Part 44

However, the convicts had discovered the corral shortly after their arrival on the island, and from that time onward they had lived off its stores, though they did not inhabit it. On the 11th of November, two of these bandits, unexpectedly surprised by the arrival of the colonists, fired upon Harbert, and one of them returned boasting of having killed one of the island's inhabitants, but he returned alone. His companion, as is known, had fallen beneath Cyrus Smith's dagger. Let one judge of Ayrton's anxiety and despair when he learned this news of Harbert's death! The colonists were now but four, and, as it were, at the mercy of the convicts!

Following this event, and during all the time that the colonists, detained by Harbert's illness, remained at the corral, the pirates did not leave their cavern, and even, after having plundered the Grand-View plateau, they did not think it prudent to abandon it.

The ill-treatment inflicted upon Ayrton then redoubled. His hands and feet still bore the bloody imprint of the bonds that tied him night and day. At every instant he expected a death from which he seemed unable to escape.

Thus it was until the third week of February. The convicts, still watching for a favorable opportunity, rarely left their retreat, and made only a few hunting excursions, either into the interior of the island or as far as the southern coast. Ayrton had no further news of his friends, and he no longer hoped to see them again! At length, the unhappy man, weakened by ill-treatment, fell into a profound prostration that no longer permitted him to see or hear. Hence, from that moment, that is to say for two days past, he could not even tell what had happened.

"But, Mr. Smith," he added, "since I was imprisoned in that cavern, how is it that I find myself back at the corral?"

"How is it that the convicts are lying there, dead, in the middle of the enclosure?" replied the engineer.

"Dead!" cried Ayrton, who, despite his weakness, half raised himself.

His companions supported him. He wished to rise, they let him do so, and all directed their steps toward the little stream.

It was broad daylight.

There, on the bank, in the position in which a death that must have been sudden had surprised them, lay the five corpses of the convicts!

Ayrton was thunderstruck. Cyrus Smith and his companions looked at him without uttering a word. At a sign from the engineer, Nab and Pencroff examined these bodies, already stiffened by the cold.

They bore no apparent trace of wound.

Only, after having carefully examined them, Pencroff perceived on the forehead of one, on the chest of another, on the back of this one, on the shoulder of that one, a small red point, a sort of barely visible bruise, whose origin it was impossible to recognize.

"It is there that they were struck!" said Cyrus Smith.

"But with what weapon?" cried the reporter.

"A thunderbolt weapon whose secret is not ours!"

"And who struck them down?..." asked Pencroff.

"The avenger of the island," replied Cyrus Smith, "he who transported you hither, Ayrton, he whose influence has just again manifested itself, he who does for us all that we cannot do ourselves, and who, having done it, hides himself from us."

"Let us seek him then!" cried Pencroff.

"Yes, let us seek him," replied Cyrus Smith, "but the superior being who accomplishes such prodigies, we shall find him only if it pleases him at last to call us to him!"

This invisible protection, which reduced their own action to nothing, irritated and touched the engineer at once. The relative inferiority it attested was of a kind that a proud soul may feel wounded by. A generosity that arranges itself so as to elude all mark of gratitude accused a sort of disdain for those obliged, which spoiled, to a certain extent in Cyrus Smith's eyes, the worth of the benefit.

"Let us search," he resumed, "and God grant that it may be permitted us one day to prove to this haughty protector that he has not to do with ingrates! What would I not give that we might acquit ourselves toward him, by rendering him in our turn, were it at the price of our lives, some signal service!"

From that day, this search was the sole preoccupation of the inhabitants of Lincoln Island. Everything urged them to discover the word of this enigma, a word that could be none other than the name of a man endowed with a truly inexplicable and in some sort superhuman power.

After a few moments, the colonists re-entered the dwelling of the corral, where their care promptly restored to Ayrton his moral and physical energy.

Nab and Pencroff carried the corpses of the convicts into the forest, some distance from the corral, and buried them deeply.

Then Ayrton was made acquainted with the facts that had come to pass during his sequestration. He then learned the adventures of Harbert, and through what series of trials the colonists had passed. As for them, they no longer hoped to see Ayrton again and had to fear that the convicts had mercilessly massacred him.

