by Jules Vernes
His chance footsteps bringing him back towards the house, he stopped on the edge of a deep excavation in which were scattered a number of tools. There, before long, would be laid the foundations of a new building which would double the size of his laboratory. But on this general holiday the workers had abandoned their task, and had gone off to enjoy themselves.
Sofr was rather casually estimating the extent of the work already done and still remaining to do when in the shadows of the excavation a shining point attracted his gaze. Interested, he went down into the depths of the hole, and freed a strange-looking object from the earth which partly covered it.
Returned to the daylight, the Zartog examined his find. It was a sort of container, constructed of some unknown metal of a greyish colour and a granular texture, and whose brightness had been dimmed by its long stay in the ground. At one-third of its length, a crack showed that the case consisted of two parts one inside the other. He tried to open it.
At his first attempt the metal, disintegrated by time, fell into dust and revealed a second object which it contained.
The material of which this object was formed was as great a novelty for the Zartog as the metal which had hitherto protected it. It was a roll of sheets superimposed and covered with strange signs, whose regularity indicated that they were written characters of an unfamiliar type. Sofr had never seen anything like them or even distantly resembling them.
Trembling with emotion, the Zartog hurried to shut himself in his laboratory. After carefully spreading out the precious document he began to study it.
Yes, it was indeed writing, nothing could be more certain than that. But it was no less certain that this writing resembled none of those which, since the beginning of historic time, had been used anywhere on the surface of the earth.
Whence came that document? What did it signify? Such were the two questions which at once confronted Sofr’s mind.
To reply to the first he had of course to be able to reply to the second. So it was first a question of reading and then of translating – for it could be affirmed a priori that the language in which this document was written was as unknown as its writing.
Would that be impossible? The Zartog Sofr did not think so. Without further delay he set feverishly to work.
The work lasted long, very long, for whole years. Sofr did not give up. Without letting himself get discouraged, he continued his methodical study of the mysterious document, advancing step by step towards the light. At last the day came when he grasped the key to this undecipherable riddle, the day when, though still with much hesitation and more trouble, he could translate it into the tongue of the Men-of-the-Four-Seas.
And when that day came, Zartog Sofr-Ai-Sr read what follows:
Rosario, May 24th, 2...
I date the opening of my narrative in this way although it was really drawn up much more recently and in very different surroundings. But in such a matter order is to my mind imperiously necessary, and for this reason I have adopted the form of a ‘journal’ written from day to day.
Thus it is May 24th that opens the narration of those frightful happenings which I propose to describe for the enlightenment of those who come after me – if indeed mankind is still entitled to count on any future whatever.
In what language shall I write? In English or in Spanish, which I speak fluently? No! I shall write in the language of my own country: in French.
That day, May 24th, I had invited a few friends to my villa in Rosario.
Rosario is or rather was a Mexican town, on the shore of the Pacific, a little to the south of the Gulf of California. About ten years previously I had settled there to direct the exploitation of a silver-mine which I owned. My affairs had gone surprisingly well. I was rich, very rich indeed – that word makes me laugh today! – and I was intending before long to go back to my own country, France.
My villa, a very luxurious one, was situated on the highest point of a large garden which sloped down towards the sea and ended abruptly in a steep cliff, over a hundred yards high. To its rear the ground rose still further, and by using the zig-zag roads we could reach the crest of the mountains at a height of more than 1,500 yards. It was a very pleasant run - I had often climbed it in my car, a fine powerful open car of thirty-five horse-power, one of the best French makes.
I had been living at Rosario with my son Jean, a fine lad of twenty, when, on the death of some relatives distant by blood but near to my heart I welcomed their daughter Hélène, an orphan totally unprovided for. Since then five years had elapsed. My son Jean was now twenty-five and my ward Hélène twenty; in my secret heart I destined them for one another.
Our wants were attended to by a valet, Germain, by Modeste Simonat, an expert chauffeur, and by two servants Edith and Mary, the daughters of my gardener George Raleigh and his wife Anna.
That day, May 24th, there were eight of us sitting round my table, in the light of lamps fed by electrogenic groups installed in the garden. In addition to the master of the house, his son, and his ward, there were five others, three belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race and two to the Mexican peoples.
Dr Bathurst figured among the former and Dr Moreno among the latter. Both were savants in the broadest acceptance of the word, but this did not keep them from being very seldom in agreement. At heart they were splendid fellows and the best friends in the world.
The two other Anglo-Saxons were Williamson, the owner of an important fishery in Rosario; and Rowling, an enterprising businessman who had founded near the town a number of market gardens from which he was reaping a rich fortune.
As for the last of the guests, it was Señor Mendoza, president of the Rosario law-courts, a worthy man with a cultivated mind and of high integrity.
We reached the end of the meal without any noteworthy incident. What we talked about till then I have forgotten. Not so, on the other hand, regarding what we said as we smoked our cigars.
Not that our remarks were of any importance in themselves, but the brutal commentary soon to be made upon them could not fail to give them a certain piquancy. For this reason I have never been able to get them out of my mind.
