Laura (6 page)

Before whom, my dear uncle?

Before the devil, ready to break your bones if you should lie, he replied, and his wicked smile and infernal gaze returned.

I am not in the habit of lying, I told him; I am an
honest
man, and I do not swear oaths.

Very well; then answer! What is the meaning of this story of a broken glass case, hallucinations, a journey into the crystal? During your illness two years ago, my
brother-in
-law wrote me something rather muddled about it and I made Laura tell me about it yesterday evening. Is it true that you wanted to enter by thought into a geode lined with amethyst crystals, that you believed you really had entered it, and that you saw there the face of my daughter?

All that is unfortunately true, I replied. I had an extraordinary vision, I broke a glass case, I injured my head, I had a fever, I recounted my dream with the
conviction
with which it had left me, and for some time people thought me mad. However, my uncle, I am not; I am cured, I am in good health, I work to my teachers’ satisfaction, my behaviour is not at all extravagant, and nothing would have made me unworthy of being Laura’s husband, if you had not given authorisation for her to be engaged to another who has little interest in her hand, whereas I …

This is not about Laura, said Uncle Nasias with a
gesture
of impatience; it is about what you saw in the crystal. I want to know what it was.

You want to humiliate me, I can see that clearly, make me say that I am not in possession of my wits, in order then to prove to me by my own admissions that I cannot marry Laura.

Laura again? Nasias cried out in anger. You bore me with your nonsense! I am speaking to you of serious things, you must answer me. What did you see within the crystal?

Since you take it thus, I told him, annoyed in my turn, what I saw in the crystal is more beautiful than what you have seen and will ever see in the course of your journeys. Here you are, proud and imperious as anything, because you have perhaps visited Oceania or crossed the
Himalayas
. Children’s games, my dear uncle! Playthings from Nuremberg in comparison with the sublime, mysterious world that I saw as I see you, and which I explored, I who am talking to you!

Well done, that is how you must speak! went on my
uncle, whose angry face had once more become smooth and caressing. Now, tell on, my dear Alexis; I am listening to you.

Surprised by the interest he was taking in my
adventure
, and at the risk of being ensnared in a trap by him, I yielded to the pleasure of recounting what had left in me a memory so dear and so precise, a memory that
no-one
yet had deigned to listen to seriously. I must say that I had, this time, an incomparable listener. His eyes shone like two black diamonds, his half-open mouth seemed to drink in each of my words avidly; he leapt with
enthusiasm
, interrupted me with shouts of joy which were like roars, twisted like a grass snake with outbursts of
convulsive
laughter, and, when I had finished, he made me begin again and name each stage of my journey, each aspect of the fantastical land, asking me the relative distance, the extent, the height, the orientation of each mountain and of each valley, as if I were talking about a real country, one it was possible to explore other than on the wings of imagination.

When he had finished shouting out and I thought I could talk reason to him:

My dear uncle, I went on, permit me to say that you look to me like a man of great passion. That this land exists somewhere in the universe, I cannot doubt since I saw it and I can describe it; but that it may be useful to seek it on our planet, that is what I cannot believe. So we should not seek the path to it anywhere but in the
divinatory
faculties of our minds and in the hope of dwelling there one day, if our souls are as pure as diamond, the emblem of the soul’s incorruptible nature.

My dear child, replied Uncle Nasias, you do not know what you are saying. You have had a revelation, and you do not understand it. You did not tell yourself that our little globe was a large geode, whose outer layer is our earthly bark and whose interior is lined with admirable, gigantic crystallisations, or had regard to those little protrusions on the surface that we call mountains, and which form no more than relative projections which the bumps on an orange skin present in relation to the size of a pumpkin. It is the world we call subterranean that is the true world of splendour; now, there certainly exists a vast part of the surface which is still unknown to man, where some tear or deep declivity would permit him to descend to the region of gemstones and to gaze in the open air upon the marvels which you saw in a dream. That, my dear nephew, is the sole dream of my own life, the sole goal of my long and difficult voyages. I am convinced that this tear or rather this volcanic crevasse of which I speak exists at the poles, that it is regular and in the form of a crater a few hundred leagues in diameter and a few dozen leagues deep, in short that the brightness from the mass of gems appearing at the bottom of this basin is the sole cause of the aurora borealis, as your dream clearly demonstrated to you.

