CHAPTER VI.THE CAPTAIN MAKES AN EXPLORATION.
Hector Servadac was not the man to remain long
unnerved by any untoward event. It was part of his
character to discover the why and the wherefore of everything
that came under his observation, and he would have
faced a cannon-ball the more unflinchingly from understanding
the dynamic force by which it was propelled.
Such being his temperament, it may well be imagined that
he was anxious not to remain long in ignorance of the
cause of the phenomena which had been so startling in
their consequences.
“We must inquire into this to-morrow,” he exclaimed,
as darkness fell suddenly upon him. Then, after a pause,
he added: “That is to say, if there is to be a to-morrow;
for if I were to be put to the torture, I could 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 it ever does appear—we will explore the
coast to the west and south, and return to the gourbi. If
we can find out nothing else, we must at least discover
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 Zoof crouched 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 sounder than the sleep of
the just.
Overwhelmed by the questions that crowded upon his
brain, Captain Servadac could only wander up and down
the shore. Again and again he asked himself what the
catastrophe could portend. Had it affected only a small
portion of the continent, and had the towns of Algiers,
Oran, and Mostaganem escaped the inundation? Could
he bring himself to believe that all the inhabitants, his
friends, and comrades had perished; or was it not more
probable that the Mediterranean had merely invaded the
region of the mouth of the Shelif? But this supposition,
although it might to some extent account for the disappearance
of the river, did not in the least explain the other
physical disturbances. Another hypothesis that presented
itself to his mind was that the African coast might have
been suddenly transported to the equatorial zone. But
although this might get over the difficulty of the altered
altitude of the sun and the absence of twilight, yet it
would neither account for the sun setting in the east, nor
for the length of the day being reduced from twelve hours
to six.
“We must wait till to-morrow,” he repeated; adding,
for he had become distrustful of the future, “that is to say,
if to-morrow ever comes.”
Although not very learned in astronomy, Servadac
was acquainted with the position of the principal constellations.
It was therefore a considerable disappointment to
him that, in consequence of the heavy clouds, not a star
was visible in the firmament. To have ascertained that
the pole-star had become displaced would have been an
undeniable proof that the earth was revolving on a new
axis; but not a rift appeared in the lowering clouds, which
seemed to threaten torrents of rain.
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 about an hour and a
half, he noticed on the western horizon a strong glare that
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 very much nearer the earth,
she could never give a light as intense as this.”
And as he spoke the screen of vapour was illuminated
to such a degree that the 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 the east only an hour
and a half ago. Would that those clouds would disclose
what enormous luminary lies behind them! What a fool
I was not to have learnt more astronomy! Perhaps, after
all, I am racking my brain over something that is quite in
the ordinary course of nature.”
But, reason as he might, the mysteries of the heavens
still remained impenetrable. For about an hour some
luminous body, its disc evidently of gigantic dimensions,
shed its rays upon the upper strata of the clouds; then,
marvellous to relate, instead of obeying the ordinary laws
of celestial mechanism, and descending upon the opposite
horizon, it seemed to rise in a line perpendicular to the
plane of the equator, and vanished.
The darkness that returned to the face of the earth was
not more profound than the gloom which fell upon the
captain's soul. Everything was incomprehensible. The
simplest mechanical rules seemed falsified; the planets had
defied the laws of gravitation; the motions of the celestial
spheres were erroneous as those of a watch with a defective
mainspring, and there was only too much reason to fear
that the sun would never again shed his radiance upon the
earth.
But the captain's fears were groundless. In three hours'
time, without any intervening twilight, the morning sun
made its appearance in the west, and day once more had
dawned. On consulting his watch, Servadac found that
night had lasted precisely six hours. Ben Zoof, who was
unaccustomed to so brief a period of repose, was still
slumbering soundly.
“Come, wake up!” said Servadac, shaking him by the
shoulder; “it is time to start.”
“Time to start?” exclaimed Ben Zoof, rubbing his eyes.