We had come – how, it doesn’t matter! – to speak of the wonderful progress accomplished by man. Then Dr Bathurst said:
‘It’s a fact that if Adam (which naturally, as an Anglo-Saxon, he pronounced Edem) and Eve (which of course he pronounced Iva) were to come back upon the earth, they’d have a nice surprise!’
That was the beginning of the discussion. A fervent Darwinist, and a convinced supporter of natural selection, Moreno asked Bathurst ironically if he seriously believed in the legend of the Earthly Paradise. Bathurst replied that at any rate he believed in God and that as the existence of Adam and Eve was stated in the Bible, he refused to question it.
Moreno retorted that he believed in God at least as much as his adversary, but it was quite likely that the first man and the first woman were only myths and symbols. So there was nothing irreligious in supposing that the Bible had meant thus to typify the breath of Me introduced by the Creative Power into the first cell, from which all the others had then evolved.
Bathurst retorted that this explanation was specious and that for his part he thought it more complimentary to be the direct work of Divinity rather than to be descended from it by the intermediary of more or less simian primates...
I saw that the time had come for the discussion to get heated, but it suddenly ended, the two adversaries having chanced to find some common ground. It is this way, indeed, that such things usually finish.
This time, returning to their first subject, the two antagonists agreed, whatever might be his origin, in admiring the high degree of culture that man had attained, they enumerated his conquests with pride. We all joined in. Bathurst praised chemistry, brought to such a degree of perfection that it was tending to disappear and merge into physics; the two subjects were now becoming one, whose object was the study of immanent energy. Moreno praised medicine and surgery,
thanks to which such researches had been made into the intimate nature of the phenomena of life that in the near future the immortality of living organisms might well be hoped for. They both congratulated themselves on the heights attained by astronomy. Were we not now in communication, failing the stars, with seven of the planets of the solar system?[viii]
Wearied out by their enthusiasm, the two snatched some moments’ rest. The others, in their turn, took advantage of this to put in a word, and we entered upon the vast field of practical inventions which have so profoundly modified human conditions. We praised the railways and the steamers, used for the carriage of heavy and cumbersome merchandise; the economical aeronefs, used by travellers who are not pressed for time; the pneumatic or electro-ionic tubes that traverse every continent and sea, used by people in a hurry. We praised the countless machines, each more ingenious than the other, of which, in certain industries, one alone can perform the work of a hundred men. We praised printing and the photography of colour and of light, sound, heat, and all the vibrations of the ether. We especially praised electricity, that agent so adaptable, so docile, and so thoroughly understood in its properties and in its nature, which enables us, without the slightest mechanical connection, either to work any mechanism whatever or to steer a vessel across or under the sea or through the air; either to write, to converse, or to see one another no matter how great the distance between us.
It was quite a dithyramb in which, I must admit, I took part. We were all agreed that mankind had reached an intellectual level unknown before our time, and that this justified us in believing in its definitive triumph over nature.
‘However,’ broke in the gentle voice of President Mendoza, taking advantage of the silence which followed. ‘I will venture to say that there may have been peoples, now vanished without leaving the slightest trace, who reached a civilisation equal or analogous to our own.’
‘Which?’ asked everybody at once.
‘Oh well!... The Babylonians, for example.’
There followed a burst of mirth. To dare to compare the Babylonians with modem man!
The Egyptians,’ Don Mendoza went on quietly.
We laughed louder than ever.
"There are the Atlanteans, too – it’s only our ignorance that makes us regard them as legendary,’ the president continued.’You might add that an infinity of other peoples, older than the Atlanteans themselves, may have appeared, prospered, and died out without our knowing anything about them!’
Don Mendoza insisted on his paradox and, so as not to hurt his feelings, we agreed to pretend to take him seriously.
‘But look here, my dear president,’ Moreno insinuated, in the sort of tone one uses to make a child see reason, ‘you don’t want to claim. I suppose, that any of those ancient peoples could be compared to ourselves?... In morality, I agree that they reached the same degree of culture, but in material things!’
‘Why not?’ Don Mendoza objected.
‘Because,’ Bathurst hastened to explain, ‘the great thing about our inventions is that they spread instantaneously over the earth: the disappearance of one people, or even a large number of peoples, would leave the sum of human progress intact. For human achievements to be lost, all mankind would have to vanish at once. Is that, I ask you, an admissible hypothesis?...’
While we were talking in this way, effects and causes went on interacting throughout the infinite universe, and less than a minute after Dr Bathurst had asked this question, their final result would justify Mendoza’s scepticism only too completely.
But we had no suspicion of this, and we went on talking quietly. Some leaning over the backs of their chairs, others with their elbows on the table, we were all turning pitying glances on Mendoza, who, as we thought, had been completely floored by Bathurst’s reply.
‘First,’ the president replied unemotionally, ‘we can well believe that in the old days the earth had fewer inhabitants than it has now, so that one nation might be the only one to possess universal knowledge. Then I don’t see anything absurd, on the face of it, in supposing that the whole surface of the globe should be overwhelmed at once!’
‘Nonsense,’ we exclaimed in chorus.
