Notes

1 Le Félin géant (The Giant Cat a.k.a. Quest of the Dawn Man) and Helgvor du fleuve bleu (Helgvor of the Blue River) will be reprinted in their original English translations in a seventh volume.

2 In ancient Greece, a nymphaeum was a sanctuary dedicated to water-nymphs. The word was imported into French, as nymphée—not to be confused with nymphéa, which is a kind of water-lily—because it was borrowed for reference to fountains decorated with sculpted nymphs, but never made it into English, save for technical references to the Greek institution.

3 Amur, or Sakhalin, is a province of eastern Siberia, north of Manchuria. The French spell the name Amour, so Rosny’s choice of it as a location has a certain metaphorical resonance.

4 Ctesias was a Greek historian and physician of the 5th century B.C., contemporary with Herodotus, who produced an account of India, some fragments of which survive, most famously a passage dealing with the Cynocephali—a race of “dog-headed” people.

5 Hanno was a Carthaginian navigator of the 5th century B.C. who allegedly led an expedition southwards along the west coast of Africa; a Greek account of the voyage is preserved in the Periplus.

6 Rosny’s narrator inserts a footnote here: “All this, of course, I only learned later.”

7 Rosny’s narrator inserts another footnote: “As I never had the corpse of a Water-Man in my possession, my experimentation was necessarily limited.”

8 The phrase “île des peupliers” [isle of poplars] has a particular significance in France because it is the name of the burial-place of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the popularizer of the notion that people uncorrupted by civilization are—or were—happy and peaceful, which became a key element of French Romanticism.

9 Rosny is often exceedingly casual in the consistency of his accounts of the phases of the Moon and its course across the sky, but it is odd that he went to some trouble to inform the reader that the waning Moon was three-quarters dark about a week ago, given that the story now requires it to be in mid-cycle.

10 The Belgian jurist Edmond Picard (1836-1924) was the founder of L’Art Moderne, a significant periodical supporting the Jeune Belgique movement; he also served as a socialist senator in the Belgian government.

11 This reference is to one of the prose poems contained in “La Légende sceptique” (tr. in vol. 1 of this series as “The Skeptical Legend”), which sets out a prospectus for the future establishment of nature reserves where animals in danger of extinction might be conserved and man’s primal relationship with nature partly restored.

12 The reference is to Homer’s Odyssey, where “Argos” is sometimes used to signify the homeland of all the Greeks, rather than a part of it.

13 Choerotherium sansaniense is a fossil pig from which modern domestic swine might have descended; sivalensis is a common second component of Linnean names, but in this instance it obviously refers to the species known in Rosny’s day as Hippopotamus sivalensis and nowadays as Hexaprotodon sivalensis.

14 What Gabriel de Mortillet—the anthropologist from whom Rosny derived most of the terminology found in his prehistoric romances (see the introduction to vol. 4)—called the Tourassian epoch, after remains found in a cave called La Tourasse in the Haut Garonne, corresponds to the Azilian period of other classifications; as the text indicates, it was supposedly a transitional period between two major elements of his classification.

15 Marcasite is a kind of iron sulphide, also known as “white pyrites,” although the name is also employed more loosely to refer to any kind of pyrites employed as a gemstone.

16 Rosny’s narrator inserts a footnote here: “All the following dialogues are imperfect translations, my hosts’ language containing neither verbs nor adjectives; the verbs are represented by gestures, the adjectives by the repetition or special pronunciation of nouns. In the same way, the proper nouns only distantly resemble the correct pronunciation of the names.”

17 A region of Algeria.

18 “Jean Revel” was the pseudonym of Paul Toutain (1848-1925), a regional writer famous for his celebration of the culture of Normandy. The quote probably comes from one of the items in Contes normands (1901)

19 The word that I have had to translate as “Bandits” is the much more colorful Ecorcheurs [flayers], a designation initially given to gangs of rogue mercenaries active in France in the 14th and early 15th centuries—the name represented their alleged habit of stripping their murdered victims bare. It was subsequently used to refer to any unusually rapacious robbers.

20 A literal (if somewhat euphemistic) translation of this Dutch term of abuse would be “knave.”

21 Literally “spy-holes.”

22 Sexual symbolism is inevitably difficult to translate, because French double entendres and English ones frequently lack correspondence, so English readers will have to take it on trust that such passages as this one seem somewhat less inelegant in French.