Raymond Roussel: Impressions of Africa

The glass cage enclosed an immense musical instrument comprising brass horns, strings, circular bows, mechanical keyboards of every kind, and an extensive percussion section.

Against the cage, at the front of the platform, a large space was reserved for two huge cylinders, one red and one white; these communicated with the atmosphere sealed inside the transparent walls through a metal tube.

The fragile stem of an exceedingly tall thermometer, on which each degree was divided into tenths, rose from the cage, into which only its narrow reservoir dipped, filled with a sparkling purple liquid. No mounting held the thin diaphanous tube, placed a few centimeters from the edge that the two cylinders lightly touched.

With all eyes fixed on the curious machine, Bex offered a series of precise, lucid, and informed explanations.

We learned that the instrument before us would soon function thanks to an electric motor hidden in its sides.

Also powered by electricity, the cylinders pursued their two contrary objectives: the red one contained an infinitely powerful heat source, while the white constantly produced an intense cold capable of liquefying any gas.

It happened that the various components of the automated orchestra were made of bexium, a new metal that Bex had chemically endowed with phenomenal thermal sensitivity. Indeed, the entire musical apparatus was intended solely to highlight, in the most striking way possible, the properties of the strange substance that the able inventor had discovered.

A block of bexium subjected to various temperatures changed volume in proportions that could be quantified from one to ten.

The apparatus’s entire mechanism was based on this single fact.

At the top of each cylinder, a smoothly turning knob regulated the opening of an inner spigot that communicated via the metal conduit with the glass cage; Bex could thus change the temperature of the interior atmosphere at will. As a result of these constant disturbances, the fragments of bexium, powerfully depressing certain springs, alternately activated or deactivated a given keyboard or group of pistons, which were moved at the correct moment by ordinary notched disks.

Despite these fluctuations in temperature, the strings invariably remained in tune, thanks to a certain preparation Bex had created to render them especially stiff.

The crystal used for the cage walls was at once marvelously thin and impenetrably resistant, and consequently the sound was scarcely muffled by this delicate, vibrating obstacle.