Robur-le-conquerant. English Read online

  Chapter VIII

  THE BALLOONISTS REFUSE TO BE CONVINCED

  The President of the Weldon Institute was stupefied; his companionwas astonished. But neither of them would allow any of their verynatural amazement to be visible.

  The valet Frycollin did not conceal his terror at finding himselfborne through space on such a machine, and he took no pains whateverto hide it.

  The suspensory screws were rapidly spinning overhead. Fast as theywere going, they would have to triple their speed if the "Albatross"was to ascend to higher zones. The two propellers were running veryeasily and driving the ship at about eleven knots an hour.

  As they leaned over the rail the passengers of the "Albatross" couldperceive a long sinuous liquid ribbon which meandered like a merebrook through a varied country amid the gleaming of many lagoonsobliquely struck by the rays of the sun. The brook was a river, oneof the most important in that district. Along its left bank was achain of mountains extending out of sight.

  "And will you tell us where we are?" asked Uncle Prudent, in a voicetremulous with anger.

  "I have nothing to teach you," answered Robur.

  "And will you tell us where we are going?" asked Phil Evans.

  "Through space."

  "And how long will that last?"

  "Until it ends."

  "Are we going round the world?" asked Phil Evans ironically.

  "Further than that," said Robur.

  "And if this voyage does not suit us?" asked Uncle Prudent.

  "It will have to suit you."

  That is a foretaste of the nature of the relations that were toobtain between the master of the "Albatross" and his guests, not tosay his prisoners. Manifestly he wished to give them time to cooldown, to admire the marvelous apparatus which was bearing themthrough the air, and doubtless to compliment the inventor. And so hewent off to the other end of the deck, leaving them to examine thearrangement of the machinery and the management of the ship or togive their whole attention to the landscape which was unrollingbeneath them.

  "Uncle Prudent," said Evans, "unless I am mistaken we are flying overCentral Canada. That river in the northwest is the St. Lawrence. Thattown we are leaving behind is Quebec."

  It was indeed the old city of Champlain, whose zinc roofs wereshining like reflectors in the sun. The "Albatross" must thus havereached the forty-sixth degree of north latitude, and thus wasexplained the premature advance of the day with the abnormalprolongation of the dawn.

  "Yes," said Phil Evans, "There is the town in its amphitheater, thehill with its citadel, the Gibraltar of North America. There are thecathedrals. There is the Custom House with its dome surmounted by theBritish flag!"

  Phil Evans had not finished before the Canadian city began to slipinto the distance.

  The clipper entered a zone of light clouds, which gradually shut offa view of the ground.

  Robur, seeing that the president and secretary of the WeldonInstitute had directed their attention to the external arrangementsof the "Albatross," walked up to them and said: "Well, gentlemen, doyou believe in the possibility of aerial locomotion by machinesheavier than air?"

  It would have been difficult not to succumb to the evidence. ButUncle Prudent and Phil Evans did not reply.

  "You are silent," continued the engineer. "Doubtless hunger makes youdumb! But if I undertook to carry you through the air, I did notthink of feeding you on such a poorly nutritive fluid. Your firstbreakfast is waiting for you."

  As Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans were feeling the pangs of hungersomewhat keenly they did not care to stand upon ceremony. A mealwould commit them to nothing; and when Robur put them back on theground they could resume full liberty of action.

  And so they followed into a small dining-room in the aftermost house.There they found a well-laid table at which they could take theirmeals during the voyage. There were different preserves; and, amongother things, was a sort of bread made of equal parts of flour andmeat reduced to powder and worked together with a little lard, whichboiled in water made excellent soup; and there were rashers of friedham, and for drink there was tea.

  Neither had Frycollin been forgotten. He was taken forward and therefound some strong soup made of this bread. In truth he had to be veryhungry to eat at all, for his jaws shook with fear, and almostrefused to work. "If it was to break! If it was to break!" said theunfortunate Negro. Hence continual faintings. Only think! A fall ofover four thousand feet, which would smash him to a jelly!

  An hour afterwards Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans appeared on the deck.Robur was no longer there. At the stem the man at the wheel in hisglass cage, his eyes fixed on the compass, followed imperturbablywithout hesitation the route given by the engineer.

  As for the rest of the crew, breakfast probably kept them from theirposts. An assistant engineer, examining the machinery, went from onehouse to the other.

