Micromégas IV

 by François-Marie Arouet

CHAPTER IV

What Happened on Planet Earth

                               


   After resting, they consumed for breakfast a couple of mountains. Then wishing to inspect the countryside, they first went from north to south. Each of the Sirian's ordinary steps was about 30,000 statute feet; the Saturnian dwarf, whose height was only a thousand fathoms, followed panting far behind, for he had to take 20 steps when the other made a single stride. Picture to yourself a tiny little toy spaniel pursuing a captain of the King of Prussia's grenadiers!

   The strangers proceeded quickly, circling the globe in 36 hours; the Sun, indeed, or rather the Earth, makes the same journey in a day, but it is much easier to turn on one's axis than to walk on one's feet. Behold our travelers, then, returned to the same spot from which they had started, after having set eyes upon that sea, to them almost imperceptible, called the Mediterranean, and that other little pond which, under the name of the great Ocean, surrounds this molehill. Therein the dwarf had never sunk much above the knee, while the other had scarcely wetted his ankle. They did all they could, searching here and there, to ascertain whether Earth was inhabited. They stooped, lay down, and groped about in all directions, but their eyes and hands being out of all proportion to the tiny beings who crawl up and down here, they felt not the slightest sensation which could lead them to suspect that we and our fellow creatures have the honor to exist.

   The dwarf hastily declared there was not a single creature on this planet. His first reason was that he had not seen one. But Micromégas politely explained that that was not a good argument:

   "For," said he, "you, with your little eyes, cannot see certain stars of the 50th magnitude which I distinctly discern; do you conclude that those stars have no existence?"

   "But," argued the dwarf, "this globe is so ill-constructed, so irregular, and so ridiculously shaped! All here appears chaotic, look at these little brooks, not one of which goes in a straight line, and these ponds, which are neither round, square, oval, nor of any regular form, and all these little bristles which have rubbed the skin off my feet!"—he alluded to the trees—"Observe too the shape of the globe as a whole, how it is flat at the poles, how it turns around the Sun in a clumsily slanting manner, so that the polar climes are mere wastes. In truth, what chiefly makes me think there is nobody here, is that I cannot suppose any sensible people should wish to occupy such a dwelling."

   "Well," said Micromégas, "perhaps the people who inhabit it are not sensible. But there are in fact signs of its not having been made for nothing. Everything here seems irregular, you say, but you judge by the standards of Saturn and Jupiter. Have I not told you that in the course of my travels I have always found variety?"

   The Saturnian had answers to these arguments, and the dispute might never have ended, had not he suddenly spied what seemed to him a small tadpole moving half underwater in the Baltic sea. Actually, it was a whale. He caught it cleverly with his little finger, and placing it on his thumbnail, showed it to the Sirian, who burst out laughing a second time at the extreme minuteness of the inhabitants of our system.

   The Saturnian, now convinced our world was inhabited, immediately concluded that whales were the only creatures to be found here, and, as speculation was his strong point, made conjectures about the origin of so insignificant an atom, the source of its movement, and whether it had ideas and free will. Micromégas drew a magnifying glass from his bundle of instruments, examined the creature patiently, and found no evidence that it had a soul lodged in its body. The two travelers then suspected there were no intelligent beings in this habitation of ours, when at last they noticed something as big as a whale, floating on the Baltic sea.

   We know that at that very time, a flock of philosophers was returning from the polar circle, where they had gone to make observations no one had attempted before. The newspapers say their vessel ran aground in the gulf of Bothnia, and that they had great difficulty saving their lives, but we never know in this world the real truth about anything. I will relate honestly what occurred, without adding anything of my own invention—a task which demands no small effort on the part of a historian.

Click below to read Ch. V of

Micromégas

by François-Marie Arouet

presented on

the Freezine of

Fantasy and Science 

Fiction