Raymond Roussel - Impressions of Africa

After several minutes, Rao removed the now empty tureen, and the sated Negresses took their places for the Luenn’chetuz , a ritual dance, justly favored in that land, that was reserved for only the most solemn occasions.

They began with several slow gyrations mixed with supple and undulating movements.

Now and again they let escape from their gaping mouths formidable belches, which soon came faster and faster. Rather than trying to suppress these revolting noises, they did their best to expel them, trying to outdo each other in force and volume.

This widespread chorus, which accompanied the calm, graceful pavane like a musical score, revealed to us the peculiar properties of the unknown foodstuff they’d just ingested.

Little by little the dance became more frenetic and improvised, while their eructations, in a potent crescendo, grew increasingly frequent and intense.

There was an impressive moment of apogee, during which the sharp, deafening sound reached an infernal pandemonium; the feverish, disheveled dancers, shaken by their terrible burps as well as by their own fists, slammed into each other, pursued each other, gyrating in all directions as if in the grip of some vertiginous delirium.

Then, gradually, all grew calm, and after a long diminuendo the dance ended with the women grouped in a climactic display, underscored by a final chord that gradually faded to silence.

The young women, still wracked by some lingering hiccups, slowly resumed their original positions.

During the execution of the Luenn’chetuz, Rao had moved to the south side of the esplanade to open the prison, releasing a group of natives composed of one woman and two men.

Now only one detainee still paced behind the heavy bars.

Clearing a passage through us, Rao led the three newcomers to the spot the dancers had just trampled, their hands bound in front of them.

An anxious silence fell over the entire assembly, in anticipation of the tortures the fettered trio was about to endure.

Rao drew from his belt a mighty axe, its finely honed blade made of a strange wood that was hard as steel.

Several slaves had joined him to assist with the execution.

Held fast, the traitor Gaiz-duh was made to kneel, head bowed, while the two other convicts stood motionless.

With both hands Rao swung his axe and three times struck the traitor in the nape of the neck. With the third stroke Gaiz-duh’s head rolled on the ground.

The area had remained unsoiled by red spatter, owing to the strange, sharp wood that, as it penetrated the flesh, produced an immediate clotting effect, meanwhile soaking up the initial drops that had unavoidably been shed.

The severed portions of the head and trunk had the solid, scarlet appearance of butcher’s cuts.

We couldn’t help thinking of those mannequins, cleverly substituted for stage actors through a false bottom in a cabinet, that are cleanly sliced into sections previously painted in a bloody trompel’oeil. In this case, the corpse’s authenticity made that compact redness, usually a result of an artist’s craft, more impressive still.

The slaves carried off Gaiz-duh’s remains, along with the lightly soiled axe.

They soon returned and placed before Rao a fiery brazier in which rested two long iron pokers with coarse wooden handles, their tips glowing red.

Mossem, the second condemned man, was pushed to his knees facing the altar, the soles of his feet plainly exposed and his toenails to the ground.

Rao took from the hands of a slave a certain parchment that he unrolled at length: it was the fraudulent certificate of Sirdah’s death, which Mossem had once issued.

Holding an immense palm, a Negro continually fanned the bright, raging hearth.

Resting one knee on the ground behind the condemned man and holding the parchment in his left hand, Rao took from the brazier a burning poker whose tip he pressed into one of the heels offered to him.

The flesh crackled, and Mossem, firmly gripped by the serfs, writhed in pain.

Inexorably Rao pursued his task; it was the text of the parchment itself that he copied slavishly onto the counterfeiter’s foot.

At times he replaced the poker in the hearth, grasping its twin that glowed as it emerged from the coals.

When the left heel was entirely covered in hieroglyphs, Rao continued the operation on the right foot, still alternating between the two reddened iron tips as they cooled.

Mossem, choking on his own muffled roars, made monstrous efforts to escape his torture.

When finally the mendacious document had been copied down to the last character, Rao stood up and ordered the slaves to release Mossem, who, seized by horrible convulsions, expired before our eyes, overcome by his prolonged agony.

The body was taken away, along with the parchment and the brazier.

Back at their post, the slaves took hold of Rul, an oddly attractive Ponukelean, the only remaining member of the ill-fated trio. The condemned woman, whose hair sported long golden pins arranged in a crown, wore a frayed red velvet corset above her loincloth; the corset bore a striking similarity to the curious marking on Sirdah’s brow.

Kneeling in the same direction as Mossem, the proud Rul vainly attempted a desperate resistance.

Rao removed from her hair one of the golden pins, then applied its tip perpendicularly to the woman’s back, choosing the circle of skin visible behind the first eyelet to the right on the red corset with its frayed, knotted laces; then, with slow, even pressure, he buried the sharp spike, which penetrated the skin to the hilt.

At the scream provoked by this horrendous injection, Sirdah, recognizing her mother’s voice, threw herself at Talou’s feet to beg his sovereign mercy.

Immediately, as if to receive an unexpected change of orders, Rao turned toward the emperor, who, with an inflexible motion of his hand, commanded him to proceed with the torture.

A second pin, pulled from the woman’s black locks, was planted in the second eyelet, and one by one the entire row bristled with shining golden studs. Repeated on the left, the operation finally stripped her hair of its ornamentation and successively filled all the eyelets.

It had been a while since the wretched creature had stopped screaming; one of the sharp points, penetrating her heart, had caused her death.

The corpse, quickly taken up, disappeared like the two others.

Lifting the mute, anguished Sirdah to her feet, Talou walked to the statues aligned near the Stock Exchange. The warriors parted to clear the way for his passage and, promptly joined by our group, the emperor made a sign to Norbert; the latter, approaching the small cabin, called out his sister’s name.

After a moment the skylight in the paper roof slowly opened and flapped back, pushed from within by the slender hand of Louise Montalescot; gradually appearing through the wide aperture, she seemed to be climbing the rungs of a ladder.

Halfway out, she stopped and turned to face us. She was quite beautiful in her officer’s uniform, her long blonde curls flowing freely from beneath a tight policeman’s kepi tilted over one ear.

Her cavalryman’s blue dolman, molding a superb waist, was decorated on the right with shining gold shoulder braids; from these emanated the discreet music we’d been hearing through the walls of the hut. The sound was generated by the woman’s own breathing, thanks to a surgically established connection between the lobes of her lungs and the looped braids that concealed flexible, sonorous tubing. The gilded tips hanging from the ends of her aiguillettes like gracefully elongated counterweights were hollow and contained vibrating strips. At each contraction of her lungs, a portion of her exhaled breath passed through the multiple conduits and, activating the strips, triggered a harmonious tone.