What you are saying, my dear uncle, is founded on no healthy geological notion. My dream presented me on a large scale with known forms, forms that the mineralogical specimens placed before my eyes in miniature. Hence the kind of logic which led me into the enchanted world of the crystallo-geodic system. But what do we know about the interior conformation of our planet? We are as certain
as we can be of only one thing: that is, that at thirty or thirty-three kilometres’ depth, the heat is so intense that minerals can only exist in a fusible state. Supposing that one could descend to that depth, how would it therefore be possible for a man to avoid being burned to a crisp on the way, a state which, you will agree, is not favourable to the exercise of one’s faculties of observation? As for the aurora borealis …

You are a schoolboy who wants to play the free thinker, my uncle went on. I forgive you that, it is how you are taught, and I know moreover that the famous Tungstenius claims to explain everything without taking account of the mysterious instincts that are more powerful in certain men than those deceptive faculties of observation about which your uncle is so vain. Separate yourself here and now from my brother-in-law’s arid dissertations, and listen only to me, if you wish to raise yourself above a vulgar pedantry. You are a natural seer, do not torture your mind in order to render it blind.

“Know that I too am a seer, and that, before the
sublime
brightness of my imagination, I care very little for your little scientific hypotheses. Hypotheses, analogies, inductions, a fine business! I can make thousands of hypotheses for you, and all of them good, although they all contradict each other.

“Let us see! What is the meaning of your intense heat and your mineralogical materials in fusion at a depth of thirty-three kilometres? You proceed from known to unknown, and you believe that by so doing you grasp the key to all the mysteries. You know that at a depth of forty metres the temperature is eleven degrees, and that
it rises by one degree centigrade per thirty-three metres. You make a calculation, and you reason on what happens at two or three thousand metres lower, without thinking that this heat you have detected is perhaps due only to the scarcity of air at the bottom of a well, while, in the great interior dislocations which are unknown to you, masses of air may circulate, considerable hurricanes which, for thousands of centuries, have fed certain volcanic fires, when at other points they had, with the aid of the waters, forever extinguished the energy of the alleged central fire. You know, moreover, that this central heat is not at all
necessary
to the earth’s existence, since all life on the surface is the exclusive work of the sun. So, your core in a state of fusion is a pure hypothesis which hinders me little and which, moreover, I can counter, in supposing that there is an opening near the poles. If the poles are necessarily flattened because of the centripetal force which acts upon them continuously, why would they not be more deeply hollowed out than we think by the reaction of
centrifugal
force, which always operates in the direction of the equator? And if the poles are hollow down to a depth of thirty-three kilometres, which is in reality a trifle, how could the heat have existed there ever since the bottom of this abyss has been in contact with the icy climate of the region it occupies?

Permit me, Uncle; you speak of the icy climate at the poles. You must be aware that we believe today in the existence of an open sea at the North Pole. Travellers who have been able to approach it have seen floating mists and birds flying, certain indications of a mass of water free from the ice, and consequently enjoying a bearable
temperature. Therefore, if there is appreciable depth, there is necessarily a sea, and if there is a sea or only a lake, there is no crater into which one might descend, and your hypothesis, for it is one far more random than all those of science, falls into the water, so to speak.

