XXIV. Éblouissement.

XXIV

Dazzlement.

The sun had reached about a third of its course, and its May rays fell, warm and living, upon those rocks, which themselves seemed sensible to its heat; thousands of cicadas, invisible among the heather, made heard their monotonous and continuous murmur; the leaves of the myrtles and olive trees trembled and stirred, giving forth an almost metallic sound; at every step Edmond took upon the heated granite, he put to flight lizards that seemed emeralds; one could see, bounding upon the sloping banks, the wild goats that sometimes lure hunters thither: in a word, the island was inhabited, living, animated, and yet Edmond felt himself alone there beneath the hand of God.

He experienced a certain emotion not unlike fear: it was that distrust of broad daylight which makes one suppose, even in the desert, that inquisitive eyes are open upon us.

This feeling grew so strong, that at the moment of setting to work, Edmond stopped, laid down his pickaxe, took up his rifle, climbed for the last time the highest rock of the island, and from thence cast a wide glance over all that surrounded him.

But, we must say, what attracted his attention was neither that poetic Corsica, whose very houses he could distinguish, nor that almost unknown Sardinia which follows it, nor the Isle of Elba with its gigantic memories, nor, finally, that imperceptible line stretching along the horizon and which, to the practiced eye of the sailor, revealed proud Genoa and commercial Leghorn; no: it was the brigantine that had departed at daybreak, and the tartan that had just set sail. The first was on the point of disappearing at the Strait of Bonifacio; the other, following the opposite route, was coasting Corsica, which it was preparing to round.

This sight reassured Edmond.

He then brought his eyes back to the objects more immediately around him; he saw himself upon the highest point of the island, a conical, slender statue upon that immense pedestal; below him, not a man; around him, not a boat: nothing but the azure sea coming to beat the base of the island, and which this eternal shock bordered with a fringe of silver.

Then he descended with a rapid step, but full of caution nevertheless: he greatly feared, at such a moment, an accident similar to that which he had so skillfully and happily feigned.

Dantès, as we have said, had retraced the counter-mark of the notches left upon the rocks, and he had seen that this line led to a kind of little creek hidden like the bath of an antique nymph; this creek was wide enough at its opening and deep enough at its center for a small vessel of the speronara type to enter and remain concealed there. Then, following the thread of inductions—that thread which, in the hands of Abbé Faria, he had seen guide the mind so ingeniously through the labyrinth of probabilities—he thought that Cardinal Spada, for his own interest in not being seen, had landed in this creek, hidden his little vessel there, followed the line indicated by the notches, and, at the extremity of this line, buried his treasure.

It was this supposition that had brought Dantès back near the circular rock.

Only, this thing troubled Edmond and overthrew all his ideas in dynamics: how had it been possible, without employing considerable forces, to raise this rock, which perhaps weighed five or six thousand pounds, upon the kind of base where it rested?

Suddenly, an idea came to Dantès.

“Instead of raising it,” said he to himself, “they will have lowered it.”

And he himself sprang above the rock, in order to seek the place of its first base.

Indeed, soon he saw that a slight slope had been made; the rock had slid upon its base and had come to stop at that spot; another rock, as large as an ordinary cut stone, had served it as a wedge; stones and pebbles had been carefully readjusted to make all discontinuity disappear; this kind of little masonry work had been covered with vegetable earth, grass had grown there, moss had spread over it, a few seeds of myrtle and lentisk had lodged there, and the old rock seemed soldered to the ground.

Dantès carefully removed the earth, and recognized or thought he recognized all this ingenious artifice.

Then he set to attacking with his pickaxe this intermediate wall, cemented by time.

After ten minutes of labor, the wall gave way, and a hole large enough to thrust the arm into was opened.

Dantès went to cut the stoutest olive tree he could find, stripped it of its branches, introduced it into the hole, and made of it a lever.

But the rock was at once too heavy and too solidly wedged by the lower rock, for any human force, were it that of Hercules himself, to shake it.

Dantès then reflected that it was this very wedge that must be attacked.

But by what means?

Dantès cast his eyes around him, as do embarrassed men; and his gaze fell upon a mouflon’s horn full of powder that his friend Jacopo had left him.

He smiled: the infernal invention was about to do its work.

