Niels Andersen admitted that he had himself seen whales which, propping themselves against a cliff of ice, indulged in movements very similar to those we remark in the oratories of the various religious sects, but he maintained that devotion has nothing to do with this phænomenon. He explained it on physiological grounds; he called my attention to the fact that the whale, this Chimborazo of animals, has beneath its skin strata of fat of a depth so prodigious that a single whale often furnishes a hundred to a hundred and fifty barrels of tallow and oil. These layers of fat are so thick that while the colossus sleeps, stretched at its full length upon an icefield, hundreds of water rats can come and settle in it. These convives immensely larger and more voracious than the rats of the mainland, lead joyous life under the skin of the whale, where day and night they gorge themselves with the most delicious fat without being obliged to quit their holes. These banquets of vermin at length trouble their involuntary host and even cause him excessive sufferings. Not having hands as we have, who, God be thanked, can scratch ourselves when we feel an itching, the whale tries to mitigate his pangs by placing himself against the protruding and sharp angles of a rock of ice, and by there rasping his back with a real fervor and with vigorous movements up and down, as we see the dogs rasping their skin against a bed-post when the fleas bite them overmuch. Now in these movements the good dominie thought he saw the edifying act of prayer, and he attributed to devotion the jerkings occasioned by the orgies of the rats. Enormous as is the quantity of oil in the whale, it has not the least religious sentiment. It is only among animals of mediocre stature that we find any religion; the very great, the creatures gigantic like the whale are not endowed with it. What can be the reason? Is it that they cannot find a church sufficiently spacious to afford them entrance into its pale? Nor have the whales any taste for the prophets, and the one which swallowed Jonah was not able to digest that great preacher; seized with nausea, it vomited him after three days. Most certainly that proves the absence of all religious sentiment in these monsters. The whale, therefore, would never choose an ice-block for prayer-cushion, and sway itself in attitudes of devotion. It adores as little the true God who resides above there in heaven, as the false pagan god who dwells near the arctic pole, in the Isle of the Rabbits, where the dear beast goes sometimes to pay him a visit.
“What is this Isle of Rabbits?” I asked Niels Andersen. Drumming on the barrel with his wooden leg, he answered, “It is exactly in this isle that the events took place of which I am going to tell you. I am not able to give you its precise geographical position. Since its first discovery no one has been able to visit it again; the enormous mountains of ice accumulated around it bar the approach. Once only has it been visited, by the crew of a Russian whaler driven by-tempests into those northern latitudes, and that was more than a hundred years ago. When these sailors, reached it with their ship they found it deserted and uncultivated. Sickly stalks of broom swayed sadly upon the quicksands; here and there were scattered some dwarf shrubs and stunted firs crouching on the sterile soil. Rabbits ran about everywhere in great numbers; and this is the reason the sailors call the islet the Isle of Rabbits. A cabin, the only one they discovered, announced the presence of a human being. When the mariners had entered the hut they saw an old man, arrived at the most extreme decrepitude and miserably muffled in rabbit skins. He was seated upon a stone settle, and warmed his thin hands and trembling knees at the grate where some brushwood was burning. At his right hand stood a monstrously large bird, which seemed to be an eagle; but the moulting of time had so cruelly stripped it that only the great stiff main-plumes of its wings were left, so that the aspect of this naked animal was at once ludicrous and horribly ugly. On the left of the old man was couched upon the ground an aged bald-skinned she-got, yet with a gentle look, and which, in spite of its great age, had the dugs swollen with milk and the teats fresh and rosy.
“Among the sailors who had landed on the Isle of Rabbits there were some Greeks, and one of these, thinking that the man of the hut could not understand his tongue, said to his comrades in Greek, ‘This queer old fellow must be either a ghost or an evil spirit.’ At these words the old man trembled and rose suddenly from his seat, and the sailors, to their great astonishment, saw a lofty and imposing figure, which, with imperious and even majestic dignity, held itself erect in spite of the weight of years, so that the head reached the rafters of the roof. His lineaments, though worn and ravaged, conserved traces of beauty; they were noble and perfectly regular. Thin locks of silver hair fell upon the forehead wrinkled by pride and by age; his eyes, though glazed and lustreless, darted keen regards, and his finely-curved lips pronounced in the Greek language, mingled with many archaisms, these words resonant and harmonious:—‘You are mistaken, young man, I am neither a spectre nor an evil spirit; I am an unfortunate who has seen better days. But you—what are you.’
“At this demand the seamen acquainted their host with the accident which had driven them out of their course, and they begged him to tell them all about the isle. But the old man could give them but scant information. He told them that from immemorial times he had dwelt in this isle, of which the ramparts of ice offered him a sure refuge against his implacable enemies, who had usurped his legitimate rights; that his main subsistence was derived from the rabbits with which the isle abounded; that every year, at the season when the floating ice-blocks formed a compact mass, troops of savages in sledges visited him, who, in exchange for his rabbit skins, gave him all sorts of articles most necessary to life. The whales, he said, which now and then approached his isle, were his favorite society. Nevertheless, he added that he felt much pleasure at this moment in speaking his native language, being Greek by birth. He begged his compatriots to inform him as to the then state of Greece. He learnt with a malicious joy, badly dissimulated, that the Cross once surmounting the towers of the Hellenic cities had been shattered; he showed less satisfaction when they told him that this Christian symbol had been replaced by the Crescent. The most singular thing was that none of the seamen knew the names of the towns concerning which he questioned them, and which, according to him, had been flourishing cities in his time. On the other hand, the names by which the seamen designated the towns and villages of modern Greece were completely unknown to him; and the old man shook his head often, as if quite overwhelmed, and the sailors looked at each other with wonder. They saw well that he knew perfectly the localities of the country, even to the minutest details; for he described clearly and exactly the gulfs, the peninsulas, the capes, often even, the most insignificant hills and isolated groups of rocks. His ignorance of the commonest typographical names, therefore astonished them all the more.