  If the speed of the ship was great the two colleagues could onlyestimate it imperfectly, for the "Albatross" had passed through thecloud zone which the sun showed some four thousand feet below.

  "I can hardly believe it," said Phil Evans.

  "Don't believe it!" said Uncle Prudent. And going to the bow theylooked out towards the western horizon.

  "Another town," said Phil Evans.

  "Do you recognize it?"

  "Yes! It seems to me to be Montreal."

  "Montreal? But we only left Quebec two hours ago!"

  "That proves that we must be going at a speed of seventy-five milesan hour."

  Such was the speed of the aeronef; and if the passengers were notinconvenienced by it, it was because they were going with the wind.In a calm such speed would have been difficult and the rate wouldhave sunk to that of an express. In a head-wind the speed would havebeen unbearable.

  Phil Evans was not mistaken. Below the "Albatross" appeared Montreal,easily recognizable by the Victoria Bridge, a tubular bridge thrownover the St. Lawrence like the railway viaduct over the Venicelagoon. Soon they could distinguish the town's wide streets, its hugeshops, its palatial banks, its cathedral, recently built on the modelof St. Peter's at Rome, and then Mount Royal, which commands the cityand forms a magnificent park.

  Luckily Phil Evans had visited the chief towns of Canada, and couldrecognize them without asking Robur. After Montreal they passedOttawa, whose falls, seen from above, looked like a vast cauldron inebullition, throwing off masses of steam with grand effect.

  "There is the Parliament House."

  And he pointed out a sort of Nuremburg toy planted on a hill top.This toy with its polychrome architecture resembled the House ofParliament in London much as the Montreal cathedral resembles St.Peter's at Rome. But that was of no consequence; there could be nodoubt it was Ottawa.

  Soon the city faded off towards the horizon, and formed but aluminous spot on the ground.

  It was almost two hours before Robur appeared. His mate, Tom Turner,accompanied him. He said only three words. These were transmitted tothe two assistant engineers in the fore and aft engine-houses. At asign the helmsman changed the-direction of the "Albatross" a coupleof points to the southwest; at the same time Uncle Prudent and PhilEvans felt that a greater speed had been given to the propellers.

  In fact, the speed had been doubled, and now surpassed anything thathad ever been attained by terrestrial Engines. Torpedo-boats do theirtwenty-two knots an hour; railway trains do their sixty miles anhour; the ice-boats on the frozen Hudson do their sixty-five miles anhour; a machine built by the Patterson company, with a cogged wheel,has done its eighty miles; and another locomotive between Trenton andJersey City has done its eighty-four.

  But the "Albatross," at full speed, could do her hundred and twentymiles an hour, or 176 feet per second. This speed is that of thestorm which tears up trees by the roots. It is the mean speed of thecarrier pigeon, and is only surpassed by the flight of the swallow(220 feet per second) and that of the swift (274 feet per second).

  In a word, as Robur had said, the "Albatross," by us
ing the wholeforce of her screws, could make the tour of the globe in two hundredhours, or less than eight days.

  Is it necessary to say so? The phenomenon whose appearance had somuch puzzled the people of both worlds was the aeronef of theengineer. The trumpet which blared its startling fanfares through theair was that of the mate, Tom Turner. The flag planted on the chiefmonuments of Europe, Asia, America, was the flag of Robur theConqueror and his "Albatross."

  And if up to then the engineer had taken many precautions againstbeing recognized, if by preference he traveled at night, clearing theway with his electric lights, and during the day vanishing into thezones above the clouds, he seemed now to have no wish to keep hissecret hidden. And if he had come to Philadelphia and presentedhimself at the meeting of the Weldon Institute, was it not that theymight share in his prodigious discovery, and convince "ipso facto"the most incredulous? We know how he had been received, and we seewhat reprisals he had taken on the president and secretary of theclub.

  Again did Robur approach his prisoners, who affected to be in no waysurprised at what they saw, of what had succeeded in spite of them.Evidently beneath the cranium of these two Anglo-Saxon heads therewas a thick crust of obstinacy, which would not be easy to remove.

  On his part, Robur did not seem to notice anything particular, andcoolly continued the conversation which he had begun two hours before.

