Axolotl

Probably the best-known short story about Mexican salamanders ("Axolotls"), the work of this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

There was a time when I used to think quite often about axolotls. I would go see them in the aquarium of the Jardin des Plantes and remain transfixed for hours; I would watch them either unmoving or moving darkly. Now I too am an axolotl.

Chance led me to them one spring morning. Paris was opening its peacock tail after a slow hibernation and I went down towards the Boulevard Port-Royal, took St. Marcel and L'Hôpital, espied the green among so much grey and remembered the lions. I was a great admirer of lions and panthers, yet I had never entered into the dark humid building that housed the aquariums. I propped up my bicycle against the railing and went to look at the tulips. The lions were ugly and sad and my panther was asleep. So I opted for the aquariums and avoided some vulgar-looking fish until, unexpectedly, I came face-to-face with the axolotls. I stood there for an hour gazing at them then left, incapable of anything else.

At the Saint-Geneviève library I consulted a dictionary and learned that axolotls are larval forms, outfitted with gills, of a species of batrachia of the genus ambystoma. That they were Mexican was clear to me from their small pink Aztec faces and the sign above the aquarium. I read that specimens had been found in Africa capable of living on land during periods of drought and which continued their life in the water once the rainy season set in. I also discovered their Spanish name, ajolote, that they were edible, and that their oil was used (it might no longer be used) like cod liver oil.

I had no desire to consult specialized works; instead, I returned to the Jardin des Plantes the following day. I began going every morning, sometimes both in the morning and evening. The aquarium custodian would smile at me somewhat perplexed as he took my ticket. I would lean against the iron bar that encased the aquariums and begin my study. There was nothing strange in all this because from the first moment on I understood that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant continued to unite us all the same.  I had already had my fill that first morning in front of the glass when a few bubbles scampered to the surface. The axolotls crowded together in the aquarium's narrow, miserable floor (I alone could tell how just how narrow and miserable) of stone and moss. There were some new specimens, and most of them leaned their heads against the glass, looking with their eyes of gold at their surrounders. Disturbed, almost ashamed, I felt a certain impudence in these silent, unmoving figures gathered at the bottom of the aquarium. I mentally isolated one of them situated on the right, somewhat separate from the rest, so as to examine it more closely. What I saw was a little pink, almost translucent body (I thought of those small Chinese statues made of milky glass) not unlike that of a lizard of fifteen centimeters with a fish's tail of extraordinary delicateness – the most sensitive part of our body. Along its back ran a transparent fin fused to its tail. But what I obsessed about were its incomparably fine legs ending in tiny digits and minutely human nails. And then I came across its eyes and face. Its face was inexpressive with no other trait apart from eyes, two orifices like pinheads entirely of transparent gold, lacking all life but looking, allowing themselves to be penetrated by my gaze – my gaze that seemed to pass through that golden point and vanish in an interior diaphanous mystery. The most slender of black halos bordered its eye, engraved into its pink flesh, into its head's pink and vaguely triangular stone, albeit with round and irregular sides. All this lent it a striking resemblance to a statue corroded by time. Its mouth was concealed by the triangular plane of the face; only at a profile could its considerable size be detected, and from the front a fine crack faintly traced a lifeless stone. On both sides of the head, where the ears would have been, three red veins sprang out like coral, a vegetal growth; the gills, I assumed. And, as it were, the only living thing about it. Every ten or fifteen seconds the veins would be seized with rigid tension, then return to a more relaxed appearance. Once in a while a leg would twitch ever so slightly; I could see the tiny toes steadying themselves in the moss. That which we do not like moves us greatly, and that aquarium was so mean and miserable ... No sooner did we step forward a bit then we would fall into a queue or ram heads with one another. There were difficulties, fights, fatigue. The time felt less oppressive when we were all still.

It was precisely this stillness that made me lean over in fascination the first time I caught sight of the axolotls. I had a dim comprehension of their secret will, of abolishing time and space through indifferent immobility. Then I learned more: the contraction of their gills, the probing of their tiny legs in the stone, and the sudden swimming (some of them swam by simply undulating their bodies) all showed me that they were quite capable of escaping this mineral stupor in which they spent countless hours. More than anything, their eyes were my obsession. Near them in the neighboring aquariums, a few fish gazed at me with the simple stupidity of their beautiful eyes quite similar to ours. But the eyes of the axolotls spoke of the presence of a different life, of another way of looking. Pressing my face to the glass (sometimes, the custodian would cough worriedly) I tried to get a better view of those tiny golden points, that entrance into a world infinitely slow and remote from these pink creatures. It was useless to tap the glass with my finger right in front of their faces: they would never have emitted the slightest reaction. Those eyes of gold continued to burn in their sweet and terrible light; they continued looking at me from an unfathomable depth that gave me vertigo.

