by Theo Varlet
And indeed, over all the visible shoreline, there was not a single islet, reef or unfurling of hidden breakers. The sea-swell beat directly upon the foot of the vertical cliffs, which offered the nudity of a fresh fracture.
At a cable’s distance from the chosen creek, the sounding was still four thousand meters.
The Erebus II stopped. The motor-launch was put to sea, and the Commander designated a mechanic and four men, plus Lefébure, Gripert, the engineer Fresnel and me, to accompany de Silfrage and himself on that first reconnaissance.
“But we’re doubtless going to find ourselves walking on lava that’s still hot,” he cautioned, “so I’m going to distribute winter boots with asbestos soles. That perfect thermal insulation will protect or feet from the heat, just as it would have protected them from the cold.”
Thus equipped, we embarked, and the launch set off, to the rhythm of the sputtering engine, multiply echoed by the cliffs, as if in a cavern. The rain was streaming in floods over our hoods. The melancholy aspect of the location even weighed upon the jovial Lefébure.
The only words pronounced during the journey, except for the maneuvering orders, were by Gripert. He called our attention, with bizarre insistence, to the total lack of mollusks and algae at the foot of the cliffs, their absolute nakedness in spite of the fact that it was low tide.
But what was astonishing about that, since the island had only been in existence for ten days, having been newly-born, so to speak, engendered by the pressure of the central fire?
No one deigned to point that out to the mineralogist.
We were exited, in disembarking on to that soil, virginal of all human imprint, and we trod upon it with a sort of fearful respect. It resonated underfoot like a metal slab. There was not a single pebble to be seen, nor a blade of grass, nor any moss or lichen.
The naval captain had leapt ashore first. In his hand he held one end of a long staff sheathed in waxed cloth. It was a tricolor flag, which he unfurled, stating in a portentous voice: “In the name of the government of the French people, I, Albert de Silfrage, officer of the national fleet, take possession of this new island for my country!”
He punctuated the formula with a revolver-shot, which drew echoes from the gorge; then he searched for a fissure in which to plant the shaft of his flag—but the ground was solid, like a single block, and a sailor was unable to succeed, with powerful blow of a pickaxe, in even striking a shard from it. Only a thin superficial pellicle crumbled under his blows. It was necessary to renounce the task, and the flag was returned to its sheath; one of the sailors was charged with carrying it, awaiting a better opportunity.
As soon as they had disembarked, the mineralogist and the engineer had dropped on to all fours in order to examine the terrain.
“Iron!” muttered the former. “Native iron! Superficial oxidation…obviously! That’s what it is—there’s no doubt about it.”
“Personally, I think it’s more likely to be a basaltic rock,” the engineer demurred. “Porphyroid melaphyre, if I’m not mistaken. It’s a pity that poor Vanderdael is no longer with us. He would soon have told us the nature and age of the terrain.”
“You think, then, that a mineralogist can’t do that as well as a geologist?” Griper retorted, while getting to his feet.
In his turn, Commander Barcot bent down and felt the ground with the back of his hand. He uttered a cry of surprise. “But this terrain is cold!”
“And you expected to find it hot, Commander?” Gripert queried, ironically.
“For sure! Given that a week ago, the Ocean was here, four thousand meters deep! There must have been a volcanic eruption, an outflow of igneous matter, from the terrestrial core to the marine surface...”
“And that island is constituted by a basaltic rock,” said the engineer, supportively. “Of porphyroid melaphyre, or some other kind of analogous lava. The melting-point of lava is about four hundred degrees; it must have cooled—whereas iron, injected in a liquid state…fifteen hundred degrees!...would still be red hot, in spite of a week of exposure to the air and the rain.”
“Monsieur Fresnel, I believe that you’re mistaken, and that Monsieur Gripert is right,” the naval officer declared, politely. “Look!”
And, exhibiting a small compass that he carried in an amulet, he moved it closer to the wall of the gorge. The magnetized needle deviated from its axis, clearly attracted. There was no doubt. The black rock really was iron.
