by Theo Varlet
He interrupted himself to call to an officer who was supervising the maneuvers a few paces away: “Lefébure!” He went on: “Monsieur Lefébure, my first mate, will take you to your cabin, Doctor. I’ll introduce you to your colleagues this evening. Until then...”
I followed the first mate.
Lefébure…Robert Lefébure…from where did I remember that name? As we went down the stairway I inspected the suntanned face of my guide, who winked at me mischievously.
“So, Antoine, you no longer recognize your old friends? Bébert, remember—your schoolfellow at the Lycée de Lille, with whom you swapped postage stamps… and who cribbed your Latin translations.”
I uttered an exclamation. What an unexpected pleasure, to find myself in familiar territory, in spite of everything, aboard the ship! And I surrendered my fingers to the warm fist of the jovial mariner.
Having arrived by way of the starboard gangway at the port-holed cabin that was to be my home for long months, Lefébure helped me to stow my baggage, and while I put on the new ship’s doctor’s uniform I had bought in Boulogne—a blue jacket with braid and garnet lining—he sat cross-legged on the edge of my bed, lit a cigarette, and began my initiation without further delay.
“The old man gave you a frosty welcome eh? Not surprising. He’d already chosen his own nephew as shipboard doctor…but as it’s your friend Rivier who’s covering the expenses of the expedition, the nephew has been bounced in your favor. That’s fine; you’re lucky to be a doctor hereabouts—which is to say, virtually independent. If you were an officer, for example, you’d be at risk of having a hard time, or even if you were a member of the technical staff…for, you know, we’re taking a naturalist, a cinema-photographer, a geologist-cum-paleontologist, a mineralogist…and entire Academy of Sciences. Not to mention, as you’re doubtless unaware, engineers…one, two, three, four engineers! Yes, Monsieur, four mining engineers, to go to the South Pole! It’s amazing, but that’s the way it is, and you aren’t at the end of your surprises. If I were to tell you about the cargo: extraction machines, huts, a conveyor-belt, a decauville9 with kilometers of rail…and finally—would you believe it?—nine hundred barrels of sulfur!
“You presumably believe, in accordance with that the papers have said, that we’re going straight to the Pole, with purely scientific objectives? But it’s too soon in the season; it’s scarcely spring in the southern hemisphere—and then again, is it usual for a businessman such as your friend Rivier to pay for such an expedition? So, first we’re going to the Gabon to drop off the nine hundred barrels of sulfur—the commander’s nightmare: ‘the bold explorer,’ as all the magazines call him, raging at seeing himself transformed into a vulgar cargo carrier! After which…but I’ll tell you later. You’re dressed now. It’s ten o’clock; let’s go have an aperitif and lunch on the Cannebière. I’m not on duty, and we’re not leaving until sixteen hundred hours.”
Arm in arm, heading into the teeth of the mistral, we went to sit down on the enclosed terrace of the Café Glacier. And that was the inevitable topic of conversation over our orange curacaos on such a day: the tempest.
I questioned Lefébure. “I haven’t read this morning’s papers—what are they saying?”
“Nothing genuinely new since yesterday—still material damage and victims. But as I came down from the quarter-deck a little while ago, Madec, the wireless operator, told me about a long-wave signal he’d just picked up, which gave the explanation of the tidal wave. It’s definitely a matter of a submarine volcanic eruption. A cargo vessel, the Champlain, going from Montreal to Le Havre, which was lucky enough to catch the ocean wave—fifty meters high, if you please—head on and not sideways, in which case it would have gone down, signaled that it had seen a new island on its northern horizon, at 43° west longitude and 55° north latitude…approximately, for the ship had been sailing through fog by dead reckoning for two days. Obviously an island of volcanic origin, and as the depth thereabouts is some four thousand meters, you can imagine how much water that mass of lava must have displaced, surging from the ocean bed all the way to the surface!”