And nevertheless they were near. This I knew before, before I became an axolotl. This I knew the day I approached them that first time. As opposed to what most people think, the anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the distance between them and us. The axolotls' absolute lack of any resemblance to human beings demonstrated that this recognition was valid, that I was not relying on easy analogies. Only the little hands ... But lizards also had hands like that, and they resemble us in no way. I think that it is the head of the axolotl, this pink triangular form with its small golden eyes. It saw and knew. It demanded. They were not animals.

It seemed simple, almost obvious, to turn to mythology. In the axolotls I began seeing a metamorphosis that was unable to erase a mysterious humanity. I imagined them conscious, slaves to their bodies, infinitely condemned to an abysmal silence, to desperate reflection. Their blind gaze, the tiny yet terrible disc of inexpressive gold, yielded a message: "Save us. Save us." Surprisingly I found myself mumbling words of advice, instilling childish hopes. They continued looking at me but did not move; soon enough the gills' pink veins became rigid. At that moment I felt something like dull pain; perhaps they could see me; perhaps they noticed my effort to penetrate into the impenetrable of their lives. They were not human beings, but in no animal had I ever encountered such a profound relationship. The axolotls were like witnesses to something, and at times like horrible judges; I felt ignoble before them. There was such a frightening purity in those transparent eyes. They were larvae, but larva also meant mask as well as ghost. Behind those Aztec faces, inexpressive and yet of implacable cruelty, what image awaited its hour? 

I feared them. I think that if I hadn't sensed the proximity of the other visitors and the custodian, I would not have dared to remain alone with them. "You're eating them with your eyes," the custodian said with a laugh – he must have thought me a bit unbalanced. But he didn't realize that it was they who were devouring me, slowly, with their eyes, in a cannibalism of gold. Far from the aquarium I did nothing more than think of them; it was as if they were influencing me from a distance. I came by every day, and at night I imagined them unmoving in the darkness, slowly moving one hand that soon enough encountered another hand. Perhaps their eyes could see in complete darkness and the day continued for them indefinitely. Axolotls' eyes had no lids. 

Now I know that there was nothing odd, that this had to occur. Every morning as I leaned towards the aquarium, the recognition was greater. They were suffering; every fiber of my body perceived this muffled suffering, this rigid torture at the bottom of the water. They were spying on something, a remote annihilated dominion, a time of liberty in which the world had belonged to the axolotls. It was not possible that an expression that terrible, able as it was to overcome the forced inexpressiveness of their stone features, did not bear a message of pain, the proof of eternal damnation, of this liquid inferno that afflicted them. I uselessly sought to prove to myself that my own sensitivity was projecting into the axolotls an inexistent consciousness. They and I both knew. For that reason there was nothing strange, nothing odd in what occurred. My face was pressed up against the aquarium glass, my eyes trying one more time to penetrate the mystery of those eyes of gold bereft of iris or pupil. I looked from very close at the face of an unmoving axolotl right by the glass. Without transition, without surprise, I saw my own face in the glass; instead of the axolotl I saw my own face in the glass, I saw it outside the aquarium, I saw it on the glass's other side. Then my face moved away and I understood.

Only one thing was strange: thinking like I did before, knowing. This realization was intially akin to the horror of someone buried alive who awakes to his destiny. Outside, my face came back and approached the glass. Here I saw my mouth and its lips pressed tight in an effort to understand the axolotl. I was an axolotl and now knew instantaneously that no comprehension was possible. It was beyond the aquarium; its thoughts were thoughts beyond the aquarium. Knowing that and being the same, I too was an axolotl and was in my own world. The horror came – I knew it that very moment – from having made myself a prisoner in the body of an axolotl, transmigrating into that body with the thoughts of a man, being buried alive in an axolotl, damned to moving lucidly among insensitive creatures. But all this stopped when a leg brushed against my face; when barely moving to the side I saw an axolotl next to me, watching me; and I knew that it knew as well, without any possible communication but yet so clear. Or perhaps I also was in it, or perhaps all of us thought like a man, incapable of expression, limited to the golden shining of our eyes which gazed upon the face of the man pressed up against the glass. 