The engineer conceded the point. Embracing the surroundings with his gaze, his expression became suddenly radiant, and he exclaimed: “But then, Messieurs, this island is a mine! An inexhaustible mine! There’s more iron here than in all the other deposits in the world put together—and in its native state too, not in mineral form. We have enough here to supply terrestrial industry, even if consumption were to triple or increase tenfold, for thousands of years!”
“It’s a fortune for France!” exclaimed de Silfrage. “You don’t regret having missed the South Pole any longer, Commander?”
The mineralogist continued his investigations. His searching gaze spotted Lefébure and me in the process of examining a kind of minuscule stream that was running along the other wall down the steep slope of the gorge. By some curious phenomenon, the water was red—blood red.
Lefébure tasted it, but spat it out immediately with a frightful grimace.
“Ugh!” he said. “It’s vilely metallic. But you’ll see, old Antoine, that your colleagues will declare it excellent for rheumatism or something and install thermal baths here...”
Having arrived at the edge of the stream, Gripert dipped his hollowed hand into it and looked curiously at three little yellow pebbles, about the size of grains of maize, in his red-tinted palm.
“Gold!” I exclaimed, at the sight of them, with a start.
“Gold!” repeated Lefébure, in his resounding baritone. “Yes, great gods! Nuggets…like the ones I’ve seen at the Cape. Gold!”
The magic word attracted all our companions, including the sailors, in a matter of seconds.
“Perhaps it is, indeed, gold,” the engineer confirmed, weighing the grains that the mineralogist, without saying a word, had tipped into his palm.
They were passed from hand to hand. At their cold and dense contact, an enthusiastic emotion gripped us…and an enormous hope.”
“Gold!” repeated Commander Barcot. “Where did you get it, Monsieur Gripert?”
“There, brought down by that stream, which obviously comes from the snow-capped peak. That water is loaded with gold chloride…a soluble salt, which is even deliquescent. So, according to all appearance, the peak is constituted, wholly or partly, by a pudding-stone—a magma, if you prefer—of gold chloride and nuggets. Do you remember the appearance it presented, seen from the sea: a red rock speckled with yellow? The rain is disaggregating the magma, dissolving the chloride and carrying away the nuggets…at least, that seems probable to me; but in order to be sure, we need to go and verify my hypothesis on the spot, up there.”
“Forward march! Forward march!” thundered de Silfrage.
First, however, the commander had to call the four sailors to order—they had started rummaging in the auriferous stream and we filling their pockets with nuggets—and threaten to put the mechanic in irons if he left the launch.
The ascent began. After a hundred meters, the gorge narrowed between the high iron walls, to the point at which it was nothing more than a zigzagging corridor, a narrow grove only one or two meters wide. It was necessary for us to walk in Indian file and paddle through the red water, beneath the rain and snow that were swirling in a lugubrious semi-darkness. Our asbestos soles, designed for walking on snow or ice, were ripped to shreds by the asperities of the metallic ground.
Devoured by curiosity, we went forward nevertheless, without paying any heed to the dusk that was falling.
After half an hour of that troublesome march, however, the man who was preceding us as a scout uttered a cry of angry disappoin
tment. The corridor ended in a vertical wall, down which the red water fell in a cascade, mingled with rebounding nuggets. The walls were as smooth as skin and a hundred meters high. There was no means of getting through the cul-de-sac.
We had to give up. Having collected a few grains of gold, we went back down the gorge, already plunged into almost complete darkness. Soaked and exhausted, with our feet bruised—for the asbestos soles were in tatters—we resumed our places in the motor-launch.
Five minutes later, in the gathering night, we were on the Erebus II again, where everyone hastened to his cabin in order to change clothes.
