<h3><SPAN name="IV" id="IV"></SPAN>IV</h3>
<h2>SAVED!</h2>
<p>The day at length arrived on which, all the intellectual inheritance of
the past, all the real capital of humanity having been rescued from the
general shipwreck, the castaways were able to go down in their turn,
having henceforth only to think of their own preservation. That day
which forms, as everyone knows, the starting point of our new era,
called the era of salvation, was a solemn holiday. The sun, however, as
if to arouse regret, indulged in a few last bursts of sunshine. On
casting a final glance on this brightness, which they were never to
behold again, the survivors of mankind could not, we are told, restrain
their tears. A young poet on the brink of the pit that yawned to swallow
them up, repeated in the musical language of Euripides, the farewell to
the light of the dying Iphigenia. But that was a short-lived moment of
very natural emotion which speedily changed into an outburst of
unspeakable delight.</p>
<p>How great in fact was their amazement and their ecstasy! They expected a
tomb; they opened their eyes in the most brilliant and interminable
galleries of art they could possibly see, in <i>salons</i> more beautiful
than those of Versailles, in enchanted palaces, in which all extremes of
climate, rain, and wind, cold and torrid heat were unknown; where
innumerable lamps, veritable suns in brilliancy and moons in softness,
shed unceasingly through the blue depths their daylight that knew no
night. Assuredly the sight was far from what it has since become; we
need an effort of imagination in order to represent the psychological
condition of our poor ancestors, hitherto accustomed to the perpetual
and insufferable discomforts and inconveniences of life on the surface
of the globe, in order to realise their enthusiasm, at a moment, when
only counting on escaping from the most appalling of deaths by means of
the gloomiest of dungeons, they felt themselves delivered of all their
troubles, and of all their apprehensions at the same time! Have you
noticed in the retrospective museum that quaint bit of apparatus of our
fathers, which is called an umbrella? Look at it and reflect on the
heart-breaking element, in a situation, which condemned man to make use
of this ridiculous piece of furniture. Imagine yourself obliged to
protect yourselves against those gigantic downpours which would
unexpectedly arrive on the scene and drench you for three or four days
running. Think likewise of sailors caught in a whirling cyclone, of the
victims of sunstroke, of the 20,000 Indians annually devoured by tigers
or killed by the bite of venomous serpents; think of those struck by
lightning. I do not speak of the legions of parasites and insects, of
the acarus, the phylloxera, and the microscopic beings which drained the
blood, the sweat, and the life of man, inoculating him with typhus,
plague, and cholera. In truth, if our change of condition has demanded
some sacrifices, it is not an illusion to declare that the balance of
advantage is immensely greater. What in comparison with this
unparalleled revolution is the most renowned of the petty revolutions of
the past which to-day are treated so lightly, and rightly so, by our
historians. One wonders how the first inhabitants of these underground
dwellings could, even for a moment, regret the sun, a mode of lighting
that bristled with so many inconveniences. The sun was a capricious
luminary which went out and was relit at variable hours, shone when it
felt disposed, sometimes was eclipsed, or hid itself behind the clouds
when one had most need of it, or pitilessly blinded one at the very
moment one yearned for shade! Every night,—do we really realise the
full force of the inconvenience?—every night the sun commanded social
life to desist and social life desisted. Humanity was actually to that
extent the slave of nature! To think it never succeeded in, never even
dreamed of, freeing itself from this slavery which weighed so heavily
and unconsciously on its destinies, on the course of its progress thus
straitened and confined! Ah! Let us once more bless our fortunate
disaster!</p>
<p>What excuses or explains the weakness of the first immigrants of the
inner world is the fact that their life was necessarily rough and full
of hardships, in spite of a notable improvement after their descent into
the caverns. They had perpetually to enlarge them, to adjust them to the
requirements of the two civilisations, ancient and modern. That was not
the work of a single day. I am well aware how happily fortune favoured
them; how they again and again had the good luck when driving their
tunnels to discover natural grottoes of the utmost beauty, in which it
was enough to illuminate with the usual methods of lighting (which was
absolutely cost-free, as Miltiades had foreseen) in order to render them
almost habitable: delightful squares, as it were, enshrined and sparsely
disseminated throughout the labyrinth of our brilliantly lighted
streets; mines of sparkling diamonds, lakes of quicksilver, mounds of
golden ingots. I am well aware that they had at their disposition a sum
of natural forces very superior to all that the preceding ages had been
acquainted with. That is very easy to understand. In fact, if they
lacked waterfalls, they replaced them very advantageously by the finest
falls in temperature that physicists have ever dreamed of. The central
heat of the globe could not, it is true, by itself alone be a mechanical
force, any more than formerly a large mass of water falling by
hypothesis to the greatest possible depth. It is in its passage from a
higher to a lower level that the mass of water becomes (or rather
became) available energy: it is in its descent from a higher to a lower
degree of the thermometer that heat likewise becomes so. The greater
distance between any two degrees the greater amount of surplus energy.
