“48 hours!” murmured Selena. “That’s a long time.”
“Unless,” said Fricoulet, cheerfully, “little Cupid has lent him his wings to enable him to go faster…but such things died with mythological times and our prosaic epoch is not worthy of the descent of gods from Olympus.”
The young woman tapped the ground with the toe of her buttoned-up boot impatiently. “Oh, Monsieur Fricoulet,” she said, “it’s obvious that, unlike your friend Gontran, you don’t have a head filled with scientific ideas. You’re always making jokes.” She smiled maliciously ass she said it, in response to the reproachful gaze the young engineer directed at her.
“Would you say, Monsieur Fricoulet,” said Ossipoff, “that we’re entirely ready to depart?”
“Everything was concluded yesterday evening, Monsieur Ossipoff. The last cases were stowed away before my very eyes. I’ve given orders to keep the engine under pressure, in order that the Maria Selena can put to sea two hours after receiving Gontran’s message—assuming that everything is favorable.” Privately, he added: Which cost a lot of money, and all of it wasted. It would be better for Gontran if the old man converted his stones into 3% bonds rather than dissipate them in unrealizable follies. Fortunately, this comedy will soon come to an end. When we parted company, Gontran appeared to have understood my reasoning. He’ll telegraph from over there that the seismograph has not given any result and that Cotopaxi is extinct. Ossipoff will put the blame on Martinez da Campadores, calling him a cretin and an idiot—which the chap won’t take badly, since he’s been dead and buried for some years. Then Gontran will come back and marry Selena, and that will be his punishment for all the time he’s lost me.
While he was indulging in this monologue, the young engineer studied Ossipoff with an ironic eye. The latter was carefully checking the list of all the objects that the little company had brought with it.
Suddenly, Selena uttered an exclamation. “Father!” she said. “Father, there’s a boy from the telegraph office coming this way.” The old man abandoned his task and raced to join his daughter. “He’s coming into the hotel,” she murmured, in a tremulous voice.
“But we’re not the Hotel Royal’s only guests,” objected Fricoulet, sarcastically. Even so, agitated by a presentiment, without knowing why, he was preparing to go in search of news when the door opened and a waiter came in. “A telegram for Monsieur Ossipoff,” he said.
The old scientist ran forward, grabbed the blue envelope, opened it with feverish fingers, and avidly scanned its contents.
“Hurrah!” he cried, waving his arms in the air in a wild gesture. “Hurrah for Cotopaxi! Hurrah for Gontran de Flammermont!” Then, broken by emotion, he fell into a chair. His face was very pale, his lips blue and his eyelids almost closed.
“Father!” said Selena, hurrying over to the old man, full of anxiety.
Fricoulet, for his part, remained motionless, his feet nailed to the floor, with a distraught expression. Poor man, he thought. The dashing of all his hopes has rendered him instantaneously mad. Perhaps, if Gontran had attempted it, the experiment would have yielded good results. Gripped by remorse, he added: Sapristi! If we could start again, I’d advise Gontran to go all the way to Cotopaxi and try the seismograph. The hazards are so great…perhaps the instrument would have given the results we expected of it.
In great distress, furious with himself, he too went to Mikhail Ossipoff, who was beginning to recover. “Poor Monsieur Ossipoff,” he murmured, taking him by the hand.
The old man uttered a profound sigh, opened his eyes, then abruptly sat up straight, leapt to his feet and cried: “Hurrah! Hurrah for Gontran de Flammermont!”
Here we go, thought Fricoulet. It’s starting again!
“My dear Monsieur Fricoulet,” said Ossipoff, “would you care to run to the harbor and tell the captain of the Maria Selena that we’ll be setting sail in two hours. I’ll take charge of buckling our suitcases and settling our hotel bill.”
The engineer started in confusion. The old man had definitely suffered a mental aberration. He drew Selena to him with a wink of the eye. “Your father doesn’t seem to me to be in his normal state,” he murmured.
It was Selena’s turn to start. “What do you mean?” she asked, not taking her eyes off Ossipoff, who was feverishly putting the pieces of paper scattered on the table in order.
