cheers of the revelers. The liquid drawing was so detailed that in places one could make out the shadows of crumbs on the tablecloth.
When this convivial scene vanished, Fuxier continued the experiment by sinking a third lozenge, whose effect was not long in coming. The water, suddenly rippling, evoked—upon a rather large canvas—a certain dreamer who, sitting beside a stream, was jotting in a notebook the fruit of some inspiration; behind him, resting against the boulders of the nascent waterfall, an old man with long beard, like the personification of a river, leaned toward the fellow as if to read over his shoulder.
“The poet Giapalù allowing the old Var to rob him of the admirable verses his own genius had wrought,” explained Fuxier, who soon tossed yet another lozenge into the newly calm waters.
The roiling settled to depict half a huge clock face with unusual markings. The word “NOON,” clearly traced in relief by the water, occupied the place normally reserved for 3 o’clock; then came, on a single quarter-circle near the bottom, every division from 1 to 11 o’clock; at the lowest point, in place of the figure “VI,” one could read “MIDNIGHT” spelled out in the diametrical axis; then, to the left, eleven more divisions ended with a second iteration of the word “NOON” replacing 9 o’clock. Acting as the clock’s single hand, a long scrap of cloth, looking like the flame of a pennant, was attached to the point that would have been the exact center of the complete clock face; supposedly pushed by the wind, the supple banderole stretched rightward, marking 5 P.M. with its thin, streaming point. The clock, sitting at the top of a solidly planted pedestal, decorated an open landscape through which several people strolled, and the entire liquid tableau was astoundingly precise and accurate.
“The wind clock from the Land of Cockaigne,” Fuxier resumed, amplifying his statement with the following commentary:
“In the blissful land in question, the perfectly regular wind took it upon itself to tell the time for the inhabitants. At high noon it blew violently from the west and gradually died down until midnight, a poetic moment when everything was utterly calm. Soon a light breeze from the east gradually rose and kept growing until the following noon, which marked its apogee. An abrupt shift then occurred, and once more the tempest rushed in from the west to resume its evolution of the day before. Remarkably adapted to these unvarying fluctuations, the clock here submitted in effigy for our appreciation fulfilled its functions far better than the ordinary sundial, its solely diurnal task further hampered no doubt by passing clouds.”
The Land of Cockaigne had abandoned the watery surface, and the currents, smooth once again, swallowed a final lozenge immersed by Fuxier.
The surface, wrinkling artfully, sketched out a half-naked man holding a bird on his finger.
“The Prince of Conti and his jay,” said Fuxier, showing us his empty hand.
When the undulations had flattened out one last time, the parade again took the path to Ejur, plunging into the pitch-blackness that the light from the beacon no longer dissipated, Rao having abruptly extinguished it.
We had been walking for several minutes when suddenly, to our right, a bouquet of fireworks lit up the night sky, producing a host of detonations.
A spray of rockets climbed into the air, and soon, reaching the peak of their ascent, the incandescent nuclei exploded with a loud bang to form many luminous portraits of the young Baron Ballesteros, in place of the habitual and banal showers of fire and stars. Each image, bursting from its envelope, emerged independently then floated in the darkness with a gentle sway.
These remarkably executed drawings, sketched in fire, depicted the elegant bon vivant in the most varied poses, each one attributed a specific color.
Here the rich Argentine, in sapphire blue from head to foot, appeared in evening dress, gloves in his hand and a flower in his lapel; there a ruby-colored likeness showed him in his officer’s uniform, ready to launch an attack; elsewhere a single bust of colossal dimensions, in frontal view and traced in lines of gold, appeared alongside a dazzling violet design in which the young noble, in top hat and buttoned frock coat, was captured in profile to mid-calf. Farther on, a diamond-colored rendering evoked the brilliant sportsman in tennis garb, gracefully brandishing, at an angle, his racket. Other irradiant portraits blossomed on all sides, but the pièce de résistance was, without question, a certain large tableau in emerald green, in which the hero of this phantasmagoria, an impeccable horseman mounted on a trotting steed, gallantly greeted a passing female rider.
