That took scarcely an hour. There were no trees, even after the fashion of those in the Dead Forest; not the slightest hint of vegetation. It was a desert of stones, nothing but rock and landslides on top of ancient lava-streams.
The summit was nothing but a narrow ridge above the crater, half-filled with heaps of fallen boulders, crumbling lumps of charred stone—but what a view! The island seemed immense from that perch, at an elevation of 800 meters. From above, they searched all the ravines tumbling from the peak, all the valleys ramifying from it, with slender threads of water sparkling on the slopes, and a few pools, almost dry at present, which would become small lakes in the rainy season.
When the Villa Beauséjour was solidly anchored, they got down on to the rocks.
“A nice place for a picnic!” said Monsieur Cabrol.
“Bah! Nothing but stone today. Tomorrow, if you wish, we’ll go over there, into that green and mauve region on the horizon, and loose ourselves in 50 kilometers of arborescent ferns.”
It was a very agreeable little trip, which was renewed several times.
One day, Monsieur Kirosita arrived at the Villa early. “I’ve been notified of the location of some pterodactyl nests,” he said. “Probably the ones that grave chase to your Villa, for there are hardly any others on Astra now. And there are chicks in the nests! We’re going to hunt them to destruction—would you like to be there?”
“What? Nests with chicks—oh, but we must see that! To bring back a baby pterodactyl—that would be excellent!”
Andoche and Moderan could not restrain their joy; they were already preparing cameras and machine-pistols.
The hunt was very exciting; the Villa Beauséjour avenged itself for the earlier scare. Andoche and Moderan, alongside His Excellency Monsieur Kirosita, machine-gunned their former enemies from the balcony.
The nests were nothing but tangles of branches in holes in the rocks. When the large pterodactyls had been shot or put to flight, not without risk, it was still not very easy for the hunters to take possession of the five little ones, which struggled madly, lashing out with their tails, their wings and their claws, and dug their already-long and sharp teeth into the leather of their boots.
Andoche got a few scratches in the process, but he brought back some fine photographs of the battle.
The weeks and months passed, very pleasantly, spent in excursions and studies. Perhaps Andoche and Moderan were neglecting the Universal Cine-Phono University slightly, but there was no hurry. They had time before their return to Europe, and since the period of rest was also a period of study, that was compensation.
They had thrilling things to recount in their conversations with the family over the Tele, and every time, Monsieur des Ormettes exclaimed and declared that he was going to take the Paris-Buenos-Aires airship, which called at Astraville, in order to join his sons in such an interesting place; they should expect him—but time went by, and business continue to retain him in Paris.
Andoche had his harvest of photos, as well as other souvenirs: a Dinoceros horn; Ichthyosaurus teeth; an Iguanodon skull; the terribly-armed paw of a Megalosaurus. That was something, those little souvenirs of ferocious beasts driven from cover while alive, then fought and massacred! In addition, Monsieur Kirosita had made him a gift of one of the baby pterodactyls—the very one that had bitten or scratched him, but which could no longer bite, having been carefully stuffed.
Monsieur Cabrol had brought back so many souvenirs that he no longer knew where to put them; he had filled the guest-room with them. It was necessary to send them to Paris at the first opportunity. He had been obliged to refuse, for lack of space, an enormous and very peculiar serpent with legs, which was 15 meters long.
After so many fine days, however, the weather was beginning to deteriorate; storms succeeded one another, drowning the shore under deluges of warm rain. Astra’s Fujiyama disappeared into the mist, or appeared in total isolation, raising a menacing point above the dark clouds. Monsieur Kirosita had his Menagerie covered with large conical thatched roofs to protect his animals.
Monsieur Cabrol and his nephews went to the Palace to say goodbye and thank His Excellency and Kirosita, who displayed considerable sorrow at the departure of the Aerovilla.
