Chapter VIII: Part 8

"It is not merely needed to express all the mind conceives, but without it one cannot be understood by all. Since this idiom is the instinct or the voice of Nature, it ought to be intelligible to everything which lives under Nature's jurisdiction; and so if you understand it you can communicate and speak all your thoughts to beasts and the beasts all their thoughts to you, because it is the very language of Nature by which she makes herself understood by all animals. Therefore you should not be surprised by the ease with which you understand the meaning of a language that never before sounded in your hearing. When I speak, your soul meets in every one of my words that Truth it gropes for; and although your soul's reason does not understand it, the soul has in it Nature which cannot fail to understand this language."

"Ah! without doubt", I cried, "it was by means of this energetic idiom that our first Father of old talked with the animals and was understood by them; domination over all kinds had been given him and they obeyed him, because he made them obey in a language which was known to them; and this mother-tongue, being now lost, they no longer come to us when we call them as formerly, because they no longer understand us."

The little man did not appear as if he were going to reply to me but, taking up the thread of his discourse, he was about to continue when I interrupted him once more. I asked him in what world we were breathing, if it were thickly inhabited and by what sort of government order was maintained.

"I will reveal to you", he replied, "secrets which are not known in your climate. Look carefully at the ground on which we walk; a little while ago it was a confused and disordered mass, a chaos of intricate matter, a black and slimy dross thrown off by the Sun. After it had mingled, pressed and made compact these numerous clouds of atoms by the vigour of the rays still cast forth; after, I say, a long and powerful maturation had separated in this ball the most contrary bodies and united the most similar, this mass was so provoked by heat and sweated so much that it caused a deluge, which covered it more than forty days; for that space of time was fully needed by so much water to flow into the lowest and most sloping parts of our globe.

"From these united torrents of water was formed the sea, whose salt still proves that it must be a mass of sweat, since all sweat is salt. Following upon the retreat of the waters there remained on this earth a fat and fertile mud, and when the Sun shone upon it it rose like a blister, which cannot cast out its germ on account of the cold. It then received another maturation and this maturation rectified and perfected it by a more exact mixture and thereby the germ, which was only able hitherto to vegetate, was rendered capable of sentience. But the waters, which had settled so long on the mud, had chilled it too much and the pimple did not burst; and so the Sun heated it up once more. After the third digestion this womb was so heated that the cold no longer made an obstacle to its delivery: it opened and brought forth a man who has retained in his liver (which is the seat of the vegetative soul and the place of first maturation) the power of multiplying; in his heart (which is the seat of activity and the place of the second maturation) vital power: and in the brain (which is the seat of the intellect and the place of the third maturation) the power of reasoning. Otherwise, why should we be longer in the belly of our mothers than all other animals, if it were not that our embryo must receive three distinct maturations to form the three distinct faculties of our soul, and beasts only two, to form their two powers? I know that the horse is only completed by ten, twelve or fourteen months in the belly of a mare; but since its constitution is so contrary to that which makes us men, since it is never born except in those months (notice!) which are entirely hostile to our birth, when we remain in the womb beyond the normal time, it is not surprising that Nature needs a longer time for the delivery of a mare than of a woman.[58]

[Footnote 58: This sentence is so obscure that I do not understand it either in French or English.]

"Yes, but, someone will say, the horse remains longer in its mother's belly than we do and consequently it receives either more perfect or more numerous maturations!

"I reply that it does not follow; for without relying on the observations on the energy of numbers made by so many learned men proving that, since all matter is in movement, certain beings are completed in a certain revolution of days and destroyed in another, and without strengthening myself with the proofs, whereby they deduce (after explaining the cause of all these movements) that the number nine is the most perfect; I shall content myself by replying that the germ of man is hotter and so the Sun fashions and completes more organs in him in nine months than it sketches out in a year in that of a colt. And it cannot be doubted that a horse is much colder than a man, since this animal only dies of a swollen spleen or other diseases which proceed from melancholy.

"Nevertheless, you will say, in our world we never see a man engendered from mud and produced in this fashion.

"I am sure that your world is now too heated; for as soon as the Sun attracts a germ from the Earth it does not meet that cold damp or, to put it better, that certain period of a completed movement which forces it to several maturations, and so it immediately forms a vegetable; or if two maturations take place, the second has no time to complete itself perfectly and so it only brings forth an insect: thus, I have noticed that the monkey, which like us carries its young nearly nine months, resembles us in so many ways that many naturalists do not distinguish the species from us; and the reason is that their seed is tempered much like ours and during this time has almost been able to complete the three digestions.

