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CHAPTER

1

In which the learned and unlearned worlds are equally baffled

Bang! … Bang! …

The two pistols were fired almost at the same time. A cow, grazing fifty paces away, received one of the bullets in her spine. Even so, she had had nothing to do with the duel.

Neither one of the two adversaries had been hit.

Who were these two gentlemen? That remains unknown, and yet, beyond all doubt, this might have been the occasion to preserve their names for posterity. All that can be said is that the older one was an Englishman, the younger an American. As for indicating where the inoffensive ruminant had just grazed her last tuft of grass, nothing could be easier. It was on the right bank of the Niagara River, not far from the suspension bridge that connects the American and Canadian sides, three miles below Niagara Falls.¹

The Englishman then approached the American:

“I tell you again it was ‘Rule Britannia!’” he said.

“No! It was ‘Yankee Doodle!’” returned the other.

The quarrel was about to begin anew when one of the witnesses—no doubt acting in the interest of livestock—interposed and said:

“Let’s say it was ‘Rule Doodle’ and ‘Yankee Britannia,’ and go to lunch!”

This compromise between the two national songs of America and Great Britain was adopted, to universal satisfaction. Americans and Englishmen went back together up the left bank of the Niagara River, and went to eat at the hotel on Goat Island—a neutral terrain between the two falls.² As they are busy doing justice to boiled eggs, traditional ham, cold beef seasoned with flaming pickles, and tea in such torrential quantities as to make the celebrated cataracts jealous, we will not bother them any further.³ It is highly unlikely, in fact, that they will ever be mentioned again in this story.

Neither one had been hit.

Who was right, the Englishman or the American? It would have been difficult to say. In any case, the duel showed how passionate public opinion had become, not only in the new continent but also in the old one, about an inexplicable phenomenon which, for about a month, had turned every brain upside down.

… Os sublime dedit coelumque tueri,

said Ovid of the greatest honor bestowed upon the human race.⁴ And truly, never had people looked to the heavens so much since the appearance of man on the terrestrial globe.

Now, as it happens, during the preceding night, a trumpet in the sky had sounded a brassy call through space, above that area of Canada between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. Some had heard “Yankee Doodle,” others “Rule Britannia.” Hence that Anglo-Saxon quarrel which ended in a lunch on Goat Island. Perhaps, when all was said and done, it was neither one of those patriotic songs. But what nobody could doubt is that the strange sound had the peculiar quality of seeming to descend from the heavens to the earth.

Was it necessary to believe in some celestial trumpet blown by an angel or archangel? … Or was it rather some jolly group of aeronauts playing that sonorous instrument, which the goddess Fame uses so noisily?⁵

No! There had been no balloon, and no aeronauts. An extraordinary phenomenon was occurring in the high zones of the sky—a phenomenon unrecognizable in both nature and origin. That day it appeared above America, and forty-eight hours later above Europe, and eight days later in Asia, above the Celestial Empire. Decidedly, if the trumpet marking its passage was not that of the Last Judgment, then what was it?

As a result, in every country on the earth, royal or republican, a certain worry had to be calmed. If you heard some bizarre and inexplicable noises in your house, wouldn’t you try as quickly as possible to find the cause of those noises, and if the search led to nothing, wouldn’t you abandon your house and move to another? Yes, of course you would! But here, the house was the whole terrestrial globe. No means of quitting it for the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or Jupiter, or any other planet in the solar system. So the world had to discover what was going on, not in the infinite void, but in the atmospheric zones. No air, no noise, after all, and since there had been noise—that famous trumpet!—the phenomenon must have occurred in the middle of the bed of air,⁶ whose density diminishes as it goes up and which stretches only two leagues thick around our spheroid.⁷

Naturally, thousands of newspapers took up the question, treating it from every angle, clearing it up or confusing it further, reporting true facts or false ones, alarming or reassuring their readers—all in the interest of sales—and, in the end, inflaming the passions of the somewhat panicked masses. Politics were completely and immediately forgotten, and life went on none the worse for it. But what had the thing been?⁸

All the observatories around the world were consulted. If they did not respond, what good were observatories? If the astronomers, who can double or triple the size of stars at a hundred thousand million leagues’ distance, were incapable of determining the origin of a cosmic phenomenon only a few kilometers away, what good were astronomers?

Furthermore, precisely how many telescopes, spyglasses, opera glasses, binoculars, monoculars were pointed skyward during those warm summer nights, how many eyes were glued to the eyepieces of those instruments of every shape and size, nobody could possibly calculate. Hundreds of thousands, at the very least. Ten times, twenty times more than the number of stars the naked eye can count in the celestial sphere. No! Never had an eclipse, observed simultaneously from every point of the globe, become such a festival.

The observatories responded, but not well enough. Each one gave an opinion, but a different opinion. So an internal war took place in the learned world during the last weeks of April and the first ones of May.