He returned many times thereafter, but comes less often now. Weeks pass without his dropping in. Yesterday I saw him, and he looked at me for a long while then left abruptly. I had the impression he took little interest in all of us, that he was obeying a custom. Since the only thing I do is think, I was able to think about him a lot. It occurs to me that, in the beginning, we continued to communicate, that he felt more than ever united in a mystery over which he obsessed. But the bridges between him and me were short, because what was once his obsession is now an axolotl, alien to the life of man. I think that, in the beginning, I was capable of becoming this he again to a certain extent – ah, only to a certain extent – and sustain his desire of getting to know each other better. Now I am definitely an axolotl, and if I think like a man it is only because every axolotl thinks like a man within his image of pink stone. I also think that in all this I managed to communicate something to him those last days, when I was still he. And in this last solitude to which he no longer returns, it consoles me to think that perhaps he will write about us. That, believing he is imagining a story, he will write everything about axolotls.

Mr. Justice Harbottle

There is a tinge to tales of the morbid that appeals both to the vulgarian and those of elevated sensibilities. The vulgarian, of course, will enjoy first the trepidation and the terrorizing and lust secretly for disembowelments; those of finer mind will be able to read the same pages with the same words and detect a design far more sinister than plain brutishness. Is this why I have always loved ghost stories? Is this the vulgarian in me or someone striving towards greater understanding of our realm through the prism of art? Whatever the case, those of faith know hooves when they see them dragged through the dirt. Which brings us to this horrid little gem. 

Our titular character is not a merry old soul, and never a merry old soul could he possibly have been. He is, however, a man of particular sway since his bench has wrought the most death notices of any other under the crown – well, actually, that matter may be implied but not confirmed. A description of our judge during his last living year suggests something of the Dickensian tyrant laden with terrible auspices:

The Judge was at that time a man of some sixty-seven years.  He had a great mulberry-colored face, a big, carbuncled nose, fierce eyes, and a grim and brutal mouth. My father, who was young at the time, thought it the most formidable face he had ever seen; for there were evidences of intellectual power in the formation and lines of the forehead. His voice was loud and harsh, and gave effect to the sarcasm which was his habitual weapon on the bench. This old gentleman had the reputation of being about the wickedest man in England. Even on the bench he now and then showed his scorn of opinion. He had carried cases his own way, it was said, in spite of counsel, authorities and even of juries, by a sort of cajolery, violence and bamboozling, that somehow confused and overpowered resistance. He had never actually committed himself; he was too cunning to do that. He had the character of being, however, a dangerous and unscrupulous judge; but his character did not trouble him.

The identity of the narrator is of little concern. Le Fanu used the papers of literature's first occult detective, Martin Hesselius, to achieve several degrees of separation and lend his tale what all good ghost stories need: the strength of hearsay. Hesselius lived well past the erasing of Roger Harbottle's traces from this earth, but a tenant known to a friend of his spoke of a "dark street in Westminster" and "a spacious old house" where one unforgettable night, two men emerged from a closet in a locked room and began to traipse insouciantly across his bedroom floor:

A slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, entered the room on tiptoe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villainy .... this direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of rope.

These specters "walked as living men do, but without any sound," and our judge, given what we learn later on, is clearly the older, scurvy-ridden of the two. And his dark, thin companion may very well be a certain Lewis Pyneweck.

Pyneweck was once a grocer in Shrewsbury, to become in the course of our narrative "prisoner in the jail of that town." His charge, perhaps ironically, is forgery. As in so many of the cases presided over by Judge Harbottle, the only questions to weigh are whether the charge is valid, and if so, whether the punishment meted out conforms to the dimensions of the crime – and here is where our narrative begins to swerve and slope. Harbottle is visited by a rickety old man, Hugh Peters, who warns him of a plot afoot against the judge by his peers. A few pointed remarks are bandied about before Harbottle has the mole followed by his footman, who will be surprised at his quarry's hidden talents. In time, it is also revealed that another mole resides in Harbottle's own home, his housekeeper Flora Carwell. Carwell is the maiden name, now reassumed, of the former Mrs. Pyneweck, and into this household she brought her only child in exchange for the silence of the Judge on what had previously occurred, what was occurring between two consenting adults, and what would occur to her husband, incarcerated and abandoned to the whims of injustice. Were Harbottle's promises just more taradiddle? Given his propensity for "jollifications," it would appear that Mrs. Carwell is at best a muted conspirator and at worst a galley slave. Imagine her horror, therefore, when she consults a Shrewsbury paper one May morning on the only Friday the 13th in 1746 to find her ex-spouse among the most recently executed.