It was at that very moment that there came the cataclysm.
We had hardly chorussed ‘Nonsense!’ when a terrible din broke out. The ground trembled and gave way under our feet, the villa shook on its foundations.
We rose, we jostled together; the victims of an indescribable terror, we rushed outside.
Scarcely had we crossed the threshold than the house collapsed, burying in its ruins President Mendoza and my valet Germain, who had been coming out last. After a few seconds’ natural consternation we were going to try to rescue them when we saw Raleigh, my gardener, followed by his wife, rushing from his house at the end of the garden.
‘The sea!... The sea!...’ he was shouting at the top of his voice.
Turning towards the ocean, I stood there motionless, stupefied. It was not that I realised what I was seeing, but I felt at once that my whole surroundings had completely changed. And was not that enough to chill the heart with fright when the whole aspect of nature, that nature which we always think of as essentially changeless, could be so strangely transformed in a few seconds?
Yet I was not slow in regaining my presence of mind. The true superiority of man is not to conquer and dominate nature. It is for the thinking man, to understand it, to hold the whole universe in the microcosm of his mind. It is, for the man of action, to keep a calm spirit before the revolt of matter. It is to tell himself: ‘I may be destroyed, yes! but unnerved, never!’
As soon as I had regained my calm, I realised how the scene before my eyes differed from what I was accustomed to see. The cliff had vanished, simply vanished, and my garden was sloping down to the edge of the sea, whose waves, after destroying the gardener’s house, were beating furiously against the lowermost flower-beds.
As it was hardly admissible that the level of the sea had risen, it necessarily followed that that of the land had fallen. The subsidence was more than a hundred yards, for that had hitherto been the height of the cliff, but it must have taken place fairly gently, for we had hardly perceived it. This explained the comparative calmness of the ocean.
A few minutes’ thought told me that my theory was correct; what was more, it showed me that the descent had not yet stopped. Indeed, the sea was continuing to rise with a speed apparently of about six feet a second – roughly four or five miles an hour. Given the distance between us and the foremost of the waves, we should thus be swallowed up in less than three minutes, if the speed of the subsidence stayed the same.
I came to a decision at once:
‘My car!’ I shouted.
They saw what I meant. We dashed towards the garage, and dragged the car outside. In a twinkling it was filled with petrol, and we crowded pell-mell into it. My chauffeur. Simonat, swung the starting-handle, jumped to the wheel, engaged the clutch, and set off up the road in low gear, while Raleigh, having opened the gate, grabbed the car as it went by and hung on to the back springs.
It was high time! Just at the moment when the car reached the road, a wave broke, washing right up to the centre of the wheels. Bah! Now we could laugh at the pursuit of the sea. Although it was overloaded, my fine car would know how to keep us out of its reach, and so long as the descent into the gulf did not go on indefinitely... Indeed, we had plenty of room: two hours’ climb at least, to a possible height of about 1,500 yards.
But I soon had to realise that it was not yet time to shout victory. After the first leap of the car had carried us about twenty yards beyond the line of foam, it was in vain that Simonat did his utmost: the distance did not increase. There could be no doubt about it: the weight of twelve people was slowing us down. However that might be. our speed was almost exactly that of the advancing water, which always kept the same distance away.
We soon realised our disquieting position and, except for Simonat, who had his hand
s full driving the car, we turned round towards the road we were leaving behind us. We could see nothing but water. As fast as we conquered it, the road vanished beneath the sea, which was conquering it at the same rate.
The sea itself was calm. A few ripples were quietly dying out against an ever-changing shore. It was a lake which kept on swelling, swelling, with a steady motion, and nothing could be more tragic than our pursuit by that calm sea. It was in vain that we fled before it: the water rose implacably with us...
Simonat was keeping his eyes fixed on the road. When we came to one of the turnings he told us:
‘Here we are, halfway up the slope. Still another hour’s climb.’
We shuddered. What! Within an hour we were going to reach the top, and we should have to go on down, hunted, caught up perhaps, whatever our speed, by the masses of liquid which would crash like an avalanche on top of us!...
The hour passed without any change in the situation. We could already distinguish the summit of the hill when the car was violently shaken and made a lurch which threatened to smash it against the stones by the side of the way. Meanwhile a great wave rose behind us, rushed forward to attack the hill, overhung and at last broke right over the car, which was surrounded by its foam... Were we going to be swallowed up?...
No! The water retired, seething, while the motor, suddenly panting more quickly, speeded up.
Where had that sudden acceleration come from? The cry that Anna Raleigh gave told us: the poor woman had just realised that her husband was no longer hanging on the springs. The backwash of the wave had torn the wretched fellow away, and that was why the lightened car was climbing the slope more easily.
Suddenly it stopped dead.
‘What’s up?’ I asked Simonat. ‘A breakdown?’
Even in these tragic circumstances, professional pride still maintained its rights: Simonat gave a disdainful shrug of his shoulders, by way of letting me know that to a chauffeur of his sort breakdowns were unknown. Then, raising his hand, he silently pointed ahead. Thus the stop was explained.
