A beetle, rolling along the ground with its mandibles and
antennae a ball whose principal components were compounded
of excrement, was advancing rapidly towards the above hillock,
bent on displaying its determination to take that direction. This
articulate animal was not much bigger than a cow! If anyone
doubts what I say, let them come to me and through the testimony
of good witnesses I will satisfy the most incredulous. I followed
the beetle at a distance, openly puzzled. What was it going to do
with that great black ball?
  O reader, you who incessantly (and not unjustifiably) pride
yourself upon your perspicacity, would you be capable of telling
me? But I do not wish to put your well-known passion for
riddles to a severe test. Suffice you to know the mildest punishment
which I can inflict upon you is still to make you realise
that this mystery will not be revealed to you (it will be revealed
to you) until later, at the close of your life, when you and your
death-throes open philosophical discussions by your bedside ...
and perhaps even at the end of this stanza.
  The beetle reached the foot of the hillock. I had followed in its
tracks and was still a long way from the scene of the action; for
like the skuas, restless birds--as if always starving--who thrive
in the seas that bathe both poles, and only accidentally venture
into the temperate zones, I was ill at ease, and moved my legs
forward very slowly. But what then was the tangible substance
towards which I was advancing?
  I knew that the *genus pelicaninae* includes four distinct species:
the booby, the pelican, the cormorant, the frigate-bird. The
greyish form that appeared before me was not a booby. The
sculptured block I set eyes on was not a frigate-bird. The frosted
flesh I observed was not a cormorant. Now I could see him, the
man with encephalon bereft of annular protuberance! I delved
dimly amid my memory's meanderings: in what torrid or icy
region had I already observed that very long, broad, convex,
vaulted beak with pronounced, unguiculate, inflated bridge
hooked at its tip; those toothed, straight edges; the branches of
that lower mandible separated almost to the end and the gap
filled with a membraneous skin; that wide pouch, yellow and
sacciform, occupying the whole throat and capable of distending
itself considerably; and those very narrow nostrils, longitudinal,
almost imperceptible, hollowed into a basal groove!
  Had this living being, its respiration pulmonary and simple, its
body decked with hair, been bird complete, down to the soles
of its feet, and not merely to its shoulders, it would not then have
been so hard for me to recognise it: a very easy thing to do, as
you are about to see for yourselves. But this time, I excuse
myself; for my demonstration to be lucid I would require one
such bird to be placed on my work table, even if only a stuffed
one. Besides, I am not rich enough to procure one.
  Following step by step a previous hypothesis, I would immediately
have determined its true nature and found a place in
the outline of natural history for him in whose sickly posture I
admired such nobility. With what satisfaction at not being entirely
ignorant of the secrets of his dual organism, and with what eagerness
to know still more, did I behold him in his abiding metamorphosis!
Although he did not have a human face, he seemed to me
as fine as the two long tentaculiform filaments of an insect; or
rather, as a hasty burial; or again, as the law of reconstitution of
mutilated limbs; and above all, as an eminently putrescible
liquid! But paying no heed whatever to what was happening in
the vicinity, the pelican-headed stranger kept staring straight
ahead.
  Some other day I will bring this story to a conclusion. Yet I
will continue my narrative with dreary alacrity; for if, on your
part, you are anxious to know what my imagination is driving at
(please Heaven that it *was* indeed only imagination!), for my own,
I have resolved to finish what I had to tell you at only one sitting
(and not two!), although no one, nevertheless, has the right to
accuse me of lack of courage. But faced with similar circumstances,
more than one person would feel his heart race beneath the palm
of his hand.
  In a little port in Brittany there recently died, almost unknown,
an old salt, skipper of a coastal vessel, who was the hero of a
terrible story. He was then a master mariner and sailed for a
St Malo ship-owner. Well, after a thirteen-month absence he
reached the conjugal hearth the very moment after his wife, still
lying-in, had given him an heir to whose affiliation he could
lay no claim. The captain showed no sign of his surprise and
rage. He coldly asked his wife to dress and to join him for a walk
on the town battlements. This was January. The ramparts of St
Malo are high, and when the north wind blows the boldest
flinch. The unfortunate woman obeyed, calm and resigned; on
her return she became delirious. She died in the night. But this
was only a woman. While I, who am a man, confronted with a
drama no less great, know not whether I would keep enough
control over myself for my face muscles to remain motionless!