We had lunch on the Quai de Rive-Neuve, as the Restaurant de la Cascade, where dockers in short-sleeved shirts and elegant couples whose cars were parked outside rubbed shoulders, in the fine egalitarian tradition of Marseilles. While savoring the shellfish—mussels, oysters and sea-urchins—and the inevitable bouillabaisse, we told one another our life stories since school, each of us speaking for his own benefit and putting on a semblance of listening to the other by way of compensation.
Half an hour before raising anchor, at three-thirty in the afternoon, we headed back to the Erebus II, whose funnel was emitting thick swirls of smoke.
An expectant crowd had occupied the quay, where obstructed trams were ringing their bells loudly; a brass band was blasting heroic marches into the wind; at the water’s edge journalists were setting up a battery of photographic apparatus, including movie-cameras. It took the combined efforts of two policemen to open a passage for us.
On the ship, however, everything seemed chaotic: men fore and officers aft, open-mouthed and idle, everyone talking in low voices. All eyes were fixed on Commander Barcot, who was striding back and forth on the bridge, arms folded, brows furrowed.
“We’re not going!” whispered the bosun, Nerfi, as we crossed the deck. “Minister’s orders. The old man’s in a huff—watch out, Monsieur Lefébure. Ah, doctor! We’ve just received a wireless message for you. Hang on—Le Moullec has it—he’s looking for you. Yes, the big red-headed fellow chatting to the duty officer, behind the servomotor.”
I ran to the man, received the blue form and opened it, my heart beating.
It was signed Hans Kohbuler. The professor apologized for missing the meeting and begged me to accept his good wishes for the voyage, and those of his daughter.
My head spun. On the deck of the ship, in the blare of the music and the roar of the mistral, which made the paper flutter in my hand, I thought I was breathing Frédérique’s perfume again and hearing her voice: “Bon voyage, Doctor!”
I stayed there for some time, leaning on the bulwark, my gaze fascinated by the shiny water of the harbor...
Lefébure came back, though, and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Not bad news, I hope, old chap? No, your lady friend—it’s written all over your face. Lucky devil! By the way, do you know what’s happening? We’ve been requisitioned! And we’re waiting for an envoy from the ministry, who’ll decide our fate. ‘Be ready to sail tomorrow at eight hundred hours,’ the wireless said. The old man nearly had a heart attack—he wanted to ignore it and leave anyway. Hang on a minute, while I go and get rid of all these idiots who are watching us. They’re driving us crazy with their brass band! Since we’re not leaving today...”
It was in those troubled circumstances that I made contact with my colleagues of the general staff and the scientific personnel of the Erebus II. The effervescence of hypotheses to which everyone was giving free rein, concerning the requisitioning of the ship, created an attractive atmosphere in which I immediately found myself englobed—and those few hours of discussion did more than days of everyday intercourse to incorporate me into the shipboard society.
Two of my new companions, in addition to Lefébure, seemed to me to be particularly likeable: the mineralogist Isidore Gripert, a young man of about thirty with myopic spectacles, who was also interested in astronomy—my own hobby—and the geologist-cum-paleontologist Maxime Vanderdael, a northerner like myself.
Before spending that first night aboard moored to the Quai des Belges instead of being rocked by the waves of the Mediterranean, I took advantage of the delay to draft a long an exceedingly cordial telegram to Hans Kohbuler, Claridge’s Hotel, Paris.
By virtue of some administrative red tape, the wireless operator to the Erebus II, although he had received a wireless message on my behalf, no longer had the right to send private communications since the requisition. I had to run all t
he way to the main post office.
At half past seven the next morning the engines were already under pressure; we were only waiting for the ministry’s envoy and the order to sail. The mistral was still blowing violently, but this time there were few idlers on the quay—not one journalist and no official representatives.
At eight o’clock precisely, a taxi hurtled up at top speed and stopped at the gangplank. A uniformed naval captain came aboard, saluted us coldly and courteously, and disappeared into Commander Barcot’s cabin.
Five minutes later, the two men reappeared, chatting amicably, and went up on to the bridge. The commander, transfigured, seemed joyful in spite of the theoretical division of his authority with the naval officer. The latter, with his hands in his pockets, affected to be uninterested in the maneuvering.