But, you imbecile, Uncle Nasias replied with brutal anger, every maritime basin is a crater, I do not say
volcanic
, but a crater, a cup of igneous origin, and, if you believe in the existence of a polar sea, you will grant me the necessity of an immense excavation to contain it. It remains to be seen if this excavation is empty or filled with water. Personally, I say it is empty, because any room for expansion will empty it continuously, and because it gives rise to the electrical phenomenon of the aurora borealis, a phenomenon about which I know you wished to speak to me. I agree that it gives off a gentle warmth, for, if you are absolutely wedded to it, I will allow you a burning core situated at the centre, and far distant from the geodic crystallisation which I intend to reach. Yes, I intend to, and I want to! I have travelled the equatorial world long enough to be very certain that the surface of the earth is extremely poor in gemstones, even in these relatively rich countries, and I am resolved to go and explore those where centripetal force holds in their boundless deposits and concentrates them, while centrifugal force only pushes back towards the equator miserable debris torn from the impoverished flanks of the planet, like those fragments of shattered bone which a man’s swollen wounds throw out.

I confess that my Uncle Nasias appeared completely mad to me, and that I dared not contradict him, fearing he would fly into some act of rage.

Then explain to me, I said, to change the course of the conversation a little, what overpowering interest and burning curiosity impel you to search for these gemstone deposits which I won’t qualify as imaginary, but which you will permit me to believe are difficult to reach.

You ask! he cried out vehemently. Ah! that is because you do not know either my will, or my intelligence, or my ambition; you do not know what patient and obstinate speculations enabled me to become wealthy enough to undertake immense things. I am going to tell you. You know that I left, fifteen years ago, as salesman for a firm that was trading in cheap jewellery with the naive peoples of the Orient. Our elegant mounts in pinchbeck and the shimmering cut of our little pieces of glass charmed the eyes of the half-savage women and warriors, who brought me in exchange antique jewels of incontestable value and real, fine stones of great price.

Allow me to tell you, my dear uncle, that this trade …

Business is business, my uncle went on without giving me the time to express my thoughts, and the fine people I was dealing with firmly believed for their part that they had taken me for a dupe. In certain localities where
gemstones
are found they thought that, in giving me a pebble they had picked up at their feet, they were mocking me, much more than I was really mocking them by giving them, in exchange for a gemstone that cost them nothing, a product of our European industry which, after all, had some value. They were even astonished by my liberality and, when I saw that they were on the point of
becoming
suspicious, I played at being mad, superstitious or at being a poltroon; but I pass over these details swiftly. All
you need to know is that, from the little people, I passed quite quickly to the little sovereigns, and that my crystals mounted in copper turned their heads too.

“From success to success and exchange to exchange, I came to possess gemstones of great value and to be able to deal with the rich people of civilised countries. So I gave my trading house a good account of my mission; I assured them of useful relations with the barbarian peoples I had visited, and without ceasing to be useful to them, I created on my own account another industry which was to sell or barter real precious stones. In this trade, I became an expert lapidary and a skilful trader in curios; I made my fortune.

“I could henceforth take my ease, have a palace at Ispahan or Golconda, a villa at the foot of Vesuvius, or a feudal castle on the Rhine, and squander my income in a princely fashion without worrying about the North or South Pole, and without bothering about what is
happening
in your brain; but I am not a man for rest and a carefree life: the proof is that when I learned of your vision, I resolved to leave everything, risking the Shah of Persia’s disfavour, to come here and question you.

And also to attend to your daughter’s wedding!

My daughter’s wedding is a detail. I have never seen my daughter in the crystal, and I have seen you there.

Me? You have seen me there? So you can see into it too?

A fine question! if not, would I believe in your vision? Crystal, you see, and by crystal I mean any
mineralogical
substance well and duly crystallised, is not what the common person thinks; it is a mysterious mirror which, at a given moment, received the imprint and reflected the
image of a great spectacle. This spectacle was that of the vitrification of our planet. Call it crystallisation if you will, it is all the same to me. Crystallisation is, according to you, the action by which the molecules making up a mineral unite after having been dissolved in a fluid? Whether this fluid be burning hot or frozen matters little to me, and I declare that with regard to primitive substances you know no more than I. I concede the igneous nature of the
primitive
world; but, if I grant you the existence of a still-active fire, I declare that it burns at the centre of a diamond, which is the core of the planet.