Some may argue that Le Fanu's talents were wasted on the occult, yet I must dissent. Surely mystery and murder can be deemed a lesser genre than the pure pleasure of first-rate art; but as soon as genius decides for a more layered interpretation of reality, it may find the supernatural the most plausible of all phenomena. Harbottle is a baleful rogue, but he is not immune to logic or logic's fearful consequences. In this vein he reconsiders his guest that night and begins to doubt the senses he so loves to indulge:

I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again. The Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he laughed to scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the very first puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark front parlor were often in his memory. His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this false old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were identical with those of Lewis Pyneweck.

A quick check with prison officials confirms what cannot be reassuring: that Pyneweck has long been accounted for and has never once been released from his murky dungeon. And if you think this would be nightmarish enough among the waking, wait until you see what godforsaken corners our judge visits when he sleeps.

Merci pour le chocolat

Chocolate manufacturers have almost invariably suffered a cruel fate in literature and film, perhaps because they come to seem as petty and decadent as their precious wares. When fictional chocolate does have some kind of positive connotation, it usually veers down that extremely dubious path of catholicon and, if applicable, aphrodisiac as well. Let's set the matter straight: chocolate is but another drug. True, it may at times so stimulate the brain that some people frankly never recover. But like alcohol, nicotine, or anything else that one allows to shape's one mood and, in so doing, one's personality, chocolate is an excuse for those who need excuses and a pleasure for those whose lives may not have enough of it. Which brings us to this quiet little mystery. 

We begin with the strangely distant Marie-Claire Muller (Isabelle Huppert) exchanging vows with the just as strangely fatigued André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc). Why Polonski and Muller as the protagonists in a French film, albeit one set in this relatively multiethnic city? Are their names intentionally foreign-sounding? Our Muller is an heiress to a formidable chocolate business, which for some Europeans is as plain an accomplishment as her surname suggests. Polonski, on the other hand, while perhaps a reference to another director, is a highly regarded classical pianist. His is also a common name – in Poland, where the most famous of all French pianists was born – and so we again face the quandary, so prevalent in Chabrol, of societal conflict, of an invisible class struggle, of art and its eternity versus the immediate gratification of gold bullion. It is well known that another contemporary director likes to employ bourgeois couples called Anne and George, or variants thereof, upon whom he can inflict the vilest of fates. But what about Chabrol? "I declare you bound, re-bound, if I may be permitted to say, in marriage," says the justice of the peace. "Please exchange rings." "They're the same ones" says Marie-Claire, who goes by Mika, which may remind us not a little of Milka, a German chocolate – but I digress. Yes, Mika and Polonski were, once upon a time, wife and man, nineteen years ago to be exact. Just before, as it were, the pianist decided for reasons that will become painfully clear to us that Mika was not his soul’s mate, and opted to marry the lovely Lisbeth who would bear him his only child Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly) then perish in a mysterious car accident on Guillaume’s tenth birthday. A flashback near the film’s midpoint clarifies the unusual sequence of occurrences that evening, even if what this character remembers is not what the official police report contains. What we do know, and what is reflected in that brief glimpse into a foggy and mysterious past, is that even after their brief marriage and divorce, Polonski and Mika remained so close that it was at Mika’s house that the family was staying at the time, and it was in Mika’s neighborhood that Lisbeth fell asleep at the wheel and skidded off into eternal rest. And it was also Mika who gave Lisbeth the titular cocoa laced with Rohypnol mere minutes before her fatal ride.

Revealing this detail here does not spoil our film, because the same information is made available to the viewer at a proportionally earlier point in Merci pour le chocolat. It seems safe to assume that Mika killed Lisbeth, whether or not she intended to do so. Our task is to determine why she took this course of action, and what, if anything, occupies the black abyss of what is left of her soul. Even in the opening scenes, when Mika listlessly humors guests at her wedding reception then, as if to make amends for such a betrayal, a well-attended public exhibition of Lisbeth’s photography, we sense that she has long since been shunted down a very different track. At the exhibition we move quickly from one photo that appears to be a close-up of thumbs depressing a neck, to Polonski trapped in some imbecilic harangue on politics, to Mika tuning out – there is no other expression – one of her oldest employees and a dear friend of her father’s. With little forewarning – people seem to be quite used to her permanent somnambulism – she walks away and touches someone on the back who appears to be Guillaume. With that touch, which befits a lover much more than a stepmother, we somehow have the premonition that it will not be Guillaume. When it turns out indeed to be Mika's stepson, it is remarkable to note how his perturbation indicates sexual prudishness. Yes, Guillaume has joined the rest of the world in finding something sensual about Isabelle Huppert, hardly a cause for either lamentation or praise. But within the context of the film, it suggests yet another complication that bobs its head upon the surface on account of the only person who sees Mika touch Guillaume at the exhibition, a beautiful eighteen-year-old by the name of Jeanne Pollet (Anna Mouglalis).