“We’ll come back,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “Thanks to your friendliness we’ve spent a charming season—two charming seasons—here! We’re going to continue our journey by heading for the Argentine coast, but in six months time, the Villa Beauséjour will come back to take shelter again beneath the walls of the Palace where we have been so well-received…”
“And then, said the Governor, “I shall doubtless be able to acquaint you with further discoveries—and perhaps I will have succeeded in my attempts to bred useful animals. I have some hope for my hybrids….look, I didn’t want to tell you before having succeeded, but I think I’ve got there. In the streams of our planetary morsel we’ve found a large and handsome species of crayfish, and an idea occurred to me: I’ve had large breeding-pools prepared in the sea, in which the crayfish has developed so well that it’s in the process of being transformed into a sort of giant lobster! A little while longer…and you shall see it when you return!”
XIX. Oceanian Paradise.
The Villa Beauséjour has been flying through the rain for five or six hours. It is a trifle monotonous; there is not much to be seen. Astra Island has disappeared, vanished; everything—land and sea—has melted, there is no longer anything but warm rain that is coming down in bucketfuls.
Altitude: 100 meters. Speed: 60 kilometers an hour. Heading: South. Very prudently, Monsieur Cabrol is thinking about finding a port before nightfall. The excellent Kirosita has told him about a little coral island which might furnish the Villa Beauséjour with a pleasant watering-place for a few days. The word watering32 makes his nephews grimace; have they not been watered enough since morning—or, rather, for several days.
The sky is becoming clearer, though; toward the south, where they are headed, there is a gap in the clouds, a little blue window; there is less water in the ocean of the sky. Monsieur Cabrol sighs with satisfaction and picks up his binoculars to interrogate the horizon. Something is distinguishable in the distance: a small grey blur. After a quarter of an hour, the grey patch has clearly taken on the form of a wooded island surrounded by reefs, accompanied by other, less clear-cut islets, scattered over some distance.
“We’re now in the middle of Polynesia,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “The rain is stopping; we’re going to continue further south to take a look at the islands, in order to descend as soon as we spot a pleasant place to land.”
“And here’s the Sun again!” said Andoche, joyfully.
The Villa Beauséjour passed slowly over an archipelago of minuscule islets and 50 meters. Some were simple clumps of vegetation in the midst of the waves; others rings of madreporic reefs surrounding central lagoons bordered with coconut palms.
“Atolls,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “Islands fabricated by corals, the constructive animalcules of the Australian sea: a little reef, at first, which gradually becomes a habitable island. Look, here’s one of the atolls with a rather engaging appearance—we’ll ask it for hospitality this evening. Does the prospect of a night spent on a desert island please you?”
“Good idea, Uncle.”
From the balcony of the Villa they were able to assure themselves that the island was absolutely uninhabited: nothing but coconut palms encircling a pretty beach surrounded by rocks, where the slow work of the corals continued.
No more rain: a golden red Sun was about to set in the violet-tinted azure of the waves. A magnificently blue night, in which thousands of stars were twinkling. What calm! No neighbors, no other sound than the murmur of the waves beating the shore and the breath of the wind in the coconut palms.
“Let’s stay here for three weeks!” Moderan proposed.
“Why bother, since we can find a similar shelter every evening?”
And the following morning, the
Villa Beauséjour, thoroughly dry, took off again in a mild heat.
Islands, islets, and more islands; a seed-bed of islands above which the Aerovilla flew at a modest speed, making detours, sometimes descending almost to skim the waves or rising up to look over the sea.
They landed to eat lunch on the sand of one island, and ate dinner on another, before going on to sleep on a third.
Now there were larger islands, which seemed from on high to be enormous bouquets of flowers and tangled verdure floating on the waves—and isles under construction, in which men and coral were collaborating to create islets on rocky foundations that could gradually be linked up into a single island.
Moving from archipelago to archipelago, the Villa Beauséjour went to pay a short visit to the sixth continent, constructed long before in the 20th century. Monsieur Cabrol did not intend to stay there long; there was nothing very interesting to see on that continent, which as in a very poor state. Fragments of various sizes had been detached from it in the wake of some tempest and drifted away, as floating islands that the winds and currents carried toward the happy Tahitian archipelago, or pushed into cold regions, toward the polar ice-cap.