Now, the mining physicists had hardly descended into the bowels of the
earth ere they at once perceived that thus placed between the furnaces
of the central fire, as it were, a forge of the Cyclops, hot enough to
liquefy granite, and the outer cold, which was sufficient to solidify
oxygen and nitrogen, they had at their disposal the most enormous
extremes in temperature, and consequently thermic cataracts by the side
of which all the cataracts of Abyssinia and Niagara were only toys. What
caldrons did they own in the ancient volcanoes! What condensers in the
glaciers! At first sight they must have seen that if a few distributing
agencies of this prodigious energy were provided, they had power enough
there to perform the whole work of mankind—excavation, air supply,
water supply, sanitation, locomotion, descent and transport of
provisions, etc.</p>
<p>I am well aware of that. I am further aware that ever favoured by
fortune, the inseparable friend of daring, the new Troglodytes have
never suffered from famine, nor from shortness of supplies. When one of
their snow-covered deposits of carcasses threatened to give out, they
used to make several trial borings, drive several shafts in an upward
direction. They never failed presently to meet with rich finds of food
reserves, extensive enough to close the mouths of the alarmists, whereby
there resulted on each occasion, according to the law of Malthus, a
sudden increase in the population, coupled with the excavation of new
underground cities, more flourishing than their older sisters. But, in
spite of all this, we remain overwhelmed with wonder when we consider
the incalculable degree of courage and intelligence lavished on such a
work, and solely called into being by an idea which, starting one day
from one individual brain, has leavened the whole globe. What giant
falls of earth, what murderous explosions, what a death-roll there must
have been at the outset of the enterprise! We shall never know what
bloodthirsty duels, what rapes, what doleful tragedies, took place in
this lawless society, which had not yet been reorganised. The history of
the early conquerors and colonists of America, if it could be told in
detail, would pale entirely beside it. Let us draw a veil over the
proceedings. But this pitch of horrors was perhaps necessary to teach us
that in the forced intimacy of a cave there is no mean between warfare
and love, between mutual slaughter or mutual embraces. We began by
fighting; to-day we fall on each other's necks. And in fact, what human
ear, nose, or stomach could have longer withstood the deafening roar and
smoke of melanite explosions beneath our crypts; the sight and stench of
mangled bodies piled up within our narrow confines? Hideous and odious,
revolting beyond all expression, the underground war finished by
becoming impossible.</p>
<p>It is, however, painful to think that it lasted right up to the death of
our glorious preserver. Everyone is acquainted with the heroic adventure
in which Miltiades and his companion lost their lives. It has been so
often painted, sculptured, sung, and immortalised by the great masters,
that it is not allowable to pass it over in silence. The famous struggle
between the centralist and federalist cities, that is to say, at bottom,
between the industrial and artist cities, having ended in the triumph of
the latter, a still more bloodthirsty conflict sprang up between the
free thinking and the cellular cities. The former fought to assert the
freedom of love with its uncertain fecundity; the second, for its
prudent regulation. Miltiades, misled by his passion, committed the
fault of siding with the former, a pardonable error which posterity has
forgiven him. Besieged in his last grotto—a perfect marvel in
strongholds—and at the end of his provisions, the besiegers having
intercepted the arrival of all his convoys, he essayed a final effort:
he prepared a formidable explosion intended to blow up the vault of his
cavern, and forcibly to open a way upwards by which he might have the
chance of reaching a deposit of provisions. His hope was deceived. The
vault blew up, it is true, and disclosed a cavern above it, the most
colossal one had hitherto seen, that dimly resembled a Hindoo temple.
But the hero himself perished miserably, buried with Lydia beneath
enormous rocks on the very spot on which now stands their double statue
in marble, the masterpiece of our new Phidias, which is now the crowded
meeting-place of our national pilgrimages.</p>
<p>From these fruitful though troublous times, and from this beneficial
disorder, an advantage has accrued to us which we shall never
sufficiently appreciate. Our race, already so beautiful, has been
further strengthened and purified by these numerous trials.
Short-sightedness itself has disappeared under the prolonged influence
of a light that is pleasing to the eye, and of the habit of reading
books which are written in very large characters. For, from lack of
paper, we are obliged to write on slates, on pillars, obelisks, on the
broad panels of marble, and this necessity, in addition to compelling us
to adopt a sober style and contributing to the formation of taste,
prevents the daily newspapers from reappearing, to the great benefit of
the optic nerves and the lobes of the brain. It was, by the way, an
immense misfortune for "pre-salvationist" man to possess textile plants
which allowed him to stereotype without the slightest trouble on rags of
paper without the slightest value, all his ideas, idle or serious, piled
indiscriminately one on the other. Now, before graving our thoughts on a
panel of rock, we take time to reflect on our subject. Yet another bane
among our primitive forefathers was tobacco. At present we no longer
smoke, we can no longer smoke. The public health is accordingly
magnificent.</p>
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