The Paris Observatory showed itself to be very reserved. None of its sections made any pronouncements. In the department of mathematical astronomy, nothing had been considered worth noticing; in meridian operations, nothing discovered; in physical observations, nothing observed; in geodetics, nothing remarked; in meteorology, nothing encountered; and in calculations, nothing seen. At least the admission was frank. Same frankness at the Montsouris Observatory, at the magnetic station in the Parc Saint-Maur. Same respect for the truth at the Bureau des Longitudes. Decidedly, Français means “frank.”

The French countryside was slightly more affirmative. Perhaps during the night of May 6 a beam of light of electrical origin had appeared, with a duration not surpassing twenty seconds. On the Pic du Midi, this beam had appeared between nine and ten p.m. At the meteorological observatory on the Puy de Dôme, it had been glimpsed between one and two a.m.; on Mont Ventoux, in Provence, between two and three; at Nice, between three and four; and finally, on Semnoz in the Alps, between Annecy, Lac de Bourget, and Lake Geneva, at the moment dawn was lighting up the zenith.

Obviously, all these observations could not be dismissed out of hand. No doubt the beam had been observed at these various posts—successively—in the space of a few hours. Therefore, either it had been produced by several sources crossing through the terrestrial atmosphere, or, if it was all the work of a single light, it was because that light could move with a speed that must have been very close to two hundred kilometers per hour.

But, during the day, had anyone ever seen anything abnormal in the air?

Never.

Had the trumpet, at least, been heard sounding in the sky?

Not the slightest trumpet call had sounded between the rising and setting of the sun.

In the United Kingdom, people were very much perplexed. The observatories could not agree. Greenwich could not concur with Oxford, even though both of them declared that “nothing was there.”

“Optical illusion!” said the one.

“Acoustic illusion!” replied the other.

And from there, they disputed. In any case, illusion.

At the observatories in Berlin and Vienna, the discussion threatened to provoke an international incident. But Russia, in the person of the director of its Pulkovo Observatory, demonstrated that both were right. It all depended on the point of view used to determine the nature of the phenomenon: impossible in theory, possible in practice.

In Switzerland, at the Säntis Observatory, in the canton of Appenzell, on the Rigi, on the Gäbris, in the stations at St. Gotthard, St. Bernard, Julier, Simplon, Zurich, and Sonnblick in the Tyrolean Alps, people remained extremely reserved about a fact nobody had ever been able to verify—which is most reasonable.

But in Italy, at the meteorological stations in Venice, at the post at Etna installed in the former Casa Inglese,⁹ and at Monte Cavo, observers did not hesitate to admit the reality of the phenomenon, given that they had been able to see it, one day in the form of a little curl of vapor, and one night giving the appearance of a shooting star.¹⁰ Of what it was, in any case, they had absolutely no idea.

The truth is that the mystery began to grow tiresome to men of science, while it continued to impassion or even frighten the humble and ignorant, who have formed, now form, and will continue to form the vast majority in this world, thanks to one of the sagest laws of nature. So the astronomers and meteorologists would have given up bothering themselves with it altogether—if, on the night of the twenty-sixth, at the Kautokeino Observatory in Finnmark, Norway, and on the night of the twenty-eighth at the Isfjord Observatory in Spitsbergen, the Norwegians on one side and the Swedes on the other had not agreed on this point: in the midst of an aurora borealis there had appeared some kind of giant bird, a monster in the sky. Though it had been impossible to determine its structure, at least there was no doubt that from it came small corpuscles that detonated like bombs.

In Europe, nobody wanted to cast much doubt on the observation from the stations in Finnmark and Spitsbergen. But what seemed most phenomenal in the whole matter was that Swedes and Norwegians had been able to come to an agreement on any point at all.

People laughed about the supposed discovery in all the observatories in South America, in Brazil and Peru as at La Plata, and in those of Australia, in Sydney and Adelaide as at Melbourne. And the Australian laugh is one of the most infectious.

In short, only one head of a meteorological station spoke affirmatively on the question, despite all the sarcasms his solution might provoke. This was a Chinese astronomer, the director of the Zi-ka-wei Observatory,¹¹ built in the middle of a vast plain fewer than ten leagues from the sea, overlooking an immense horizon bathed in pure air.

“It may be,” he said, “that the object in question is simply an apparatus for aviation—a flying machine!”

What a joke!

However, if the controversy was intense in the Old World, one can imagine what it must have been in that portion of the New World occupied mainly by the United States.

A Yankee, as everyone knows, never beats around the bush. He cuts right through the bush, and the path he makes generally leads straight to his goal.¹² Therefore, the observatories in the American federation did not hesitate to speak their minds. If they did not throw their lenses at each others’ heads, it was only because they would have had to replace them at the moment they were most needed to serve.