"You will undoubtedly ask me from whom I derive the story I have just told you: you will tell me that I cannot have learnt it from those who were not there. It is true that I was the only person there and, consequently, I cannot bear witness to it because it happened before I was born. That is true; but learn that, in a region so near the Sun as ours, souls are filled with fire and are clearer, more subtle and more penetrating than those of other animals in more distant spheres. Now, since even in your world there were prophets whose minds when heated by a vigorous enthusiasm presaged the future, it is not impossible that in this world, so much nearer the Sun and consequently so much more luminous than yours, some odour of the past should reach a powerful genius, that his mobile reason should move backwards as well as forwards and that it should be able to reach a cause by effects, seeing that it can reach effects by a cause."

In this way he finished what he was saying; but after a still more private conversation in which he revealed to me very hidden secrets (one part of which I shall keep silent, while the rest has escaped my memory) he told me that not three weeks before a lump of earth impregnated by the Sun had brought him forth.

"Look at that tumour."

He then pointed out to me something on the mud swollen like a molehill.

"It is", said he, "a boil or, to speak more correctly, a womb which for the last nine months has held the embryo of one of my brothers. I am waiting here for the purpose of acting as his midwife."

He would have gone on had he not perceived the earth palpitating around this clay sod. This, together with the size of the pimple, caused him to judge that the earth was in labour and that this motion was already the effort of the pains of delivery. He left me at once to run to it; and I went off to look for my cabin.

I climbed up the mountain, whence I had descended, and reached its top with some exertion. You may conceive my distress when I found my machine was not where I had left it. I was already sighing for its loss when I saw it fluttering a long way off. I rushed after it at top speed as fast as my legs permitted, and indeed it was an agreeable pastime to contemplate this new method of hunting; for, sometimes when I almost had my hand upon it there would be a slight increase of heat in the glass ball, which drew up the air with more force, and, as this air became swifter, lifted my box above me and made me jump after it like a cat at the hook where it sees a hare hanging. If my shirt had not remained on the roof, and thereby intercepted the force of the mirrors, the box would have gone off on its travels alone.

But to what end do I refresh the memory of an adventure which I cannot recollect now except with a pain such as I then felt? It suffices to know that the box bounded, ran and flew, and that I leaped, walked and strode, until at last I saw it fall at the foot of a very tall mountain. It would very likely have led me further if the shadow of this proud swelling of the earth, which darkened the sky far into the plain, had not spread half a league of darkness around it; for when my box reached these shadows, its glass no sooner felt the coolness than it ceased to create a vacuum, with wind through the hole, and consequently there was no impulse to sustain it; in so much that it fell and would have been broken into a thousand pieces had not the pool into which it fell happily yielded under its weight. I drew it from the water, repaired what was disorganized, and then grasping it with all my strength, carried it to the top of a hill which was close at hand. There, I spread out my shirt around the globe, but I could not clothe it, because the mirrors at once began their office and I perceived my cabin already wriggling to fly. I had only time to step nimbly in and to shut myself up as before.

The sphere of our World appeared to me no more than a planet about the size the Moon appears to us; and, as I continued to rise, it lessened first into a star, then into a spark and then into nothing; this luminous point grew so fine, to equalize itself with that which ended the last ray of my sight, that finally it merged into the colour of the sky. Some may perhaps be astonished that I was not overtaken by sleep during this long voyage; but, since sleep is only produced by the soft exhalation of meats evaporating from the stomach to the brain or by a need felt by Nature to knit up our soul in order to repair during rest the spirits consumed by labour, I had no need to sleep, seeing that I did not eat and that the Sun gave me much more radical heat than I expended. However, I continued to rise and as I approached that burning world I felt a certain joy flowing in my blood, which rectified it and passed into the soul. From time to time I looked up to admire the brightness of the tints which shone in my little crystal dome; and I still remember that as I directed my eyes towards the glass ball I felt with a start something heavy fly out from all the parts of my body. A whirlwind of very thick and almost palpable smoke suffocated my glass with darkness; I stood up to examine this darkness which blinded me and I saw no vessel, no mirrors, no glass, no covering to my cabin. I looked down to see what was making my masterpiece fall in ruins, but in its place and in place of the four sides and the floor I found nothing but the sky about me. What terrified me still more was to feel some invisible obstacle repulsing my arms when I tried to extend them, as if the air had been petrified. It came into my mind then that I had risen so high I must have reached the part of the firmament which certain philosophers and some astronomers have said is solid.

