The New Moon, page 16
When I went back to my cabin I was so preoccupied with what I had just heard that I bumped by head on one of the corners of my hammock, and exclaimed involuntarily: “Who would be astonished, after that, if it were not Adam who discovered America, Cain gunpowder and Babel the printing press?”
Inarticulate and harmonious sounds, similar to those of a thousand bird-organs playing a tune in Italian tutti announced to us that we were approaching the Canary Isles. An acrid and incisive odor of ripe millet (Fourcroyana pimeloides, Linneaus) and hard eggs left us no doubt on that subject, even if we wanted to conserve any. We finally set foot on the native soil of those lovely birds (Acanthis lutea, Buffon, viridis, Cuvier, or fusca, Lesson), which are the ornament and charm of our aviaries, where they savor the pleasures of captivity so joyfully.
I devoted my every moment to them, and this is the result of my observations and the information I received about that pretty species of soliped annelids. The canary of the Canaries, the veritable canary—in a word, the autochthonous canary—is born white all over, whatever zoologists might say. When, like a young child that has just seen the light of day, that newly-hatched animal, urged by nature, disgorges the viscous fluid that pathologists call meconium, it tries to do so in vain, because its structure—its habitus, in technical terms—mounts an obstacle to it, and this is how:
The intestinal system of the canary has the particular feature that the primordial extremity of the large colon is not connected, as in other pachyderms, to the sphincter of the ovoid rectum by the small intestine; furthermore, the latter does not even exist in the species, and its place is taken by a non-secretory and amorphous laryngeal membrane of a soft and spongy consistency, but the extremely compact cellular tissue of which, not permitting any stercoral detritus to fray a path to the exterior, forces it, by a very pronounced phlogistic and diagnostic movement, to flow back into the interior. The animal, in that period of its existence, suffers and languishes, but soon the chelos, driven back in very small angular globules into its vital economy, penetrates all the orifices, and colors its feathers in yellow if it has only thus far eaten eggs, or green if it has already tasted lettuce.
You will easily understand, after that exceedingly clear explanation, why the canary’s feces are white. The chemical analysis, according to Klapproth, Hufeland and Freytag indicates that they are composed of albumin silicate, manganese subcarbide, sulfurous oxygenated phosphate and pyritic hydrosulfuric acid.
The canary’s malady, known in all climates under the name of budding jealousy, does not originate, as Guyton de Morvaux57 has asserted, from the resemblance between that lymphatic tumor to a window-catch, but from the abdominal structure inherent to the species, which we have just described. Its determinate and rational cause is the infiltration of the urinary duct into the parenchymal phlogoses of the membrane that we mentioned—an infiltration that occasions the edema of the internal walls, determines the petechy of the diseased organ and dilates it while contracting it upon itself, a morbid situation that leads to hydropsy, and finally gives birth to the death of the individual.
We did not want to abandon the Canary Isles without having visited the famous peak of Tenerife, visible to the naked eye at a distance of fifty-seven leagues, and from two hundred leagues with a telescope, provided that the latter is good and, especially, brings objects much closer. We hired guides for fear of going astray on the summit of that giant lump of chalk.
On the way, while climbing, we admired the fissures in the bare and uncultivated rock as well as the productive fertility of the celebrated mountain. Having finally reached the ultimate extremity, we first went straight to the habitation of an opulent American negro industrialist who, understanding very well that only communications can establish relationships between producers and consumers, in order to add proof to that axiom—so true but little appreciated in political economy—had just established tilted sluice gates on the culminating point of the peak, to which, by means of a very ingenious improvement, he had applied the Watt system. That is steam, by which he has succeeded in obtaining a force equivalent to at least two hundred thoroughbred Arab horses, which raises and drops the seesaw forming the lock-chamber of those sluice-gates, the upstream and downstream of which are preciously finished.
The officer I mentioned before objected to the American that the inequalities of the terrain as well as the mass of snow that accumulated on the mountain would oppose insurmountable difficulties to his hydraulic works.
