"And the American Congo," asked Max Huber, "is that out of the question?"
"To what end, my dear Max?" replied John Cort. "Do we lack vast spaces in the United States? What of the new and empty regions between Alaska and Texas? Before colonizing abroad, it is better to colonize at home, I think...."
"Ah, my dear John, the European nations will eventually divide Africa, if things continue -- an area of three billion hectares! Will the Americans leave them all to the English, the Germans, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French, the Italians, the Spaniards, the Belgians?..."
"The Americans will have nothing to do with it, any more than the Russians," said John Cort, "and for the same reason...."
"Which is?"
"It is pointless to tire your legs when you only have to extend your arms."
[My translation.]
Le Village aérien, known in English under the title, The Village in the Treetops, is Verne's Dark Continent tale, and I was surprised at how well it held up as a story. Obviously the science in this science fiction is the kind of evolutionary anthropology you would expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the book was published in 1901), but Verne is clearly skeptical of a lot of features of it, so while he accepts the essential features for narrative purposes, he also at several points in the narrative raises questions about how it should be interpreted even if true. In the Fitzroy edition, I. O. Evans says that Verne takes the opposition between the 'Missing Link' idea that there is no sharp line between man and animal and the view, found in Verne's own Catholic background, that there is a sharp difference between the two, and he gives a "somewhat inconclusive suggestion of the manner in which the problem might be solved", and I think this is right. Verne is more interested in the questions raised, I think, than this or that particular account of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, and he's not interested in coming up with a definitive answer to them so much as he is with highlighting the significance that they can be raised.
Max Huber, a Frenchman, and John Cort, an American, are residents of Libreville, where their families own a factory. They are taking an expedition into the relatively unexplored regions of the Ubangi river in Central Africa. With them are Llanga, a native orphan whom they have essentially adopted, and Khamis, an African of Arab descent. They also have a number of native porters, but the porters abandon them after an unfortunate run-in with a herd of raging elephants, and they are forced to make some hard choices about the best way to reach the nearest missionary outpost. As they follow the river, a number of mysteries start piling up -- they occasionally hear what seems to be a voice crying out a Congolese word, Ngora, meaning 'mother' (according to Verne), and it eventually becomes clear that there are traces of a previous expedition that disappeared, that of Dr. Johausen. Dr. Johausen had had the theory that the higher simians were already capable of language, and had taken an expedition into the jungle in order to prove it, but had never returned. And they will eventually come across a tribe of creatures, not quite human but more advanced than apes, living in a treetop village.
It's nicely constructed, storywise, but not very complicated; a short adventure there and back. It's not as exciting a story as Burroughs would later write, nor as rich a story as Haggard had written earlier, but as a rough early foray into the same genre, it works fairly well.