It had then been overtaken by a much more serious accident. Important repair work had been started on the eastern side, opposite Valparaiso. Use was then beginning to be made of intra-atomic energy. As with all sciences at their inception, of course, there were miscalculations and accidents due to misuse as well as to the imprudence of overly audacious scientists launched at hazard into the new science. Thus it was that the imprudence of a researcher, suddenly developing an intra-atomic force 100,000 times to that which he needed, blew up at a stroke the entire eastern coast of the sixth continent, the most populous region—an enormous accident, which had curious consequences.
The part of the sixth continent thus projected to vertiginous heights entered into the gravitational zone of the Moon, and began rotating around it as a minuscule satellite of our satellite. Thus, that new light in our sky, that little firefly accompanying the Moon, is of human manufacture, since it is a fragment of the sixth continent constructed by humans 800 years ago to relieve the old continents of their surplus of humanity.
One evening, on quitting the sixth continent, the Aerovilla encountered an islet that was exceedingly pretty in appearance, with a charming little beach beneath bouquets of foliage and lianas. On descending, they perceived a troop of monkeys leaping and swinging amid the flowery lianas—hardly troublesome neighbors, perhaps even amusing ones, for a nocturnal stopover.
Indeed, when he Villa had dropped anchor, it was visited by the entire tribe inhabiting the greenery and the coconut palms. The monkeys arrived in families, holding little ones by the hand, leaping and frolicking around the Villa, holding noisy conferences in which the elders, nodding their heads, seemed to be giving explanations.
The Villa interested them greatly, and the sight of humans did not frighten them at all. Andoche set up his camera on the balcony, and soon had a few snapshots of remarkable individuals. Then the monkeys, familiarizing themselves very rapidly, became indiscreet. They were shoving one another, leaping about and hanging in groups from the balcony, in spite of the threats of Babylas, who was following their movements with amazement, clutched in Melanie’s arms. Two or three young ones having climbed on to the roof and hoisting themselves up to the weathervane, others were about to come in through the windows.
It was at that point that Phanor, easy-going until then, became annoyed and leapt up, barking furious reproaches. That was sufficient. There was a general stampede, the indiscreet bumping into one another, jumping over one another, regaining their verdant refuge, climbing into the trees, from which they began to bombard the Villa with branches and coconuts.
It was a beautiful evening, enlivened by disputes with the monkey neighbors, their grimaces and resumptions of the bombardment, and when everyone went to bed they slept well. Phanor walked around the Villa for a long time, proud of his victory over the pithecoid tribe, determined to mount an effective guard.
In the morning, the monkeys were there again, still noisy and mocking. Held at bay by Phanor, they capered in their trees and bombarded the Villa from afar. When the Villa left, in the afternoon, its departure was saluted by further salvoes of coconuts, and the monkeys, believing that they had vanquished the invaders, performed a war-dance on the sand.
Monsieur Cabrol had not intended to devote more than a fortnight to the journey through Polynesia, and yet the Villa Beauséjour took nearly five months to complete it, punctuated by more-or-less prolonged sojourns on islands, according to the whim of the moment or the charm of the landscapes encountered in the little Edens lost in the depths of Oceanian solitudes.
Finally, Monsieur Cabrol set an easterly course, heading for the States of South America. He wanted to explore that part of the American continent for a while, to look for a place for a longer stay, perhaps in the seaside resorts of the Patagonian coast, so popular in the tourist season. After so many hot days in the tropical islands, the Villa Beauséjour might find a few months of mild and restful coolness there.
Melanie was making Monsieur Cabrol anxious; she was getting fat! A life of sweet idleness was the cause of it. When she had given a flick of the duster to the furniture and swept the floor, which did not take long—there is not much dust over the ocean—she had nothing to do but contemplate the landscape while rocking in an armchair on the starboard balcony and yawn, ready to go to sleep. Then she got up and went to sit on the port balcony, where she yawned again, struggled momentarily, and fell asleep.