I began to feel I should remain enshrined there, but the horror which overwhelmed me at the strangeness of this accident was increased by those which followed; for, as my sight ranged here and there, it fell on my breast and, instead of stopping at the outer surface of my body, passed through it; then a moment afterwards I perceived that I was looking backwards with hardly any interlapse. As if my body had become nothing but an organ of sight I felt my flesh, purged of its opacity, carry objects to my eyes, and my eyes to objects by its means. At last, after striking a thousand times without seeing them, the roof, the floor and the walls of my chair, I understood that my cabin and I had become transparent, owing to some secret necessity of light at its source. Although it was diaphanous I might still have perceived it, since we clearly perceive glass, crystal and diamonds, which are also diaphanous; but I imagine that in a region so near the Sun that luminary purges bodies much more perfectly of their opacity by arranging the imperceptible channels of matter straighter than in our world, where its strength is almost exhausted by so long a journey and is scarcely capable of transpiring its light into precious stones; yet on account of the interior equality of their superficies it causes them to cast back through their glasses (as if through little eyes) either the green of emeralds, the scarlet of rubies or the violet of amethysts as the different pores of the stone, whether straighter or more sinuous, extinguish or rekindle this enfeebled light by the quantity of the reflections. One difficulty may embarrass the reader, which is how I could see myself and yet not see my box, since I had become as diaphanous as it was. To this I reply that the Sun doubtless acts differently upon living than upon inanimate bodies, since no portion of my flesh, of my bones, or of my entrails lost its natural colour though they were transparent; on the contrary, my lungs preserved their soft delicacy in an incarnadine red; my heart, still vermilion, swung easily between the systole and the diastole; my liver seemed to burn in a fiery purple and heating the air I breathed continued the circulation of my blood; in short, I saw, touched and smelt myself the same and yet I was not the same.

While I considered this metamorphosis my journey grew continually shorter, but at that time much more slow on account of the serenity of the ether, which grew rarefied the nearer I approached the source of the daylight; for, since at this stage matter is very subtle on account of the great amount of void with which it is filled, and since this matter is consequently very idle because of the void which is not active, the air, as it passed through the hole of my box, could only produce a little wind barely able to sustain me.

I never think of the malicious caprices of Fortune, who continued to oppose the success of my enterprise with such obstinacy, but I wonder how it was my brain was not turned. But hearken now a miracle, which future ages will find it difficult to believe. Shut up in a transparent box, of which I had lost sight, with my movement so slackened that I did well not to fall back, in a state where all that the whole machine of the world encloses was powerless to aid me, I was reduced to the height of extreme misfortune; yet, just as when we are dying we are inwardly moved to desire to embrace those who gave us our being, so did I lift my eyes to the Sun, our common father. This ardour of my will not only bore up my body, but hurled it toward the thing which it desired to embrace. My body thrust on my box and in this fashion I continued my journey. As soon as I perceived this I stiffened all the faculties of my soul with more attention than ever to attach them in the imagination to what attracted me, but the efforts of my will forced me against the roof in spite of myself and the weight of my cabin on my head so incommoded me that finally the burden forced me to grope for its invisible door. Fortunately I found it, opened it and threw myself outside; but that natural apprehension of falling, which all animals have when they find themselves supported by nothing, made me stretch out my arm suddenly to catch hold of it. I was only guided by Nature, which cannot reason, and therefore Fortune, her enemy, maliciously thrust my hand against the crystal roof. Alas! What a thunder-clap it was in my ears when I heard the noise of the icosahedron breaking into fragments! So great a disorder, so great a misfortune, so great a terror are beyond all expression. The mirrors attracted no more air, for there was no more vacuum; the air ceased to become a wind by hastening to fill it; the wind ceased to urge my box upwards; in short, soon after this breakage I saw it falling far across the vast fields of the world and in that region it regained the opaque darkness it had exhaled. Since the energetic strength of the light diminished there, the box eagerly rejoined the dark density which was, as it were, essential to it, just as we see souls long after their separation return to seek their bodies, and, in trying to rejoin them, wander about their sepulchres for a hundred years. I surmise that it lost its transparency in this way, for I saw it afterwards in Poland in the same state as it was when I first entered it. I have since learned that it fell in the Kingdom of Borneo, under the equinoctial line; that a Portuguese merchant bought it from the islander who found it and that, passing from hand to hand, it came into the possession of the Polish engineer who now flies in it.[59]

[Footnote 59: It has been held that this refers to the "flying dragon" experimented with by Buratini at Warsaw in 1648. The evidence that Cyrano himself had visited Poland is very flimsy.]