On this question that had grown so controversial, the observatories in Washington, D.C., and the one in Cambridge in the state of Massachusetts, locked heads with those of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Ann Arbor in Michigan. The subject of their dispute was not on the nature of the object observed, but on the precise moment of observation; for all declared to have seen it on the same night, at the same hour, at the same minute, at the same second, though the trajectory of the mysterious moving object was only a moderate height above the horizon. Now, from New Hampshire to Michigan, from Massachusetts to the District of Columbia, there is enough distance that this double observation, made at the same moment, could be considered impossible.¹³

Dudley Observatory, in Albany in the state of New York,¹⁴ and the Military Academy at West Point, proved their colleagues wrong with a note calculating the right ascension and declination of said object.

But it was recognized later that these observers were mistaken about their object, for the latter was only a meteor that was passing through the middle layer of the atmosphere. Therefore, it could not be the thing in question. Besides, how could that meteor have played the trumpet?

As for that trumpet, people tried in vain to explain away its blaring fanfare as a kind of acoustical illusion. Ears, in this circumstance, were no more mistaken than eyes. People had certainly seen, and certainly heard. On the night of May 12—a very dark night—the astronomers of Yale College, at the Sheffield Scientific School, had been able to transcribe a few measures of a musical phrase, in D major, in 4/4 time, which gave, note for note and rhythm for rhythm, the refrain of the “Chant du départ.”¹⁵

“Aha!” replied the wits, “it’s a French orchestra playing in the middle of the clouds!”

But witticisms are no reply. That was the remark of the Boston Observatory, which was founded by the Atlantic Iron Works, and whose opinions on questions of astronomy and meteorology were beginning to be seen as law in the learned world.¹⁶

Then intervened the Cincinnati Observatory, created in 1873 on Mount Lookout thanks to the generosity of Mr. Kilgour,¹⁷ and so well known for its micrometrical measurements of double stars. Its director declared, in the fullest good faith, that something was certainly there, that some kind of moving object had been seen, at rather closely spaced times, at various points in the atmosphere, but that on the nature of this moving object—its dimensions, its speed, its trajectory—it was impossible to say anything.

It was then that a newspaper of immense circulation, the New York Herald,¹⁸ received from one of its subscribers the following anonymous communication:

It will not have been forgotten that, a few years ago, a rivalry led to conflict between the begum of Ragginahra’s two inheritors: the French doctor Sarrasin in his city Franceville, and the German engineer Herr Schultze in his city Stahlstadt, both situated in southern Oregon in the United States.

It cannot have been forgotten either that, with the goal of destroying Franceville, Herr Schultze fired off a colossal projectile intended to crash into the French city and sweep it off the face of the earth in a single blow.

Even less can it possibly have been forgotten that this projectile, whose initial velocity from the mouth of the monster cannon had been miscalculated, flew with a speed six times that of an ordinary shell (150 leagues per hour), that it never fell to earth, and that, having become a satellite, it now circles and will eternally circle our globe.¹⁹

Why might not this be the object in question, whose existence cannot be denied?

Very ingenious, that subscriber to the New York Herald. And the trumpet?—There had been no trumpet in Herr Schultze’s projectile!

So all the explanations explained nothing, and all the observatories observed badly.

There still remained the hypothesis proposed by the director of Zika-wei. But the opinion of a Chinese! …

It must not be believed that satiety finally overtook the public in the Old and New World. No! Discussions continued at full force, without anybody managing to agree with anybody else. And yet, there was a pause. A few days rolled by without any report of the object, whether meteor or otherwise, and without any trumpet blast heard in the sky. Had the thing fallen on some point of the globe where it would be difficult to find its traces—at sea, for example? Was it lying in the depths of the Atlantic, Pacific, or Indian Ocean? How could anybody say?

But then, between June 2 and 9, a series of new incidents occurred, which would have been impossible to explain merely by some cosmic phenomenon.

Within eight days, the people of Hamburg, on the tip of the tower of St. Michael’s Church; the Turks, on the highest minaret of the Hagia Sophia; the people of Rouen, at the end of their cathedral’s metallic spire; the people of Strasbourg, on the pinnacle of the Münster;²⁰ the Americans, on the head of their Statue of Liberty at the mouth of the Hudson,²¹ and on the top of the Washington Monument in Washing-ton;²² the Chinese, on the summit of the Temple of the Five Hundred Gods in Canton;²³ the Hindus, on the seventh story of the pyramid of the Temple of Tanjavur;²⁴ the devotees of St. Peter, on the cross of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome; the English, on the cross of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London; the Egyptians, on the tip of the Great Pyramid of Giza; the Parisians, on the lightning rod of the Iron Tower of the Exposition of 1889,²⁵ three hundred meters high—could all observe a flag, flying at each of these all-but-inaccessible places.

And this flag was black, of thin cotton weave, scattered with stars, with a golden sun at its center.²⁶