Monsieur Cabrol lent her books; she nodded her head in her armchair and slowly closed her eyes. The books did not amuse her. Unfortunately, the Polynesian islands still lacked lending libraries.
There was the Tele. Monsieur Cabrol displayed the photos taken by his nephews there, as well as a little collection of films brought for rainy days. Then he thought of his nephews’ Cine-Phono University—but sad to say, Melanie went to sleep all the more rapidly.
Then Monsieur Cabrol decided that it was necessary to force Melanie to exercise—two hours of violent exercise per day. He instructed the two boys to make use of those two hours in taking turns to take Melanie out, watching over her in order that there should be no trickery, and thus save her from obesity. On little islands, Melanie had to make at least two circuits of the isle on the beach, leaping from rock to rock if necessary at certain places—and Melanie kept to that regime.
A few days after leaving the Polynesian islands and their delightful solitudes, the residents of the Villa Beauséjour rediscovered the vibrant and noisy life of the great commercial cities of the coast, the elegance and animation of towns.
Monsieur Cabrol had no intention of installing them in that noisy society; he only gave it a passing glance, time to make a few purchases—notably some hunting equipment to vary their distractions; instruments as far from modern as possible: prehistoric American bows, crossbows firing paralyzing darts, lassoes, and even an old flintlock rifle.
There was an exploration cruise then, over the coast of Chile, all the way to the Bolivian frontier, and Monsieur Cabrol was able to take note of several spots where all the conditions favorable for prolonged sojourns came together—all that one could desire by way of distraction. Monsieur Cabrol loved the picturesque; he needed busy landscapes: mountains, rocks, lakes and rivers flowing under vaults of inextricable foliage.
All of that seemed to be present in the region where the Villa landed one morning, in weather that was warm but not excessively so, on an escarpment alongside a rapid splashing rivulet, which descended in successive bounds from the mountainous background, the beautiful line of whose crests and peaks stood out against the sky, above a series of successive outcrops covered in a thick fleece of forest.
Behind the Villa, old tall trees scale the hill and extend their gesticulating branches into the clouds on high. The residents of the Villa are delighted with the landscape; they follow the
mountain’s changes of hue at different hours of the day, from the light morning mist to the dramatic sunsets in mauve and dark blue. They allow themselves to be lulled, on the balcony or in their rooms, by the murmur of water running over pebbles.
They have the forest outside their windows, the profound green-lit undergrowth, the bushy thickets in which an invisible life can be divined. Some distance away the buildings of a hacienda are perceptible, livestock in the fields, huts and smoking roofs. Life is good. It seems better and sweeter still when one has just passed through large breathless cities, and especially when one communicates by Tele with the family that has stayed behind in Paris, in the great whirlwind of business and the chaos of the world-wide resurfacing.
They will stay here for some time, making seasonal excursions into the mountains, to the heart of a scarcely-inhabited country—where, it is said, a few Araucanian tribes survive, camped in the ruins of unknown ancient cities. Then, in the warm months, the Villa will transport itself toward the Atlantic, to the luxurious beaches of the Patagonian Riviera, frequented by the upper classes of Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. They are beginning to see bathers from China and Japan, attracted by the casinos, the palaces, the race-courses and the gambling.
The Villa Beauséjour will surely find, well away from the high society beaches noisy with a fake and illusory life, the fine beach of family dreams.
In the meantime, the forest air cure, short strolls and hunting trips in the forest with Melanie, who has so much need of exercise, and Phanor, who turns round from time to time and barks to call to Babylas, left alone in the house.
In the wild forests of this mountainous country there is a great deal of game, large and small, of every species: deer and antelope are abundant, dangerous animals are rare. Numerous hunters are beating the thickets and leading the life of the ancient leatherstockings of North America. The animals killed are taken to the culinary factories of each region, which send them, well-refrigerated, to central factories to be transformed into alimentary pills.
Chalet in the Sky Page 27