  "Gentlemen," said he, "you ask yourselves doubtless if thisapparatus, so marvelously adapted for aerial locomotion, issusceptible of receiving greater speed. It is not worth while toconquer space if we cannot devour it. I wanted the air to be a solidsupport to me, and it is. I saw that to struggle against the wind Imust be stronger than the wind, and I am. I had no need of sails todrive me, nor oars nor wheels to push me, nor rails to give me afaster road. Air is what I wanted, that was all. Air surrounds me asit surrounds the submarine boat, and in it my propellers act like thescrews of a steamer. That is how I solved the problem of aviation.That is what a balloon will never do, nor will any machine that islighter than air."

  Silence, absolute, on the part of the colleagues, which did not for amoment disconcert the engineer. He contented himself with ahalf-smile, and continued in his interrogative style, "Perhaps youask if to this power of the "Albatross" to move horizontally there isadded an equal power of vertical movement--in a word, if, when, wevisit the higher zones of the atmosphere, we can compete with anaerostat? Well, I should not advise you to enter the "Go-Ahead"against her!"

  The two colleagues shrugged their shoulders. That was probably whatthe engineer was waiting for.

  Robur made a sign. The propelling screws immediately stopped, andafter running for a mile the "Albatross" pulled up motionless.

  At a second gesture from Robur the suspensory helices revolved at aspeed that can only be compared to that of a siren in acousticalexperiments. Their f-r-r-r-r rose nearly an octave in the scale ofsound, diminishing gradually in intensity as the air became morerarified, and the machine rose vertically, like a lark singing hissong in space.

  "Master! Master!" shouted Frycollin. "See that it doesn't break!"

  A smile of disdain was Robur's only reply. In a few minutes the"Albatross" had attained the height of 8,700 feet, and extended therange of vision by seventy miles, the barometer having fallen 480millimeters.

  Then the "Albatross" descended. The diminution of the pressure inhigh altitudes leads to the diminution of oxygen in the air, andconsequently in the blood. This has been the cause of several seriousaccidents which have happened to aeronauts, and Robur saw no reasonto run any risk.

  The "Albatross" thus returned to the height she seemed to prefer, andher propellers beginning again, drove her off to the southwest.

  "Now, sirs, if that is what you wanted you can reply." Then, leaningover the rail, he remained absorbed in contemplation.

  When he raised his head the president and secretary of the WeldonInstitute stood by his side.

  "Engineer Robur," said Uncle Prudent, in vain endeavoring to controlhimself, "we have nothing to ask about what you seem to believe, butwe wish to ask you a question which we think you would do well toanswer."

  "Speak."

  "By what right did you attack us in Philadelphia in Fairmount Park?By what right did you shut us up in that prison? By what right haveyou brought us against our will on board this flying machine?"

  "And by what right, Messieurs Balloonists, did you insult andthreaten me in your club in such a way that I am astonished I cameout of it alive?"

  "To ask is not to answer," said Phil Evans, "and I repeat, by whatright?"

  "Do you wish to know?"

  "If you please."

  "Well, by the right of the strongest!"

  "That is cynical."

  "But it is true."

  "And for how long, citizen engineer," asked Uncle Prudent, who wasnearly exploding, "for how long do you intend to exercise that right?"

  "How can you?" said Robur, ironically, "how can you ask me such aquestion when you have only to cast down your eyes to enjoy aspectacle unparalleled in the world?"

  The "Albatross" was then sweeping across the immense expanse of LakeOntario. She had just crossed the country so poetically described byCooper. Then she followed the southern shore and headed for thecelebrated river which pours into it the waters of Lake Erie,breaking them to powder in its cataracts.

  In an instant a majestic sound, a roar as of the tempest, mountedtowards them and, as if a humid fog had been projected into the air,the atmosphere sensibly freshened. Below were the liquid masses. Theyseemed like an enormous flowing sheet of crystal amid a thousandrainbows due to refraction as it decomposed the solar rays. The sightwas sublime.

  Before the falls a foot-bridge, stretching like a thread, united onebank to the other. Three miles below was a suspension-bridge, acrosswhich a train was crawling from the Canadian to the American bank.

  "The falls of Niagara!" exclaimed Phil Evans. And as the exclamationescaped him, Uncle Prudent was doing all could do to admire nothingof these wonders.

  A minute afterwards the "Albatross" had crossed the river whichseparates the United States from Canada, and was flying over the vastterritories of the West.