The Year 5865 Page 3

  His interlocutor was enthusiastic to continue but he kept silent, took the letter, put it in his game-bag, and left. Scarcely had he taken a few steps, however, than he came back again.

  “Would it be indiscreet, sir,” he said, “to ask your name?”

  “What! Have I not told you?” exclaimed the confused castaway. “My name is Daghestan.”

  It was Daghestan, our friend, our intimate friend: our illustrious colleague Daghestan, the glory of Caucasia!

  “Daghestan!” cried our friend the hunter, in amazement—but he said no more; Daghestan seemed absorbed by a profoundly intimate sentiment, his eyes still motionless and staring out to sea.

  The friend of the Caucasian hunter was us. Daghestan’s letter was therefore given to us yesterday.

  Too profoundly moved to preface it with any commentary, we are publishing it immediately, enclosing in our heart all the veneration that one always experiences for a great misfortune.

  The Shore of the Black Sea, 4 Prairial 5001

  Have you forgiven me, my dear fellow? On seeing my fatherland again, shall I still find my best friend? If I have sinned, oh, forgive me, in view of the sufferings I have endured! How many times since my departure I have regretted having deceived your friendship, of not having told you about the voyage I wanted to undertake, of not having made my final farewells, since I would not be able to come back!

  But what can you expect? I was so full of desire and hope; how could I sadden my friends by showing them the will-o’-the-wisps of my illusions, in taking up before them the staff of the traveler and the writing-pad of the delirious chronicler, yearning to launch forth beyond the sea, to go explore the most distant lands, the least known and perhaps the most inhospitable of all, alone with the dreams of a young man and a passionate lover of science?

  Finally, here I am, returned! But how? In truth, I have no idea. Who has thrown me here at the threshold of my fatherland, on the shore of the Black Sea? Was it a loving hand or the fury of an enemy? Was it the waves or human beings?

  It seems to me that yesterday…my God, but where was I yesterday?

  My friend, I no longer know whether I have been dreaming, or whether I am dreaming still. Yesterday, however…no, I don’t know any more; I no longer remember anything...

  All that I know is that I’ve just woken up from a profound and dolorous sleep, that I’m alone and helpless, that my traveler’s staff and my writing-pad were here beside me, stained with blood. A sad scene to strike my first gaze! Well, what can I tell you, my friend? My first thought, my first sigh—alas!—were not for them, and, forgive me, my dear friend, were not for you either, nor for the fatherland.

  Sitting on a Caucasian rock, whose foot I see immersed in the water, I turn my back to the fatherland and my friends, while my eyes full of tears search in the distance, in the far distance, beyond our sea, for heartbreaking memories, which I can as yet only glimpse as in an obscure mirage, which nevertheless cause my heart to palpitate violently, like a dream...

  Oh, no, no, my friend, it is not a dream that I have had! The hand that is writing to you, and is having so much difficulty holding the pencil between its bloody fingers, the feet that refuse to carry me, agonized by wounds that are still gaping, and my body, all covered with wounds, which can scarcely stir upon the rock, all tell me that no, I am not dreaming, I have not been dreaming.

  I have come from a savage land; I have crossed vast deserts inhabited by ferocious beasts that have not done me any harm, and by humans that rushed upon me as if to devour me…and yet, I confess, I weep sensuously at the memory of those lands. My mind, my heart, my soul—everything is there. If you only knew what emotions I have experienced there, what happiness...

  In sum, I wanted to die there, far from the fatherland. Poor fool! The fatherland, that beautiful jewel of civilization, that abode of happiness and glory, no longer speaks to my heart. I would prefer a dead glory, an extinct happiness, barbarity—perhaps the most ignoble barbarity of the countries of the west.