“That the telegram must have struck your father terribly hard, and we need to make a decision.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know…at any rate, we can’t leave him in his state.”
The young woman stared at Fricoulet; a sudden doubt had just entered her mind as to the young engineer’s mental equilibrium. As they stood next to one another, Ossipoff turned round and, observing their embarrassment, said: “Well, why are you both standing there like book-ends? Monsieur Fricoulet, you should already have left; as for you, Selena, you’d do better to give me a little help. Come on, what’s the matter with you? What are you talking about?”
“It’s the telegram, Father,” the young woman replied. You didn’t show us Monsieur de Flammermont’s telegram, so I said to Monsieur Fricoulet that you were doubtless hiding something from us…that perhaps Monsieur de Flammermont is ill…injured…”
Ossipoff snatched the telegram from the portfolio into which he had stuffed it and held it out to Selena.
“Here!” he said. “Read it, and be reassured.”
The young woman scanned the form rapidly and passed it to Fricoulet, asking in a low voice: “I don’t understand what you were trying to say. This telegram could not have caused my father anything but great joy.”
Fricoulet rubbed his eyes forcefully. I’m seeing things, he thought. I’m reading it wrong, or else Gontran has gone mad out there.
And he re-read these words for a third time:
“Martinez Campadores prediction perfectly accurate. Seismograph indicates imminent eruption. Leave immediately. Regards. Flammermont.”
He stood there motionless, dumbstruck, rolling the telegram between his fingers, racking his brains, wondering why Gontran had done this. I can only put his conduct down to sunstroke, he thought. In any case, it’s necessary to go all the way; now that he’s given the word to depart, we have to depart. I only hope that we’ll arrive in time to avert a catastrophe.
“Well, Monsieur Fricoulet?” cried Ossipoff.
“Just so, Monsieur,” replied the young engineer, heading for the door. “I’ll run to the harbor and, when you arrive, the Maria Selena will be ready to raise anchor.”
A fortnight later, thanks to winds blowing from the north-east, the schooner arrived in Aspinwall. The material, carefully packed in enormous boxes, was embarked in a great hurry on the Panama railway. On the other side of the isthmus, it was reloaded on the Salvador Urquiza, a 500-tonne coaster that was to transport it to Tacames, on the Las Emeraldas River. There, a steamboat would take it to Quito in the center of the massive Andes Mountains, less distant from Cotopaxi than Guayaquil.
On February 24, at 8 p.m., as Fricoulet was leading on the rear guard-rail, smoking an excellent cigar while his eyes absent-mindedly followed the white foam formed by the propeller in the clear Pacific waves, a sudden intense light irradiated the horizon, reflected from the surface of the ocean like firelight. For a second, everything was red: the horizon, the sky, the sea and the ship itself seemed to be stained with blood. Then the light disappeared; everything became dark again—even darker than before.
Fricoulet had shot bolt upright as if moved by a spring and hurtled towards the hatchway to the lower decks. “Ossipoff!” he shouted. “Ossipoff!”
The old scientist had undoubtedly witnessed the strange phenomenon too, through the porthole in his cabin, for he was running up the steps of the stairway, accompanied by Selena. Behind them came the captain, followed by some of the crew.
“What’s happening?” asked Mikhail Ossipoff, dragging Fricoulet toward the side of the ship.
“Over
there!” replied the young engineer, extending his arm toward the point on the horizon that had caught fire so suddenly. As he spoke, a frightful and monstrous noise burst forth, like the explosion of 100 artillery batteries firing in unison. Then a sudden tempest descended on the ship, tearing away its sails and bending its masts, while the waves, lifted up by an unknown force, reared up like mountains, lifting the unfortunate ship to a vertiginous height and then letting it fall back into unsoundable gulfs. The sky, however, remained clear, myriad of stars shining as on a night in spring.
Suddenly, the wind dropped, the waves relaxed, the atmosphere became calm and on the sea, congealed like an oil-slick, the ship continued on its way. Ossipoff, who never lost his self-composure, especially when it came to making scientific observations, consulted his watch. The strange cyclone had lasted just two minutes. Everyone on board, passengers and crewmen alike, still under the impression of that incomprehensible cataclysm, looked at one another silently, tremulously and fearfully.