V. An Astronomy Lesson
We met up again in the ward-room, with exclamations of well-being. The electric lights were shining; the radiators full of warm water were maintaining a comfortable atmosphere, in contrast to the cold and damp outside. A strong hot toddy was distributed, and completed the restoration of our spirits. When the smoke of pipes and cigarettes rose up, the talk, scattered and fragmentary until then, finally became coherent. We were able to recount our discovery to our comrades who had stayed aboard. Everyone expressed his impatience for tomorrow to come, in order to attempt a further climb to the upper plateau of the iron cliff, in order to reach the snowy peak and make sure that the gold carried by the red stream really did come from there.
No one, however, really dared believe entirely in that prodigious wealth. In spite of the specimens that everyone rattled in his palm, we retained a few doubts. An island of iron and gold, surged from the waves by eruption and cooled down in the space of a week to the ambient temperature! No, that was absurd, impossible!
The Commander appointed himself the interpreter of everyone’s desire. “Monsieur Gripert, you must have an opinion about that. I’d be obliged if you’d communicate it to us.”
With his second glass of grog in his left hand, the mineralogist was busy warming the right, stained by acid, on a radiator. He turned toward us.
“Gladly, Commander. My conviction is settled, and I can summarize it briefly. That island is not the result of a volcanic eruption. It is not even of terrestrial origin. Only the oxygen that has coated its surface with a thin layer of ferrous oxide has been borrowed from the gas that we respire, during the few seconds when that surface—and only the surface—was raised to incandescence by virtue of atmospheric friction.
“In other words, Messieurs, if no innate heat is any longer manifest on the ground of the island, itself constituted by a mass of iron and gold visibly extracted from geological layers hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, it’s because we have in that island a block of matter that has come from the depths of space: the debris of some unknown planet...a minuscule star fallen from the heavens…a giant aerolith…a bolide!”
There was a general outcry.
“What are you saying?”
“It’s absurd!”
“Nothing like that has ever been seen!”
“A bolide that size! It would have smashed the Earth’s crust!”
“Someone would have seen it fall; it would have been perceived as a heavenly body in the preceding days...”
Monsieur Gripert stood up to the storm. “And why not? What if the bolide had struck the sea obliquely, and ricocheted as if skimmed, perhaps pirouetting several times on its axis, exhausting its momentum before settling on the ocean bed, on the terrestrial crust…which is a good fifty kilometers thick?”
“Monsieur Gripert,” the Commander went on, “would you care to be a little more explicit?”
“Do you want a lecture?”
“Yes, yes!”
“Speech! Speech!”
“Go on, Gripert!”
“In that case, Messieurs, a little hush!” said the mineralogist, folding his arms, placing his index-finger at the corner of his mouth.
He collected himself. Silence fell. And, as if he were lecturing in front of his students, he placed his hands flat on a table and began:
“First, allow me a little digression into the domain of astronomy—a science that is fortunately not alien to me, by virtue of a exception of which I am justly proud, in these times of excessive specialism, which make scientific synthesis so difficult...
“Messieurs, intersidereal space is not the absolute void that the ignorant imagine. Without paying any heed to the multiple energies that are incessantly interwoven in the ether—electromagnetic waves, lines of force, gravitational fields—space is populated by unevenly-distributed material particles, of which shooting stars are witnesses familiar to everyone. The latter generally follow fixed orbits around the sun at cometary velocity. They’re currents of particles strung out like chaplets, through which the Earth passes at determined times of the year. There are, in consequence, the Perseids in August, the Leonids in November, and the Geminids in December. But shooting stars are trivial in dimension—a few grams at the most—and their inflammation by friction the upper layers of the atmosphere suffices to reduce them to gas, volatilizing them without residue.
“There are other celestial materials of larger size: fragments of dead stars, including an ancient tiny satellite of the Earth that was disaggregated, according to Stanislas Meunier;10 blocks hurled out by volcanoes or the moon or the smaller planets, according to Émile Belot;11 and material subsisting from the primitive chaos of the original nebula—the science is not very definite. These materials circulate in space unknown to us. Space is populated by them, but we only perceive them when they happen to penetrate the terrestrial atmosphere and are heated up by it superficially to the point of incandescence, like shooting stars.