The engine-room bell rang. Orders were shouted. The mooring-ropes were cast off. The propeller began to turn in the greasy water of the harbor. The quay gently slipped away—and with an accelerating speed, the panorama of the two shores filed past our eye, while the Cannebière shrank, as seen in our wake.
The transporter-bridge extended its futuristic arch overhead momentarily; we doubled Fort Saint-Jean; and an initial thrust of the swell caused me to stagger. The telegraph bell regulated our progress with the commander’s orders. “Hard to starboard! Increase speed! Full steam ahead!”
And the Erebus II, heading south-west, assumed her cruising sped of fifteen knots, in spite of the increasingly heavy swell that came at her obliquely.
Clinging to the rampart of the upper deck, sprayed with mist, my eyes roasted by the ferocious mitral, I watched the coast of France draw away, while thinking about Frédérique...
I was beginning to feel the first symptoms of sea-sickness when a whistle-blast rang out, and then a sailor touched my shoulder and asked me to go down to the ward-room.
I found the ship’s officers and the scientific personnel assembled before the naval officer and Commander Barcot.
“Messieurs,” declared the latter, scanning us with his bright eyes, glistening with pride, “we’re no longer going to the South Pole! The government of the Republic is sending us on a mission, and I have the honor of presenting to you Monsieur de Silfrage, corvette captain, who is the bearer of the ministerial orders. We’re instructed to go and explore the new island, provisionally named island N, which a submarine volcanic eruption caused to surge forth three days ago in the middle of the Atlantic.”
IV. On Island N
The first four days of that journey only left me with the memory of an abominable feeling of nausea, and of having been shaken in my bunk by one of those crazily-rotating fairground rides known as “whips.” I can still see the porthole of my cabin, pointing toward the gray sky one moment and plunging profoundly into the waves the next, throwing me into a glaucous and sepulchral gloom. I can still see the face of the waiter who sometimes came to offer me something to eat, in vain, and that of Lefébure, who arrived streaming in his black waterproof, shouting through the partly-open door at me; “Still as floppy, then, Doc? Not yet ready to come and care for your scientific colleagues?”
The fact is that everyone on board could have died without my giving a damn—but the only serious accident that occurred in those four days was the disappearance of the geologist Vanderdael, carried away by a wave, and I could do nothing about that except sincerely regret it, when I found out about the death of my unfortunate northern compatriot.
I was not alone in suffering from seasickness. It had cut a swathe through the scientific ranks, and three places still remained empty at the ward-room table when I reappeared there for breakfast on the twelfth of September. The sea was still heavy, but I no longer felt ill and had an appetite worthy of a polar bear.
Following the usual custom of ships that spend long months wintering in the heart of the ice-sheet, and aboard which the members of the expedition tend to group, as much to combat the cold more effectively as to tighten the bonds of camaraderie and create an atmosphere of human solidarity against the hostility of nature, the seventeen members of the general staff—except for those on duty—and the scientific personnel ate together at the same table, over which the corvette captain and Commander Barcot took turns to preside.
“I believe you’ve found your sea-legs, Doctor!” said the latter, ironically, when I went in—but that was the whole of his vengeance. Thereafter, I must say, his rancor at my appointment was concealed beneath the perfect politeness that he manifested outside of his rare fits of anger, when he became surprisingly coarse and swore—always in English, it’s true—in a manner worthy of the master of a Yankee vessel.
My mocking friend Lefébure was on watch, and my neighbors, the mineralogist Gripert and the wireless operator Madec limited themselves to inoffensive jokes. The discovery of the island toward which we were sailing was not, apparently, a goal as heroic as our original destination, but its interest was sufficient to maintain a cordial and indulgent humor. Moreover, the scientist saw me as a colleague, and the ship’s personnel accorded to the ship’s doctor—an individual almost equal in status to the “master after God”—a consideration to which land-dwellers are unaccustomed.