With the help of his pickaxe Dantès dug, between the upper rock and that upon which it rested, a mine conduit such as pioneers are wont to make when they wish to spare the arm of man too great fatigue, then he stuffed it with powder; then, unraveling his handkerchief and rolling it in the saltpeter, he made of it a fuse.

Fire being set to this fuse, Dantès withdrew.

The explosion was not long in coming: the upper rock was in an instant lifted by the incalculable force, the lower rock flew into fragments; from the little opening which Dantès had first made, there escaped a whole world of trembling insects, and an enormous couleuvre, guardian of that mysterious path, rolled upon its bluish coils and disappeared.

Dantès approached: the upper rock, now without support, inclined toward the abyss; the intrepid seeker went around it, chose the most tottering spot, planted his lever in one of its edges, and, like Sisyphus, braced himself with all his power against the rock.

The rock, already shaken by the concussion, wavered; Dantès redoubled his efforts: one would have said one of those Titans who uprooted mountains to make war upon the master of the gods. At length the rock yielded, rolled, bounded, precipitated itself and disappeared, engulfing itself in the sea.

It left uncovered a circular place, and brought to light an iron ring set in the middle of a square flagstone.

Dantès uttered a cry of joy and astonishment: never had a more magnificent result crowned a first attempt.

He wished to continue; but his legs trembled so violently, but his heart beat so wildly, but so burning a cloud passed before his eyes, that he was forced to stop.

This moment of hesitation had the duration of a flash of lightning. Edmond passed his lever through the ring, lifted vigorously, and the unsealed flagstone opened, disclosing the rapid slope of a kind of staircase sinking into the shadow of a cavern growing ever darker.

Another would have thrown himself forward, would have uttered cries of joy; Dantès stopped, grew pale, doubted.

“Come,” said he to himself, “let us be a man! accustomed to adversity, let us not be cast down by a deception; or else it would have been for nothing that I have suffered! The heart breaks, when, after having been dilated beyond measure by hope at its tepid breath, it re-enters and shuts itself up in cold reality! Faria has dreamed: Cardinal Spada has buried nothing in this grotto, perhaps he has never even come here, or, if he has come, Cesar Borgia the intrepid adventurer, the tireless and gloomy thief, has come after him, has discovered his trail, has followed the same tracks as I, as I has lifted this stone, and, descended before me, has left me nothing to take after him.”

He remained a moment motionless, thoughtful, his eyes fixed upon that dark and continuous opening.

“Now that I count on nothing more, now that I have told myself it would be senseless to preserve any hope, the sequel of this adventure is for me a matter of curiosity, that is all.”

And he remained still motionless and meditating.

“Yes, yes, this is an adventure to find its place in the life, mingled with shadow and light, of that royal bandit, in that web of strange events which compose the variegated warp of his existence; this fabulous event must have linked itself invincibly to the other things; yes, Borgia came here some night, a torch in one hand, a sword in the other, while at twenty paces from him, at the foot of this rock perhaps, there stood, gloomy and threatening, two bravos questioning the earth, the air and the sea, while their master entered as I am going to do, shaking off the darkness with his formidable and flaming arm.

“Yes; but what will Cesar have done with those bravos to whom he had thus delivered his secret?” Dantès asked himself.

“What was done,” he answered himself smiling, “with the buryers of Alaric, who were buried with the buried.”

“However, if he had come here,” resumed Dantès, “he would have found and taken the treasure; Borgia, the man who compared Italy to an artichoke and ate it leaf by leaf, Borgia knew too well the use of time to have lost his in replacing this rock upon its base.

“Let us descend.”

Then he descended, the smile of doubt upon his lips, murmuring that last word of human wisdom: Perhaps!...

But, instead of the darkness he had expected to find, instead of an opaque and vitiated atmosphere, Dantès saw only a soft light decomposed into bluish day; the air and the light filtered not only through the opening which had just been made, but still through cracks in rocks invisible from the outer ground, and through which one saw the azure of the sky where trembled the branches of the evergreen oaks and the spiny and creeping ligatures of the brambles.

After some seconds of stay in this grotto, whose atmosphere was rather warm than humid, rather fragrant than stale, and was to the temperature of the island what the bluish light was to the sun, Dantès’s gaze, accustomed, as we have said, to darkness, could sound the most remote angles of the cavern: it was of granite whose spangled facets sparkled like diamonds.

“Alas!” said Edmond smiling, “here no doubt are all the treasures the cardinal will have left; and that good abbé, seeing these walls all resplendent in a dream, will have sustained himself in his rich hopes.”

