Off on a Comet! a Journey through Planetary Space Page 9

  CHAPTER VI. THE CAPTAIN MAKES AN EXPLORATION

  Hector Servadac was not the man to remain long unnerved by any untowardevent. It was part of his character to discover the why and thewherefore of everything that came under his observation, and he wouldhave faced a cannon ball the more unflinchingly from understanding thedynamic force by which it was propelled. Such being his temperament, itmay well be imagined that he was anxious not to remain long in ignoranceof the cause of the phenomena which had been so startling in theirconsequences.

  "We must inquire into this to-morrow," he exclaimed, as darkness fellsuddenly upon him. Then, after a pause, he added: "That is to say, ifthere is to be a to-morrow; for if I were to be put to the torture, Icould not tell what has become of the sun."

  "May I ask, sir, what we are to do now?" put in Ben Zoof.

  "Stay where we are for the present; and when daylight appears--if itever does appear--we will explore the coast to the west and south, andreturn to the gourbi. If we can find out nothing else, we must at leastdiscover where we are."

  "Meanwhile, sir, may we go to sleep?"

  "Certainly, if you like, and if you can."

  Nothing loath to avail himself of his master's permission, Ben Zoofcrouched down in an angle of the shore, threw his arms over his eyes,and very soon slept the sleep of the ignorant, which is often sounderthan the sleep of the just. Overwhelmed by the questions that crowdedupon his brain, Captain Servadac could only wander up and down theshore. Again and again he asked himself what the catastrophe couldportend. Had the towns of Algiers, Oran, and Mostaganem escaped theinundation? Could he bring himself to believe that all the inhabitants,his friends, and comrades had perished; or was it not more probablethat the Mediterranean had merely invaded the region of the mouth ofthe Shelif? But this supposition did not in the least explain the otherphysical disturbances. Another hypothesis that presented itself to hismind was that the African coast might have been suddenly transported tothe equatorial zone. But although this might get over the difficultyof the altered altitude of the sun and the absence of twilight, yetit would neither account for the sun setting in the east, nor for thelength of the day being reduced to six hours.

  "We must wait till to-morrow," he repeated; adding, for he had becomedistrustful of the future, "that is to say, if to-morrow ever comes."

  Although not very learned in astronomy, Servadac was acquainted withthe position of the principal constellations. It was therefore aconsiderable disappointment to him that, in consequence of the heavyclouds, not a star was visible in the firmament. To have ascertainedthat the pole-star had become displaced would have been an undeniableproof that the earth was revolving on a new axis; but not a riftappeared in the lowering clouds, which seemed to threaten torrents ofrain.

  It happened that the moon was new on that very day; naturally,therefore, it would have set at the same time as the sun. What, then,was the captain's bewilderment when, after he had been walking for aboutan hour and a half, he noticed on the western horizon a strong glarethat penetrated even the masses of the clouds.

  "The moon in the west!" he cried aloud; but suddenly bethinking himself,he added: "But no, that cannot be the moon; unless she had shifted verymuch nearer the earth, she could never give a light as intense as this."

  As he spoke the screen of vapor was illuminated to such a degree thatthe whole country was as it were bathed in twilight. "What can this be?"soliloquized the captain. "It cannot be the sun, for the sun set in theeast only an hour and a half ago. Would that those clouds would disclosewhat enormous luminary lies behind them! What a fool I was not to havelearnt more astronomy! Perhaps, after all, I am racking my brain oversomething that is quite in the ordinary course of nature."

  But, reason as he might, the mysteries of the heavens still remainedimpenetrable. For about an hour some luminous body, its disc evidentlyof gigantic dimensions, shed its rays upon the upper strata of theclouds; then, marvelous to relate, instead of obeying the ordinary lawsof celestial mechanism, and descending upon the opposite horizon, itseemed to retreat farther off, grew dimmer, and vanished.

  The darkness that returned to the face of the earth was not moreprofound than the gloom which fell upon the captain's soul. Everythingwas incomprehensible. The simplest mechanical rules seemed falsified;the planets had defied the laws of gravitation; the motions of thecelestial spheres were erroneous as those of a watch with a defectivemainspring, and there was reason to fear that the sun would never againshed his radiance upon the earth.

