City in the Sahara - Barsac Mission 02

 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data


Verne, Jules, 1828-1905. The Barsac mission.

Translation of L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac.


Reprint of the 1960 ed. published by Ace Books, New York.


CONTENTS: book 1. Into the Niger bend,    book 2. The city in the Sahara. I. Title.

[PZ3.V594Bar7] [PQ2469] 843'.8 76-48161


 ISBN 0-88411-911-4 (v. 1)

 ISBN 0-88411-912-2 (v. 2)


INTRODUCTION

Book 1 of Jules Verne's posthumous story, L'Etonnante Aventure de la Mission Barsac, published in this series under the title Into the Niger Bend, described the vicissitudes of the Barsac Mission, sent out at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century to ascertain whether the Negroes of French West Africa were qualified to become voters and citizens. After being threatened and impeded, robbed of its armed escort and of its native porters, its members were pounced on in mysterious circumstances, pinioned, and threatened with death.

Accompanying the Mission was a young English girl, Jane Blazon, passing under the pseudonym of Jane Momas. With her elderly nephew, Agenor de St. B6rain, she had undertaken the journey to clear the name of her brother, George Blazon, accused of having turned traitor and led the native troops he commanded in murderous attacks on the Negroes. In his grave at Koubo she found evidence of his innocence; instead of having been shot down by a punitive expedition, as was alleged, he had been deliberately murdered from behind by some unknown assassin, who was presumably guilty of the Blazon column's atrocities.

By taking this news to her father, Lord Blazon of Glenor, Jane hoped to restore the old man's peace of mind, shattered by this stain on the family honour, but the kidnapping of the Mission had precluded this. Meantime, unknown to her, Lewis Blazon, also her brother, had vanished after a bank robbery in which he was suspected of complicity.

The events which followed the kidnapping of the Barsac Mission and of Jane Blazon are described in the present volume. They illustrate Jules Verne's inventive genius as well as his ability to keep abreast of the latest scientific and technical advances and to weave them into his narrative. Unpublished until after his death in 1905, the stoiy incorporates inventions made towards the end of his life, notably that of wireless telegraphy. It shows that he shared in the contemporary belief, not justified by events, that liquid air was the motive power of the future. But it also illustrates his remarkable powers of foresight in his description of rocket-propelled missiles, aircraft with a vertical take-off and automatic stabilizers, and the attempt to control the weather by inducing passing clouds to discharge themselves in rain.

He was plainly aware of early experiments with airplanes, and may have known of the achievements of the Wright Brothers. Yet Verne himself had pinned his faith not to the airplane but to the helicopter.* An attempt to take advantage of both types may have produced the aircraft which he called Flaneurs— though their nature is more graphically expressed by the term I have substituted.

As in Book I the names of some of the characters have been altered to avoid a possible clash with those (See, for example his account of its advantages over other types of aircraft in his story, The Clipper of the Clouds.) of actual people. But the titles of this mysterious city, of its varied inhabitants, and of its ruler, are those given by the author himself.

In my introduction to Book I, I put forward a possible reason why so remarkable a work does not seem to have been hitherto translated into English. The continuation of the narrative suggests another, that at the time it seemed too far fetched even for Jules Verne.

In those orderly days the notion of a super-scientific community ruled by criminals seemed beyond the bounds of possibility. We have seen such communities (not mere cities but nations) compared to which the City in the Sahara seems almost tame.

Here Verne's prophetic gifts misled him only by falling short of the truth. Yet the story remains an example of the symbolism which he could use so effectively. His Blackland typifies much in our civilization, its triumphs of technology and its material advances compared with its backwardness (indeed with its retrogression) in moral and spiritual development, the threat implicit in its very nature that the misuse of its mighty powers will end in its own destruction.

Nevertheless his strong religious faith forbade Verne to despair of humanity. The stronghold of material progress may be shattered, but from its ruins come the decent people, the gentle and humble of heart, preserved (humanly speaking) by their idealism, their sense of duty, their moral integrity, and their mutual faith.


CHAPTER I

BLACKLAND

At the beginning of the century even the most accurate and recent of maps represented the Sahara, that immense stretch of nearly 300,000 square miles, only by a blank space. When the Mission led by the Deputy Barsac underwent the trials described in the first part of this narrative, nobody had crossed it, nobody had entered it. It was completely unknown.

At that time, the strangest legends circulated about that unexplored region. Sometimes, so the natives said, they had seen immense black birds with outspread wings and fiery eyes flying towards or into these arid plains. Sometimes a horde of great red devils, mounted on plunging horses whose nostrils emitted flames, had suddenly emerged from that mysterious land. These uncanny horsemen galloped into the towns, slaying, massacring all whom they found in their way, then returning to the desert, and carrying across their saddles men, women, and children who never returned.

Who were these miscreants who destroyed the villages, pillaged the huts, looted the miserable treasures of the poor Negroes, and disappeared, leaving behind them ruin, despair and death? Nobody knew.