Jeanne we know from an earlier scene. In it, two very well-to-do middle-aged ladies Pauline (German actress Isolde Barth) and Louise Pollet meet in a posh restaurant where, one gets the impression, they no longer need to look at the menu. Apart from reveling in their poshness, they are also awaiting their teenage children, Jeanne and Axel, who are openly dating but “probably playing tennis right now” (the hint is clear, even to the mothers in denial). When the duo finally cruises in still perspiring from, well, their afternoon workout, Pauline is reminded of an announcement from today’s paper regarding the Muller-Polonski wedding. What happens next is so preposterous (Barth's pronounced accent in French imbues the whole scene with an urgent gravity, as if the foreign press were reporting a scandal) it could only be likely: apparently Jeanne, a budding young pianist, was born at the same hospital on the same day as Guillaume Polonski. Owing to a dearth in bracelets, only the first three letters of their surnames were written and – and here I admit to having laughed myself silly, and not only at the thought of a Swiss hospital lacking supplies. In any case, what we may say is that some doubts arise as to Jeanne's parentage, all the more so since her legal father has been dead for many years; Louise's shockingly defensive reaction – any self-assured parent would have mocked the whole notion – only serves to deepen Jeanne's and our suspicions. One thing leads to another and Jeanne shows up on the Polonskis' doorstep eager to meet the great master. In no small coincidence, she also happens to have a piano competition in Budapest in a couple of weeks and could benefit from as much private tutoring as possible. Polonski, of course, is in that regard all too happy to oblige. And although he makes a point of verbally dismissing Jeanne's paternity queries, his treatment of her indicates otherwise, perhaps because she reminds him of Lisbeth, whose gestures culled from photographs in Guillaume's room she begins to ape.

Not every secret that subtends Merci pour le chocolat is revealed, because life does not show all its cards, at least not all at once. We may think we know what took place that lonely night, but the versions we get cannot be considered in any way definitive. There are many delicate, observant moments that illuminate our cast in unpredictable ways: consider when Dutronc, a marvelously understated actor, thoroughly convinces Jeanne that he may believe her story, then turns to Guillaume and speaks exactly like a father who has no doubt about his offspring; when Mika goes to see Louise in her office for one of the tensest tea-drinking scenes in recent memory; or when a character turns off the lights in bed only to have a close-up reveal a face much more awake in the darkness than the light, as if the face and the brain behind it thrived in the shadows of human motives. A couple of details from the telltale flashback, details specifically concerning Guillaume, also imply what may have happened and what may yet occur. Yet as Polonski himself admits, Jeanne's distinct resemblance to Lisbeth has as much to do with the good memory it generates as with any biological probability. Almost anyone can resemble anyone else if a few key mannerisms are copied; the more eccentric the mannerisms available, the more convincing the understudy. And we haven't even mentioned what piece Jeanne will be playing in Budapest.

The Tower in Rome

It is curious that some deride allegory, and even curiouser that others abuse it; and it is perhaps most curious that we need a word for allegory when we already have the word art. The modern mind, that cesspool of rebellion and relativism, has come to regard allegory as some kind of cheap trick, oftentimes imputing its prevalence to the necessity of making the masses believe without directly telling them what it is they should believe (which has much to do with how some parents educate their offspring). After cannons and pipes blaze in equal fury at the chicanery of medieval warlocks, we are handed the modern novel steeped in insincerity and nothing more than an allegory for the relativism that exculpates its authors from any kind of moral structure. You know the kind: everything hitherto has been a dream, or a lie, or a deception based on the lie found in a dream provoked by another sort of pipe. It is in this way that modern art finds an out when they really had no business at all being in. Allegory, when used elegantly, is one of the most radiant types of story because its revelation has overcome you in measured steps; it likely contains the recognitions and reversals that have been shown to compose good tragedy; and when sublimated by a master's hand can sometimes prove the corollary that "all art is an allegory of art itself" (I paraphrase to stymie the Googling hordes). First-rate works indeed add to the mystery of art's fascination, but old-fashioned, edifying allegories also yield the sensations we crave. Which brings us to the above tale in this collection.

