The Face in the abyss

In way, Graydon learns from Suarra that the old races of Yu-Atlanchi, the lost continent, know neither death, neither the disease, nor the procreation but which they controls on the other hand the dreams and the evolution of the other races. Once arrived in the cave of the Face in the abyss , an enormous face cut in the rock, the three assistants of Graydon precipitate to seize richnesses in which the cave abounds and disappear, while Graydon disappears. When the unhappy engineer awakes, it is surrounded by Indians Aymara S who must accompany back it in Chupan, apart from the borders of Yu-Atlanchi. Two months, finally given later of its wounds, Nicholas Graydon decide to set out again in the continent lost with all the equipment necessary to find beautiful Suarra there. In its sleep, Nicholas Graydon sees Adana , the Mother-Snake, which promises to him to help it if it succeeds in coming until it by the only force from its easy way and its courage.

On the road of the lost continent, the explorer kills out of the man-lizards and saves in extremis three Indians who then accompany it in the cave by the Lord Huon , chief of the outlaws of Yu-Atlanchi. In spite of a reception reserved and being wary, Nicholas Graydon succeeds in being made accept by the community of the outlaws which decides to help it. The hero listens to the history of Yu-Atlanchi and his six Lords: one day, Nimir, one of the six Lords of the lost continent, decides to break the pact which bound the old race to the Mother-Snake and to reign without division on the region. But it was made prisoner and locked up by magic in the “Face in the abyss”. Since, only its spirit wanders again, in the search of a new body to accommodate it. Graydon also learns that the outlaws would like to reopen the doors of the life and dead in order to having children. Huon proposes with the explorer to carry out it to the city of Yu-Atlanchi. But Dorina , the concubine of Huon, proposes in Graydon first of all to meet Suarra in a secret place: the cave of woman-frog. But Graydon falls into a ambuscade and is done removed by man-lizards which carry out it in front of the throne of Nimir, the Dark one. The spirit of Nimir, assisted by the cruel lord Lantlu , requires of him to lend its body to him and to reign with him on Yu-Atlanchi. Whereas he endeavors to refuse in spite of the psychic suffering that Nimir imposes to him. Graydon is finally saved by Kon , the man-spider.

After having joined Regor , faithful lieutenant de Huon, the explorer discovers that the cave of the rebels was put at bag following the treachery of Dorina and that Huon was made prisoner by Lantlu. The hero then decides with Regor to go to save Huon which must be delivered to dinosaurs at the time of circus games. Once drawn from business, Huon kills Dorina of its own hands before fleeing with his/her companions. A little later Nicholas Graydon learns that Suarra was captured by the men of Lantlu and share to deliver it. Whereas Suarra will be delivered to the desires lascifs of a hideous man-lizard, the explorer saves it, but it is found confronted with Nimir which gives a supposed magic collar to him to protect it. At this point in time starts the great final battle between the forces of the good of the Mother-Snake and the forces of the evil of Nimir, opponent troops the human ones and legions of man-lizards, forces magic and charms malefic. Nimir fails to take again the capacity on Yu-Atlanchi, but the Mother-Snake announces the end of the reign of the old races. The doors of the life and death are again open and Graydon can finally like with leisure beautiful Suarra.

Main characters

• Adana , also called Mother-Snake , surviving last of an extinct race ophidienne;

• Cadok , lord of the city of Yu-Atlanchi, combined of Huon;
• Dancret , small and cynical French, henchman of Starrett;
• Dorina , concubine of Huon;
• Emer , old name of the Aymaras Indians in the novel;
• Nicholas Graydon , thirty-four years, graduate of Harvard, mining engineer;
• Huon , chief of the rebels outlaw;
• Kon , spider tisseuse, henchman of Huon, member of a species semi-spider, semi-human;
• Lantlu , cruel henchman of Nimir, the Lord of Darkness;
• Nimir , Seigneur of Darkness who seeks to find his capacity;
• Regor , known as “Regor the Black”, henchman of Huon, rebels outlaw. At the end of the one of its arms a bludgeon was grafted;
• Soames , American, henchman of Starrett;
• Starrett , large adventurer, gold digger without scruples;
• Suarra , young virgin with the service of Adana, the Mother-Snake;
• Tyddo , Lord of the Madness, auxiliary of the Mother-Snake.

Comments

Reason against magic

The account of exploration of an unknown world by a contemporary adventurer of its reader makes it possible the author to confront two worlds: that of the modern rational thought and that of the magic and the legends. In the Face in the abyss , the hero - who is an engineer very with the fact of the scientific discoveries of his time - tries to be explained in a rational way the phenomena of which he is the witness on the lost continent of Yu-Atlanchi. The rational thought is opposed thus to the magic thought and tries to bring back all the traditional elements of marvellous in the bosom of science.

Some examples:

• when he sees his companions of adventure transforming themselves as by magic into gold droplets, the hero does not hesitate to attach this strange phenomenon to discovered of the atom by the physicist Ernest Rutherford while speculating in the molecular transformations that this discovery could allow;
• when the hero discovers the existence of invisible winged snakes, it explains their invisibility by the optical theory of refraction of the luminous rays, as in the more known phenomenon of the mirages in the desert. On this subject, Abraham Merritt does not omit either to refer to those of its prédesseurs who already tackled the subject in literature: H.G. Wells in the invisible Man or of Guy of Maupassant in Horla.

