Laura (3 page)

How could I recognise it? I said. Is this not the first time I have come here?

Silly-head! she replied, have you already forgotten that, last year, you handled the geode clumsily and dropped it on the gallery floor? One of the crystals was chipped, you didn’t make a great fuss about it; but the trace of the
accident
has remained, and here it is. You have looked at it often enough to recognise it. Today, it serves you as a cave to shelter your poor head, tired out by the brilliance of the sun on the gemstone.

Indeed, Laura, I replied, I now recognise it very well; but I cannot understand how a break barely visible to the naked eye, in a specimen which my two hands
could
contain, has become a cavern in which the two of us can sit down on the flank of a mountain which could cover our entire town …

And, Laura went on, at the centre of a land that embraces a horizon whose depths your gaze can barely grasp? All this astonishes you, my poor Alexis, because you are a child without experience and without
contemplation
. Take a good look at this charming land, and you will easily understand the transformation that the geode seems to have effected upon you.

I gazed for a long time, and without tiring, at the
dazzling
vista we overlooked. The more I looked at it, the more able I became to bear its brilliance, and little by little it became as gentle upon my eyes as the greenery of the woods and meadows of our earthly regions. I was
surprised
to discern in it general shapes reminiscent of our glaciers, and soon even the smallest details of this
gigantic
crystallisation became as familiar to me as if I had explored them a hundred times in every direction.

You see, my companion then said, picking up one of the brilliant stones which lay beneath our feet, you see, this circular, hollow mountain range is just like this pebble, with its empty centre. One may be small and the other immense, but the difference is scarcely appreciable in the limitless expanse of creation. Each jewel in this vast screen has its own matchless value, and the mind which in its love cannot associate the grain of sand with the star is a sick mind, or played false by the deceptive notion of reality.

Was it Laura who spoke to me in this way? I sought to verify this; but she too shone like the brightest of the gemstones, and my eyes, by now accustomed to the
splendours
of the new world she had revealed to me, could not bear the additional radiance which seemed to emanate from her.

My dear Laura, I said, I am beginning to understand. And yet up there, a long way from here, and all around the horizon which encloses us, there are icy peaks and snowfields …

Look at the little geode, said Laura, placing it in my hand; you can clearly see that the crystals around the perimeter are limpid like ice and veined with opaque shades of white, like snow. Come with me, and you shall see at close quarters these eternal glaciers where cold is unknown and where death cannot seize us unawares.

I followed her, and this journey—which I estimated must have been of several leagues—was covered so swiftly that I was unaware of the moments passing. We were soon on the tallest summit of the great ice peak, which was in reality just a colossal prism of milky hyaline quartz, as was borne out, on a manageably small scale, by the geode which I held as a point of comparison, and just as Laura had declared to me; but what a grandiose sight came into view again from the very summit of the great white crystal! At our feet, the circle of amethyst, drowned in its own reflections, was now only a small element of the picture, agreeable because of the melancholy sweetness of its lilac tints, the elegance of its shapes contributing to the harmony of the whole. How many other splendours were unfurled in space!

O Laura, my dear Laura! I cried out, bless you for bringing me here! Where did you learn of the existence of these marvels, and how to reach them?

What does that matter to you! she replied; gaze upon the beauty of the crystalline world and savour it. The valley of the amethyst is, as you can see, only one of the
thousand aspects of this nature, whose riches are
inexhaustible
. Here, on the other side of the large crystal, you see the charming world of the jaspers with their changing veins. No cataclysm has sullied these magnificent, patient works of nature, or buried them in barbaric mixtures and brutal confusions. Whilst in our little world, troubled and refashioned a hundred times, the gemstone is
shattered
, dispersed, enshrouded in a thousand unknown, dark places, here it is plain for all to see. It sparkles, reigns everywhere, fresh and pure, and truly royal as it was in the first days of its happy formation.

“Further off, you can see the valleys where
amber-coloured
chalcedony is rounded into powerful hills, while a chain of dark, glowing-red zirconium completes the illusion of a limitless blaze. The lake which half-reflects them at its edges, but whose centre presents a surface of slackly lapping waves, is made up of indeterminate shades of chalcedony, whose nebulous fleeciness reminds one of white horses on the sea when there is a steady breeze.

“As for these masses of beryls and sapphires, a material whose rarity is so prized among us, they have no more importance here than God’s other works. They stretch out to infinity in slender colonnades which you take perhaps for far-off forests, as I wager you take those slender,
tender
stems of green chalcedony to be thickets, and those crystalline efflorescences of pyromorphite for carpets of velvety moss caressing the edges of the many-coloured agate ravine; but that is nothing.

“Let us go on a little, you shall explore the opal oceans where the sun, that blazing diamond whose creative power is unknown to me, plays in all the reflections of
the rainbow. Do not linger on these islands of turquoise, further on are those of tender lazulite and of lapis, run through with veins of gold.

“Here is mad labradorite, the reflections from its facets by turns colourless and pearly, and aventurine with silver rain that displays its polished flanks, while the fires of red, warm almandine, whose praises were once sung by a seer called Hoffmann, are concentrated around the centre of its austere mountain.

“As for me, I love those humble rose gypsums
forming
long walls, piled on top of each other, right up to the skies, and those fluorites lightly tinted with the freshest colours, or then again those blocks of feldspar, which we call moonstone, because it has the smooth reflection of that heavenly body’s rays.

