December 2018, Issue No. 3
TIME TRAVEL NEXUS PRESENTS . . .
El Anacronópete
by Enrique Gaspar
original publication 1887
illustrated by F. Gómez Soler
translated by Michael Main
—Happy New Year’s Eve from Time Travel Nexus Presents! There are certainly endless numbers of Christmas time travel stories, but what about New Year’s Eve? The only one I can think of is the final episode of Rowan Atkinson’s final episode of Blackadder, which you might want to watch online tonight. Then again, perhaps you’d like to curl up with a nice time travel book from 1887. It has nothing to do with New Year’s Eve, but it is the earliest example I know where a scientist—probably a mad scientist, but you’ll have to be the judge of that—sets out to intentionally build a time machine. And not just any time machine! It’s a flying time machine. So if you’re in the mood to meet our mad Sarragossan inventor, Don Sildufo, please enjoy the first chapter here, including the first man-on-the-street who figures it might be nice to travel back to change his own past. At the end of the blog, there’s a link to the entire novel to keep you up well into the new year. ¡Disfrutad la novela!
CHAPTER I
In which it is shown that moving FORWARD is not the hallmark of progress
ARIS—FOCUS OF GAIETY, center of activity, the very core of hustle and bustle—presented that day a singular appearance. It wasn’t the orderly parade of Parisians and foreigners heading to the Champ de Mars, some to satisfy common curiosity, others to make a technical study of the progress of science and industry. More than anything, their appearances reflected a cheerfulness, like the gentry of old Lutecia on their annual procession to take in the Grand Prix de Paris horse race, butchering English and flaunting their fine suits and dresses with trains, each of which by itself was the equal of the prize purse and which altogether could retire the national debt of some countries.
Still, the truth is that although an age of widespread competition pervaded that year of 1878, it wasn’t racing either, since it was not more than ten days into the month of July. Moreover, there was no to-ing and fro-ing; that is to say it wasn’t the sort of thing that happens in cases wherein the paths of tourists are at odds with those coming and going from their workdays. Everyone followed the same course, a sense of wonder engraved in every look. The shops were closed; trains from all compass points disgorged passengers who stormed carriages and coaches with nothing but the cry: “To Trocadero!”
The steamboats of the Seine, the beltway rail, the American trams—indeed every last means of transportation extant in that modern Babylonia directed its activity toward the one target of the public’s desire. Yet even so, through the suffocating heat of that high summer day, two human rivers overflowed the sidewalks, since, ignoring private vehicles, Paris’s 14,000 carriages could transport no more than 280,000 people, granting ten trips for each of the two-seaters; hence, with the population approaching two million for the draw of the day which everyone wanted to attend, it seemed that 1,700,000 had to go by foot.
The Champ de Mars and the Trocadero, stage for the coming once-in-a-lifetime demonstration, had been invaded at dawn by an impatient multitude of those who, not counting on a ticket for the actual lecture in the pavilion’s Hall of Festivities that day at 10AM, had to content themselves with lesser affairs by braving admission to the exposition area. Those who still couldn’t gain access afflicted themselves on bridges and avenues. The lazier or less fortunate were reduced to spreading out through the heights of Montmartre, church towers, the Bosque hills and the high ground in parks. Roofs, monuments, columns, commemorative arches, observatories, artesian wells, cupolas, lightning rods, anything that offered elevation had been co-opted; and the stores were depleted of umbrellas, parasols, straw hats, fans and cold drinks to combat the sun.
Just what was up in Paris? To be fair, these people who so admire themselves that they place their own mediocrity on pedestals for the world to take them as geniuses all the while amusing themselves with their own stale caricatures, were now stirred to action for ample reason. Science had just taken a step that was to change the course of mankind. One name, until then obscure and Spanish to boot, had come forth with a flash of brilliance to erase the memory of the most eminent minds the world had ever known. And indeed, what had those minds done anyway? Fulton applied Watt and Papin’s experiments to maritime locomotion so ships could crash through the waves under his impulsive force; but to leave a port on Monday and arrive in another on Tuesday, as opposed to arriving Saturday with the wind in your sail, cannot be said to bypass time, but—at best—only to spend less. Stephenson, inventing the locomotive, allowed man to devour countryside on two sinews of iron; but remember that greater distances in fewer minutes are always limited to seeking tomorrow on the path of today. The same can be said of Morse: Sending thoughts over a wire via an electrical agent doesn’t alter the fact that even when the electric current is capable of circling the globe four times per second, the message still takes 1/240th of a minute to complete a revolution around the equator. It’s said that such results follow inevitably from the nature of time—not to mention that it’s impossible to eliminate the telegraph wires, which goes to show that a telegraph is but one connected entity, or as they say: “It’s a very long dog who has his tail pulled in Madrid and barks in Moscow.”
