Mr. Croknuff, of course, did not neglect to carry her meals up to the platform of the aquarium. He soon began taking his own in the same place at the same time, but Mysora immediately quit his company whenever he risked repeating his passionate declarations. She had to do that more than once to put an end to such assaults, threatening with expressive gestures to cut the tube that supplied her with breathable air.
Mysora, who expected every day to be saved by Farandoul, understood when she saw Croknuff fortifying the Aquarium that her beloved was coming. Her heart beat faster; the final hour of her ordeal had sounded, and she had to be ready for anything!
At noon on May 17, Mr. Croknuff went up to the roof of the Aquarium and anxiously followed the vicissitudes of the fervent fighting just outside Melbourne along the Geelong road. Rifle-shots and cannon-fire made the walls of the Aquarium tremble on their foundations; it was obvious that the battle was drawing nearer. Retreating soldiers were beginning to flock back to the streets of Melbourne, their tales of terror spreading through the city. Seeing that the moment of truth was approaching, Mr. Croknuff gave the order to raise the drawbridge and sent his defenders to their posts.
At that moment, some newspaper-sellers appeared, announcing a new edition of the Melbourne Herald. Mr. Croknuff called out to one of the criers and asked for a copy. The vendor attached the paper to a piece of string lowered from the rampart, whereupon one of the sharks in the moat leapt out of the water and snapped at him. Fortunately, the poor man fell back in fright, and the greedy monster caught nothing but his bag of papers—which it swallowed, for want of anything better.
On the first page of the paper, with headlines in large letters, were the following communications from the valiant reporter Dick Broken:
Cheep Hill, May 17, 3 a.m.
General Farandoul.
I chatted with General Farandoul, the terrible leader of the monkeys, for a quarter of an hour. He is still quite young, but his forehead seems to be marked with the seal of genius. By some unknown means, he has become the instructor and commander of an army of monkeys whose devotion to his person is absolute.
His special guard consists of 200 quadrumanes whom he knows very intimately, having apparently spent his childhood with them.
The Farandoulian troops.
At the present time some 40,000 monkeys have disembarked, divided into several brigades commanded by the former mariners of the three-master La Belle Léocadie.
The Enemy’s Intentions.
General Farandoul is determined to carry out, with his forces and those he expects: The Conquest of Australia!
The vast project bubbling in his head is the dream of founding an Oceanian Empire in Melbourne; he wishes to bring the simian race—which he calls a race of “imperfect men”—to civilization, bringing it nearer to the human race.
If England does not come immediately to our aid, no one can tell whether Farandoul might not become the Alexander and the Caesar of the fifth continent.
Stand up, men of free Australia, to block the road of conquest!
Cheep Hill, 3:15 a.m.
The Farandoulian troops, harangued by their General, are marching enthusiastically along the road to Melbourne. Colonel Mandibul is in command of the advance guard. Commandant Kirkson has been ordered to take the prisoners of Campbell’s corps to Geelong.
I shall try to escape.
Outside Melbourne, 7 a.m.
Thanks to my knowledge of the country I was able to escape from Cheep Hill, and this morning I reached the advance posts of the Australian army, in the midst of the greatest dangers. The battle is joined. The Farandoulians, I regret to say, are gaining ground with every minute that passes, in spite of the heroic bravery of our troops.
Melbourne, 7:25 a.m.
Governor Collingham and his staff have been surprised and routed by an unexpected attack by monkeys falling from the treetops, like that which happened yesterday at Cheep Hill. The army is falling back in disarray towards Melbourne. I am in the thick of the brawl, taking notes for your benefit. We must prepare to fight from house to house, as at Saragossa! 23 We must bury ourselves beneath the ruins of Melbourne like the Greeks at Missolonghi! 24 To arms!
I will send you the WHOLE story, with TERRIFYING DETAILS of atrocious, heroic and comical episodes, etc, etc, for the afternoon edition.
