The Eternal Adam and other stories (32 page)

Have the Spanish given up the idea of
regaining their peninsula? Unquestionably, for it seems to be impregnable by
land and by sea.

But there was someone who cherished the idea of reconquering this
defensive and offensive peninsula. It was the leader of the band, a strange
being – or perhaps rather a madman. This hidalgo bore the name of Gil Braltar,
a name which, to his mind at least, had predestined him to that patriotic
conquest. His reason had not been able to resist it, and his place should have
been in a mental home. He was well known, but for ten years nobody knew what
had become of him. Had he wandered off into the outer world? In fact, he had
not left his ancestral home: he lived there like a troglodyte in the woods, in
the caverns, and especially in the unexplored depths of the Cave of San Miguel
which, it was reputed, led right down to the sea. He was thought to be dead. He
was still alive, none the less, after the style of a savage, bereft of human
reason, and obeying only his animal instincts.

He slept well, did General MacKackmale,
with both eyes shut, though longer than was permitted by regulations. With his
long arms, his round eyes deeply set under their beetling brows, his face
embellished with a stubbly beard, his grimaces, his anthropithecoid gestures,
the extraordinary prognathism of his jaw, he was remarkably ugly – even for an
English general. Something of a monkey but an excellent soldier nevertheless,
in spite of his apelike appearance.

Yes, he slept in his comfortable apartments
on Waterport Street, that winding road which traverses the town from the
Waterport Gate to the Alameda Gate. Was he perhaps dreaming that England would
seize Egypt, Turkey, Holland, Afghanistan, the Sudan, the Boer Republics – in
short, every part of the globe at her convenience? And this at the very moment
when she was in danger of losing Gibraltar!

The door of his bedroom opened with a
crash.

‘What’s up?’ shouted the general, sitting
erect with a bound.

‘Sir,’ replied the aide-de-camp who had
just burst in like a bombshell, ‘the town has been invaded!’

‘The Spanish?’

‘Presumably, sir. ‘

‘They have dared –’

The general did not complete his sentence.
He got up, wrenched off the nightcap which adorned his head, jumped into his
trousers, pulled on his cloak, slid down into his boots, clapped on his helmet
and buckled on his sword even while saying:

‘What’s that racket I can hear?’

‘It’s the clatter of lumps of rock falling
like an avalanche on the town. ‘

‘Then there’s a lot of them?’

‘Yes, sir, there must be. ‘

‘Then all the bandits of the coast must
have joined forces to take us by surprise – the smugglers of Ronda, the
fishermen of San Roque, the refugees who are swarming in the villages?’

‘Yes, sir, I’m afraid so. ‘

‘Well, has the governor been warned?’

‘No, sir; we can’t possibly get through to
his residence on Europa Point. The gates have been seized, and the streets are
full of the enemy. ‘

‘What about the barracks at the Waterport
Gate?’

‘We can’t get there either. The gunners
must have been locked up in their barracks. ‘

‘How many men have you got with you?’

‘About twenty, sir – men of the Third
Regiment who have been able to get away. ‘

‘By Saint Dunstan!’ shouted General
MacKackmale. Gibraltar taken from England by those – those – orange-vendors!
It’s not going to happen! No! It shan’t!’

At that very instant the bedroom door opened, to admit a strange being
who jumped on to the general’s shoulders.

‘Surrender!’ he howled in raucous tones
which sounded more like the roar of a beast than like a human voice.

Several men, who had entered with the
aide-de-camp, were about to throw themselves on that being when, seeing him by
the light of the room, they recoiled.

‘Gil Braltar!’ they cried.

It was indeed that hidalgo whom nobody had
seen for a long time – that savage from the caves of San Miguel.

‘Will you surrender?’ he howled.

‘Never!’ replied General MacKackmale.

Suddenly, just as the soldiers were
surrounding him, Gil Braltar emitted a prolonged and shrill
‘Sriss.’
At
once the courtyard of the house itself was filled with an invading army.

Could it be credible! They was monkeys,
they were apes – hundreds of them! Had they come to seize from the English that
rock of which they themselves are the true owners, that hill on which they had
dwelt even before the Spanish, and certainly long before Cromwell had dreamed
of conquering it for Britain?

Yes, they certainly had! And their numbers
made them formidable, these tailless apes with whom one could live on good
terms only by tolerating their thieving: those cunning and audacious beasts
whom one took care not to molest because they revenged themselves – as had
sometimes happened – by rolling enormous rocks on the town.

And now these apes had become an army led
by a madman as fierce as themselves – by this Gil Braltar whom they knew, who
shared their independent life, by this four-legged William Tell whose whole
existence was devoted to the one idea – to drive the foreigners from Spanish
soil!

What a disgrace for the United Kingdom if
the attempt succeeded! The English, conquerors of the Hindoos, of the
Abyssinians, of the Tasmanians, of the Australian Black-fellows, of the
Hottentots, and of so many others, to be overcome by mere apes!

If such a catastrophe took place, all that
General MacKackmale could do would be to blow out his brains! He could never
survive such a dishonour.

However, before the apes whom their
leader’s whistle had summoned had entered the room, a few of the soldiers had
been able to throw themselves upon Gil Braltar. The madman, endowed with
superhuman strength, struggled, and only after great difficulty was he
overcome. The monkey-skin which he had borrowed having been torn from him, he
was thrust into a corner almost naked, gagged, bound, unable to move or to
utter a cry. A little later General MacKackmale rushed from the house resolved,
in the best military tradition, to conquer or die.