Fricoulet was the first to recover his wits. “My word,” he said. “If someone were to tell me that we’ve been subject to the counter-shock of an eruption, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
A dolorous exclamation replied to him: “Cotopaxi!”
And Ossipoff, his eyes haggard and his hair disordered, clung hard to the rail, his eye fixed on the horizon.
Selena ran to him: “Father! My dear Father!” she stammered, tremulously, her heart wrung by an inexpressible anguish. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that Monsieur Fricoulet’s presentiments are accurate—that the light we have seen and the noise we have heard must have been produced by an eruption of Cotopaxi, which is only a few 100 kilometers away.”
Moved by the old man’s distress, the young engineer hastened to intervene. “Do you really think that was the cause of the tempest that descended upon us? In saying that, I was being a trifle speculative…”
Ossipoff shook his head. “Alas,” he replied, “it’s only too probable. In consequence of a subterranean cataclysm that no on could foresee, the eruption predicted by Martinez da Campadores for next month has just occurred. And he added, in a broken voice: “Fate is undoubtedly against me, insistent on reducing my projects to nothing.”
Suddenly, Selena uttered a terrible scream and collapsed into her father’s arms, shaken by convulsive sobs.
“Selena! My beloved daughter!” said the old scientist, fearfully. “What is it? Why these tears?”
The young woman sobbed even harder. Mikhail Ossipoff and Fricoulet, both observing the explosion of this anguish mutely, were unable to deduce its cause and felt powerless to calm her down. Ossipoff limited himself to repeating, as tenderly as possible, the epithets that his paternal affection transmitted from his heart to his lips. “But after all, what’s the matter, my darling girl?” he asked, taking advantage of a momentary pause in Selena’s sobbing.
Then, in the midst of the young woman’s tears and moaning, Fricoulet heard these words: “Cotopaxi! Oh, Gontran…my dear Gontran!”
“What’s she saying?” Ossipoff asked, having not caught the meaning of these unintelligible words.
The young engineer frowned, and his features suddenly contracted in the grip of a violent emotion. “Gontran!” he cried. “Oh, the poor fellow!” And his arms fell limp by his sides, in a gesture of defeat and despair. Seeing Ossipoff interrogating him with his gaze, he groaned. “Oh, don’t you see that if Cotopaxi has erupted, Gontran has certainly perished, buried by its lava? While you, in your scientific egotism, see nothing in this catastrophe but the ruination of your hopes, your daughter sees the death of her fiancé, and I that of my best friend.” He added: “You’ve sent him to his death—he’s a victim of your madness, and you haven’t even a single regret for him!” And Fricoulet turned round, hiding his face in his hands to conceal the sincere tears that were streaming down his cheeks.
Ossipoff was devastated. In the first moment, indeed, his mind had been struck by only one thing: the annihilation of his hopes. The idea that Gontran might have died—and what a death!—in the burning lava of the volcano had not even occurred to him. Now, however, he felt a sharp pain in his heart at the thought that the fine boy whose qualities he had appreciated so much, and whom he already loved like a son, had perished. Yes, Fricoulet was right; he was the man who had caused the young Comte’s death and broken his daughter’s heart forever—the heart of his adored Selena, for whose happiness he would have given the last drop of his blood.
Overwhelmed, he fell to his knees on the deck and took Selena’s hands in his own. “Forgive me, my daughter,” he murmured. “Yes, I’m a madman. Yes, I’m a wretch, since I’ve allowed my soul to be invaded by the love of science, when it should only have been full of affection for you.”
The flow of Selena’s tears redoubled. As for Fricoulet, moved by the despairing attitude of the old man and already regretting the hard words he had addressed to him, he went to him, grabbed him by the shoulders and lifted him up. “No, Monsieur Ossipoff,” he said. “No, you’re not a wretch. No, you’re not a madman…and your daughter forgives you for the death of her fiancé, as I forgive you the death of my friend.”
The old man looked at him and stammered: “Do you really mean it?”
“Here’s my hand,” Fricoulet replied, simply.
Ossipoff shook the hand that the engineer offered to him vigorously. Then, turning to his daughter, he said, in a low voice: “And you, Selena? Will you forgive me too?”