ANNOUNCE to your readers that a SUPPLEMENT with a literal account of ATROCITIES will appear TOMORROW; I shall make every effort to ensure that I shall be present at every one.
Mr. Croknuff had scarcely finished reading when violent detonations resounded at the end of the avenue. It was an artillery battery attempting to cover the retreat and stop the attackers. There was no longer any hope of that; the fight was on! Thanks to his spectacles, Mr. Croknuff clearly saw a troop of bounding apes fall upon the battery and take possession of it. Standing on his rampart, Mr. Croknuff harangued his men, demanding that they should fight to the last breath, to be buried with him, if it should come to that, beneath the ruins of the Aquarium!
A great hurrah went up in response, and they waited for the attack. Hours went by as innumerable monkeys filed past the end of the avenue and spread out into the city, where the battle still continued in a few places. Then the gunfire dwindled away, eventually ceasing for good at about 4 p.m.
The entire city was in the hands of the Farandoulians, who proceeded to disarm its inhabitants. Only a few patrols of monkeys were visible. As dusk fell, Mr. Croknuff perceived that the posts protecting his Aquarium were the last points at which the English flag still flew.
At daybreak the following morning, the Melbourne Herald came out again. A vendor brought one all the way to the Aquarium. It contained the following proclamations:
RESIDENTS!
The line attaching Australia to England is broken!
The old name is abolished.
The country will take the name of: FARANDOULIA (THE OCEANIAN EMPIRE).
His Majesty Saturnin I, its august founder, will take the title THE MONKEY KING.
Men and monkeys are henceforth equal before the law.
Parliamentary rule is abolished.
The provincial militias are dissolved.
The permanent army will be composed entirely of monkeys.
General Mandibul is appointed governor of Melbourne.
Issued to Melbourne at the general quarters of the Farandoulian armies.
On May 17,
Saturnin I
BIMANES OF MELBOURNE
His Majesty Saturnin I, whose heart is overflowing with sentiments of affection for all the subjects of his vast empire, whether they be bimanes or quadrumanes, invites you to be the first to offer to the world the noble example of true fraternity!
Live henceforth in peace with your formerly-disinherited brothers, the noble and generous monkeys who, brought up in the forests from generation to generation, have not been able, as you have, to partake of the banquet of civilization.
Though their manners are as yet unpolished, their hearts remain pure and good; they have forgotten the injuries done to their brothers and are ready to extend the hand of friendship as a sign of reconciliation.
Bimanes of Melbourne, resume the course of your everyday labors in peace, under the protection of the quadrumane armies.
The prosperity of the country will achieve new and greater heights. The united bimanes and quadrumanes will soon astonish the Old World and conquer it with new ideas!
At the Mansion of the Governor of Melbourne,
May 17,
General Mandibul
Colonel Makako, Monkey Representative of Borneo
Colonel Tapa-Tapa, Monkey Representative of New Guinea
ORDERS OF THE DAY
All bimanes who continue to resist the Farandoulian troops will be brought before a military tribunal.
The bimane Croknuff, Director of the Great Melbourne Aquarium, will lay down his arms before noon if he does not wish to be treated with the full rigor of military law.
Melbourne, May 17,
General Mandibul
Colonel Makako
Colonel Tapa-Tapa
VII.
On reading these proclamations, the bimane Croknuff became green with rage. The Aquarium’s downcast keepers seemed disposed to obey the orders of General Mandibul; since all other resistance had ceased, they wanted to know why their Director was so stubbornly determined to fight. A few of them were appointed spokesmen by their comrades, but Mr. Croknuff cut them off.
“Degenerate sons of old England!” he cried. “I won’t keep you. Go! Run away! Desert! Abandon the flag of the Motherland! I shall defend it alone, to the death! Tell the invaders that the Great Aquarium of Melbourne will die rather than surrender!”
The employees did not need to be told twice. The drawbridge was lowered in an eye-blink and they all left the enclosure, having disposed of their weapons. Mr. Croknuff, from the top of the rampart, saw them arrive at the first post and observed the felicitations addressed to them by the monkeys by means of hearty handshakes.