Thus suspended in the airy regions of the sky, filled with consternation at the death I expected by my fall, I turned my sad eyes to the Sun, as I have already told you. My sight carried my thought with it and my looks fixedly attached to its globe marked out a way whose traces were followed by my will to lift my body there. This vigorous bound of my soul will not be incomprehensible to any one who will consider the most simple effects of our will; it is well known, for example, that when I wish to leap, my will, borne up by my fantasy, raises the whole microcosm and tries to carry it to the point desired, and if it does not always reach this, the reason is that the principles of Nature, which are universal, prevail over individuals, and, since the power of will is peculiar to sentient things and that of falling to the centre is common to all matter, my leap is forced to end when its mass, having conquered the insolence of the will which surprised it, draws near the point to which it tends.

I shall say nothing more of what happened on the rest of my journey for fear of taking as long to tell it as to make it; let it suffice that at the end of twenty-two months I landed very happily upon the great plains of the day. This land is like burning snow-flakes, so luminous is it. Yet it is an incredible thing which I have never been able to understand whether, after my box fell, I rose to or descended upon the Sun. I only remember that when I arrived there I walked lightly upon it; I only touched the ground by a point and I often rolled like a ball without finding it any more uncomfortable to walk with my head than with my feet. Although my legs were sometimes turned towards the sky and my shoulders towards the ground, I felt as naturally placed in this position as if my legs had been upon the ground and my shoulders towards the sky. On whatever part of my body I placed myself, on the belly, on the back, on an elbow, on an ear, I found myself upright. By this I perceived that the Sun is a world which has no centre and that, since I was far outside the active sphere of our world and all those I had met with, it was consequently impossible that I should still weigh, since weight is only the attraction of a centre within the sphere of its activity.

The respect with which I printed my steps upon this luminous country suspended for a time my burning ardour to continue my voyage. I felt myself ashamed to walk upon the daylight; my astonished body was desirous of support from my eyes and since this transparent land which they penetrated could not support them, my instinct, having mastered my thought in spite of me, drew me to the most hollow part of a depthless light. Little by little, however, my reason undeceived my instinct; I pressed assured and not trembling steps upon the plain and I counted my strides so proudly that if men could have perceived me from their world they would have taken me for the great God who walks upon the clouds. After I had walked about fifteen days, as I believe, I reached a district of the Sun less resplendent than that from which I came. I felt deeply moved by joy and I imagined that this joy was assuredly the result of a secret sympathy for its opacity retained by my being. The knowledge I had of it did not make me desist from my enterprise; for I was like those sleeping old men who, although they know that sleep is bad for them and that they have ordered their servants to deprive them of it, are nevertheless very annoyed at the time they are awakened. So, as my body grew darker when I reached more shaded provinces, it re-contracted the weaknesses brought by this infirmity of matter; I grew weary and sleep grasped me.

Those pleasing languors which possess us at the approach of sleep poured so much pleasure into my senses that, captured by pleasure, my senses forced my soul to thank the tyrant who chains his slaves; for sleep, that old tyrant of one half our days, who, on account of his old age, cannot endure the light or look upon it without swooning, had been forced to abandon me when I entered the brilliant climates of the Sun and had come to wait for me upon the borders of the shaded region of which I speak, where he caught me, arrested me his prisoner, and shut up his declared enemies, my eyes, under the dark vault of my eyelids; and, fearing lest my other senses should betray him as they had betrayed me and trouble him in the peaceable possession of his conquest, he tied down all of them to their beds. All this means in two words that I lay down very weary upon the sand. It was a flat plain, so bare that as far as I could see my sight did not even meet a bush; and yet when I woke up I found myself under a tree, in comparison with which the tallest cedars would seem like grass. Its trunk was of massive gold, its branches of silver and its leaves of emeralds, which, underneath the glittering green of their precious surface, reflected as in a mirror the images of the fruit which hung round about. But judge whether the fruit owed anything to the leaves: the burning scarlet of a large carbuncle formed one half of each and the other half was uncertain whether its material came from chrysolite or from a piece of golden amber; the open flowers were roses of very large diamonds and the buds were big, pear-shaped pearls. A nightingale, whose smooth plumage rendered him excellently beautiful, was perched on the summit and seemed with his melody desirous of forcing the eyes to confess to the ears that he was not unworthy of the throne upon which he was seated.

For a long time I remained amazed at the sight of so rich a spectacle and I could not be satiated with looking at it; but as I was occupying all my thoughts in contemplating among the other fruits an extraordinarily beautiful pomegranate, whose pulp was a cluster of several large rubies, I perceived the little crown which took the place of its head was moving and stretching out until it formed a neck. Then I saw something white seething above it which, by thickening, growing, advancing and retiring the matter in different places, at last appeared as the face of a small bust of flesh. This small bust ended in a circle about the waist; that is to say, its lower parts still kept the shape of an apple. Little by little it stretched out, its stem became two legs, and each of its legs split into five toes. This humanised pomegranate loosened itself from its stem and with a light bound fell exactly at my feet. Certainly I must admit I was impressed with veneration when I saw this little reasonable apple, this little piece of a dwarf no larger than my thumb, but strong enough to create itself, walking before me proudly.