The imaginings of Jules Verne, taken to be unbelievably marvelous, were mere child’s toys before the magnitude of the real-life invention of our modest man of Saragossa, neighbor to the Courts of Spain. Journeying to the center of the Earth is just a matter of opening a hole to descend through, like the Greeks who many centuries before the Christian era had already dug deep into the lowlands south of Athens to unearth rich veins of lead and silver. Their diggings were shallower, but the principle was no different. Or consider navigating the air by means of the ingenious theory of gas-wielding burners. The approach offers no advantage over leaving the steering to the aeronaut who controls the tether as in the Battle of Fleures whereupon General Jourdan tethered the Montgolfiers’ balloon in order to spy on the enemy’s position. Another of Verne’s imaginings, acquiring the North Pole in the expectation it will thaw, is naught but an exercise in pure patience, as if slavishly imitating those wise people who, in order to do their shopping, wait for a shop that’s gone into liquidation. And regarding the Nautilus: Long before Verne, our Catalan compatriot Monturiol had already carried out wildly successful tests in his own underwater vessel, the Ictíneo. Indeed, in order to find out what exists in the ocean’s depths, it’s sufficient to merely assemble a crew of divers. Above all (and kindly forgive my fixation on this point), consider uprooting the alluvial ground on Monday, only to arrive on Tuesday in the Eocene, on Wednesday in the Permian, and to conclude the week in a sea of fire; or traveling in 20 hours from France to Senegal by air; or perhaps reaching the end of a submarine voyage sooner or later—but always later than it began, hence trapping men of science into a rigid notion of “later” that inevitably leads them into chasing after tomorrow as if yesterday were already known to the nᵗʰ decimal place.
The world is humanity’s house, whose inhabitants multiply themselves, building more and more stories, all for more space but without a careful architectural study of the building’s foundations to ensure they’d support the massive weight to be piled upon them. When the passage of half an hour so distorts the facts of an event we’ve witnessed thirty minutes beforehand, can we blindly trust the historians’ accounts of ancient times? Should we base our future behavior on such accounts? By a series of deductions, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes thought to prove the existence of fossil men, but is it not possible that the femur bone he took for human belonged to a zoological species of some lowlife relative of don Quixote’s mount? Know that our past is unknowable. The sciences study it in retrospect, proceeding more or less by induction, but so long as we have no true awareness of yesterday, it’s pointless to ramble on about tomorrow. Rather than aiming to prove that which can’t be proved about the future, let us instead learn to believe in the touch of God as shown in his truly colossal work of architecture.
UCH WERE THE PHILOSOPHICAL PRINCIPLES of that one brilliant mind—Don Sindulfo García, doctor of mathematics, physics and the natural sciences—and of his spectacular invention which universally imbued the eager people of the city with anxiety and expectancy, and necessarily awakened in Paris things which (despite being called the Brain of the World) could not fit into its head.
“But tell me, Señor Captain—” asked a gentleman to one of the Hussars of Pavia traveling by omnibus with 19 other individuals to the site of the experiment—“as a Spaniard, you must know the workings of El Anacronópete.”
“Forgive me,” responded the one asked, “I know I fought the enemies of my country; I know to be cautious with the men and to be gallant with the ladies; I know of military discipline, strategy and tactics; but on the matter of navigating the skies, I know only what I learned from being tossed in a blanket at college when I hadn’t sufficient tobacco to go around.”
“Even so,” persisted the questioner, “I would imagine that, as a fellow countryman of the brilliant inventor of the machine, your notions would be more on target than those of a foreigner.”
“I am proud to be Spanish, and I am also Señor García’s nephew, but I have no more insight into the subject at hand than any other.”