“Not at all,” the industrialist replied, smiling. “With regard to the first point, you must understand that it would be physically impossible to establish tilted sluice-gates—note the expression—on absolutely flat ground. As for the second difficulty, this is how I resolve it….”
He introduced us then into a vast courtyard surrounded by spacious buildings, in which hundreds of workmen were occupied in different tasks. Immense heaps of snow were piled up next to one another, like grain-mills, and workers were carrying them away in little baskets to throw them into enormous coke furnaces similar to those that Monsieur Cockerill uses for cast iron.58
We could not hide our surprise at encountering in the Canary Isle an establishment similar to the one in Seraing, and we enquired urgently as to what the snow became in those ardent furnaces.
“Marine salt!” replied our host.
At those words, our astonishment no longer knew any limits, but he soon convinced us of what he was telling us by giving us the following explanation of the manipulations that were being carried out before our eyes.
During the waning of the August moon, when the last quarter of that planet is at its perihelion, the snow is carefully collected; it is mixed with a very compact volatile alkali as hard as one can find; then it is submitted to the centripetal action of an extremely violent reagent, such as chalk, in order to separate the heterogeneous particles from the homogeneous molecules, in such a fashion that, the absorption being complete, the snow is eventually ready to undergo the proof of fire. The energy of that fire, for the latter operation to succeed, must be equivalent that of refractory rays reflected by the isosceles prism of the mirror with which Archimedes set fire to the fleet of Scipio Africanus in the port of Syracuse.
The extreme ardor of that prodigious heat seizes the snow when it is introduced into the furnace and prevents it from melting, which could not fail to happen if the heat were less intense. The snow, hermetically enveloped by the flames, solidifies by crystallizing, and is taken out red hot from the furnace; it is then thrown into tubs filled with a dilute solution of alum and animal saltpeter, and it is in that preparation that it recovers its primitive whiteness.
We tasted that marvelous salt; it was very sapid, lightly teasing the nervous buds of the tongue, and superb to look at.
We finally took our leave of the negro industrialist after having offered him a copy of a work on pebble-oil by Dr. Cloetboom,59 born in Strépy-Bracquegies, a circumstance unknown until now to contemporary biographers. He received the book with pleasure and promised, in view of the abundance of the raw material, to add an exploitation of pebble-oil to his factory, with the result that before long, he would be able to boast of having turned the famous peak of Tenerife into salad, since the mountain already produced vegetables, that its oaks and other woods could furnish vinegar, its rocks oil and its snows salt. As for pepper, unfortunately, it would be necessary to import that from Cayenne.
We went back on board, braced the mizzen, hoisted the jibs, raised the royals and not long afterwards, pushed by a favorable wind, dropped anchor in a bay in the Cape Verde Islands. We made no observation there more curious than that of the famous geologist Schwartzeberg, who was accompanying the expedition. He submitted the land of Cape Verde to metallurgical analysis, and found that it was composed in equal proportions of Naples yellow and Prussian blue, which produces the Venice green tint with which it is colored—the tint that gives the islands their name, just as the colors of their waters give their names to the Black Sea, the Red Sa the Blue Sea, the White Sea, etc.
As we were about to go back on board, a Malay cicerone offered to show us the Royal Museum of Antiquities. We accepted the offer and immediately went to that interesting establishment. Various objects captivated our attention there, including a phial still containing the elixir that Garus, king of the trans-Rhenian Propontide, sent to Anaximander, King of Thrace, when the latter contracted jaundice under the walls of Thebes, then defended by Pisitratus. The two most curious rarities in the gallery, however, are two Roman earthenware vases discovered recently almost at surface level in the island’s interior.