For the hero, only exist physical or chemical phenomena more or less accessible to human comprehension, depending on the progress report of the scientific research. Abraham Merritt declared besides that there was in its novel no scientific statement which cannot be justified.

Prototype of civilizations

The forgotten civilization of Yu-Atlanchi which the author creates in his novel is a at the very least eclectic world which it presents as the matrix and the source of all civilizations human known, present or last. Thus, during their long migration of the Antarctic continent covered by the ices with prehistory with humanity, Yu-Atlanchiens essaimé on Earth the germs of our civilizations. Thus, Yu-atlanchi would be the prototype of the lost civilizations attested in the history, like the Atlantis or even the Ground of Mû, giving a real base to the legends. In the city, Nicholas Graydon discovers statues which resemble to the Egyptian gods with heads of animal and a temple which points out that of Karnak, thus making to ancient Egyptian civilization a kid of this civilization first. The Mother-Snake appears to the hero like the mythical prototype of the princesses Khmer Naga of civilization or Lilith, the first wife of Adam, driven out by Eve. The rebels of Huon carry coats of mail similar to those of crossed and weapons of the type of those used in ancient Crete.

Abraham Merritt answers in its account the typical questionings of a search of the origins, of a single source of all known civilizations which, by successive migrations, would have essaimé in the whole world, like a kind of during romantic with the myth of the Aryens. It is useful to recall that the myth of a single civilization at the origin of the human civilsiations had been started again by the colonel James Churchward in his various works on the Continent lost Mu whose first volume appeared in 1926, that is to say four before the publication of the second part of the novel of Abraham Merritt which will be made a duty quote it.

A cultivated hero

During its account, Abraham Merritt makes some allusions érudites to the fine arts like substituting for long literary descriptions of the visual comparisons differently more effective on the cultivated reader. Thus, the hero compares the hideous face of Kon, the man-spider, with the nightmarish sights of the Sabbat of the Witches of Albrecht Dürer and paintings of the room of the Wisdom forgotten with works of Michel-Angel - with its last Jugement - or of the Greco, of Davies, John Singer Sargent, Hans Holbein the Young person or of Sandro Botticelli.

Crossings man-animal

Following the example H.G. Wells in the Island of Doctor Moreau , Abraham Merritt approaches without developing it the topic of the crossing of the species, in fact of the crossing man-animal, and its consequences. The author imagines an old race with the immense capacities which controls the evolution and intervenes on the process of evolution under the terms of historical and biological considerations: the cells at the origin of the man and the animals are the same ones and the human embryo passes by all the animal stages before becoming properly human and the nature itself produced of the anomalies.

Abraham Merritt does not hesitate to mix the kinds and the references, drawing with the sources of the Christian religion or Greek mythology, inventing even scientists with doubtful research, to base the scientific possibility of such interventions on the races. The author develops a polymorphic argumentation, quoting Saint François d' Assise - which called the animals his/her “brothers” -, Protée - who symbolized in antiquity the polymorphism of the life - and of the European scientists of his invention as Grégory of Edinburgh - which would have invented the term of protaebion -, the Vornikoff Russian, the Schwartz German or the French Red-headed. But it is always a feeling of fear which seizes the hero when it distinguishes on the animal features of certain characters of the account of the characteristic human.

Criticisms specialized

In its History of the modern science fiction , Jacques Sadoul declares in connection with this novel: The fight between Nimir, the deposed god, the man-spiders, the dinosaurs of the prohibited valley, the faithful ones of the Mother-Snake, attractive Suarra and the modern American armed with his repeating rifle, are one of the masterpieces epic of Merritt. .

French editions

• Abraham Merritt, a face in the abyss , translated from American by Paul Chwat, Albin Michel, coll “Science fiction”, 1971;
• Abraham Merritt, a face in the abyss , translated from American by Paul Chwat, I have Lu, 1978 (republication in 1999, ISBN 2-27711-886-9);
• in : Atlantis. The islands anglouties , Presses of the City, “Bus” coll, 1995;
• in : Abraham Merritt, complete Works - 2 , Lefrancq Literature, 1998. ISBN 2-87153-541-8.
• in : Abraham Merritt, complete Works - 2 , Ananké Editions, coll “Volumes”, Brussels, 2002.

Quotations

• “ All the life on the Earth has a common origin. Today different, multiform such Protée, it does not remain about it less than the man and the tiger, the fish and the snake, the lizard and the bird, the ant and the bee, all come from these formerly similar drops of frost, wandering million years ago on the not very deep littorals of the first seas. ”, chap. IV, pp. 43-43;

• “ It could have killed it… it had intended certainly to do it… What had prevented that the blow was mortal? He endeavoured to reflect… God! how the head hurt him! ”, chap. VII, p. 68;

• “ First of all, I estimate that you build too quickly apart from yourselves, and too slowly inside. The thought, my child, east is a force quite as powerful as any of those which you named, and more easily controllable, because one produces it in oneself. It seems to me that you are never objectively leaning on this problem. One day or the other, you will find yourselves locked up so deeply in your machines, which you will be unable to find a means of leaving there. ”, chap. XX, p. 169;

• “ Graydon heard the sound of a voice which he did not know, realiserealised that it was his, left while running right in front of him. ”, chap. XXVI, p. 225;

• “ What a light of the devil! What a terrible night! Hold, the rhyme is rich… the expansion of this cursed numbness appeared dammed up about it. ”, chap. XXVI, p. 226;