The Eternal Adam and other stories (38 page)

As for the last
of the guests, it was Señor Mendoza, president of the Rosario law-courts, a
worthy man with a cultivated mind and of high integrity.

We reached the
end of the meal without any noteworthy incident. What we talked about till then
I have forgotten. Not so, on the other hand, regarding what we said as we
smoked our cigars.

Not that our
remarks were of any importance in themselves, but the brutal commentary soon to
be made upon them could not fail to give them a certain piquancy. For this
reason I have never been able to get them out of my mind.

We had come – how,
it doesn’t matter! – to speak of the wonderful progress accomplished by man.
Then Dr Bathurst said:

‘It’s a fact that
if Adam (which naturally, as an Anglo-Saxon, he pronounced
Edem
)
and Eve (which of course he pronounced
Iva
)
were to
come back upon the earth, they’d have a nice surprise!’

That was the
beginning of the discussion. A fervent Darwinist, and a convinced supporter of
natural selection, Moreno asked Bathurst ironically if he seriously believed in
the legend of the Earthly Paradise. Bathurst replied that at any rate he
believed in God and that as the existence of Adam and Eve was stated in the
Bible, he refused to question it.

Moreno retorted
that he believed in God at least as much as his adversary, but it was quite
likely that the first man and the first woman were only myths and symbols. So
there was nothing irreligious in supposing that the Bible had meant thus to
typify the breath of Me introduced by the Creative Power into the first cell,
from which all the others had then evolved.

Bathurst retorted
that this explanation was specious and that for his part he thought it more
complimentary to be the direct work of Divinity rather than to be descended
from it by the intermediary of more or less simian primates...

I saw that the
time had come for the discussion to get heated, but it suddenly ended, the two
adversaries having chanced to find some common ground. It is this way, indeed,
that such things usually finish.

This time,
returning to their first subject, the two antagonists agreed, whatever might be
his origin, in admiring the high degree of culture that man had attained, they
enumerated his conquests with pride. We all joined in. Bathurst praised
chemistry, brought to such a degree of perfection that it was tending to
disappear and merge into physics; the two subjects were now becoming one, whose
object was the study of immanent energy. Moreno praised medicine and surgery,
thanks to which such researches had been made into the intimate nature of the
phenomena of life that in the near future the immortality of living organisms
might well be hoped for. They both congratulated themselves on the heights
attained by astronomy. Were we not now in communication, failing the stars,
with seven of the planets of the solar system?
^[viii]

Wearied out by
their enthusiasm, the two snatched some moments’ rest. The others, in their
turn, took advantage of this to put in a word, and we entered upon the vast
field of practical inventions which have so profoundly modified human
conditions. We praised the railways and the steamers, used for the carriage of
heavy and cumbersome merchandise; the economical aeronefs, used by travellers
who are not pressed for time; the pneumatic or electro-ionic tubes that
traverse every continent and sea, used by people in a hurry. We praised the
countless machines, each more ingenious than the other, of which, in certain
industries, one alone can perform the work of a hundred men. We praised
printing and the photography of colour and of light, sound, heat, and all the vibrations
of the ether. We especially praised electricity, that agent so adaptable, so
docile, and so thoroughly understood in its properties and in its nature, which
enables us, without the slightest mechanical connection, either to work any
mechanism whatever or to steer a vessel across or under the sea or through the
air; either to write, to converse, or to see one another no matter how great
the distance between us.

It was quite a
dithyramb in which, I must admit, I took part. We were all agreed that mankind
had reached an intellectual level unknown before our time, and that this
justified us in believing in its definitive triumph over nature.

‘However,’ broke
in the gentle voice of President Mendoza, taking advantage of the silence which
followed. ‘I will venture to say that there may have been peoples, now vanished
without leaving the slightest trace, who reached a civilisation equal or
analogous to our own.’

‘Which?’ asked
everybody at once.

‘Oh well!... The
Babylonians, for example.’

There followed a
burst of mirth. To dare to compare the Babylonians with modem man!

The Egyptians,’ Don
Mendoza went on quietly.

We laughed louder
than ever.

"There are
the Atlanteans, too – it’s only our ignorance that makes us regard them as
legendary,’ the president continued.’You might add that an infinity of other
peoples, older than the Atlanteans themselves, may have appeared, prospered,
and died out without our knowing anything about them!’

Don Mendoza
insisted on his paradox and, so as not to hurt his feelings, we agreed to
pretend to take him seriously.

‘But look here,
my dear president,’ Moreno insinuated, in the sort of tone one uses to make a
child see reason, ‘you don’t want to claim. I suppose, that any of those
ancient peoples could be compared to ourselves?... In morality, I agree that
they reached the same degree of culture, but in material things!’

‘Why not?’ Don
Mendoza objected.

‘Because,’ Bathurst
hastened to explain, ‘the great thing about our inventions is that they spread
instantaneously over the earth: the disappearance of one people, or even a
large number of peoples, would leave the sum of human progress intact. For
human achievements to be lost, all mankind would have to vanish at once. Is
that, I ask you, an admissible hypothesis?...’

While we were
talking in this way, effects and causes went on interacting throughout the
infinite universe, and less than a minute after Dr Bathurst had asked this
question, their final result would justify Mendoza’s scepticism only too
completely.

But we had no
suspicion of this, and we went on talking quietly. Some leaning over the backs
of their chairs, others with their elbows on the table, we were all turning
pitying glances on Mendoza, who, as we thought, had been completely floored by
Bathurst’s reply.