  Oh, there too, my friend, there was no longer for me any disorder or chaos…and yet I was in the bosom of New Cosaquia, the France of antiquity, that beautiful France, it is said, where despair, desolation and death now reign. I aspired through all my senses the perfumed memories of the ruins of Paris, the great capital of the earliest ages of the world; I dreamed of happiness on the debris of the palaces of such proud kings, such renowned works of art, which is covered now by the huts of a few savages, the descendants of the uncivilized Cosaques who once inhabited our beautiful land, and whom the hand of God drove so far away, doubtless to hide from the world of today the degradation and ignominy of barbarism, and punish a people who, according to the Sacred Books, deserved to be punished...

  And today, here I am, injured, thrown upon our shore, my heart broken by dolor.

  Oh, no, that was no dream; the memories are coming back to me...

  And then again, out there, that vessel out there, bobbing on the waves…I would rather not believe my eyes, and yet I can see it, I can see it clearly, so long as I remain motionless, lying on the rock where I was doubtless deposited; and the vessel also remains motionless in the midst of the waters. I have seen it stir, as soon as I was able to raise myself up a little, and instantly, its life became more active; it is balancing itself on the waves as if to take flight; human beings have reappeared on its broad back; its machinery is rotating in the air and in the water, alternately, like the wings of a bird. It is about to launch itself into the distance; there is no doubt about it.

  One man—just one—is standing, motionless, his arms folded over his chest and his eyes turned in my direction...

  Before ending the letter I am writing, my friend, I shall stand up on tiptoe one more time. in order to see as far as possible, finally to determine who that man is…that man who is staring at me so fixedly and waving at me so graciously from his vessel...

  Ah! The vessel is leaving…like a flash of lightning...

  Alas, my friend, my friend…that vessel…is taking away my last hope, my last affection, my last illusion...

  Oh, what frightful separation! That man…but it is not a man, my friend! Have you not guessed…?

  Forgive me, my dear friend, all my divagations. I believe I’m still dreaming: let me wake up. Later—yes, later—I shall take my courage in both hands, I shall exert all my strength to remain impassive and bring out the truth of the traveler’s tale. My eyes will tell you then what they have seen, and my soul what it has felt, its pleasures and its anguish.

  Until then, Adieu!

  II. DAGHESTAN

  Caucasian Gazette

  Caucasipol, 6 Prairial 5001

  We shall not recapitulate here the entitlements of Daghestan to the admiration of our fatherland and the entire world. That eulogy, which it would be impossible for us to make with equanimity, would appear suspect to those who know what good friends we were. Everyone is familiar, in any case, with his important and very curious publications on ancient history. The entire Caucasian press was enriched thereby twenty years ago. Our journal, more than any other, tried its utmost to extend their distribution as far as possible, even beyond our Caucasian tribes.

  If I do not want to say anything about him at present, however, I cannot resist the temptation to recall his last observation on history, which summarizes so well, in my opinion, the spirit and range of his important works, and which raised such a clamor.

  “Ancient history,” Daghestan wrote, “is a fine puzzle handed down from olden times, to exercise the sagacity of scientists and the verve of novelists...”

  “So you deny the existence of ancient times and peoples?” he was answered from all sides. People doubtless forgot, in saying that, the neat little fable that we find in the works of the illustrious writer.

  Reni, according to this fable, had been cast away by a shipwreck, with his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, on an island lost in the immensity of the ocean. The father kept silent about the shipwreck, in order not to make his children regretful, and arranged a life for them there as best he could. Reni therefore grew up without knowing anything except the soil of his island, the sky and the sea—nothing beyond. Having hunted and fished for a long time, he grew bored. He then wrote down, doubtless for posterity, his impressions of boredom, and then his history, and that of the island. The world, of course, began with his father, whom God had surely created in order to perpetuate a species hitherto unknown...

  One day, however, he discovered a means of venturing over the water, and soon perceived other islands, inhabited like his own, and even more than his own. This gave him to reflect; he reread his impressions and his history…and then began to laugh wholeheartedly at the naivety of his tales.