You will have heard this story before, but not in this sequence or consummation. First we hear the legend of an ancient city's impregnable tower; then we hear of the death of the regent; finally another ruler lays claims to the throne with different motives as his engine. In this case our ruler was once "a man of lowly origin who had raised himself up from the dust to the highest station and had become a great lord" – although I suppose one never really stops being of lowly origin. Fairy tales and fables, which are some of the most tightly plotted narratives in all of literature, will inform the next stage. The new ruler understands that he cannot truly be considered the king of far and wide until he has deciphered the enigma that stands before him in metal and stone. The final preamble to the story's main events is very much an allegory of parental duties: the king asks his minions to swear to do his will without first telling them his wishes. They hesitate and then at length relent, all the while knowing his wish: to ingress the tower's "four gates, facing each of the four sides of the world." The oddities within the tower cannot be properly described here, but each one contains a clear parallel to older and more spiritual Judaic works that will be as familiar to the readers of The Tower of Rome as the creations of this writer or these siblings are to our ears. Since all despots end up resembling one another, our despot remains nameless throughout. And he does not tarry in threatening his court of advisers and stargazers to decrypt what he has witnessed within the tower walls. They are given a month to resolve the matter, at which point they will be replaced – although dismissals in those days usually meant more than simply an end to a career.   

And it is here that we find another familiar: the soothsayer and astrologist, as grey as the clouds he reads. It is he who steps forth after a month's investigation into the meaning of the monument has predictably yielded not one conclusive piece of evidence. The stargazer is taken aside by the emperor, who still lusts after the sacred knowledge to which he feels that he alone is entitled, and asked to speak of that which cannot be spoken and relate what must be deemed ineffable. What he confesses sub rosa to his liege will recall to mind another old tale:

The tower with the four gates was built by Emperor Nimrod, and not by human hands but with the power of enchantment. When Nimrod had subjugated the entire world and had become ruler over all creatures, he said in his heart, 'I am God.' Everyone knelt and bowed before him and brought sacrifices to him. Fearing that after death another would rule the earth and would destroy the altars that had been raised for him, and would blot out the name of Nimrod from human memory, he put the entire power and might of his universal rule into his iron crown ... [and] concealed the secret of the iron crown from the stars and spirits and hid it inside a rock. He recorded the secret on a tablet, and flying to the highest peak of the Mountains of Darkness, he hewed out a hole in a stone of the mountain and placed the tablet in it, and with enchantment rolled the heaviest stone in the world upon it.

You need not be a Biblical scholar to gain the substance of this passage, but like most works literary or otherwise, it most greatly benefits the subject experts. You may wonder about the actual location of the Mountains of Darkness, what the tablet could possibly say and in what language, and what on earth or beyond a king would be doing with something so Spartan as an iron crown that could easily be a shackle. Perhaps that's why instead of opening the gates, each emperor has hung new locks upon them.

http://www.w3.org/2004/Talks/0611-sb-wsswintro/bruegel-tower-of-babel-ruins-big.jpg

Hugo, "Crépuscule"

A work ("Twilight") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

A white moiré shroud shakes amidst the woods,
A cryptic pond gleams where the clearing waits;
The trees stretch deep, their branches black like soot;
Did you see Venus there in lightest gait?

Or Venus dancing on the hilly peak?
Are you then lovers, passing through the shades?
As brown paths are with muslin white arrayed,
To sleeping tombs the waking grass will speak.

What says the grass? How then the tomb's reply?
If you live, love!  Beneath the yews we're cold. 
Hare, find your hole!  Love, love!  Soft falls the night;
Be happy while our thoughts retain their mold.

Live! God wants us loved. Make us envy you,
O pairs who pass beneath green hazels' womb. 
All that, when leaving life, lives in the tomb,
We took from love, in prayer so to use.

Our dead ere were so beautiful indeed;
The shaded glowworm strays with torch aloft;
This tomb will shake, by God's will so decreed,  
Amidst the swaths on wind upon a toft.

The reaper's dull tread shall make meadows quake;
A black roof's shape shall trace a cottage bare;
The heavens' star, with flowers' vivid glare,
Shall open splendid freshness in its wake.

Love! 'Tis the month of ripest berry fruit.
And dreamy evening's angel shall embed,
Afloat on wind and darkest wing's pursuit,
The quick's each kiss with prayers of the dead.