‘First,’ the
president replied unemotionally, ‘we can well believe that in the old days the
earth had fewer inhabitants than it has now, so that one nation might be the only
one to possess universal knowledge. Then I don’t see anything absurd, on the
face of it, in supposing that the whole surface of the globe should be
overwhelmed at once!’

‘Nonsense,’ we
exclaimed in chorus.

It was at that
very moment that there came the cataclysm.

We had hardly
chorussed ‘Nonsense!’ when a terrible din broke out. The ground trembled and
gave way under our feet, the villa shook on its foundations.

We rose, we
jostled together; the victims of an indescribable terror, we rushed outside.

Scarcely had we
crossed the threshold than the house collapsed, burying in its ruins President
Mendoza and my valet Germain, who had been coming out last. After a few
seconds’ natural consternation we were going to try to rescue them when we saw
Raleigh, my gardener, followed by his wife, rushing from his house at the end
of the garden.

‘The sea!... The
sea!...’ he was shouting at the top of his voice.

Turning towards
the ocean, I stood there motionless, stupefied. It was not that I realised what
I was seeing, but I felt at once that my whole surroundings had completely
changed. And was not that enough to chill the heart with fright when the whole
aspect of nature, that nature which we always think of as essentially
changeless, could be so strangely transformed in a few seconds?

Yet I was not
slow in regaining my presence of mind. The true superiority of man is not to
conquer and dominate nature. It is for the thinking man, to understand it, to
hold the whole universe in the microcosm of his mind. It is, for the man of
action, to keep a calm spirit before the revolt of matter. It is to tell
himself: ‘I may be destroyed, yes! but unnerved, never!’

As soon as I had
regained my calm, I realised how the scene before my eyes differed from what I
was accustomed to see. The cliff had vanished, simply vanished, and my garden
was sloping down to the edge of the sea, whose waves, after destroying the
gardener’s house, were beating furiously against the lowermost flower-beds.

As it was hardly
admissible that the level of the sea had risen, it necessarily followed that
that of the land had fallen. The subsidence was more than a hundred yards, for
that had hitherto been the height of the cliff, but it must have taken place
fairly gently, for we had hardly perceived it. This explained the comparative
calmness of the ocean.

A few minutes’
thought told me that my theory was correct; what was more, it showed me that
the descent had not yet stopped. Indeed, the sea was continuing to rise with a
speed apparently of about six feet a second – roughly four or five miles an
hour. Given the distance between us and the foremost of the waves, we should
thus be swallowed up in less than three minutes, if the speed of the subsidence
stayed the same.

I came to a
decision at once:

‘My car!’ I shouted.

They saw what I
meant. We dashed towards the garage, and dragged the car outside. In a
twinkling it was filled with petrol, and we crowded pell-mell into it. My
chauffeur. Simonat, swung the starting-handle, jumped to the wheel, engaged the
clutch, and set off up the road in low gear, while Raleigh, having opened the
gate, grabbed the car as it went by and hung on to the back springs.

It was high time!
Just at the moment when the car reached the road, a wave broke, washing right
up to the centre of the wheels. Bah! Now we could laugh at the pursuit of the
sea. Although it was overloaded, my fine car would know how to keep us out of
its reach, and so long as the descent into the gulf did not go on
indefinitely... Indeed, we had plenty of room: two hours’ climb at least, to a
possible height of about 1,500 yards.

But I soon had to
realise that it was not yet time to shout victory. After the first leap of the
car had carried us about twenty yards beyond the line of foam, it was in vain
that Simonat did his utmost: the distance did not increase. There could be no
doubt about it: the weight of twelve people was slowing us down. However that
might be. our speed was almost exactly that of the advancing water, which
always kept the same distance away.

We soon realised
our disquieting position and, except for Simonat, who had his hands full
driving the car, we turned round towards the road we were leaving behind us. We
could see nothing but water. As fast as we conquered it, the road vanished
beneath the sea, which was conquering it at the same rate.

The sea itself
was calm. A few ripples were quietly dying out against an ever-changing shore.
It was a lake which kept on swelling, swelling, with a steady motion, and
nothing could be more tragic than our pursuit by that calm sea. It was in vain
that we fled before it: the water rose implacably with us...

Simonat was
keeping his eyes fixed on the road. When we came to one of the turnings he told
us:

‘Here we are,
halfway up the slope. Still another hour’s climb.’

We shuddered.
What! Within an hour we were going to reach the top, and we should have to go
on down, hunted, caught up perhaps, whatever our speed, by the masses of liquid
which would crash like an avalanche on top of us!...

The hour passed
without any change in the situation. We could already distinguish the summit of
the hill when the car was violently shaken and made a lurch which threatened to
smash it against the stones by the side of the way. Meanwhile a great wave rose
behind us, rushed forward to attack the hill, overhung and at last broke right
over the car, which was surrounded by its foam... Were we going to be swallowed
up?...

No! The water
retired, seething, while the motor, suddenly panting more quickly, speeded up.

Where had that
sudden acceleration come from? The cry that Anna Raleigh gave told us: the poor
woman had just realised that her husband was no longer hanging on the springs.
The backwash of the wave had torn the wretched fellow away, and that was why
the lightened car was climbing the slope more easily.

Suddenly it
stopped dead.

‘What’s up?’ I
asked Simonat. ‘A breakdown?’

Even in these
tragic circumstances, professional pride still maintained its rights: Simonat
gave a disdainful shrug of his shoulders, by way of letting me know that to a chauffeur
of his sort breakdowns were unknown. Then, raising his hand, he silently
pointed ahead. Thus the stop was explained.