Those vases both have the form of a truncated cone resting on it point; one the upper part of the first one observes a hemispherical swelling crowned by a strangulated circular neck. The inscription on the first vase is:
DIV. IO. N. EN. S. M. — S.P.Q.R.
which was initially translated as:
DIvii JOvis Nepotis ENnius Sacravit Manibus
and that of the second vase was conceived in these terms:
NI. GER. A. N. T. — S.P.Q.R.
which was interpreted as:
NIlo GERmanicus Aquas Nubiae Traxit (or Traxulit)
But since then, Hellenist scholars well-versed in the lexicography and lapidary chirography of ancient peoples have proved that the former signifies:
DIVIONENSis MULTARDA
and the second;
NIGER ANTuerpiensis
a version evidently confirmed by the shape of the vases.
The importance of this discovery for archeology and the history of the ancient peoples of Italy is incalculable, for it demonstrates evidently that Rome, the mistress of the entire world, nevertheless paid that tribute to the manufacturers of Dijon, for their mustard, and those of Antwerp for their boot-polish, long before the Phoceans60 came to settle in Marseilles. The polish of the capital of the Marquisate of Antwerp and the condiment of the main town of the Duchy of Burgundy undoubtedly reached the subjects of Caesar by way of the Brunehault causeways, which were the locomotives of the day.
The curator of the museum, a descendant of the illustrious Gronovins,61 had recently married one of the great granddaughters of the Benedictine scholar Montfaucon.62 He showed us the very interesting manuscript of a treatise that he intends to publish. The treatise will form four folio volumes, ornamented with plates, three of notes and one of tables. The author proves conclusively in that work, which he permitted us to read, that obscene lamps representing the phallus are lamps that were set alongside culpable Vestals when they were buried alive. Roman law intended by that measure that the corrupt Vestal should have before her eyes until death, and beyond, the instrument of her dishonor. That explains in a very rational manner the large quantity of those lamps that one finds every day in digs.
Here the author adds a very simple and just reflection: “If the Romans had been familiar with German tinder, the number of Vestals executed would have been much reduced, for their lovers would have made use of that means, which they would have had to hand, to relight the fire on the altar of Vesta when it went out.” What an even greater influence might have been exerted on the mores of the dwellers of the Tiber by the modest phosphoric match, which was, alas, unknown to them!
We were continuing the course of our voyage placidly when, one morning, we were woken up with a start by a salvo that made the hatches shake. We went to the lower deck in haste, and there we found the crew, under arms, arranged in a circle around the captain in his full dress uniform. The latter announced to us in a grave and solemn tone that we were on the equator and, in consequence, the ceremonial baptism was about to take place.
I will spare my readers the details of that holy rite, so familiar to all good Christians. I submitted to it with unction and humility, and the almoner was delighted by my pious sentiments. I ran on to the deck as soon as it was finished in order to see the famous line that divides the world into two hemispheres, but it was a waste of effort, for, less solid than the pyramids of Giza, it had disappeared so completely that I was unable to discover the slightest trace of it. I retired, discontented, and cursed the carelessness of mariners—adventurous and insouciant folk—who had neglected the simple precaution of placing a few boundary-markers to indicate to future navigators the precise place where the line had once existed.63
We doubled, without stopping, the island of Saint Helena, the celebrated island where the spouse of Constantin Porphyrogenete, founder of the race of Peleologues,64 discovered the wood of the true cross, and where the secular man who set fire to Europe in our days became a heap of ashes.
I shall say a little about the Cape of Good Hope, so devoid of interest, according to Levaillant,65 one of the members of the expedition of the unfortunate Captain Cook. All the indigenes of that region are English or Dutch. We ate a galantine of filleted elephant trunk à la Soubise, and a delicious vol-au-vent of giraffe in tortoise. We went to digest it on Table Mountain, covered with expanses of water, and from there we admired the beautiful view that extended before our eyes, for Cape Town is situated directly under the table.
We did not neglect to visit the astronomer Monsieur Herschel, a worthy son of his famous uncle, who has come to install himself to the Cape for three years in order to verify whether the reverse of the stars whose other side he had observed from Greenwich in England was identically similar.66 He offered us coffee, and we then presented him with a glass of starry aniseed from the Maldives, and he bid us farewell, after having shaken our hands cordially and wished us good luck for the rest of our voyage.