  But these last fears were groundless. In three hours' time, without anyintervening twilight, the morning sun made its appearance in the west,and day once more had dawned. On consulting his watch, Servadacfound that night had lasted precisely six hours. Ben Zoof, who wasunaccustomed to so brief a period of repose, was still slumberingsoundly.

  "Come, wake up!" said Servadac, shaking him by the shoulder; "it is timeto start."

  "Time to start?" exclaimed Ben Zoof, rubbing his eyes. "I feel as if Ihad only just gone to sleep."

  "You have slept all night, at any rate," replied the captain; "it hasonly been for six hours, but you must make it enough."

  "Enough it shall be, sir," was the submissive rejoinder.

  "And now," continued Servadac, "we will take the shortest way back tothe gourbi, and see what our horses think about it all."

  "They will think that they ought to be groomed," said the orderly.

  "Very good; you may groom them and saddle them as quickly as you like.I want to know what has become of the rest of Algeria: if we cannot getround by the south to Mostaganem, we must go eastwards to Tenes." Andforthwith they started. Beginning to feel hungry, they had no hesitationin gathering figs, dates, and oranges from the plantations that formed acontinuous rich and luxuriant orchard along their path. The district wasquite deserted, and they had no reason to fear any legal penalty.

  In an hour and a half they reached the gourbi. Everything was just asthey had left it, and it was evident that no one had visited the placeduring their absence. All was desolate as the shore they had quitted.

  The preparations for the expedition were brief and simple. Ben Zoofsaddled the horses and filled his pouch with biscuits and game; water,he felt certain, could be obtained in abundance from the numerousaffluents of the Shelif, which, although they had now become tributariesof the Mediterranean, still meandered through the plain. CaptainServadac mounted his horse Zephyr, and Ben Zoof simultaneously gotastride his mare Galette, named after the mill of Montmartre. Theygalloped off in the direction of the Shelif, and were not long indiscovering that the diminution in the pressure of the atmospherehad precisely the same effect upon their horses as it had had uponthemselves. Their muscular strength seemed five times as great ashitherto; their hoofs scarcely touched the ground, and they seemedtransformed from ordinary quadrupeds into veritable hippogriffs.Happily, Servadac and his orderly were fearless riders; they made noattempt to curb their steeds, but even urged them to still greaterexertions. Twenty minutes sufficed to carry them over the four or fivemiles that intervened between the gourbi and the mouth of the Shelif;then, slackening their speed, they proceeded at a more leisurely pace tothe southeast, along what had once been the right bank of the river, butwhich, although it still retained its former characteristics, was nowthe boundary of a sea, which extending farther than the limits of thehorizon, must have swallowed up at least a large portion of the provinceof Oran. Captain Servadac knew the country well; he had at one time beenengaged upon a trigonometrical survey of the district, and consequentlyhad an accurate knowledge of its topography. His idea now was to draw upa report of his investigations: to whom that report should be deliveredwas a problem he had yet to solve.

  During the four hours of daylight that still remained, the travelersrode about twenty-one miles from the river mouth. To their vastsurprise, they did not meet a single human being. At nightfall theyagain encamped in a slight bend of the shore, at a point which on theprevious evening had faced the mouth of the Mina
, one of the left-handaffluents of the Shelif, but now absorbed into the newly revealedocean. Ben Zoof made the sleeping accommodation as comfortable as thecircumstances would allow; the horses were clogged and turned out tofeed upon the rich pasture that clothed the shore, and the night passedwithout special incident.

  At sunrise on the following morning, the 2nd of January, or what,according to the ordinary calendar, would have been the night of the1st, the captain and his orderly remounted their horses, and during thesix-hours' day accomplished a distance of forty-two miles. The rightbank of the river still continued to be the margin of the land, and onlyin one spot had its integrity been impaired. This was about twelve milesfrom the Mina, and on the site of the annex or suburb of Surkelmittoo.Here a large portion of the bank had been swept away, and the hamlet,with its eight hundred inhabitants, had no doubt been swallowed up bythe encroaching waters. It seemed, therefore, more than probable that asimilar fate had overtaken the larger towns beyond the Shelif.

  In the evening the explorers encamped, as previously, in a nook of theshore which here abruptly terminated their new domain, not far fromwhere they might have expected to find the important village ofMemounturroy; but of this, too, there was now no trace. "I had quitereckoned upon a supper and a bed at Orleansville to-night," saidServadac, as, full of despondency, he surveyed the waste of water.

