Monsieur Jonquelle (2 page)

There was a moment's silence. Then Monsieur Jonquelle went on:

“Of course, the average person, accustomed to adventure tales, has a fantastic notion about these hostile natives. But there is in fact nothing fantastic about them. The whole of this immense forest, lying above the equator, is inhabited by these tribes, and their furtive attacks with poisoned weapons, usually at night, are well known to everybody. Stanley's whole expedition was constantly menaced by them. You will see his map dotted all over with their camps. They are no fairy creatures of romance. They are a constantly menacing, actual peril in the Congo.

“Chauvannes saw nothing strange or mysterious about what happened to the native members of his expedition. His journal is clear on that.

“I said a while ago that the incredible things set out in the journal did not begin to appear until about the seventeenth of December, when they had finally come out. It is true that some indicatory things are noted in the journal before that date. Chauvannes could not sleep. He returns again and again to this fact. Bromides did no good. He continues to complain about the failure of the bromides. He wonders if the drugs have lost their virtue, or if they could not have been pure. He notes that he tested this with one of the other men and observed the effect. The bromides were all right. This fact gave him a good deal of concern. He could not sleep. And the drugs upon which the medical profession depends in such a case, failed.

“We find this feature in considerable detail and beginning some time before December 17 while the expedition was still in the forest of the Congo, in its awful march to the northeast.

“It could have been nothing short of awful in every conception of the word. The whole of that vast wilderness is a kingdom of Satan. We never can get any adequate realization of it—a horror of gloom and rain, the heavens shut out nearly all the time by the tree tops, the whole earth underneath a bog, every form of creeper, of vermin, of reptile, the stench of a rotten world, and this invisible enemy that never relented and never tired
out. It was enough to break down the morale of anybody. No wonder Chauvannes couldn't sleep! But it never did break down his morale—that's precisely what I am going to make clear to you—not even when he saw, with an almost uncanny second sight, what was inevitably ahead of him.

“I don't know when it was that Chauvannes realized what was ahead of him, but as I have said, I think he saw it almost from the first day of the march north.

“I studied that journal word by word and sentence by sentence. I felt at the time that no one of us understood it, that the thing meant something which ought to appear if we were able to grasp a proper conception of it. I felt before it as I used to feel before those clever German dispatches, which appeared on their faces to be merely a narrative of a domestic incident, when they were in fact army orders containing a definite direction. I was right, as events proved, but the government authorities in Paris at the time considered my notion fantastic.

“Still, as I have said, the strange digressions in his journal did not begin to appear until about the seventeenth of December, when they came out on to the great grass-covered plateau outlined to the east by a low mountain range, beneath which lay Lake Albert Nyanza. As it happened, they had come out ten days ahead of the date which
they had determined upon for the arrival of the lake boat. It was to receive the expedition at the same point on the Nyanza that Stanley met Emin Pasha.

“Now, here was another indicatory point. They did not go ahead to the Nyanza as Stanley had done. They camped on a grassy slope—it looked like an English lawn, Chauvannes said—within the first day's march out of the forest. Here they remained.

“Chauvannes had all the modern implements that an explorer carries with him, and he laid down the exact location of this camp with the most painstaking accuracy. It was charted in the journal in half a dozen different forms and checked in every variety of way. He seemed to have spent a lot of time at this. He was determined that the exact spot of this camp should be definitely located for all time and beyond any possibility of error. And he did not fail. The exact location of that camp is as certain as any boundary monument on our Belgian frontier. It can be located to-day within the error of half a meter. He had plenty of time for this, because he remained in this camp with Leturc while the other men went on to the Nyanza.

“The route to the lake could now be laid out to the eye. It was directly below a marked rocky promontory of the sky line. But the men with
Chauvannes thought it better to be certain of the way out, and as they had to put in the time until the boat arrived, it seemed advisable to go over the route. The American beach comber, Dix, and the Finn set out for the Albert, Leturc remaining in the camp with Chauvannes.

“Chauvannes seemed in the journal to take a certain care to justify this course. He was now alarmed about his condition. The camp was in a spot little less than heavenly after the awful forest of the Congo. It was a rolling country of bright green pasture land, veined with an outline of trees, its hilltops studded with thickets beyond which lay to the east the range of mountains rimming the Nyanza. It was simply a paradise after the horror of the vast wilderness to the southwest of it. Birds were everywhere. It was a glorious country, full of antelope, eland, buffalo and the like. It was no trouble for a hunter to supply a camp.

“It was here alone with Leturc that Chauvannes finished the journal, which I finally deciphered, as one might say, at the
Service de la Sureté
in Paris.

“I have said that the only thing indicating Chauvannes' condition before the seventeenth of December, when they came out on the old elephant track into this heavenly country below the Albert, was the fact that he could not sleep and that the
bromides had failed him. But this was not precisely all. The journal began to indicate a state of mind in Chauvannes that he apparently hesitated a long time to record, the impression that they were approaching some sort of creature of which they had very little, if any, dependable information.

“That statement seems vague, but the impression upon which it is founded in the journal is in itself vague. It was, to put it plainly, a feeling that some strange creatures were ahead of him. Now, one could have understood this, if it had been the feeling that these creatures were
following
the expedition, for the hostile dwarfs had, in fact, followed it until they had destroyed, as I have said, every member of the expedition except the four white men. But it was not this peril that seemed to affect Chauvannes; this was a thing of which he was aware and which he could understand; but the vague fear of the creatures
on in front of him
was a new conception.

“Chauvannes said that he could not dismiss this impression and that it increased as he advanced, attaining to a definite certainty of apprehension at about the time they came out into the grass land west of the Albert.