But Dantès recalled the terms of the will, which he knew by heart: “In the farthest angle of the second opening,” said that will.

Dantès had only penetrated into the first grotto; it was necessary now to seek the entrance of the second.

Dantès oriented himself: this second grotto must naturally sink into the interior of the island; he examined the stumps of the stones, and went to strike upon one of the walls which seemed to him to be that where this opening must be, masked no doubt for greater precaution.

The pickaxe rang for an instant, drawing from the rock a dull sound, whose compactness brought the sweat to Dantès’s brow; at length it seemed to the persevering miner that a portion of the granite wall answered with a deeper and more hollow echo to the call made to it; he brought his ardent gaze near the wall and recognized, with the tact of the prisoner, what no other perhaps would have recognized: that there must be an opening there.

However, so as not to do useless work, Dantès, who, like Cesar Borgia, had studied the price of time, sounded the other walls with his pickaxe, interrogated the ground with the butt of his rifle, opened the sand at suspicious spots, and having found and recognized nothing, returned to the portion of the wall that gave this consoling sound.

He struck again, and with more force.

Then he saw a singular thing, which was that, under the blows of the instrument, a kind of coating, like that applied to walls for fresco painting, lifted and fell in scales, disclosing a whitish and soft stone, like our ordinary cut stones. They had closed the opening of the rock with stones of another nature, then they had spread this coating upon these stones, then upon this coating they had imitated the tint and the crystalline aspect of the granite.

Dantès then struck with the pointed end of the pickaxe, which entered an inch into the wall-door.

It was there that he must dig.

By a strange mystery of human organization, the more the proofs that Faria had not been mistaken ought, in accumulating, to reassure Dantès, the more his failing heart gave itself up to doubt and almost to discouragement: this new experience, which should have given him new strength, took from him the strength that remained to him: the pickaxe descended, almost escaping from his hands; he laid it on the ground, wiped his brow, and remounted toward the daylight, giving himself the pretext of seeing whether any one was spying upon him, but, in reality, because he needed air, because he felt he was about to faint.

The island was deserted, and the sun at its zenith seemed to cover it with its eye of fire; in the distance, little fishermen’s boats opened their wings upon the sapphire-blue sea.

Dantès had not yet taken anything: but it was too long to eat at such a moment; he swallowed a mouthful of rum and re-entered the grotto with a firmer heart.

The pickaxe that had seemed so heavy to him was become light again; he lifted it as he would have done a feather, and set vigorously to work.

After a few blows, he perceived that the stones were not at all cemented, but merely placed one upon another and covered with the coating of which we have spoken; he introduced the point of the pickaxe into one of the fissures, pressed upon the handle, and saw with joy the stone fall at his feet.

From that moment, Dantès had only to draw each stone toward him with the iron tooth of the pickaxe, and each stone in turn fell near the first.

From the first opening, Dantès could have entered; but by delaying a few instants, it was to put off certainty while clinging to hope.

At length, after a new hesitation of an instant, Dantès passed from this first grotto into the second.

This second grotto was lower, darker and of a more frightful aspect than the first; the air, which penetrated there only through the opening made at that very moment, had that mephitic odor which Dantès had been astonished not to find in the first.

Dantès gave the outer air time to go revive that dead atmosphere, and entered.

To the left of the opening, was a deep and dark angle.

But, we have said, for Dantès’s eye there were no darknesses.

He sounded with his gaze the second grotto: it was empty like the first.

The treasure, if it existed, was buried in that dark angle.

The hour of anguish had arrived; two feet of earth to dig, that was all that remained to Dantès between supreme joy and supreme despair.

He advanced toward the angle, and, as if taken with a sudden resolution, attacked the ground boldly.

At the fifth or sixth blow of the pickaxe, the iron rang upon iron.

Never did a funereal tocsin, never did a trembling passing-bell produce such an effect upon him who heard it. Dantès would certainly not have grown paler had he met with nothing.

He sounded beside the spot where he had already sounded, and met with the same resistance but not the same sound.

“It is a wooden chest, bound with iron,” said he.

At that moment, a rapid shadow passed intercepting the light.

Dantès let his pickaxe fall, seized his rifle, passed back through the opening, and sprang toward the daylight.

A wild goat had bounded over the first entrance of the grotto and was browsing a few paces off.