  As soon as the beetle reached the foot of the hillock the man
raised his arm towards the west (in precisely this direction a
lamb-eating vulture and a Virginian eagle-owl had engaged in
aerial combat), wiped from his beak a streaky tear which presented
a diamond-sparkling colour-scheme, and said to the scarab:
  "Wretched ball! Have you not rolled it long enough? Your
vengeance is still not assuaged; and already this woman whose
arms and legs you trussed with strings of pearls in such wise
as to make up an amorphous polyhedron, so that you might trail
her along at your tarsi across valleys and tracks, over thorns and
stones (let me draw near to see if it still be her!) has seen her bones
gouged by wounds, her limbs, buffed by the mechanical law of
rotary friction, blending into the unity of coagulation, and her
body presenting, instead of the primordial lineaments and natural
curves, the monotonous appearance of an entirely homogeneous
whole which through the confusion of its various shattered components
resembles only too well the mass of a sphere! She has
been dead a long time; leave these remains to earth, and beware
lest your consuming rage swell to irreparable proportions: it is no
longer justice, for egoism, hidden in the teguments of your brow,
like a phantom slowly lifts the trappings that overlay it."
  The lamb-eating vulture and the Virginian eagle-owl, driven
imperceptibly by the vicissitudes of their struggle, had drawn
near us.
  The beetle trembled at these unexpected words, and what on
another occasion would have been an insignificant movement this
time became the distinctive mark of a fury that knew no more
bounds, for it scraped the thighs of its hind legs formidably against
the edges of its elytrae, producing a high-pitched sound!
  "Who then are you, pusillanimous creature? It seems you have
forgotten certain strange developments in the past; you do not
retain them in your memory, my brother. This woman betrayed
us, one after the other. You first, then myself. It seems to me
this insult must not (must not!) disappear from the memory so
easily. So easily! Your magnanimous nature allows *you* to forgive.
But do you know whether, despite the abnormal state of this
woman's atoms, reduced to dough (it is not now a question of
ascertaining whether, on first inquiry, anyone would believe
this body to have been enlarged by a notable quantity of density,
rather by two powerful wheels thrown into gear than by the
effects of my fiery passion) she does not still exist? Silence, and
let me be revenged."
  It resumed its manege and made off, pushing the ball before
it. When it was at a distance, the pelican cried out:
  "That woman, by her magic power, has given me the head of a
palmiped and has turned my brother into a scarab: perhaps she
deserves even worse treatment than that I have just described."
  And I, unsure whether or not I was dreaming, and guessing
from what I had heard the nature of the hostile relations that
united in bloody combat above me the lamb-eating vulture and
the Virginian eagle-owl, flung back my head like a hood, to give
my lungs free play and all available ease and elasticity, and, eyes
staring upward, shouted at them:
  "You there! Stop your fighting! Both of you are right, for to
each she had promised her love. Accordingly she betrayed you
both. But you are not the only ones. Besides, she deprived you
of your human shape, making a cruel sport of your most hallowed
sufferings. And you still hesitate to believe me! She is dead,
anyway, and the beetle made her undergo a punishment whose
imprint, despite the pity of him she first betrayed, is ineffaceable."
  At these words they ended their feud and tore out no more
feathers nor strips of flesh: they were right to behave thus. The
Virginian eagle-owl, lovely as a thesis on the curve described by a
dog running after its master, swooped down into the crevices of
a ruined convent. The lamb-eating vulture, lovely as the law of
arrest of development in the chests of adults whose propensity
for growth is not consonant with the quantity of molecules
assimilated by their organism, was lost in the upper strata of the
atmosphere. The pelican, whose generous forgiveness had impressed
me deeply--for I did not think it natural--resumed on
his hillock the majestic impassivity of a lighthouse, as if to warn
human navigators to heed his example and keep their destiny
safe from the love of dark witches, and went on staring straight
ahead of him. The beetle, lovely as the tremor of the hands in
alcoholism, disappeared on the horizon. Four more existences one
could cancel from the book of life. I ripped out a whole muscle
of my left arm, for I no longer knew what I was doing, so moved
was I in view of this quadruple calamity. And I believed it to be
excrement! Really, what an utter simpleton I am!