“Sacrebleu!” cried Farandoul.
“Ventre de phoque!” roared Mandibul.
“What? What?” demanded the anxious female castaways, while the mariners calmly awaited their leaders’ orders.
“What! The herrings are definitely in revolt. They’re showing dire ingratitude towards us, who have been fighting all morning in their defense. Look! Our herring shoal is scraping the icebergs in the hope of throwing water over our cabin and us!”
James Codgett whimpered inarticulately.
“Don’t worry!” Farandoul went on. “We’ll stay all the same. We’ll fight to the end, and we’ll triumph!”
“Are we far from the coast of Holland?” asked Codgett, feebly.
“I suppose we must have covered 50 or 60 leagues since our departure from the Pole, but I can’t tell exactly where we are or where we’re headed, all our instruments being at the bottom of the sea. Now, back to the cabin, and let’s see what happens with regard to the icebergs.”
And the whole company, holding hands for fear of accidents, headed toward the center of the shoal, abandoning the rear to the attacks of the cachalots. The tremors continued and they were spilled on to the moving floor more than once. Farandoul, Mandibul and four men headed for the icebergs, leaving the rest of the company in the cabin, with instructions to avoid overly violent movements.
The shoal was still scraping. Farandoul and Mandibul, getting forward with considerable difficulty, saw the herrings precipitating themselves at the icy masses with a mad range, after the fashion of a furious bull hurling itself at a picador’s horse. The situation was grave. At each shock to the head, the shoal splintered; entire fragments sliced away by the ice dispersed in meager groups immediately tracked by hammerheads, or formed small separate shoals, offshoots of the flagship shoal.
The assaulted icebergs also broke sometimes under the impact and crumbled on to the shoal, which creased under the weight and was split by long crevasses. In the midst of the whirlwinds of foam, mingled with herrings, which every impact sent up, two unfortunate creatures were in danger: César Picolot’s two seal pupils. Atoning for the immense greed they had indulged since their arrival on the shoal, it was impossible for them to move and quit the post, dangerous now, that they had taken up. The space separating the icebergs was diminishing rapidly, and the poor seals, half-dead with terror, were no longer thinking of stuffing themselves with herrings.
There was no way out of the situation; behind them the shoal was already breaking up. The fatal moment would soon arrive. Suddenly, the impact of a monumental iceberg sent them flying through the air and they disappeared before the mariners’ grieving eyes.
“There’s the danger,” said Farandoul, “and there’s no means of combating it effectively. We have to be patient and hope that the shoal will calm down. While we wait, let’s return to the cabin and strengthen it as much as possible.”
The cabin had suffered somewhat from the successive shocks that had shaken it. The mariners were already busy with indispensable repairs. Farandoul’s first concern was to consolidate the fragile floor on which it rested. He had all the barrels saved from disaster slid underneath, and also the empty piano. The planks were spaced out slightly to cover a larger area and solidly joined together with carefully-pinned spars. This operating visibly soothed the shoal, for it appeared to be scraping the icebergs more gently.
The great crisis seemed to have passed. Nevertheless, as a prudent measure, Farandoul had a large fragment of mast laid down horizontally in front of the cabin, in order to ward off, as far as was possible, the danger of running unexpectedly aground.
Everyone was more tranquil; all immediate danger seemed to have been dispelled and they were able to think about preparations for dinner. Night had fallen—a night deprived of all illumination, for the Moon was veiled by thick cloud and no aurora borealis illuminated the depths of the sky.
The herrings provided the entire meal, with a lichen salad in pure cachalot-oil, but no one complained; combat and the ground-quakes had given everyone a raging appetite.
After the meal, they had no need to go back to gymnastics, in view of the relative mildness of the temperature—minus 42 degrees—and spent the evening peacefully in the luxury of general conversation. The German scientists, who had saved their pipes from all the successive shipwrecks, sought a means of replacing the absent tobacco; after numerous trials they succeeded in fabricating a pseudo-tobacco from the fur of their bearskins mixed with small herring-bones. The female castaways complained a little about the clouds of nauseating smoke emitted by the pipes, but they soon got used to it.
When Tournesol had intoned a few old drinking-songs, César Picolot begged the castaway artistes to cheer the company up with a few of the brighter items in their repertoire. Madame Léa (d’Arcis-sur-Aube), a fine singer, obtained a great success with an item from La Favorite,119 and Madame Bichard declaimed a verse narrative improvised by César Picolot, who improvised its stanzas as she went along:
It was far far, away in the polar snows,
On a barren and mobile herring shoal,
Enemies everywhere snapping their jaws,
Sharks on the lookout, taking their toll,120
That poor castaways….
By the 175th stanza, everyone was asleep; the courageous artiste followed suit, and Picolot, ensconced in his bearskin, began the 176th:
The unfortunate herrings, too anxious to run,
To the foggy bank where…shivered….the frying-pan…
He did not finish, but slumped forward and falling asleep. His rhythmic snoring seemed to conserve the Alexandrine form for some time, but in the end the lyre was extinguished and Picolot, after a few snores of 13 or 14 feet without a cesura, snored in prose like any common mortal.