From now on, he was alone at his station—alone with Mysora. Australia had but one defender: the heroic Croknuff!
Fortunately, Mr. Croknuff felt that he was well-nigh invulnerable. The approaches to the fortress were garnished with carefully-disposed torpedoes. His moat, defended by the whale, the sharks and the octopodes, was uncrossable. Finally, as a last resort, a mine-chamber charged with 15 kilos of dynamite had been excavated beneath the directorial office. Mr. Croknuff experienced a certain sensual thrill at the thought that if he were blown up, he would be blown up in company with Mysora.
In the afternoon, the monkeys gathered at the end of the avenue. Mr. Croknuff could see, with perfect distinction, Saturnin I giving orders to his brightly-clad staff. Oh, if he only had artillery, what a pleasure it would have been to shower his enemy with grape-shot!
When monkey scouts advanced cautiously to the wall surrounding the grounds, Mr. Croknuff afforded himself the pleasure of exploding one of his torpedoes under their feet. The unfortunate monkeys were hurled into the air, but their commandant—our old friend from La Belle Léocadie, Seaman Tournesol—escaped safe and sound, and went to make his report to Farandoul.
Mr. Croknuff having imprudently revealed his batteries, Farandoul postponed his attack.
When night fell, Mr. Croknuff found it inconvenient to have to guard such a considerable expanse of ramparts all by himself. He had to march back and forth all night along the length of his fortifications, rifle in hand, keeping a sharp look-out. When morning approached, he could not stay there. Being unable to see any preparations being made outside for an attack, he lay down on some sandbags. One eye closed, then the other, and he fell into a profound sleep.
He slept very badly! He dreamed that he was the monkeys’ prisoner and that Farandoul had him impaled for display in a new Museum of Natural History. Little monkeys came to this Museum to listen to educational lectures on mankind. As the carefully-pinned-up Croknuff served as a subject for the professor’s demonstrations, Farandoul and Mysora walked past wearing diving-suits and laughingly pointed him out to their children, who were similarly clad. This horrid spectacle made Mr. Croknuff cry out in alarm and wake up.
Horror! His dream was on the way to realization. The monkeys were surrounding the Aquarium, silently preparing to mount an assault. In advance of the monkeys, men dressed in diving-suits were descending into the moat.
Saturnin I had correctly reckoned that Mr. Croknuff, left alone in his fortress, could not mount a sufficient guard. He had assumed that fatigue would overcome the scientist at the end of the night, and all preparations had been made to profit from this opportunity. In the final hours of darkness, a battalion of monkeys had advanced upon the Aquarium, carrying ladders, wooden beams with which to make bridges, and brushwood to heap up in the moat.
Saturnin, Mandibul and four monkeys, having put on diving-suits, had descended into the moat—repelling the attacks of the Javanese sharks with their air-pistols—in order to fix large beams in place between the two banks. As for the whale, needless to say, it had fled to the far end of the semicircle at the first sight of the diving-suits. It was at the very moment that the monkeys were arriving at the foot of the bastion that Mr. Croknuff awoke. It required 30 seconds of rubbing his eyes and pinching himself to ascertain that he was not still impaled—and that was sufficient time for the monkeys to deploy their ladders.
As they mounted their deliberate assault, giving voice to their war-cry, Mr. Croknuff rediscovered his courage. He seized a ladder and, with a superhuman effort, he pushed it aside, along with all those it carried. The cries were redoubled—the ladder had collided with others as it fell, toppling scores of assailants—but it did not put an end to the escalade. The monkeys, by grace of their natural agility, had nothing to fear from heavy falls; they got up again and resumed their charge with increased vigor.
It was a success. The first line of defense was breached.
Mr. Croknuff, beside himself with rage, howled as he saw that he was on the point of being surrounded by monkeys that were leaping on to the rampart simultaneously from 15 ladders. To perish thus, without vengeance! That single thought gave him the strength of ten, and with a great leap he threw himself backwards into the Aquarium building, whose door he scarcely had time to barricade.
