(176) The abracadabrante story of Child Moon

 

“Godfrey, facing in that direction—the only one in which land could possibly lie—tried to make out whether some cliff might emerge from the darkness. As the first rays of the rising sun outlined it, they would bring its contours into sharper relief.
But nothing yet appeared through the uncertain dawn. A light mist was rising from the sea, making it impossible even to determine the extent of the breakers.”

Jules Verne, The School for Robinsons

Lucian arrives in the Archipelago. Following an exchange of letters with Félix—an exchange Lucian regards as a slight betrayal (the word is perhaps a little strong… but the feeling tends in that direction)—Lucian has made the decision to “make the journey”… as one might say, to make a pilgrimage… The “betrayal” would seem to originate in the fact that Félix had suggested… subtly… though perhaps not subtly enough… at least not for Lucian… that Igniatius might not always be the author of the drawings… Perhaps this was precisely what Félix intended: to provoke a reaction to an apparently ordinary request, one that Lucian could not simply accept at face value. In any event, that reaction prompted Lucian’s departure. Félix learns of this departure through a letter from Igniatius. The letters themselves will not be published here; they will be the subject of another publication. At most, they will be alluded to whenever the circumstances of the narrative that follows call for it. This narrative is set against Lucian’s arrival by ship, an ocean liner… but one aboard which no social life can be perceived… no crew either… a kind of ghost ship…

Lucian’s Journal

I had embarked without being able to say with any certainty at what moment I had made the decision to do so, for although I could still recall the ordinary circumstances that had preceded my departure—a few belongings gathered together without much care, a door closed behind me, some papers taken almost mechanically, and among them certain letters I already knew by heart, while still feeling the rather childish need to keep them close to me—I could not have recovered, within that succession of gestures which afterwards lends our decisions the reassuring appearance of a sustained act of will, the precise instant when I had ceased to regard going to the Archipelago as a mere possibility, as though whatever had set me in motion had occurred not within me but in that uncertain space which had opened between a few lines from Félix and the answer I had been unable to give him; for Félix had asserted nothing, and I would have been unfair to attribute to him an accusation he had taken particular care not to formulate, yet he had suggested, with a discretion for which I no longer knew whether I should be grateful to him or hold it against him, that the drawings we had been discussing for so long might not always have had the origin we attributed to them, that Igniatius might not, in every circumstance, have been their author with quite the certainty we had allowed ourselves to assume, and this hypothesis, almost withdrawn in the very movement by which it appeared, had nevertheless shifted something I had until then believed sufficiently established not to require defending.
I had not felt betrayed—or at least I would have refused the word had anyone spoken it in my presence, so greatly would it have lent to what was perhaps no more than a slight bruising of feeling the gravity of a rupture—and yet I must admit today that there remained in my irritation something that obscurely belonged to that family of emotions, not because Félix had broken some pact between us whose terms we had agreed upon, but because, without seeming to do so, he had touched upon a silent understanding whose existence I had discovered only at the moment when it ceased to seem entirely secure; and perhaps that was what he had intended, perhaps he had merely asked a question whose implications he understood well enough to know that it would not receive a tranquil answer from me, or perhaps he had intended nothing at all and I alone was responsible for the importance I had given to a few words, which scarcely altered the outcome since, deliberately or otherwise, he had shifted the floor beneath my feet and, believing that I was answering him with a decision entirely my own, I had found myself aboard a ship.