“Some only shine momentarily, and then escape terrestrial attraction, flying away at a tangent and continuing their vagabond course. They are never seen again. Others—a few hundred every twenty-four hours, for the entire Earth—are captured by attraction, either reach the ground intact and are embedded there, or explode in mid-air and fall in fragments. Since its origin, therefore, it has been calculated that the Earth has received several cubic kilometers a century—and the other planets too, of course—and since the discovery of radioactivity, it is believed that the sun itself extracts from that external supply the material necessary to maintain its radiation. ‘Suns,’ Arrhenius12 has written, ‘nourish themselves on aeroliths as herbivores do on meadow-grass.’
“It is only in the last hundred years that official science, too prudent in this respect, has recognized the extraterrestrial origin of bolides—since the remarkable fall at Laigle in the Orne in the early years of the nineteenth century. Since then, thousands of instances have been observed, and all public and private museums included blocks of meteoric iron of various sizes—for it is iron, Messieurs, of which these tiny celestial bodies are most frequently formed. The Greek name Sideros, which designated the metal iron as well as a heavenly body, proves to us elegantly that the intuition of primitive peoples did not have to wait for the decree of the Académie des Sciences to identify bolides with the blocks of meteoric iron from which they preferred to forge their tools and weapons, because of the ease with which they could work it, and its particular qualities due to the traces of nickel and manganese generally enclosed therein.
“The size of meteoric rocks collected or identified thus far varies from a few grams to hundreds or thousands of kilos. You can see in the Museum of Paris a mass of iron of 625 kilos, found at Caille in the Alpes-Maritimes. Nordenskjold discovered fifteen on the island of Sosko, south of Greenland, which weighed between 8000 and 20,000 kilos. In Diablo Canyon in Arizona there is a crater 7000 meters in diameter, which is two kilometers in circumference, hollowed out by a meteorite 150 meters in diameter—but that one burst into fragments, which are scattered around the vicinity of the crater.
“That bolides of larger dimension could exist…do exist…it would be absurd to deny, even a priori, and without having had irrefutable proof before your eyes in that island. We do not know the entire surface of the Earth, especially the ocean beds, must vaster that the land surface, where fo
ur fifths of bolides must be swallowed up, nor all the possibilities of intersidereal space. Certain regions of space must be much richer than others in vagabond materials, and the appearance of the moon suffices to make us admit it, if one believes the recent hypothesis that attributes our satellite’s craters—so strangely similar to shell-craters—to the arrival of a host of bolides.
“Must we expect a celestial bombardment of the same sort someday, of which the bolide that has formed Island N is only the advance messenger? It’s quite possible, and the future will tell us—or our successors. In any case, there can be no doubt about this fact: a fragment of a heavenly body, a block of iron and gold several kilometers in diameter, was circulating on the fifth of September last—a week ago—in the same region of space as the Earth. That block fell into the Atlantic Ocean, at an oblique trajectory, heading from east to west—a circumstance that considerably aggravated the effects of the aerial and marine waves over Newfoundland and the American coast, which were, in any case, situated much closer to the point of impact than the Old World.
“The fall of that mass, Messieurs, was witnessed by human eyes, and if you had not been hypnotized, like everyone else, by the anecdotal news of the tempest”—the mineralogist thus qualified the loss of a hundred and fifty ships and several hundred thousand human lives!—“you would have attached more importance, on the sixth to the radio messages sent by three ships that had escaped the tidal wave and noted the appearance of an exceedingly bright bolide of an apparent diameter twice that of the full moon, which they had seen fall beyond the horizon in broad daylight an hour or two before the arrival of the devastating wave.
“Messieurs, you are now informed; I shall not abuse your attention any longer—but if the Commandant will authorize me to do it, I shall ask Monsieur Madec to send a message for me to the Académie des Sciences to take note of and announce the communication that I shall immediately begin to draft regarding the Atlantic bolide...alias island N.”