“At first Chauvannes put this down as an illusion arising from the depression of insomnia. But
he began to speak of it later as a sort of definite premonition to be reckoned with.

“Of course, when the journal first came into our possession, we took this, and the incredible things that followed, to be merely the illusions of a man whose nervous system had broken down. This was a profound error. Every statement following in the journal was, as it proved, of the most definite importance. One got here at this point in the journal a pretty clear conception of the condition of Chauvannes at the time.

“The three with him, whose care, devotion and untiring solicitude are, as I have said, the persistent note of this latter part of Chauvannes' journal, were now very much concerned about him. They seemed to understand the danger, to himself, of one in such a mental state, for they secured and destroyed all the ammunition to the private weapons which Chauvannes carried; they even broke the blades of the knives. They appeared to realize that a homicidal seizure might develop from such a mental condition, and they seemed to fear that it might take the course of a suicidal mania. They were wholly without fear for themselves, as Chauvannes' journal repeats over and over again.

“It is here, now, at this point, that the whole journal of Chauvannes' begins to be taken up with the extraordinary things that he observed. The
impression of some strange creatures close on the camp, in the neighborhood, became an obsession. One can tell that from the speculations with which the pages of the journal are filled at this point, as though the man were endeavoring to lay down an argument in order to support an impression which he felt certain was sound, but which he was also certain would appear fantastic to all other persons. Were men justified in the belief that the exceedingly narrow limits of their crude senses could give them a knowledge of all the creatures that might inhabit the world? He continues to reflect upon the limitation of the senses; the eye was easily deceived; the ear was wholly undependable; the sense of scent in a human being was absurd beside that of the most inferior animal, and all feeling was confined to a sense of touch infinitely crude. Was it not then ridiculous to assume, depending on such limited agencies, that one could have any large conception of what even the limited area of the world close about him contained?

“There are a dozen pages of this speculation closely written in the journal, following the insomnia and what we at first took to be the hallucination which possessed Chauvannes at the time. They bring us up to the strange events which he began now to set down in detail.

“This was all mental. It was all what one
would call ‘a state of the mind.' The physical evidences began now to appear.

“It was on the first night in the new camp after they had emerged from the forest that Chauvannes had a sensation, as he puts it, of something delicately feeling over his face. It seemed to be a very slight, moving touch, as of the tip of a feather, but it was clearly distinguishable. The man put up his hand and made a swift gesture in the darkness about him, but there was absolutely nothing that he could touch. He says that this thing happened more than once in the night, and each time, although he put out his hand instantly, it came in contact with no physical evidences of any creature about him.

“This was before Dix and the Finn had set out to go over the route to the Albert. Chauvannes says that he spoke to the men ‘guardedly,' as he puts it, about this experience on the day that followed it, but they had observed nothing. There had certainly been no sound in the tent; nor was there any track or evidence of the fact that any creature had been in it.

“The thing occurred again the next night. On this occasion Chauvannes distinctly felt that swift, lingering touch pass over his face; and again, instantly, he clutched about him in the dark, beating the whole place with his arms in a desperate effort to come into some physical contact with the creature.
But it was wholly to no purpose. He touched nothing. There was no sound anywhere, and the men sleeping about him in the tent were not disturbed. He says that on the following morning he mentioned this thing again, but the three men with him had no experience of it whatever.

“If these creatures, of which Chauvannes had the strange premonitory sense, had finally appeared, they seemed to be directing their attentions exclusively to him. At any rate, the men denied having been disturbed by anything. They had seen nothing, felt nothing. But they were disturbed about Chauvannes.

“And it was on this day, it seems, that they took the precaution about his weapons. They also decided that the Frenchman Leturc should remain with Chauvannes all the time to see that nothing happened to him. The journal makes it clear that this precaution was taken, with the idea that Chauvannes in his present mental condition might do some injury to himself, rather than in the notion that he was menaced by any mysterious creature.

“And they followed that plan. Dix and the Finn set out to go to Albert Nyanza, and Leturc remained with Chauvannes.

“It was on the third night, after the two men had departed and he was alone in the tent with
the sleeping Leturc, that Chauvannes saw this creature. He says it was about three o'clock in the morning. He had been awake through the entire night, his eyes usually closed. He does not know how he happened to open them, but he did open them. It was precisely seventeen minutes to three, by the watch which he wore on his wrist. He knew this because it was a night of full moon, the brilliant rays of which entered the tent through the half-opened flap. There was absolutely no sound to have attracted Chauvannes' attention, and no other physical evidence of the presence of the creature that he was at the time aware of. But at any rate, he opened his eyes practically at the moment when the creature entered the tent—a thing it did without disturbing the flap and without making any sound whatever.

“Chauvannes says that he saw it distinctly. It paused for a moment after it had entered, remaining for some seconds quite motionless. He says that in proportion to the other parts of the creature's body, the head was enormous. It was cubical in contour. The outline was perfectly clear, but what we would call features were hardly distinguishable. The thing seemed to lack features. That was one of the distinguishing horrors of it—a head big in proportion to its body, cubical in outline and lacking features! The chest and the abdomen were also big, estimating the creature
by its own proportions. The limbs were long, narrow and jointed. The whole creature was of a repulsive, reddish color, and without any of the usual covering of animals with which the human race is familiar. The body seemed to be of some hard red substance, Chauvannes said—frozen and polished flesh, after the skin had been removed, was the idea he got.

“The creature remained only a moment visible to him; then it disappeared. It seemed to Chauvannes that it disappeared merely by turning about. He was unable to see it again, although the doorway where it entered was clear in the moonlight, and there was only the grass floor of the tent.”