"Human animal", he said in that mother-tongue, whereof I have formerly spoken, "after I had observed you for a long time from the branch on which I was hanging I thought I read in your face that you were not an inhabitant of this world, and for that reason I have descended to be enlightened by the truth."

When I had satisfied his curiosity about all the matters concerning which he questioned me, I said to him:

"But tell me who you are; what I have just seen is so very astonishing that I despair of ever knowing the cause unless you instruct me. What! a huge tree all of pure gold, whose leaves are emeralds, the flowers diamonds, the buds pearls, and, among all this, fruits which make themselves into men in the twinkling of an eye? For my part I admit that the comprehension of such a miracle passes my capacity."

I was awaiting his reply to this explanation, when he said:

"As I am the king of the nation which makes up this tree, you will not take it ill if I call them to follow me."

When he had spoken thus I noticed that he collected himself in meditation. I do not know if he wound up the interior springs of his will and thus excited outside himself the movement, which was the cause of what you are about to hear, but it is certain that immediately afterwards all the fruits, all the flowers, all the leaves, all the branches, in short, the whole tree, fell apart into little seeing, feeling and walking men, who began to dance around me as if to celebrate their birthday at the very moment of their birth. The nightingale alone retained its shape and was not metamorphosed; it came and perched on the shoulder of the little monarch, where it sang an air so melancholy and so amorous that the whole assembly, including the prince himself, were moved by the gentle languors of its dying voice and shed a few tears. My curiosity to learn whence this bird came caused me so extraordinary a longing to speak that I could not contain it.

"Seigneur", said I, addressing myself to the king, "if I did not fear to importune your majesty I should ask you why among so many metamorphoses the nightingale alone has kept its being?"

The little prince listened to me with a benevolence which showed his natural kindness; and, understanding my curiosity, he replied:

"The nightingale has not changed its form like us, because it could not. It is a real bird and is no more than it appears to be. But let us walk towards the opaque regions and on the way I will relate to you who I am, together with the story of the nightingale."

I had scarcely showed the satisfaction I received from his offer, when he bounded lightly on to one of my shoulders. He raised himself on his little toes to bring his mouth level with my ear; and sometimes hanging by my hair and sometimes sliding down it, he said:

"By my faith, you must excuse a person who is already out of breath. I have crowded lungs in a little body and my voice is consequently so weak that I am forced to strain to make myself heard. I hope the nightingale will speak for himself. Let him sing if he wishes, and we shall at least have the pleasure of hearing his story in music."

I replied that I was not yet sufficiently practised in the language of birds; that, indeed, a certain philosopher whom I had met on my way to the Sun had given me some general principles to understand that of the beasts, but that they were not enough to understand all words in general, nor enough for me to be moved by all the delicate points which would be met with in an adventure such as this must be.

"Well", said he, "since you will have it so, your ears shall be deprived not only of the nightingale's beautiful songs, but of almost all its adventure, whereof I can only tell you that part which has come to my knowledge; however, you must be content with this fragment, because, even if I knew it all, the brevity of our journey to its country, whither I am about to conduct you, would not permit me to take my story further."

Having spoken thus, he jumped from my shoulder to the ground. He then gave his hand to his little subjects and began to dance with them in a kind of movement which I cannot describe, because nothing like it has ever been seen. But hearken, nations of the Earth, to that which I do not compel you to believe, because it passed for a miracle in a world where your miracles are only natural effects! As soon as these little men began to dance I seemed to feel their motion in myself and my motion in them. I could not look upon this dance without being distinctly moved from where I was, as if a whirlwind agitated all the parts of my body with the same dance and the particular movement of each one; and I felt the same joy expanding upon my face which a similar movement had spread upon theirs. As the dance drew closer, the dancers became confused with a much more rapid and more imperceptible motion; it seemed that the object of the ballet was to represent an enormous giant; for as they drew nearer each other and redoubled the swiftness of their movement they became so closely mingled that I perceived nothing but a great, open and almost transparent colossus; and yet my eyes perceived them interlinked with each other. At this moment I began to be unable to distinguish any more the diversity of the movements of each, on account of their extreme rapidity and also because this rapidity shrank as it approached the centre, and thus each vortex at last occupied so little space that it escaped my sight. Yet I think these parts drew still closer together; for this once unwieldy human mass gradually reduced itself until it formed a young man of moderate height, all of whose limbs were proportioned with a symmetry to which perfection at its strongest idea could never have flown. He was beautiful beyond everything to which all painters have raised their fantasy; but what I thought very marvellous was that the connection of all the parts which completed this perfect microcosm took place within the twinkling of an eye. The most agile of our little dancers leaped up with a flourish to the height and into the position needed to form a head; others hotter and not so loose formed the heart; and others much heavier only supplied the bones, the flesh and the plumpness.