  “As we should also laugh,” Daghestan added, “if we were able to cross the sea that conceals the past from us and hides islands perhaps more populous than our own—we who fix the precise moment when the world was born with so much precision!”

  It was, therefore, far from Daghestan’s mind to want to deny antiquity. He meant that its books, if it had any, and its monuments, if it built any, had been so utterly ruined or so well hidden from us, that even our imagination is at a loss to say anything about it. Historians who want to be known as serious historians are content to call those times barbaric, and those people, to whom they only accord a near-vegetative life, barbarians. On the other hand, other, bolder historians place in those times and those people their monstrous illusions, their phantasmagoric dreams and their cherished ideals.

  It was a time of gods, demigods and genies. It was China before Sione-Fine, Egypt before Mehmet Ali; it was New Cosaquia before Nhoel I. Happy times! Our poetry lives on it, our most graceful literature stems from it. It was the time of legen
ds, of heroic songs, when men were giants, ogres and slayers of armies. It was the time of our Sheikh Mansour the Invincible, who destroyed a whole army with a single sweep of his scimitar.10

  That is ancient history.

  Perhaps, someone will say to me: “But after all, even if Daghestan is right to incriminate the veracity of ancient history, he ought at least to respect modern history, which can be seen, felt and touched, which crushes us with its reality. And yet he has also said that he only approaches that history tremulously. Why?”

  Why! Because, unfortunately, a man who wants to write history cannot see everything; because he is obliged to rely on documents drawn from all over, which are entirely foreign to him. If, therefore, these documents are taken from one of those peoples whose society is divided into twenty separate parts, twenty opposed camps, who watch one another with weapons in hand, who tear one another apart with deceitful reportage, which slander one another all the time—and there are many such peoples, peoples in which truth is silent, in which a biased and all-powerful press reigns, whose voice speaks as it wishes, so loudly that it alone can be heard—how can he write its history?

  Thus, I tremble with anxiety like Daghestan every time I try to form an accurate idea of that which I have not seen. Were those heroes of which history speaks to me really heroes? Was that brigand really a brigand?

  I only know what my historian tells me; I see through his eyes, I think via his mind. But has he seen clearly? He is human; he has passions. Might he not have seen too distantly, or at too close range? Did he not have an interest through which he gazed, if only the interest of self-esteem?

  Poor history!

  Given this, who can tell me that ancient history has been engraved with a different chisel than our own, that the ancients did not also look at facts through the naivety of their beliefs, under the mirage of prejudices suckled by the mores of a time when civilization was far from being advanced? And after all, when they are silent, who has spoken for them?

  Everyone knows that horrible catastrophes have disrupted our globe several times; science says so.11 Tradition speaks to us of universal deluges—is that impossible?—of frightful conflagrations, of irruptions of barbarians that have decimated, or even annihilated, civilized peoples. Who held the chisel then to transmit these important facts to us? And where are the original writings, the monuments, the documents of every sort? Annihilated—swallowed up by the corrupting waters or burned by the flames.

  Let us, then, bow down. We know nothing…nothing but what amiable storytellers have wanted to invent for us, perhaps aided by a few historical crumbs that they have plucked from the air, by a few distant and deceptive echoes that have reached them in their solitude.

  And we, because we are a trifle incredulous, because we attribute to olden times legends and ingenious poetry edited by a legion of unknown rhapsodists...

  Sacrilege!

  Oh, what I mean to say, I shall not retract, in spite of all my respect for your Hang-Fo, the most ancient Chinese writers, for your Bulbul, the illustrious Persian, whose imagination is so cheerful and so fecund that it surpasses ours, for your Parawendo, the glorious poet whose genius elevated him, it is said, to the presidency of the glorious Republic of Siam, for your Nasreddin, the pearl of Egypt, for your Chari, of the old kingdom of Sudan, whose work is in everyone’s hands.12

  Those men were men of olden times, it is said; their talents are beyond reproach, their eloquence admirable, their narrations gripping—but as to their veracity, who will certify that for me? Have not a few indiscreet individuals been saying for a long time that the works of these men are of doubtful paternity, attributed to sonorous names to make them heard more clearly and further away? Has not even more been said? Has it not been said that these men, no matter from what country and what time they hail, were graceful writers who, to please their compatriots, wrote historical romances that have had the good fortune to reach us without encumbrance.