The danger was no less outside. A few of
the soldiers had been able to rally, probably at the Waterport Gate, and were
advancing towards the general’s house, and a few shots could be heard in
Waterport Street and the market-place. None the less, so great was the number
of apes that the garrison of Gibraltar was in danger of being forced to give up
the position. And then, if the Spaniards made common cause with the monkeys,
the forts would be abandoned, the batteries deserted, and the fortifications
would not have even one defender.

Suddenly the situation was completely changed.

Indeed in the torchlight the apes could be
seen beating a retreat. At their head marched their leader, brandishing his
stick. And all, copying the movements of his arms and legs, were following him
at the same speed.

Then had Gil Braltar been able to free
himself from his bonds, to escape from that room where he had been imprisoned?
It could not be doubted. But where was he going now? Was he going towards
Europa Point, to the residence of the governor, to attack him and call on him
to surrender?

No! The madman and his army descended
Waterport Street. Then, having passed the Alameda Gate, they set off obliquely
across the park and up the slopes.

An hour later, not one of the invaders of
Gibraltar remained.

Then what had happened?

This was disclosed later, when General
MacKackmale appeared on the edge of the park.

It was he who, taking the madman’s place,
had directed the retreat of that army after having wrapped himself up in the
monkey skin. So much did he resemble an ape, that gallant warrior, that he had
deceived the monkeys themselves. So he had only to appear for them to follow
him...

It was indeed the idea of a genius, and it
well merited the award to him of the Cross of the Order of St George.

As for Gil Braltar. the United Kingdom gave
him, for cash down, to a Barnum, who soon made his fortune exhibiting him in
the towns of the Old and the New World. He even let it be supposed, that
Barnum, that it was not the Wild Man of San Miguel whom he was exhibiting, but
General MacKackmale himself.

The episode had certainly been a lesson for
the government of Her Gracious Majesty. They realised that if Gibraltar could
not be taken by man it was at the mercy of the apes. And that is why England,
always practical, decided that in future it would send to the rock only the
ugliest of its generals, so that the monkeys could be deceived once more.

This simple precaution will secure it for
ever the ownership of Gibraltar.

The day of an American journalist in the
year 2889

The men of the twenty-ninth century live in
a perpetual fairyland, though they do not seem to realise it. Bored with
wonders, they are cold towards everything that progress brings them every day.
It all seems only natural.

If they compared it with the past, they
would better appreciate what our civilisation is, and realise what a road it
has traversed. What would then seem finer than our modern cities, with streets
a hundred yards wide, with buildings a thousand feet high, always at an equable
temperature, and the sky furrowed by thousands of aero-cars and aero-buses!
Compared with these towns, whose population may include up to ten million
inhabitants, what were those villages, those hamlets of a thousand years ago,
that Paris, that London, that New York, – muddy and badly ventilated townships,
traversed by jolting contraptions, hauled along by horses – yes! by horses!
it’s unbelievable!

If they recalled the erratic working of the
steamers and the railways, their many collisions, and their slowness, how
greatly would travellers value the aero-trains, and especially these pneumatic
tubes laid beneath the oceans, which convey them with a speed of a thousand
miles an hour? And would they not enjoy the telephone and the telephote even
better if they recollected that our fathers were reduced to that antediluvial
apparatus which they called the ‘telegraph’?

It’s very strange. These surprising
transformations are based on principles which were quite well known to our
ancestors, although these, so to speak, made no use of them. Heat, steam,
electricity, are as old as mankind. Towards the end of the nineteenth century,
did not the savants declare that the only difference between the physical and
chemical forces consists of the special rates of vibration of the etheric
particles?

As so enormous a stride had been made, that
of recognising the mutual relationship of all these forces, it is incredible
that it took so long to work out the rates of vibration that differentiate
between them. It is especially surprising that the method of passing directly
from one to another, and of producing one without the other, has only been
discovered so recently.

So it was however, that things happened,
and it was only in 2790, about a hundred years ago, that the famous Oswald Nyer
succeeded in doing so.

A real benefactor of humanity, that great
man! His achievement, a work of genius, was the parent of all the others! A
constellation of inventors was born out of it, culminating in our extraordinary
James Jackson. It is to him that we owe the new accumulators, some of which
condense the force of the solar rays, others the electricity stored in the
heart of our globe, and yet again others, energy coming from any source
whatever, whether it be the waterfalls, winds, or rivers. It is to him that we
owe no less the transformer which, at a touch on a simple switch, draws on the
force that lives in the accumulators and releases it as heat, light,
electricity, or mechanical power after it has performed any task we need.

Yes, it was from the day on which these two
appliances were thought out that progress really dates. They have given mankind
almost an infinite power. Through mitigating the bleakness of winter by
restoring to it the excessive heat of the summer, they have revolutionised
agriculture. By providing motive power for the appliances used in aerial
navigation, they have enabled commerce to make a splendid leap forward. It is
to them that we owe the unceasing production of electricity without either
batteries or machines, light without combustion or incandescence, and finally
that inexhaustible source of energy which has increased industrial production a
hundred-fold.

Very well then! The whole of these wonders,
we shall meet them in an incomparable office-block – the office of the
Earth
Herald,
recently inaugurated in the 16823rd Avenue.

If the founder of the
New York Herald,
Gordon Bennett, were to be born a second time today, what would he say when he
saw this palace of marble and gold that belongs to his illustrious descendant,
Francis Bennett? Thirty generations had followed one another, and the
New
York Herald
had always stayed in that same Bennett family. Two hundred
years before, when the government of the Union had been transferred from
Washington to Centropolis, the newspaper had followed the government – if it were
not that the government had followed the newspaper – and it had taken its new
title, the
Earth Herald.