When this large, beautiful young man was entirely finished, although his rapid construction had scarcely allowed me any time to notice an interval in its progress, I saw the king of the whole people enter by the mouth, yet it seemed to me he was attracted into this body by the breathing of the body itself. All this mass of little men had not yet given any sign of life; but as soon as it had swallowed its little king, it felt itself one. He remained some time looking at me and then, as if he were grown familiar by looking, he approached me, caressed me, and giving me his hand said:

"And now without damaging the delicacy of my lungs I can converse with you about the things which you long to know; but it is reasonable to reveal to you first of all the hidden secrets of our origin. Learn then that we are animals inhabiting the luminous regions of the Sun; the most general and the most useful of our occupations is to travel through the vast countries of this great world. We note carefully the habits of the nations, the peculiarity of climates and the nature of all things that can merit our attention, from which we build up an exact science of what exists. You must know that my vassals travelled under my guidance and, in order to have leisure to observe things more curiously, we did not keep the conformation particular to our body (which your senses could not perceive), whose subtlety would have caused us to move too quickly; but we made ourselves into birds. All my subjects became eagles by my command; and for fear they should grow weary I transformed myself into a nightingale to soothe their fatigue by the charms of music. I followed the rapid flight of my people without flying, for I was perched on the head of one of my vassals. We were following our road when a nightingale, dwelling in a province of the opaque country, through which we were then travelling, astonished to see me in the power of an eagle (it could only take us for what it saw us to be), began to commiserate my misfortune. I caused my followers to halt and we descended on the tops of some trees where sighed this charitable bird. I took so much pleasure in the sweetness of its mournful songs that I would not undeceive it, in order that I might enjoy them longer and more at my ease. On the spur of the moment I invented a story, in which I related to it imaginary misfortunes which had caused me to fall into the hands of the eagle; I mixed with it such surprising adventures, wherein the passions were so skilfully aroused and the music so well suited to the words, that the nightingale was beside itself.

"One after the other we sang to each other in music the story of our mutual loves. In my airs I sang that I was not only consoled for, but that I even rejoiced in, my misfortune, since it had procured me the glory of being lamented in such beautiful songs; and this inconsolable little creature replied in its airs that it would gladly accept all my esteem for it, if it knew that this could make it merit the honour of dying in my place, but that, since Fortune had not reserved so much glory for so unfortunate a creature, it would only accept of that esteem sufficiently to prevent me from blushing for my friendship. In my turn I replied again with all the transports, all the tenderness and all the caresses of so touching a passion that twice or thrice I perceived it ready to die of love on its branch. In truth, I mingled such skill with the softness of my voice and I surprised its ear with such masterly strokes and with paths so little frequented by those of its kind, that I carried off its fair soul into all the passions by which I desired to dominate it.

"We passed twenty-four hours in this exercise and I think we should never have been tired of making love if our throats had not refused us voices. This was the only obstacle which prevented us from proceeding, but feeling that the labour was beginning to hurt my throat and that I could not go further without falling into a swoon, I made it a sign to come near me. The peril in which it thought I was in the midst of so many eagles convinced it that I was calling it to my help. It flew immediately to my aid and, wishing to give a glorious proof that it dared to brave death even to his throne for a friend's sake, it came and sat proudly on the great curved beak of the eagle on which I was perched. So great a courage in so weak an animal moved me to veneration; for, even if I had called to it as it supposed and although there is a law among animals of the same kind to help another in misfortune, yet the instinct of its timid nature ought to have made it hesitate. But it did not hesitate. On the contrary, it started so hastily that I do not know which flew the first, my signal or the nightingale. Proud at seeing the tyrant's head under its feet, happy to think that it was about to be sacrificed for love of me almost within my wings and that perhaps some fortunate drops of its blood might be sprinkled on my feathers, it looked gently towards me and, having as it were said farewell by a look, which seemed to ask my permission to die, it thrust its little beak so sharply into the eagle's eyes that I saw they were crushed rather than struck. When my bird felt it was blind it made itself new sight at once. I remonstrated gently with the nightingale on its too precipitate action and, judging that it would be dangerous to hide from it any longer our real existence, I revealed myself to it and told it what we were; but the poor little creature, convinced that these barbarians, whose prisoner I was, forced me to feign this fable, would give no faith to anything I could say. When I perceived that all the reasons by which I tried to convince it were mere waste of breath, I whispered some orders to ten or twelve thousand of my subjects and immediately the nightingale perceived at its feet a river flowing under a boat and the boat floating upon the river. It was just large enough to hold me twice over. At the first signal I made to them my eagles flew off and I threw myself into the boat, whence I cried to the nightingale to embark with me if it could not yet resolve to abandon me so soon. As soon as it came in I commanded the river to flow towards the region where my people were flying; but since the fluidity of the water was less than that of the air and consequently the rapidity of their flight greater than that of our sailing, we remained a little behind.