It was a fine opportunity to secure his dinner, but Dantès feared lest the detonation of the rifle should attract some one.

He reflected an instant, cut a resinous tree, went to light it at the still smoking fire where the smugglers had cooked their breakfast, and returned with this torch.

He wished to lose no detail of what he was about to see.

He approached the torch to the shapeless and unfinished hole, and recognized that he had not been mistaken: his blows had alternately struck upon iron and upon wood.

He planted his torch in the earth and set to work again.

In an instant, a space three feet long by about two feet wide was cleared, and Dantès was able to recognize a chest of oak wood bound with chased iron. In the middle of the lid there shone, upon a silver plate which the earth had not been able to tarnish, the arms of the Spada family, that is to say a sword placed in pale upon an oval shield, as are Italian shields, and surmounted by a cardinal’s hat.

Dantès recognized them easily: Abbé Faria had drawn them for him so many times!

From that moment, there was no longer any doubt, the treasure was indeed there; they would not have taken so many precautions to replace an empty chest in that spot.

In an instant, all around the chest was cleared, and Dantès saw by turns appear the central lock, placed between two padlocks, and the handles of the side faces; all this was chased as they chased at that epoch, when art rendered the vilest metals precious.

Dantès took the chest by the handles and tried to lift it: it was an impossible thing.

Dantès tried to open it: lock and padlocks were closed; the faithful guardians seemed not to wish to yield their treasure.

Dantès introduced the cutting edge of his pickaxe between the chest and the lid, pressed upon the handle of the pickaxe, and the lid, after crying out, burst. A wide opening of the planks rendered the ironwork useless, which fell in turn, still clutching with their tenacious nails the boards cut into by their fall, and the chest was disclosed.

A vertiginous fever seized upon Dantès; he seized his rifle, primed it and placed it near him. First he closed his eyes, as children do, to perceive, in the sparkling night of their imagination, more stars than they can count in a sky still lit, then he reopened them and remained dazzled.

Three compartments divided the chest.

In the first shone rutilant gold crowns with tawny reflections.

In the second, badly polished ingots arranged in good order, but which had of gold only the weight and the value.

In the third, finally, half full, Edmond stirred by the handful the diamonds, the pearls, the rubies, which, a sparkling cascade, made, in falling one upon another, the noise of hail upon windowpanes.

After having touched, palpated, plunged his trembling hands into the gold and the jewels, Edmond rose and took to running through the caverns with the trembling exaltation of a man touching upon madness. He leaped upon a rock whence he could discover the sea, and perceived nothing; he was alone, quite alone, with those incalculable, unheard-of, fabulous riches, which belonged to him: only, was he dreaming or was he awake? was he having a fleeting dream or grappling body to body with a reality?

He needed to see his gold again, and yet he felt that he would not have the strength, at that moment, to sustain the sight of it. For an instant, he pressed his two hands upon the top of his head, as if to prevent his reason from fleeing; then he sprang right across the island, without following, not a path, for there are none in the island of Monte-Cristo, but a fixed line, putting the wild goats to flight and frightening the sea-birds with his cries and gesticulations. Then, by a detour, he returned, still doubting, precipitating himself from the first grotto into the second, and finding himself again face to face with that mine of gold and diamonds.

This time, he fell to his knees, compressing with his two convulsive hands his bounding heart, and murmuring a prayer intelligible to God alone.

Soon, he felt calmer and therefore happier, for from that hour only did he begin to believe in his felicity.

He then set about counting his fortune; there were a thousand ingots of gold of two to three pounds each; then, he piled up twenty-five thousand gold crowns, each possibly worth eighty francs of our present currency, all with the effigy of Pope Alexander VI and his predecessors, and he perceived that the compartment was only half empty; finally, he measured ten times the capacity of his two hands in pearls, in precious stones, in diamonds, many of which, set by the best jewelers of the epoch, offered a remarkable value of execution, even beside their intrinsic value.

Dantès saw the day decline and extinguish itself little by little. He feared to be surprised if he remained in the cavern, and went out, his rifle in his hand. A piece of biscuit and a few mouthfuls of wine were his supper. Then he replaced the stone, lay down upon it, and slept scarcely a few hours, covering with his body the entrance of the grotto.

This night was at once one of those delicious and terrible nights, such as this man of thunderbolt emotions had already passed two or three of in his life.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”