The cortege had stopped to ponder this attractive spectacle at its leisure.
The portraits, falling slowly and projecting their powerful polychromatic illumination over a vast expanse, hung in the air for some time without sacrificing any of their brilliance. Then they faded out noiselessly, one by one, and gradually the shadows spread once more over the plain.
Just as the last trace of fireworks vaporized in the night, the entrepreneur Luxo came to join us, proud of the superb effect produced by the pyrotechnical masterpiece he had personally engineered.
Suddenly a distant rumbling could be heard, long and dull; apparently the detonations of the fireworks had provoked a storm brewing in the muggy atmosphere. Immediately the same thought occurred in everyone’s mind: “Jizme is about to die!”
At a sign from Talou, the cortege started up again and, swiftly crossing the southern part of Ejur, emerged once more onto Trophy Square.
The storm had already drawn near; bolts of lighting followed each other in quick succession, followed by increasingly loud bursts of thunder.
Rao, who had gone on ahead, soon reappeared with his men, who were straining under the weight of a curious litter that they set down in the middle of the esplanade. By the flashes of lightning, we could examine the strange composition of this object, which looked at once comfortable and terrifying.
A bed frame, raised off the ground by four wooden feet, supported a soft white mattress entirely covered in fine individuated designs, in shape and size not unlike the tailpieces that close the chapters of certain books. The most varied subjects were gathered in this collection of minuscule, independent, isolated images; landscapes, portraits, starstruck couples, groups dancing, ships in distress, and sunsets were treated with a naïve and conscientious art by no means lacking charm or interest. A cushion was slipped under one end of the mattress, raising it to support the sleeper’s head; behind the place nominally reserved for the occiput stood a lightning rod, its shining stem rising high above the long berth. A metal skullcap, connected by a wire to the base of the tall vertical needle, was apparently intended to encircle the forehead of some convict sentenced to perish on the lethal couch; at the other end, two metal shoes, placed side by side, communicated with the earth by means of another wire, the tip of which had just been sunken into the ground by Rao himself.
Having reached its peak with the meteorological rapidity peculiar to equatorial regions, the storm now unfurled with extreme violence; a terrible wind shuttled fat black clouds, from which burst an incessant cataclysm.
Rao had opened the prison to release Jizme, the graceful and beautiful young native, who, since the triple execution earlier on, had remained alone behind the dark bars.
Offering no resistance, Jizme lay down on the white mattress, placing her own head in the iron skullcap and her feet in the stiff shoes.
Prudently, Rao and his aides edged away from the dangerous contraption, which then stood completely isolated.
Jizme grasped with both hands a parchment chart hanging by a thin cord from her neck and stared at it at length, taking advantage of the occasional flash of lightning to exhibit it to everyone with a defiantly joyous expression; a name in hieroglyphics, inscribed in the middle of the supple rectangle, was underscored at a distance, to the right, by a small triple drawing depicting three phases of the moon.
Soon, Jizme let go the chart and shifted her look away from the front of the red theater, settling her gaze on Nair; the latter, still imprisoned on his pedestal, had abandoned his delicate labors since the appearance of the beautiful convict, whom he devoured with his eyes.
By then the thunder was rumbling continually, and lighting flashed often enough to give the illusion of false daylight.
Then, with a horrible roar, a blinding zigzag of fire jolted across the sky and struck the tip of the lightning rod. Jizme, whose arms had begun stretching toward Nair, was unable to complete her gesture; the electricity coursed through her body, and the white litter soon supported nothing more than a cadaver with staring eyes and inert limbs.
During the brief silence the storm observed after the next deafening clap of thunder, heartrending sobs drew our attention to Nair, who shed tears of anguish while keeping his eyes fixed on the deceased.
The porters removed the apparatus without disturbing Jizme’s corpse, and we waited in pained stupor while the elements gradually receded.
The wind continued chasing the clouds southward and the thunder moved swiftly away, losing more of its force and duration with each passing minute. Little by little the sky cleared and the moon shone brightly over Ejur.