"All the way I tried to undeceive my little guest; I pointed out to it that it could hope for no fruit from its passion, since we were not of the same species; that it ought to have perceived this when the eagle whose eyes it had crushed had made new eyes in its presence, and when at my command ten thousand of my vassals had metamorphosed themselves into this river and the boat in which we were sailing. My arguments were unsuccessful. The nightingale replied that as to the eagle making itself eyes as I asserted, there had been no need, because it was not blinded, since the beak had not pierced its eye-balls; and as to the river and the boat, which I said had only been created by a metamorphosis of my people, they had been in the wood since the creation of the world, only no one had noticed them. Seeing it was so ingenious in deceiving itself I agreed with it that my vassals and I would metamorphose ourselves into whatever it liked before its eyes, on condition that afterwards it would return to its own country. Sometimes it asked that this should be a tree; sometimes it wished this to be a flower, sometimes a fruit, sometimes a metal, sometimes a stone. At last to satisfy all its desires at once, when we had reached my court at the place where I had ordered it to await me, we metamorphosed ourselves before the nightingale's eyes into that precious tree, whose shape we have just abandoned, which you met with on your road.

"Now I see this little bird resolved to return into its own country, my subjects and I will renew our shape and continue our journey. But first of all it is reasonable to tell you who we are: animals, natives of the Sun in its luminous part, for there is a very remarkable difference between the nations produced by the luminous region and the nations of the opaque region. In the world of the Earth you call us Spirits and your presumptuous stupidity gave us this name because you could not imagine any animals more perfect than man, and yet you saw certain creatures perform acts above human power, and so you thought these animals were Spirits. But you are mistaken, nevertheless; we are animals like you. Although, as you have just seen, we give our matter the shape and essential form of those things into which we desire to metamorphose ourselves, whenever we please, that does not mean that we are Spirits. But hearken, and I will discover to you why it is that all these metamorphoses which seem to you so many miracles are purely natural processes. You must know that since we were born inhabitants of the bright part of this great world, where the principle of matter is action, our imagination is necessarily much more active than that of the inhabitants of the opaque regions and the substance of our bodies is also much finer. Granted this, it inevitably follows that since our imagination meets with no obstacle in the matter which composes us, it arranges that matter as it desires and since it is mistress of our whole mass it causes this mass to pass, by moving all its particles, into the order necessary to create on a large scale the thing it has formed in little. Thus each of us imagined the place and part of that precious tree into which he desired to change, and by this effort of imagination we excited our matter to the movements necessary to produce them, and therefore we became metamorphosed into them. Thus, when my eagle's eyes were crushed, to re-establish them he had only to imagine himself a clear-sighted eagle, since all our transformations occur by means of movement; for this reason, when we transmuted ourselves out of leaves, flowers and fruits into men, you saw we still danced some time after, because we had not yet recovered from the movement we had to give our matter to make ourselves into men: like bells which vibrate after they stop and continue in muffled tones the same sounds which the clapper caused by striking them. For the same reason you saw us dance before we made a large man because, in order to produce it, we had to give ourselves all the general and particular movements necessary to constitute it; so that this motion, bringing our bodies little by little closer to each other and absorbing them one with another through its movement, should create in each part the specific movement it ought to have. You men cannot do the same things on account of the weight of your mass and the coldness of your imaginations."