  "Quite impossible," replied Ben Zoof, "except you had gone by a boat.But cheer up, sir, cheer up; we will soon devise some means for gettingacross to Mostaganem."

  "If, as I hope," rejoined the captain, "we are on a peninsula, we aremore likely to get to Tenes; there we shall hear the news."

  "Far more likely to carry the news ourselves," answered Ben Zoof, as hethrew himself down for his night's rest.

  Six hours later, only waiting for sunrise, Captain Servadac set himselfin movement again to renew his investigations. At this spot the shore,that hitherto had been running in a southeasterly direction, turnedabruptly to the north, being no longer formed by the natural bank of theShelif, but consisting of an absolutely new coast-line. No land was insight. Nothing could be seen of Orleansville, which ought to have beenabout six miles to the southwest; and Ben Zoof, who had mounted thehighest point of view attainable, could distinguish sea, and nothing butsea, to the farthest horizon.

  Quitting their encampment and riding on, the bewildered explorers keptclose to the new shore. This, since it had ceased to be formed by theoriginal river bank, had considerably altered its aspect. Frequentlandslips occurred, and in many places deep chasms rifted the ground;great gaps furrowed the fields, and trees, half uprooted, overhung thewater, remarkable by the fantastic distortions of their gnarled trunks,looking as though they had been chopped by a hatchet.

  The sinuosities of the coast line, alternately gully and headland,had the effect of making a devious progress for the travelers, and atsunset, although they had accomplished more than twenty miles, they hadonly just arrived at the foot of the Merdeyah Mountains, which, beforethe cataclysm, had formed the extremity of the chain of the LittleAtlas. The ridge, however, had been violently ruptured, and now roseperpendicularly from the water.

  On the following morning Servadac and Ben Zoof traversed one of themountain gorges; and next, in order to make a more thorough acquaintancewith the limits and condition of the section of Algerian territory ofwhich they seemed to be left as the sole occupants, they dismounted, andproceeded on foot to the summit of one of the highest peaks. From thiselevation they ascertained that from the base of the Merdeyah to theMediterranean, a distance of about eighteen miles, a new coast line hadcome into existence; no land was visible in any direction; no isthmusexisted to form a connecting link with the territory of Tenes, which hadentirely disappeared. The result was that Captain Servadac was drivento the irresistible conclusion that the tract of land which he had beensurveying was not, as he had at first imagined, a peninsula; it wasactually an island.

  Strictly speaking, this island was quadrilateral, but the sides were soirregular that it was much more nearly a triangle, the comparison of thesides exhibiting these proportions: The section of the right bank of theShelif, seventy-two miles; the southern boundary from the Shelif to thechain of the Little Atlas, twenty-one miles; from the Little Atlas tothe Mediterranean, eighteen miles; and sixty miles of the shore of theMediterranean itself, making in all an entire circumference of about 171miles.

  "What does it all mean?" exclaimed the captain, every hour growing moreand more bewildered.

  "The will of Providence, and we must submit," replied Ben Zoof, calm andundisturbed. With this reflection, the two men silently descended themountain and remounted their horses. Before evening they had reachedthe Mediterranean. On their road they failed to discern a vestige of thelittle town of Montenotte; like Tenes, of which not so much as a ruinedcottage was visible on the horizon, it seemed to be annihilated.

  On the following day, the 6th of January, the two men made a forcedmarch along the coast of the Mediterranean, which they found lessaltered than the captain had at first supposed; but four villages hadentirely disappeared, and the headlands, unable to resist the shock ofthe convulsion, had been detached from the mainland.

  The circuit of the island had been now completed, and the explorers,after a period of sixty hours, found themselves once more beside theruins of their gourbi. Five days, or what, according to the establishedorder of things, would have been two days and a half, had been occupiedin tracing the boundaries of their new domain; and they had ascertainedbeyond a doubt that they were the sole human inhabitants left upon theisland.

  "Well, sir, here you are, Governor General of Algeria!" exclaimed BenZoof, as they reached the gourbi.

  "With not a soul to govern," gloomily rejoined the captain.

  "How so? Do you not reckon me?"

  "Pshaw! Ben Zoof, what are you?"

  "What am I? Why, I am the population."

  The captain deigned no reply, but, muttering some expressions of regretfor the fruitless trouble he had taken about his rondo, betook himselfto rest.