“I feel as if I had only just gone to sleep.”
“You have slept all night, at any rate,” replied the
captain; “it has only 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 to the 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 get round by the south
to Mostaganem, we must go eastwards to Tenes.”
And forthwith they started. Beginning to feel hungry,
they had no hesitation in gathering figs, dates, and oranges
from the plantations that formed a continuous rich and
luxuriant orchard along their path. The district was quite
deserted, and they had no reason to fear any legal penalty
for their depredations.
In an hour and a half they reached the gourbi. Everything
was just as they had left it, and it was evident that
no one had visited the place during their absence. All
was desolate as the shore they had quitted.
The preparations for the expedition were brief and
simple. Ben Zoof saddled the horses and filled his pouch
with biscuits and game; water, he felt certain, could be
obtained in abundance from the numerous affluents of the
Shelif, which, although they had now become tributaries
of the Mediterranean, still meandered through the plain.
Captain Servadac mounted his horse Zephyr, and Ben Zoof
simultaneously got astride his mare Galette, named after
the mill of Montmartre. They galloped off in the direction
of the Shelif, and were not long in discovering that the
diminution in the pressure of the atmosphere had precisely
the same effect upon their horses as it had had upon
themselves. Their muscular strength seemed five times as
great as hitherto; their hoofs scarcely touched the ground,
and they seemed transformed from ordinary quadrupeds
into veritable hippogriffs. Happily, Servadac and his
orderly were fearless riders; they made no attempt to
curb their steeds, but even urged them to still greater
exertions. Twenty minutes sufficed to carry them over
the four or five miles that intervened between the gourbi
and the mouth of the Shelif; then, slackening their speed,
they proceeded at a more leisurely pace to the south-east,
along what had once been the right bank of the river, but
which, although it still retained its former characteristics,
was now the boundary of a sea, which extending farther
than the limits of the horizon, must have swallowed up at
least a large portion of the province of Oran. Captain Servadac
knew the country well; he had at one time been
engaged upon a trigonometrical survey of the district, and
consequently had an accurate knowledge of its topography.
His idea now was to draw up a report of his investigations:
to whom that report should be delivered was a
problem he had yet to solve.
During the four hours of daylight that still remained.
the travellers rode about twenty-one miles from the river
mouth. To their vast surprise, they did not meet a single
human being. At nightfall they again encamped in a
slight bend of the shore, at a point which on the previous
evening had faced the mouth of the Mina, one of the left-hand
affluents of the Shelif, but now absorbed into the
newly revealed ocean. Ben Zoof made the sleeping
accommodation as comfortable as the circumstances would
allow; the horses were clogged and turned out to feed
upon the rich pasture that clothed the shore, and the night
passed without 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 the 1st, the captain and his
orderly remounted their horses, and during the six-hours'
day accomplished a distance of forty-two miles. The
right bank of the river still continued to be the margin of
the land, and only in one spot had its integrity been
impaired. This was about twelve miles from 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 by the encroaching waters. It
s-eemed, therefore, more than probable that a similar fate
had overtaken the larger towns beyond the Shelif, and
that Mazagran, Mostaganem, and Orleansville had all been
annihilated. After skirting the small bay thus formed by
the rupture of the shore. Captain Servadac found himself
again upon the river bank, exactly opposite the site once
occupied by the mixed community of Ammi-Moossa, the
ancient Khamis of Beni-Ooragh; but not a vestige of the
place remained. Even the Mankara Peak, below which it
had been built, and which was more than three thousand
feet in height, had totally disappeared.
In the evening the explorers encamped, as previously,
in a nook of the shore which here abruptly terminated their
new domain, not far from where they might have expected
to find the important village of Memounturroy; but of
this, too, there was now no trace,
“I had quite reckoned upon a supper and a bed at
Orleansville to-night,” said Servadac, as, full of despondency,
he surveyed the drear 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 getting across to Mostaganem.”