He continued his proof and supported it with examples so palpable that finally I threw off a large number of badly proved opinions by means of which our pig-headed men of learning prejudice weak people's understanding. Then I began to comprehend that in very truth the imagination of these Solar people, which on account of the climate must be hotter, while for the same reason their bodies must be lighter and their entities more mobile (since in that world, unlike ours, there is no attraction from the centre to turn matter away from the movement imprinted upon it by the imagination) I conceived, I say, that without a miracle this imagination could produce all the miracles it had recently done. A thousand examples of almost similar events, witnessed by the nations of our globe, completed my conviction: Cippus, King of Italy, having witnessed a bull-fight, so filled his imagination with horns all that night that the next morning he found his forehead horned; Gallus Vitius, bending up his soul and exciting it vigorously to conceive the essence of madness, by an effort of imagination gave his matter the same movements this matter should have to constitute madness, and so became mad; King Codrus, the consumptive, fixing his eyes and his thought on the freshness of a young face and upon that flourishing happiness which the boy's youth overflowed with almost to him, and giving his body the movement by which he imagined the young man's health, became convalescent; and lastly several pregnant women made monsters of the children already formed in their wombs, because their imagination was not strong enough to give them themselves the shape of the monsters they imagined, but was strong enough to arrange the much hotter and more mobile matter of the fœtus in the order necessary for the production of these monsters. I am even convinced that, when that famous hypochondriac of antiquity imagined himself a pitcher, if his matter had not been too compact and too heavy to follow the emotion of his fantasy it would have formed a perfect pitcher out of his body, and he would really have appeared a pitcher to everyone as he appeared to himself.

So many other satisfactory examples convinced me to such an extent that I did not doubt any of the marvels related to me by the Man-Spirit. He asked me if I desired anything more of him; I thanked him with all my heart. Afterwards he had still the kindness to advise me, since I was an inhabitant of the earth, to follow the nightingale into the opaque regions of the Sun, because they were more apt for the pleasures desired by human nature. Scarcely had he finished speaking when he opened his mouth very wide and I saw the king of these little animals fly out of his throat in the shape of a nightingale. The large man fell down at once and at the same time all his limbs flew away piecemeal in the shape of eagles. This nightingale, creator of himself, perched on the head of the most beautiful of them, whence he sang an admirable air, by which I fancy he bade me farewell. The real nightingale flew away also, but not in their direction nor so high as they. I did not lose sight of it and we travelled on at about the same pace; for since I had no idea of visiting one country rather than another I was very glad to accompany it, especially since the opaque regions of the birds were more suitable to my temperament and I hoped there to meet with adventures more answerable to my humour.

With this hope I journeyed on for at least three weeks with every sort of pleasure, if I had had only my ears to satisfy, since the nightingale did not let me lack music; when it was weary it came and rested upon my shoulder and when I stopped it waited for me. At last I reached a district in the region of this little singer, which then did not trouble to accompany me further. Having lost sight of it, I sought for it and called it; but at last I grew so weary of vainly pursuing it that I resolved to rest. For this purpose I lay down upon a lawn of soft grass which carpeted the roots of a tall rock. This rock was covered with several green leafy saplings, whose shadow charmed my tired senses most delightfully and forced me to abandon them to sleep, to repair in safety my strength in so calm and cool a place.

STORY OF THE BIRDS[60]

[Footnote 60: See Appendix I, for a brief account of Tom d'Urfey's opera derived from this part of Cyrano's _Voyages_.]

I began to grow sleepy in the shade, when I perceived a marvellous bird gliding in the air above my head; it sustained itself with so light and so imperceptible a movement that I wondered several times if it were not a little universe balanced by its own centre. Nevertheless it descended little by little and at last arrived so near me that my eyes were happily filled with its image. Its tail appeared to be green, its belly of enamelled azure, its wings carnation colour and its purple head glittered, when moved, with a golden crown whose rays sprang from its eyes. For a long time it flew in the air and I was so attentive to everything it did that my soul, being as it were folded and shortened down to the single operation of seeing, scarcely reached to that of hearing for me to perceive that the bird talked by singing.

Released little by little from my ecstasy, I noticed distinctly syllables, words and the speech it articulated. Here then, to the best of my memory, are the terms in which he arranged the fabric of his song:

"You are a stranger", sang the bird very agreeably, "and you were born in a world where I was born too. That secret inclination which draws us to our compatriots is the instinct urging me to desire that you should know my life.

"I see that your mind is trying to understand how it is possible that I can express myself to you in coherent speech, seeing that although birds imitate your words they do not understand them; but when you in turn imitate the barking of a dog or the song of a nightingale you do not understand what the dog or the nightingale means. From that you may deduce that neither birds nor men are any the less reasonable on this account.

"However, just as among you there have been found men so enlightened that they understood and spoke our language, such as Apollonius Tianeus, Anaximander, Æsop[61] and several others, whose names I will not repeat, since you have never heard of them; so among us there are individuals who understand and speak your language. Some, indeed, only know the language of one nation; but just as there are some birds which say nothing, others which twitter, others which talk, so there are still more perfect birds able to use all sorts of idioms. For my part I have the honour to belong to that small number.

[Footnote 61: Apollonius of Tyana (1st cent. A.D.), Greek neo-Pythagorean. Anaximander (611-547 B.C.), Greek philosopher. Æsop (620-560 B.C.), Greek fabulist.]