The company’s unanimously calm and pure sleep lasted several hours. All of a sudden, Farandoul woke up, the sound of something scraping on the wall of the cabin having attracted his attention. He listened. The scraping continued. Mandibul and a few other men also awoke.
“What’s that?” asked Farandoul. “Has someone gone out?”
“No, we’re all here…it’s a stranger!”
“A stranger! Is there someone else on our herring shoal?”
A formidable thump on the wall provided conclusive evidence that there really was someone outside. Everyone was sitting up.
“Who goes there?” demanded Farandoul, picking up a lantern.
The only response was another violent blow. The stranger certainly had only the vaguest idea of politeness. With a lantern in one hand and a hatchet in the other, Mandibul went to the door to greet the visitor, followed by several armed men.
Mandibul had no sooner pushed the door ajar and stick out the hand holding the lantern than a sudden impact ripped the door from its hinges and knocked it flat. At the same time, a white form precipitated itself into the cabin on to the group of mariners.
The stranger was a gigantic white bear. It was poor Tournesol which received its first embrace; in response to the vigorous hatchet-blows landed on its thick skull by the mariner, furious at being disturbed, the white bear grabbed Tournesol between its paws and crushed him to its body.
Fortunately, Mandibul had seized a Turkish khanjar made of Damascus steel, which he always carried with him in memory of certain odalisques with whom he had almost perished, stitched in a sack. With a firm hand, he sought out a plum spot in the bear’s back and plunged it in all the way to the hilt. The bear immediately opened its arms and released Tournesol in order to turn on Mandibul—but four mariners seized it by the paws from behind, tipped it backwards and finished it off with knife-thrusts.
“Where is the security of our shoal of herrings?” cried James Codgett. “Where, now that it’s inhabited by polar bears? Oh, the case of Hatteras versus Hatteras…”
“What are you complaining for?” riposted Mandibul. “Don’t you understand what chance has sent us? Just as we were beginning to get tired of eating nothing but h
errings and more herrings, Providence, which never abandons us, sends us something else. That white bear will be delicious, spit-roasted…”
“I’m not saying anything different. Perhaps I’ll find it delicious tomorrow—but that doesn’t alter the fact that it would also have been very well able to find me delicious today. Henceforth, I shan’t dare to go walking on the shoal…”
“Bah! That bear must have fallen from one of the icebergs that our shoal grazed; we probably won’t have the same luck twice.”
The mariners were of the same mind as Mandibul. They went out, led by Farandoul, to see whether the bear might have a comrade prowling in the vicinity. They soon came back empty-handed; no bear had had turned up.
The shoal of herrings, doubtless tormented by the coming and goings provoked by the unexpected visit of the white bear, started scraping the icebergs again. The rest of the night was disturbed by various shocks and prolonged tremors.
At 7 a.m., the Moon slid out of the veil of cloud that had obscured it until then, and its rays illuminated the shoal sufficiently to allow the castaways to leave the cabin. Farandoul immediately took advantage of the opportunity to make a general tour of inspection.
As soon as he stepped away from the cabin, he noticed numerous moving crevasses streaking the shoal in every direction. In certain places, he sank to his knees amid less densely-packed herrings. Further away, the shoal had caved in over a rather large area and the bottom of the hole was full of sea-water fed into it by several steams running through the crevasses. The herring shoal—a floating and living island—now possessed a lake 20 meters wide and rivers. At the front, where the greatest threat was, the disaster had taken on the greatest proportions. The shoal had lost more than 150 meters during the night, and the disintegration was continuing. The crevasses were growing wider; from time to time a fragment of the shoal, complexly detached, separated from the bulk of the troop and vanished behind the icebergs.
The pensive Farandoul headed for the rear, followed by the mariners, marching with infinite precaution. The shoal had also lost much of its width; the sides, incessantly scraped by the icebergs, were gradually rumbling. Instead of the 500 meters of width with which it had started out, the shoal could now count little more than 350.
At the rear, things were not changing as rapidly; thanks to the reference-points established by the mariners, the calculation was easy. The shoal had only lost 7,50 meters to the teeth of the cachalots and other voracious enemies.
“If we can’t do anything against these icebergs,” said Farandoul, “we can do a great deal against the cachalots! Let’s fight to ensure that our shoal lasts as long as possible!”
VIII.
We have no intention of following our friends’ monotonous voyage on the herring shoal day by day, for fear of falling into details devoid of interest. We say monotonous, because the first few days, which we have described at length, were followed by a very considerable number of almost identical days. The most complete monotony was the essential characteristic of that long journey, which lasted no less than 28 days and four hours.
Monotony in occupations. Every morning, before dawn, a tour of inspection, reparation to the cabin for breakfast; then, combat at the rear from sunrise to sunset, and even during the evening when the Moon was full.
Monotony in nourishment. Always herring and cachalot, and more herring and cachalot! The master cook was very ingenious, and found new culinary combinations every day, but it was still only herring and cachalot.