“If, as I hope,” rejoined the captain, “we are on a
peninsula, we are more likely to get to Tenes; there we
shall hear the news.”
“Far more likely to carry the news ourselves,”
answered Ben Zoof, as he threw himself down for his
night's rest.
Six hours later, only waiting for sunrise, Captain
Servadac set himself in movement again to renew his
investigations. At the spot last chosen for encampment,
the shore, that hitherto had been running in a southeasterly
direction, turned abruptly to the north, being no
longer formed by the natural bank of the Shelif, but consisting
of an absolutely new coast-line. No land was in
sight. Nothing could be seen of Orleansville, which ought
to have been about six miles to the south-west; and Ben
Zoof, who had mounted the highest point of view attainable,
could distinguish sea, and nothing but sea, to the
farthest horizon.
Quitting their encampment and riding on, the bewildered
explorers kept close to the new shore. This,
since it had ceased to be formed by the original river-bank,
had considerably altered its aspect. Frequent landslips
occurred, and in many places deep chasms rifted the
ground; great gaps furrowed the fields, and trees, half
uprooted, overhung the water—some old olives being
especially 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 travellers, and at sunset, although they had accomplished
more than twenty miles, they had only just arrived
at the foot of the Merdeyah Mountains, which, before the
cataclysm, had formed the extremity of the chain of the
Little Atlas, The ridge, however, had been violently
ruptured, and now rose perpendicularly from the water.
On the following morning Servadac and Ben Zoof
traversed one of the mountain gorges; and next, in order
to make a more thorough acquaintance with the limits and
condition of the section of Algerian territory of which
they seemed to be left as the sole occupants, they dismounted,
and proceeded on foot to the summit of one of
the highest peaks. From this elevation they ascertained
that from the base of the Merdeyah to the Mediterranean,
a distance of about eighteen miles, a new coast-line had
come into existence; no land was visible in any direction;
no isthmus existed to form a connecting link with the
territory of Tenes, which had entirely disappeared. The
result was that Captain Servadac was driven to the irresistible
conclusion that the tract of land which he had
been surveying was not, as he had at first imagined, a
peninsula; it was actually an island.
Strictly speaking, this island was quadrilateral, but the
sides were so irregular that it was much more nearly a
triangle, the comparison of the sides exhibiting these proportions:—The
section of the right bank of the Shelif,
seventy-two miles; the northern boundary from the Shelif
to the chain of the Little Atlas, twenty-one miles; from
the Little Atlas to the shore of the Mediterranean, eighteen
miles; and sixty miles of the shore of the Mediterranean
itself, making in all an entire circumference of about 171
miles.
“What does it all mean?” exclaimed the captain, every
hour growing more and more bewildered.
“The will of Providence, and we must submit,” replied
Ben Zoof, calm and undisturbed.
With this reflection, the two men silently descended the
mountain and remounted their horses, which had been
grazing quietly on the luxuriant herbage.
Before evening the wayfarers had reached the Mediterranean.
On their road they failed to discern a vestige of
the little town of Montenotte; like Tenes (of which not
so much as a ruined cottage was visible on the horizon), it
seemed to be annihilated.
On the following day, the 6th of January, the two
men made a forced march along the coast of the Mediterranean,
which they found in some degree less altered
than the captain had at first supposed; but four villages,
Callaat-Chimah, Agniss, Marabout, and Pointe-Basse, had
entirely disappeared, and the headlands, unable to resist
the shock of the 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 the ruins of their gourbi. Five
days, or what, according to the established order of things,
would have been two days and a half, had been occupied
in tracing the boundaries of their new domain; and
although not the only living occupants, inasmuch as herds
of cattle had been seen, they had ascertained beyond a
doubt that they were the sole human inhabitants left upon
the island.
“Well, sir, here you are, Governor-General of Algeria!”
exclaimed Ben Zoof, 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 regret for the fruitless trouble he had taken
about his rondo, betook himself to rest.