We were arriving in the probable locale of the island, but the coordinates of latitude and longitude furnished by the steamship Champlain turned out to be incorrect; for two days we carried out a search in vain in a northward direction, picked at random.
Although the tempest had diminished, and only a broad swell without breaking crests remained, the sea remained utterly deserted beneath the fuliginous sky. Transatlantic services had not been resumed since the cyclone, and in addition, if the radio messages were to be believed, United States shipping had been “virtually annihilated” and Europe’s severely depleted.
Since our departure from Marseilles the news from France and America picked up by out antenna had told us very little, apart from the enormous damage caused around the perimeter of the Ocean by the “volcanic eruption.” All countries were organizing subscriptions in favor of the victims of the cyclone, and people were still talking much more about them than about island N. Its very existence had been called into question and, it appeared, treated as a hoax by a certain number of newspapers. In spite of that, on a motion from the French delegate, the League of Nations was busy trying to decide to which country the mandate for the new territory ought to be confided. In the same way that we were sending our messages in secret code, however, the radio broadcasting stations were not breathing a word to the public about the mission of the Erebus II, and we had sailed toward the island incognito—with several days’ start on our potential competitors, in the improbable case that any other nation had similarly had a ship ready to depart, equipped for a long-distance mission of exploration.
It was on the fourteenth of September that we sighted island N, some two hundred miles north-west of the position indicated, under a cloudy sky, in dismal weather. The cold was extraordinarily sharp for the time of year. A north-easterly breeze was blowing, bringing us a breath of the ice-cap. Rain was falling intermittently, stinging our faces beneath the hoods of our waterproofs. In the interval between two squalls, toward mid-afternoon, the cry of “Land on the starboard bow!” rang out. When the laymen were able to make it out, they saw a kind of snow-capped cone surmounting a pedestal of black cliffs, which stood out prominently against the leaden backcloth of the sky.
The island was about six kilometers long and the peak nine hundred meters high—but what astonished us was that no smoke or vapor was rising from it.
“It’s funny, all the same, that volcanic island!” muttered Lefébure—we had both taken refuge in the port lifeboat, set against a deckhouse next to the bridge, which gave us some shelter from the wind and rain. “I saw one once in 1909, in the isles of Sonda, not far from the famous Krakatoa. It was a few hundred meters long, at the most, and scarcely rose above sea level. One might have mistaken it for a sleeping whale. But that one was fuming, I can assure you—fumin
g like ten factories from all its pores, even two months after its appearance.”
While altering course in order to head straight for its goal, the Erebus II had reduced her speed. Binoculars to their eyes, the two captains were scrutinizing the island, searching for a landing-point. On the bridge beside them, a helmsman, with his ears to the microphones of the ultrasonic sounding apparatus, was announcing the depth in a loud voice.
Commander Barcot expected to arrive at any minute over the submarine plateau that ought, logically, to serve as a foundation for the new island, but nothing became manifest; the depth-readings were between thirty-eight hundred and four thousand meters.
Meanwhile, the island was becoming distinct even to the naked eye. The cone, devoid of snow in its lower reaches, seemed to be dark red in color, dotted with yellow, and of an entirely different nature from the pedestal, formed of black rock cracked by fissures. One of them might perhaps allow access to the plateau surrounding the base of the snowy peak.
Lefébure pointed out the bizarre form of the latter. “Exactly the same silhouette as Mount Corcovado near Rio de Janeiro, as seen from the Boulevard de Botafogo…but only the silhouette, not the color. What the devil can it be made of, this fake Corcovado? One would swear that it was mahogany, encrusted with streaks of gold!”
As there was little more than two hours of daylight remaining, there was no possibility of making a tour of the island in order to find a more favorable point of disembarkation. In his impatience to set foot on the new land, which we all shared, the Commander set a course for the nearest crack in the black cliff.
We were no more than half a mile from it.
“Four thousand five hundred meters!” announced the helmsman.
“That’s implausible!” said the Commander. “Unexpected! The island must have risen up as if on a spike of basalt, like the shaft of a column. If this goes on, there won’t even be a means of dropping anchor.”