The young woman’s only response was to throw herself into her father’s arms. He hugged her for a long time. Suddenly, Fricoulet burst out laughing. Putting his hand on the old man’s shoulder, he cried: “Shall I tell you something? Well, we’re both imbeciles!”
Ossipoff looked at him, his eyes increasingly bewildered. “What do you mean?” he murmured.
“It means that the phenomenon we’ve just witnessed can’t be attributed to an eruption of Cotopaxi.”
Selena stood up straight and threw herself into the young engineer’s arms. “Oh, tell us, Monsieur Fricoulet, tell us that what you’re saying is possible!”
“It’s very probable, Mademoiselle, and this is why: we are at this moment, if I’m not mistaken, about 83 degrees and 30 minutes west of the Paris meridian, at a latitude of four degrees north. Well, relative to us, Cotopaxi lies to the south-west. Now, it’s on the port side that the phenomenon appeared—which is to say, to the west. The Cordilleras aren’t in that direction, so far as I know.”
He did not finish. The old scientist had thrown himself upon him impetuously and hugged him. “Oh, my friend, my son!” he cried. “You’ve brought me back to life.”
Selena, for her part, had seized his hands again. “And me!” she said. “You’ve given Gontran back to me.”
“But in that case,” said Ossipoff, “What was the cataclysm?”
“Perhaps a submarine volcano?”
“Or even a lightning-strike!”
“Unless it was a ship blowing up in the open sea!”
Each of them offered an opinion, but the old man shook his head.
“I can see only one means of satisfying ourselves as to the cause of that surprising phenomenon,” said Fricoulet.
“And what’s that, my friend?” asked Ossipoff, who was beginning to mellow toward the young engineer.
“To go and see. Let’s set a course westwards and go full steam ahead until we’ve found something.”
The captain was consulted, and immediately changed the ship’s direction—but the night passed without the lookout sighting anything on the horizon but the waves of the sea extending to infinity.
At dawn, Fricoulet—who had not quit the deck, continually scanning the darkness with the aid of a telescope—suggested that they set a new course towards the south-west. Suddenly, however, the voice of a seaman on the topsail cried: “Land to port!”
Fricoulet raised his telescope and aimed it in the direction indicated. “Indeed,”
he said, “I think I can see something out there, far away on the horizon: a little black dot. As for telling whether the dot’s a ship, land or only a cloud, I can’t.”
The captain, leaning over his poop-deck, was also studying the signaled object. “The seaman’s right,” he said. “It’s definitely land that we can see—so what shall we do?”
“Head straight for it at top speed. We need to have clear consciences—we’ve lost several hours, but perhaps we’ll find important information there, from a scientific viewpoint.” Ossipoff having spoken thus, the captain increased the steam-pressure and the ship headed straight for the land.
“I didn’t know that there was any land at all in this part of the Pacific,” Ossipoff said.
The captain consulted his chart and replied: “There’s the island of Malpelo, which belongs to Colombia. It’s an arid uninhabited rock, doubtless the summit of a submarine mountain.”
For two hours they went at full steam and gradually perceived a low tongue of land emerge more distinctly from the waves, on which the telescope did not reveal any hint of vegetation.
The captain called a halt; he did not know the region very well, and had to be careful not to break the hull of his vessel on rocks that might be lurking at water-level. “Are the gentlemen proposing to take the adventure any further?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Fricoulet. “We want to go ashore.”
A command rang out, and a few minutes later, one of the ship’s boats was dancing on the waves, manned by four oarsmen.
“Are you coming with me, Monsieur Ossipoff?” asked the young engineer, as he took his place in the stern of the boat.
Without answering, the old scientist clambered down the rope-ladder and sat down beside his companion. Then they cast off; the oars ploughed the waves with marvelous unanimity, and the boat flew like an arrow in the direction of the island. As they drew closer to the shore, though, they encountered a large quantity of wreckage: plants, bushes, tree-trunks and the corpses of animals, Fricoulet even thought he recognized the horribly mutilated body of a man. The captain claimed that this island was uninhabited, he thought. It doesn’t appear so.
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 19
