Fig. 33. Ultra-Martian houses. Drawn by Mlle. Smith after her vision of November 2, 1898.
“The roofs were flat, supplied with chimneys, or tubes. The men, with arms and bodies bare, had for all clothing only a sort of skirt reaching to the waist and supported by a kind of suspenders thrown over the shoulders, which were apparently very strong. Their heads were very short, being about three inches high by six inches broad, and were close shaven. They had very small eyes, immense mouths, noses like beans. Everything was so different from what we are accustomed to in our world that I should have almost believed it to be an animal rather than a man I saw there, had there not suddenly issued from the lips of one of them some words, which, fortunately—I hardly know how—I was able to note down. This vision lasted a quarter of an hour. Then I found my waist liberated, but my right hand was still firmly held, in order to trace strange characters on the paper” (text 34, adieux of Ramié to Hélène).
A little later there was a continuation, or an abortive repetition, of the same vision; the table did not appear distinctly, and Ramié (text 35) contented himself with teaching Hélène things concerning a world beyond, a near neighbor to Mars, and a coarser language, of which Astané alone could furnish a translation. This is, in effect, what took place two weeks later: Astané incarnated himself with gestures and peculiar spasmodic movements, and repeated (in Hélène’s ordinary voice) the barbaric text, followed word by word by its Martian equivalents, which Esenale, in turn, succeeding Astané, interpreted in French, in his customary manner. Leopold also informed us, in reply to a question of one of the sitters, that this uncouth and primitive world was one of the smaller planets; but it is to be presumed that he would also have answered in the affirmative if he had been asked if it were called Phobos or Deimos; and, in short, one of the satellites of Mars would answer better than the asteroids to the globe “very near to ours,” of which Ramié spoke.
Up to this point the ultra-Martian messages were confined to the preceding. The last texts obtained (37 to 40) seem to announce that the end has not been reached on that side, and cause us to hope for new revelations, when the astronomer Ramié, as the result of his having studied under the skilful direction of his master Astané, shall be in a position to make further discoveries in the Martian sky. Psychologically speaking, this amounts to saying that the process of latent incubation continues; a new ultra-Martian language is in a state of development in the subliminal depths. If it bursts forth some day, I shall hasten to bring it to the knowledge of the scientific world—in another edition of this book. For the present I limit myself to remarking how much the little ultra-Martian we possess already indicates the wish to answer my questions of the 16th of October.
I had accused the Martian dream of being a mere imitation, varnished with brilliant Oriental colors, of the civilized environment which surrounds us—and here is a world of terrifying grotesqueness, with black soil, from which all vegetation is banished, and the coarser people of which are more like beasts than human beings. I had insinuated that the people and things of that upper world ought really to have other dimensions and proportions than with us—and here are the inhabitants of that farther world veritable dwarfs, with heads twice as broad as they are high, and houses to match. I had made allusion to the probable existence of other languages, referred to the superabundance in Martian of i and e, impeached its syntax and its ch, borrowed from the French, etc.—and here is a language absolutely new, of a very peculiar rhythm, extremely rich in a, without any ch at all up to the present moment, and of which the construction is so different from the French that there is no method of discovering it.
This latter point, above all, seems to me to present in its apogee the character of childishness and puerility which clearly shows itself in that unexpected appendix to the Martian cycle, as in the entire cycle itself. Evidently the naïve subliminal philologist of Mlle. Smith has been struck by my criticisms on the identical order of the words in Martian and in French, and has endeavored to avoid that defect in her new effort at an unknown language.
But not knowing in just what syntax and construction consist, she has found nothing better to suit her purpose than the substitution of chaos for the natural arrangement of the terms in her thought, and the fabrication of an idiom which had decidedly nothing in common with the French in this respect. Here is where the most beautiful disorder is practically a work of art. It has, moreover, succeeded, since, even with the double translation, Martian and French, of text 33, it is impossible to know exactly what is meant.
It is possibly the little girl Etip who is sad, and who weeps because the man Top has done harm to the sacred animal Vanem (which had hidden, sick, under some green branches), wishing to enter in to a blue basket. At least it could not have been the branch, the man, or the basket which was sacred, the child sick, etc.
The green branch is out of harmony with a world in which, according to Hélène’s vision, there were neither trees nor verdure; but Esenale has not specified whether it means vert or ver, vers, etc., nor whether caché and entré are participles or infinitives. I leave this rebus to the reader and come to my conclusion, which will be brief, since it accords with the considerations already given at the end of the two preceding chapters.