Monotony in recreations. Gymnastics having been abandoned to avoid annoying the shoal, they were reduced to innocent games and soirées exclusively devoted to literature and dancing. When they were very tired—and only then—Farandoul permitted César Picolot to give public performances of the produce of his lyre; usually, the audience would depart for the land of dreams around the 12th or 15th stanza.
To occupy the long evenings, the solicitor James Codgett offered to give a series of lectures on the civil and criminal codes of procedure, but his idea was welcomed with such scant enthusiasm that he took offence and retreated into his bearskin, promising to demanded compensation for the injury to his self-respect from Mrs. Hatteras.
César Picolot, however, desirous of finding an outlet for lucubrations of great literature, has a stroke of genius. He decided to found a literary periodical on the slightly-reduced model of the Revue des Deux Mondes. After having meditated for eight days and nights as to what title to give this compilation, he decided on:
THE RED HERRING
A MARITIME AND LITERARY GAZETTE
Published daily on Farandoul Shoal,
A great shoal of herrings in the process of voyaging from the North Pole to the coast of Holland
Editor-in-chief: César Picolot - Editorial secretary: James Codgett
The Red Herring having not set caution aside, politics was forbidden; it therefore limited itself to giving, every morning, a summary of the previous day’s events, augmented by the reflections and suppositions of the editor-in-chief, on the front page, and a few words on the events of the night—if any—in the stop press. The rest of the paper was devoted to philosophy and literature.
Let us not forget to say that the Red Herring appeared on headed notepaper at a shilling a sheet. César Picolot did not recoil at any luxury, and yet the paper, absolutely devoid of subscribers, brought him no reward. The print-run comprised one single and unique manuscript copy, which Picolot attached personally to the cabin door every morning at 8 a.m. The headed paper, it is true, cost him nothing but a literary sacrifice. Picolot had stolen the first sheets from the solicitor Codgett; then, when the latter complained, he had bought the rest of the supply by admitting the solicitor to the editorial staff in the capacity of secretary and by consenting to publish as a serial Considerations on Roman and Britannic Law by James Codgett, solicitor, 7 Chancery Lane, open from one till five, circumstances permitting.
The most remarkable item in the first issue of the Red Herring was a sonnet entitled:
THE ICEBERG
by Madame L. d’A (s.A.)
It commenced thus:
Enormous block, bristling with spires of frost.
The iceberg, etc. etc.
And terminated:
…and your heart, Madame,
Is sharper and colder than the berg!
After the sonnet came an article on the education of seals and a few brief philosophical pensées signed “Descartes junior.”
It is by means of a few extracts from the Red Herring that we shall continue our narrative of our friends’ voyage on the great shoal of herrings; disdaining trivial facts, we shall choose only the most remarkable and the most touching episodes of that dramatic journey.
It is the issues of May 27 and 28, July 5, 7 and 8 and September 11 that will furnish us with the necessary materials of our work of condensation. Readers desirous of following all the ups and downs of the drama may consult the very full report of Lieutenant Mandibul and the complete collection of the Red Herring in the archives of the Société de la Géographie, or peruse Monsieur César Picolot’s own account in the Revue des Deux Mondes.
We begin:
May 27
ANOTHER HERRING-QUAKE
Last night, as a result of unknown irritations, the herring shoal reverted, with an indomitable fury, to scrape against all the icebergs that we incessantly run across in the course of our journey to more fortunate climes. The first shock was felt at 11:35 p.m.; it hasted three minutes 27 seconds, during which the cabin never stopped creaking violently.
After an interval of ten minutes, the tremors resumed, even more violently, until morning.
At the moment when these lines are being written, the appreciable damage consists of a series of profound cracks in the port-side wall of our cabin, a collapse of the forward external planking and, most importantly, injuries and contusions of varying degrees of seriousness sustained by the following persons:
Madame Bichart, dramatic artiste
, a bruise on the left shoulder.
Monsieur Trabadec, mariner, a bloody nose caused by the fall of a piece of the ceiling.
Monsieur James Codgett, editorial secretary of the Red Herring, numerous bruises and general curvature.
Madame Hatteras, gentlewoman, contusions.
May 28
THE DISASTER
As our readers know, the central part of the shoal has been more resistant than the rest to the formidable shocks that have continued without interruption since yesterday.
The forepart has suffered particularly, as in previous catastrophes. At first light, Commodore Farandoul organized a relief operation to the threatened locales; our editor-in-chief, admitted to the number of volunteers for that expedition, displayed throughout the entire day a courage and activity that excited the admiration of all the witnesses to his heroism.
Thanks to the measurements taken, it was possible to estimate at 39 meters the portion of the shoal that has crumbled under the repeated impacts with the icebergs. Commodore Farandoul attempted by all possible means to oppose and halt the disintegration of the shoal; standing with a few men at the extreme forward point, skillfully directing the maneuver, he succeeded, with the aid of a long wooden beam, in pushing back the icebergs with which the shoal had made contact, but that was accomplished at the price of superhuman fatigue and running immense dangers.
Thanks to his efforts, the shoal did not lose more than six meters in the first half of the day, but in the afternoon, even huger icebergs having appeared, the maneuvering of the beam no longer had sufficient effect and the disaster assume colossal proportions.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 63