The news of the captain’s relationship with the scientific colossus redoubled the curiosity of the passengers who now wanted to find in him traces of his uncle, much as on the desert plains of Marathon or between the vineyards of the Catalaunian Fields we search for Milcíades’ footsteps or the hoofprints of Attila’s steed; the women asked whether Don Sindulfo was married, the men whether he’d been awarded any commendations, and everyone whether he was related to the famous bullfighter Frascuelo.
“But, to cut to the chase,” said one, “what is he proposing to do?”
“That which we, the French, have long tired of doing—” exclaimed a hot-headed patriot—“to travel by air.”
“Yes, with fine control and a dizzying speed,” a policeman added prudently, while keeping an eye on the cavalryman who had put his hand on his sabre, not meaning anything but to position it to his liking.
“I don’t deny,” interjected a fourth, “that it’s marvelous and grand to sail through the atmosphere wherever you desire, but sooner or later that accomplishment was inevitable. But the intelligent man can hardly conceive what this vehicle can really do—to travel back in time, leaving Paris after dining at Le Grand Véfour today only to arrive yesterday at the Monastery of Yuste to partake of chocolate with the Emperor Carlos V.”
“That’s impossible,” everyone shouted.
“Impossible for us, the ignorant,” continued the speaker, “but not so for the last World Congress of Science which has vouched for the invention. All doubts will soon be dispelled. Señor García sets off today in his Anacronópete for unknown times, from which he intends to return within a month bringing evidence of his fabulous expedition.”
“I’ll bet the inventor is a Bonapartista who wants to restore that traitor of Sedan back to the throne,” a patriot cried.
“Or bring back Robespierre’s reign of terror,” said a royalist supporter, balling his fists.
“One step at a time,” argued a sensible voice. “If El Anacronópete aims to undo history, it seems to me that we must be congratulated as it allows us to amend our failures.”
“Quite right,” called a married man jammed into the front of the bus, thinking of his tiresome wife. “As soon as the ticket office opens to the public, I’m booking passage to the eve of my wedding.”
The passengers were still reveling when the bus (not without great risk of squashing the already compressed crowd) ground to a halt at the head of a bridge; and surging off the bus, everyone tried to break through as best they could to seek their destinies.
It seems the tale we’ve just heard is fictitious, but there is nothing truer. Dr. Sindulfo García prepared his practical experiment to address the most arduous task ever faced by the annals of science: traveling back through time.
What tests had he already done? What branch of study did his discovery belong to, which until today had been but an abstract idea, but that he had been able to thoroughly decipher? What value would various agents put on this whole affair? What colossal entity was it with which he threatened to reveal the truth of the past to a century that looks for its ideals in tomorrow and accepts “forward” as the formula for progress?
The next chapter will tell us.
translation ©2011–2014 by Michael Main
Hope you enjoyed that first chapter. Feel free to hop over to our sister site, storypilot.com, for the complete translation of Enrique Gaspar’s novel. Then head back here at the end of February for the earliest time travel writing (with yet another mad scientist) of another 19th-century man that you just might recognize, even if I don’t tell you the origin of this quote:
The constantly increasing accumulation of pieces of machinery, big brass castings, block tin, casks, crates, and packages of innumerable articles, by their demands for space, necessitated the sacrifice of most of the slighter partitions of the house, and the beams and flooring of the upper chambers were also mercilessly sawn away by the tireless scientist in such a way as to convert them into mere shelves and corner brackets of the atrial space between cellars and rafters. Some of the sounder planking was utilised in the making of a rude broad table, upon which files and heaps of geometrical diagrams speedily accumulated. The production of these latter seemed to be the object upon which the mind of Dr. Nebogipfel was so inflexibly set. All other circumstances of his life were made entirely subsidiary to this one occupation. Strangely complicated traceries of lines they 
were — plans, elevations, sections by surfaces and solids, that, with the help of logarithmic mechanical apparatus and involved curvigraphical machines, spread swiftly under his expert hands over yard after yard of paper. Some of these symbolised shapes he despatched to London, and they presently returned, realised, in forms of brass and ivory, and nickel and mahogany. Some of them he himself translated into solid models of metal and wood; occasionally casting the metallic ones in moulds of sand, but often laboriously hewing them out of the block for greater precision of dimension. In this second process, among other appliances, he employed a steel circular saw set with diamond powder and made to rotate with extraordinary swiftness, by means of steam and multiplying gear.
—from The Chronic Argonaut by H. G. Wells (1888)
So until January, keep on travelin’! —Michael