“The old man asked, with the most lively interest, and even with a certain anxiety, about an ancient temple, which, he said, had been of old the grandest in all Greece. None of his hearers recognised the name,, which he pronounced with tender emotion. At last,, when he had minutely described the place where this, monument stood, a young seaman suddenly recognised the spot. ‘The village where I was born,’ he exclaimed, ‘is situated precisely there. During my childhood I have long watched there the pigs of my father. On this site there are, in fact, the ruins of very ancient constructions, which must have been incredibly magnificent. Here and there you see some columns still erect; they are isolated or connected by fragments of roofing, whence hang tendrils of honeysuckle and red bind-weeds. Other columns, some of them red marble, lie fractured on the grass. The ivy has invaded their superb capitals, formed of flowers and foliage delicately chiselled. Great slabs of marble, squared fragments of wall and triangular pieces of roofing, are scattered about, half-buried in the earth. I have often, continued the young man, ‘passed hours at a time in examining the combats and the games, the dances and the processions, the beautiful and ludicrous figures which are sculptured there. Unfortunately these sculptures are much injured by time, and are covered with moss and creepers. My father, whom I once asked what these ruins were, told me that they were the remnants of an ancient temple, of old inhabited by a Pagan God, who not only indulged in the most gross debaucheries, but who was, moreover, guilty of incest and other infamous vices; that in their blindness the idolators had, nevertheless, immolated oxen, often by hundreds, at the foot of his altar. My father assured me that we still saw the marble basin wherein they had gathered the blood of the victims, and that it was precisely the trough to which I frequently led my swine to drink the rain-water, and in which I also preserved the refuse which my animals devoured with so much appetite.’
“When the young sailor had thus spoken, the old man gave a deep sigh of the most bitter anguish; he sank nerveless upon the stone seat, and hiding his visage in his hands, wept like a child. The bird at his side emitted terrible cries, spread its enormous wings, and menaced the strangers with talons and beak. The she-goat moaned and licked the hands of her master, whose sorrows she seemed trying to comfort by her humble caresses. At this sight a strange trouble swelled in the hearts of the seamen; they hastily quitted the hut, and did not feel at ease until they could no more hear the sobbings of the old man, the croakings of the hideous bird, and the bleatings of the goat. When they got on board their vessel again they related their adventures. Among the crew there chanced to be a scholar, who declared that it was an event of the highest importance. Applying with a sagacious air his right forefinger to his nose, he assured the seamen that the old man of the Isle of Rabbits was beyond all doubt the ancient god Jupiter, son of Saturn and Rhea, once sovereign lord of the gods; that the bird which they had seen at his side was evidently the famous eagle which used to bear the thunderbolts in its talons; and that, in all probability, the goat was the old nurse Amalthea, which had of old suckled the god in the isle of Crete, and which now continued to nourish him with its milk in the Isle of Rabbits.”
Such was the history of Niels Andersen, and it made my heart bleed. I will not dissemble; already his revelations concerning the secret sufferings of the whale had profoundly saddened me. Poor animal! against this vile mob of rats, which house themselves in your body and gnaw you incessantly, no remedy avails, and you carry them about with you to the end of your days; rush as you will to the north and to the south, rasp yourself against the ice-rocks of the two poles, you can never get rid of these villainous rats? But pained as I had been by the outrage wreaked upon the poor whales, my soul was infinitely more troubled by the tragical fate of this old man who, according to the mythological theory of the learned Russian, was the heretofore King of the gods, Jupiter the Chronide. Yes, he, even he, was subject to the fatality of Destiny, from which not the immortals themselves can escape; and the spectacle of such calamities horrifies us, in filling us with pity and indignation. Be Jupiter, be the sovereign lord of the world, the frown of whose brows made tremble the universe! be chanted by Homer, and sculptured by Phidias in gold and ivory; be adored by a hundred nations during long centuries; be the lover of Semele, of Danae, of Europa, of Alcmena, of Io, of Leda, of Calisto! and after all, nothing will remain at the end but a decrepit old man, who to gain his miserable livelihood has to turn dealer in rabbit skins, like any poor Savoyard. Such a spectacle will no doubt give pleasure to the vile multitude, which insults to-day that which it adored yesterday. Perhaps among these worthy people are to be found some of the descendants of those unlucky bulls which were of old immolated in hecatombs upon the altar of Jupiter; let such rejoice in his fall, and mock him at their ease, in revenge for the blood of their ancestors, victims of idolatry; as for me, my soul is singularly moved, and I am seized with dolorous commiseration at the view of this august misfortune.
[THE DAILY NEWS]
(1874.)
:: “Ich hab’ mein Sach auf Nichts gestellt,