“If you will climb to the poles of this enchanted world, across the ice floes of satiny sericolite and limpid
aquamarine
, we shall see the permanent aurora borealis which man has never gazed upon, and you will understand that, in this universe which you see as immobile, the most intense life palpitates in the breaths of an energy so
formidable
that …”

Here, my cousin Laura’s intoxicating voice was drowned out by a din like that of a hundred million thunderclaps. A hundred billion resplendent fireworks shot up into a black sky which I had at first taken for a measureless vault of tourmaline, but which was torn into a hundred billion burning strips. All the reflections were extinguished, and I saw, laid bare, the heaven’s abysses scattered with stars whose colours were so intense and whose size so terrifying, that I toppled backwards and lost consciousness …

It is nothing, my dear Alexis, Laura told me, placing upon my forehead something cold that had the effect of an ice cube. Return to yourself and recognise your cousin, your Uncle Tungstenius and your friend Walter, who are urging you to shake off this lethargy.

No, no, it will be nothing, said my uncle, who was holding my wrist to take my pulse; but, another time, when you have talked a little too much at lunch while absent-mindedly drinking glass after glass of my little white wine from Neckar, do not amuse yourself by
breaking
the glass display cases with your head and scattering all the crystals and gemstones of the collection like a
madman
. God knows what damage you could have done, if we had not been there, not to mention the fact that your wound could have been serious and cost you an eye or part of your nose! Mechanically, I raised my hand to my brow and when I took it away it was reddened with a few drops of blood.

Leave it alone, Laura told me, I am going to change the compress; drink a little of this kidney vetch, my child, and don’t look at us in that wild, confused way. I am quite certain that you were not drunk, and that this is a little attack of apoplexy produced by an excess of
unrewarding
toil.

O my dear Laura, I said with an effort, pressing my lips to her hand, how can you use the phrase ‘unrewarding toil’ to describe the admirable journey we made together into the crystal? Give me back that resplendent vision of the opal oceans and the lapis islands! Let us return to the verdant thickets of green chalcedony and the sublime banks of euclase and spinel, or to the fantastic stalagmites
of the alabaster caves that invited us to such sweet repose! Why did you want to take me beyond the limits of the starry world and make me see things the human eye
cannot
bear?

Enough, enough! said my uncle sternly. This is fever, and I forbid you to say one word more. Go and fetch the doctor, Walter; and you, Laura, continue to cool his brain with compresses.

I believe I had a kind of sickness and many confused dreams, whose visions were not always pleasant. To be more precise, the assiduous presence of that good fellow Walter threw me into strange terrors. In vain, I tried to prove to him that I was not a madman, by giving him a faithful account of my journey into the crystal; he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.

My poor Alexis, he said, it is a sad and truly
humiliating
thing for your friends and for yourself, that in the midst of healthy, rational teachings, you have become enamoured to the point of delirium with those miserable gemstones, good only for amusing children and amateur collectors. You are confusing everything in your mind, I can see that clearly, useful materials with minerals whose sole value is their rarity. You speak to me of fantastical
colonnades
of plaster and carpets of moss made from lead phosphate. There is no need to fall under the spell of
hallucination
in order to see these marvels at the heart of the earth, and the veins in the mines would offer your eyes, greedy for strange shapes and exquisite, brilliant colours, the treasures of antimony with its thousand azure needles, carbonated manganese in a rose eglantine crust, cerusite in pearly-white bundles, types of modified copper in every
shade of the rainbow, from malachite greens to azurites of ultramarine blue; but all these coquetries of nature prove nothing, beyond chemical combinations which your uncle would call rational, while I call them fatal. You have not sufficiently grasped the goal of science, my dear child. You have stuffed your memory with vain details, and see, they have tired out your brain without any benefit to practical life. Forget your diamond peaks, diamond is just a little crystallised carbon. Coal is a hundred times more precious, and, by reason of its usefulness, I find it more beautiful than diamond. Remember what I told you, Alexis; the mattock, the anvil, the drill, the pick and the hammer, these are the most brilliant jewels and the most respectable forces of human reasoning!

I listened to Walter speaking, and my over-excited imagination followed him into the depths of the
subterranean
excavations. I saw the reflections of torches, suddenly illuminating veins of gold running along flanks of quartz the colour of rust; I heard the hoarse voices of the miners as they plunged into the galleries of iron or the chambers of copper, and their heavy steel
sledgehammers
’ brutal rage as they beat mercilessly upon the most ingenious products of the mysterious work of centuries. Walter, who led this greedy, barbarous horde, looked to me like a Vandal chieftain, and fever ran through my veins, fear turned my limbs to ice; I felt the blows echo in my skull, and I hid my head in the pillows on my bed, crying out:

Mercy! Mercy! The mattock, the horrible mattock!

One day, my Uncle Tungstenius, seeing that I was calm, wanted to convince me also that my journey into
the radiant regions of the crystal was nothing but a dream.

If you have seen all these pretty things, he told me with a smile, I congratulate you. That could be quite
curious
, especially the turquoise islands, if they derived from a gigantic accumulation of the remains of antediluvian animals; but you would do better to forget these
fantastical
exaggerations and study, if not more exactly, then at least more rationally, the history of life from its origin and throughout the entire course of its transformations on our globe. Your vision presented you only with a world that was dead or had yet to be born. You had perhaps thought too much of the moon, where nothing as yet indicates the presence of organic life. It would be better to think of that succession of magnificent births that are wrongly called the lost races, as if anything could be lost in the universe, and as if all new life was not a reworking of the elements of former life.

I listened more readily to my uncle than to my friend Walter, because, despite his stammer, he said some quite good things and did not have so much contempt for the combinations of shape and colour. Only, the sense of the beautiful, which had been revealed to me by Laura in our excursion through the crystal, was absolutely denied to him. He was open to enthusiastic admiration; but for him beauty was a state of being relative to the conditions of its existence. He fell down in ecstasy before the most hideous animals of the antediluvian ages. He was entirely at ease before the mastodon’s teeth, and that monster’s digestive faculties drew tears of affection from him. For him
everything
was mechanism, appropriation and function.