By means of his famous telescope, which brings objects twelve times closer than they are away, he has convinced himself that the stars are species of celestial animalcules that nourish themselves on pure ether. Those that we call shooting stars are stars that are disgorging the superfluity of their luminous matter by way of urinary or gastric tracts, and comets are species of voracious stars that engulf myriads of invisible stars in their passage. They seem to be particularly fond of those that compose the Milky Way, doubtless because their taste is more agreeable. Those kinds of planets play a role within the armillary system very similar to that played by conquerors on out terraqueous globe; the female individuals of the species have thick capillary systems; they are the hairy comets; and individuals of the other species, known as tailed comets, are remarkable for the enormous dimension of their reproductive and regenerative apparatus. These discoveries annihilate entirely the systems of Tycho Brahe and Copernicus, and we shall soon envisage the sun, and even the moon, in an unfamiliar light.
The captain was alerted to an exceedingly lively and precipitate oscillatory movement of the compass two days later, when we were in the vicinity of the Cap des Aiguilles, where all the wool of the great and small Namaquois and Caffrerie is knitted.67 We then entered the Sunda Strait, into which are discharged, drop by drop, the impure and miry waters of the canal that Busiris, the sin of Nimrod, hollowed out in the Urethra.68
We also called in at the Île Bourbon, so called because Hugues Capet, chief of that royal branch, was born there. We passed through the Molluskan islands, formerly called the Moluccas, a formless and indigestible mass of hymentopteran and tetrapteran crustaceans whose formation does not date back beyond the creation of the globe.69
I shall not talk about our incursions into the Caroline, Philippine, Marianne, etc. Islands, all inhabited either by laundresses, ironers or dressmakers, uniquely occupied in the fabrication of Persian fabrics and Indian nankeens, nor the Île de la Trinité, all of whose inhabitants are idolaters, which surprised us strangely. The only interesting thing we saw in this phase of the voyage was the rice-mines of the Carolines. That substance is found in schistous and granitic rocks mingled with chalk; it affects the form of agglomerated masses, like puddings, and not that of tabular veins, like marble or copper, or that of salmon, like lead. Manual labor alone extracts the rice, in which the mines are very rich, but before it is separated from the mica and fatty quartz that are inherent to it and it can become granular, as we receive it in Europe, it has to be subjected to a sequence of exceedingly complicated metallurgical manipulations, too long to describe here, which will be the subject of an ad hoc paper that I shall publish in due course.70
We finally reached Polynesia, the unique goal of our voyage. Polynesia! That marvelous country newly invented and “unknown even to its inhabitants,” to make use of the beautiful expression of Ptolemy Porphyrogenete, reproduced word for word by Racine. We saluted it with cries of joy, and, without wasting a second, we headed for the Viti islands.71
The first, on the beach of which we descended, is named Vanona-Leboli, and is entirely deserted, to such an extent that one often finds immense villages there in which one does not encounter a single house.
A few human bones confirmed that that of Kandabon72 had once been inhabited by cannibals who had nourished themselves on human flesh. They had devoured one another, and the last of them, having no more fellows to sink his teeth into, had eaten himself. He had recorded that circumstance in is epitaph, engraved with the point of a nail on a piece of liana, the text of which read:
D.O.M.
Emêm-iom
Regnam em rap rinif ed ia’j
Rerovéd à neir sulp tnaya’n
Emèrtre miaf am de emitciv
R.I.P.
I have attempted the following free translation, although no one in the crew knows the language of such uncivilized savages any more than I do:73
D.O.M.
A victim of extreme hunger
Having nothing more to devour
I have ended up eating
Myself.
R.I.P.
We went back aboard, and were heading straight for an island whose mountains crowned with verdure offered a magnificent sight when a dense fog hid it from view. We looked for it on the marine charts but could not find it. We took possession of it in the name of France, and after having visited it we called it Civilization Island, a name fully justified by the astonishing marvels that we witnessed there, and of which I shall try, if it is possible, to give you a faint idea.
