FLYING ISLANDS BY JULES VERNE
(A Parody)
CHAPTER I: THE SPEECH
“GENTLEMEN, I have finished!” announced Mr. John Lund, a young member of the Royal Geographical Society. Exhausted, he sank back into his armchair. Deafening applause filled the assembly hall along with cries of “Bravo.” The dazzled audience rose. One by one, the gentlemen approached John Lund to grip his hand. Seventeen gentlemen smashed their chairs in token of their amazement, eight of them spraining their craning necks as they did so. One of these gentlemen was the captain of a 100,009-ton yacht, The Pandemonium.
“Gentlemen!” uttered Mr. Lund, deeply moved. “I consider it my sacred duty to express my gratitude for that inhuman patience with which you listened to a speech lasting forty hours, thirty-two minutes, and fourteen seconds! Tom Snipe,” he said, turning to his old servant, “wake me in five minutes. I shall sleep; these gentlemen shall pardon me for the audacity of doing so in their presence!”
“Yes, sir!” said old Tom Snipe.
Throwing his head back, John Lund slept immediately.
John Lund was a Scotsman by birth. He had received no education whatsoever and he had never studied anything, yet he knew everything there was to know. He was one of those fortunate people who gain a knowledge of all that is splendid and beautiful by figuring everything out on their own. The rapture that had greeted his speech was quite justified. Over those forty hours, he presented for the consideration of messieurs gentlemen a proposal for a project of immense proportion, the fulfillment of which would garner fame for England and prove the illimitable reach of the human mind. The subject of Lund’s speech was nothing less than “Boring Through the Moon with a Colossal Borer!”
CHAPTER II: THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
But Sir John wasn’t to be allowed to sleep even three minutes. A heavy hand descended upon his shoulder. He awoke. Before him stood a gentleman 7.073 feet tall, as thin as a beanpole and as skinny as a dried-out snake. Completely bald, he was dressed entirely in black and wore four pairs of glasses on his nose. He carried a thermometer on his chest and a thermometer on his back.
“Follow me!” said the bald-headed man in a sepulchral voice.
“Where to?”
“Follow me, John Lund!”
“And if I won’t?”
“Then the moon must be bored by me before it is bored by you!”
“In that case, sir, I’m at your service.”
“Have your servant follow!”
Mr. Lund, the bald man, and Tom Snipe left the assembly hall and together set off through the well-lit streets of London. They walked and walked.
“Sir,” said Snipe to Lund, “if our walk is as long as this gentleman is tall, then in accordance with the law of friction we shall wear out our soles!”
The two gentlemen considered. Ten minutes later they decided Snipe’s remark was witty and broke out in loud laughter.
“With whom do I have the honor of laughing, sir?” Lund asked of the bald-headed man.
“You have the honor of walking, talking, and laughing with a member of every single geographical, archaeological, and ethnographical society in existence, who possesses a master’s degree in all the sciences that exist or ever will, a member too of the Moscow Art Club, honorary trustee of the School of Bovine Midwifery at Southampton, subscriber to Demon Illustrated, professor of yellow-green magic and elementary gastronomy at the future University of New Zealand, and director of the Nameless Observatory, William Bolvanius. Sir, I am escorting you to—”
John Lund and Tom Snipe went down on their knees before the great man and lowered their heads in respect. They had heard so much of him.
“I am escorting you, sir, to my observatory, which is located twenty miles hence. Sir! I need a partner for my undertaking, the significance of which you must necessarily utilize the two hemispheres of your cerebrum to comprehend. You, sir, are the chosen one. After delivering your speech for forty hours, no doubt you have little desire for conversation, and I, sir, love nothing so much as to commune at length with my telescope and silence! You will oblige your servant to hold his tongue, I trust. Hurrah for silence! I am escorting you to . . . You have no objections?”
“None, sir! I only regret that we are not trained to race and that our boots have soles, which to replace costs money, and—”
“I shall buy you new boots.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Those readers who burn with desire to be better acquainted with Mr. William Bolvanius can read his remarkable treatise Did the Moon Exist Before the Flood and if It Did, Why Didn’t It Drown? As an added bonus, they will receive another pamphlet, banned, published a year before his death, and entitled How to Wipe Out the Universe and Escape with One’s Life at the Same Time. Between them, these two works convey the personality of this most remarkable man far better than anything else.
Incidentally, the treatise describes the two years Bolvanius spent in the marshes of Australia, where it was impossible to light a fire, subsisting entirely on crayfish, pond scum, and crocodile eggs. While living in the marshes, he invented a microscope that looks and works exactly like our microscope and discovered the vertebral column of the fish of the species Fishus. On returning from this long trip, he settled a few miles outside of London and devoted himself to astronomy. A tremendous misogynist (three times married, he was the owner of three magnificent, many-branched pairs of cuckold’s horns) who liked his privacy, he led an ascetic life. Thanks to his keen and subtle mind, his observatory and his writings on astronomy remained completely obscure. It is to the sorrow and misfortune of all right-thinking Englishmen that this great man is no longer with us. He quietly passed away last year, devoured by three crocodiles while swimming in the Nile.
CHAPTER III: THE MYSTERIOUS SPOTS
The observatory to which Bolvanius escorted Lund and old Tom Snipe . . .(Here follows an extremely lengthy and extremely dull description of the observatory, which the translator has decided to omit in order to save time and space.) There stood the telescope perfected by Bolvanius. Lund went over to the telescope and directed his gaze at the moon.
“What do you see there, sir?”
“The moon, sir.”
“But what do you see beside the moon, Mr. Lund?”
“I have the honor of seeing the moon and the moon alone.”
“And what about that handful of pale spots close to the moon?”
“By heavens, sir! I see them! Call me an ass, if I don’t see them! What are they?”
“Spots that are uniquely visible through my telescope. But enough! Leave the telescope alone! What I want to know, what I must know, is the nature of those spots! And soon I shall! I intend to travel to those spots! And you will come with me!”
“Long live the spots!” shouted John Lund and Tom Snipe.
CHAPTER IV: TROUBLE IN THE SKY
Half an hour later, Mr. William Bolvanius, John Lund, and the Scotsman Tom Snipe, transported by eighteen aerostatic balloons, were flying towards these mysterious spots. They sat in a hermetically sealed cube filled with compressed air and containing a machine to manufacture oxygen.* This awesome, unprecedented flight had commenced on the night of March 13, 1870. The wind was blowing from the southwest. The compass needle pointed NWW. (An extremely boring description of the cube and the eighteen aerostatic balloons follows.) Deep silence enveloped the cube. The gentlemen huddled in their capes and smoked cigars. Tom Snipe, stretched out on the floor, slept as if in his own bed. The thermometer† registered a temperature below zero. For the first twenty hours, not a word was spoken and nothing of note occurred. The balloons had entered the clouds. Several lightning bolts pursued them but failed to overtake them, since the balloons belonged to an Englishman. On the third day, John Lund came down with diphtheria and Tom Snipe was in the throes of depression. The cube collided with an aerolite and received a terrible jolt. The thermometer registered seventy-six degrees.