  Thus, perhaps, it will one day be with the ingenious and brilliant works of our fecund Kazbek, whose lively and colorful imagination is so adept at dressing up history. We smile at them ourselves, and taken pleasure in them—but who can tell us that the history in question might not be the only one that reaches posterity, which will not smile as it reads it? Poor posterity!

  I do not know, in truth, why Daghestan is the only historian of our days who has had the courage to speak so frankly about times past. It seems that people are happy to sleep in tranquil belief in the elementary history learned at school, and take pleasure in plugging their ears in order not to hear the reportage of science, which speaks to us every day and which, even in isolation, is sufficient to make us doubt the past.

  Does not science, and science alone, without the aid of fallible history, tell us that vast transformations have overtaken our globe? Valleys have been filled in, mountains have collapsed, rivers have vanished, while others have changed their course or been given birth, and all that often under the terrible impact of volcanoes. Under the impact of volcanoes, islands of great extent have emerged from the depths of the sea. On the other hand, the earth has opened up and swallowed entire countries. Perhaps the interior of the Earth is as extensively populated as its surface. Our daily excavations demonstrate it to us. Oh, if we could only excavate beneath the seas!

  All these catastrophes are undoubtedly rare within a human lifespan; they are less so within the lifespan of a people; are they not frequent within the lifespan of a world?

  Everyone knows, besides, that the sea has changed and continually changes its location; that it invades one shore to retreat from another—but people do not think about that. You do not think that today’s land is not the land of old; you do not think that our ships are sailing placidly over the ruins of old cities, old peoples whose remains you want to find in your fields. With your compasses and measuring devices, you steer where your imagination directs you, and you say: it was here; here are its ruins. That city was on the edge of the sea, on a mountain or in a valley, here it is. And if, in fact, you find an old cornice, an old potsherd or some rusty medallion there, oh, you are triumphant then, you load your vessels, you cross the sea full of the enthusiasm of the scientist who has solved a difficult problem, and you cry: Glory to me, to my wisdom! Reserve a place for me in your Academies! I have found ancient Constantinople, the great city of the earliest ages of the Orient—because you have found on the edge of the sea, where you know the great city was, some petrified slipper or the broken pillars of some wretched caravanserai.

  But you do not ask yourself whether the sea might not have retreated, whether the Bosphorus might have been filled in, whether the Sea of Marmora might not have been that beautiful verdant valley we all know, whether the famous strait of the Dardanelles that has exercised the imagination of novelists to such an extent might not have been that deep and delightful ravine at the bottom of which you can walk with dry feet, alongside the canal that we have dug there. No, you still want to find Constantinople on the sea shore.

  With the same eyes you will doubtless also search for London, the capital of the England of the earliest ages of the world, which you will try to find in one of those bastard islands that rose from the depths of the nearby seas only a few centuries ago, and close your mental vision to the narrow English Channel that you can no longer see, on those rocks and mountains that a volcanic eruption has evidently heaped up, in order to make the familiar solid road that extends into New Cosaquia, the France of olden times—the road that science has discovered.

  These are facts—well-authenticated and very important facts—but no history has seen these changes...

  I apologize to the readers of our newspaper for allowing myself to get carried away involuntarily by the charm of the critical novelty that no longer wants to believe in the classical axiom: the master has spoken. What I have just said, moreover, is not mine; I have only reproduced the thoughts and writings of our friend Daghestan, as anyone can see. I therefore claim no honor for myself, but I am honored to belong to his school, to the school whose skepticism, I hope, will enable our history to make great progress.