There was only a moment’s respite. The second line of defense would be stormed soon enough—but that respite, brief as it was, was sufficient for the enraged Croknuff to put his final plan into operation!
Standing in his directorial office, in the center of the tanks of his aquarium, facing the terrified Mysora, he waited for Farandoul and the monkeys, in order to blow himself up along with them. A single movement of his hand, and 15 kilos of dynamite, bursting forth like a volcano, would rise 1000 feet into the air, along with the wreckage of the Aquarium, its assailants and the last citizen of free Australia.
Outside, the monkeys discussed the situation. Farandoul broke down the door with two blows of a hatchet and came into the building alone. Realizing that the old scientist, in his despair, might commit some act of savagery, he wanted to make one last attempt at conciliation before risking everything to tear Mysora from Mr. Croknuff’s grasp. With a single glance, he measured the full extent of the danger. In the horrible rictus disfiguring Croknuff’s face, he read the manifest hope of a terrible vengeance and a fatal resolution—and Mysora was there, behind the pane of glass, holding out her trembling hands towards him.
“There’s still time!” he cried to the scientist. “Give in, and give me Mysora, and I’ll make you Minister of Public Education! All resistance is useless. In a minute, the Aquarium and everyone in it will be in my power, and it will be too late to ask for mercy. Give me Mysora!”
“Come and get her!” Croknuff yelled.
Farandoul realized that only an attack of lightning rapidity could prevent Croknuff from doing any harm. He stepped back to the door and issued an order to his troops. A single voice replied, and the aquarium was invaded in less than a second. Meanwhile, ten monkeys who had been placed at each window were smashing every one—including the walls of the tanks—with single blows of heavy wooden beams. Farandoul and Mandibul launched hatchet-blows at Mysora’s aquarium, which no one had dared to breach with a beam.
The entire building made a cracking sound, as if it were about to collapse. A torrent of water gushed from the tanks broken by the beams—and in Croknuff’s office, all the inmates of the Aquarium were swarming around the legs of the semi-submerged scientist.
“Hurrah for old England!” Croknuff howled, hurling himself towards his dynamite. “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!” His lifted arm was about to come down, and his mine was about to do its work, when a hideous creature rose up from the debris of one of the tanks smashed by the monkeys’ beams, and fell upon him.
It was his giant octopus—his favorite, before the arrival of the whale—which tore at him with its four pairs of arms and its innumerable s
uckers!
The octopus held him firmly; he was about to perish in its grip or be drowned in his office.
Mysora was about to escape him...
Mr. Croknuff turned his head towards her. Farandoul having broken the wall of the tank with their hatchet-blows, Mysora had thrown herself into the arms of her triumphant fiancé. Farandoul and Mandibul were dragging her outside...
With a last desperate effort, Croknuff disengaged his arms from the grip of the octopus and triggered the mine-chamber.
A frightful shock shook the ground; a terrible detonation resounded. A jet of flame burst forth like a waterspout. The Aquarium exploded!
Walls, tanks, fish, monkeys—the entire edifice and all those contained within it—were projected violently into the air by the explosion. Their scattered debris strewn across the grounds, forming a circle with a radius of a mile.
Croknuff and his octopus, still locked in their embrace, were seen being lifted aloft amid splinters of wood, at the center of a vortex of fire.
For several minutes, the survivors of this disaster were unable to get their bearings. A cloud of black smoke ascended from the ruins of the Aquarium. The first to speak was an individual who emerged from the moat wearing a blackened diving-suit.
“Help us, La Belle Léocadie!” he cried. “There’s work to be done here!”
This person was General Mandibul, last seen with Farandoul, who was carrying poor near-dead Mysora, when the mine exploded. Since he had been able to come safe and sound through the fiery furnace, there was still hope for the two young lovers. Mariners and monkeys threw themselves in unison towards the moat.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 10