"And now," said Cyrus Smith, ending his account, "there remains a duty for us to fulfill. Half our task is done, but if the convicts are no longer to be feared, it is not to ourselves that we owe having become masters of the island again."

"Well then!" replied Gideon Spilett, "let us ransack this whole labyrinth of the spurs of Mount Franklin! Let us leave no excavation, no hole unexplored! Ah! if ever a reporter found himself in presence of a moving mystery, it is surely I who speak to you, my friends!"

"And we shall not return to Granite House," replied Harbert, "until we have found our benefactor."

"Yes!" said the engineer, "we shall do all that it is humanly possible to do... but, I repeat, we shall find him only if he is willing to permit it!"

"Are we staying at the corral?" asked Pencroff.

"Let us stay," replied Cyrus Smith, "provisions are abundant there, and we are here at the very center of our circle of investigation. Besides, if need be, the cart will rapidly reach Granite House."

"Good," replied the sailor. "Only, an observation."

"Which?"

"Here is the fine season advancing, and we must not forget that we have a crossing to make."

"A crossing?" said Gideon Spilett.

"Yes! That of Tabor Island," replied Pencroff. "It is necessary to carry thither a notice indicating the situation of our island, where Ayrton now is, in case the Scottish yacht should come to take him back. Who knows if it is not already too late?"

"But, Pencroff," asked Ayrton, "how do you count on making this crossing?"

"On the Bonadventure!"

"The Bonadventure!" cried Ayrton... "it no longer exists."

"My Bonadventure no longer exists!" howled Pencroff, leaping up.

"No!" replied Ayrton. "The convicts discovered it in its little harbor scarcely eight days ago, they put to sea, and..."

"And?" said Pencroff, whose heart palpitated.

"And, having no longer Bob Harvey to handle her, they ran aground on the rocks, and the boat was entirely broken up!"

"Ah! The wretches! The bandits! The infamous rogues!" cried Pencroff.

"Pencroff," said Harbert, taking the sailor's hand, "we will make another Bonadventure, a larger one! We have all the ironwork, all the rigging of the brig at our disposal!"

"But do you know," replied Pencroff, "that it takes at least five or six months to build a craft of thirty to forty tons?"

"We shall take our time," replied the reporter, "and we shall renounce for this year the crossing to Tabor Island."

"What would you have, Pencroff, we must resign ourselves," said the engineer, "and I hope this delay will not be prejudicial to us."

"Ah! My Bonadventure! my poor Bonadventure!" cried Pencroff, genuinely dismayed at the loss of his boat, of which he was so proud!

The destruction of the Bonadventure was evidently a regrettable fact for the colonists, and it was agreed that this loss must be repaired as soon as possible. This settled, they occupied themselves only with bringing to a successful issue the exploration of the most secret portions of the island. The search began on that very day, the 19th of February, and lasted a whole week. The base of the mountain, between its spurs and their numerous ramifications, formed a labyrinth of valleys and counter-valleys very capriciously disposed. It was evidently there, at the bottom of these narrow gorges, perhaps even inside the mass of Mount Franklin, that it behooved them to pursue their researches. No part of the island would have been better fitted to hide a dwelling whose host wished to remain unknown. But so great was the entanglement of the spurs that Cyrus Smith had to proceed in their exploration with a strict method.

The colonists first visited the whole valley that opened to the south of the volcano and gathered the first waters of the Fall River. It was there that Ayrton showed them the cavern in which the convicts had taken refuge and in which he had been sequestered until his removal to the corral. This cavern was absolutely in the state Ayrton had left it. There were found a certain quantity of ammunition and provisions that the convicts had carried off with the intention of creating a reserve.

The whole valley leading to the grotto, a valley shaded by fine trees, among which conifers dominated, was explored with extreme care, and the southwest spur having been turned at its point, the colonists engaged in a narrower gorge that took its rise at that picturesque piling-up of the basalts of the shore.

Here the trees were more rare. Stone replaced grass. Wild goats and mouflons gamboled among the rocks. There began the arid part of the island. One could already recognize that, of these numerous valleys that ramified at the base of Mount Franklin, only three were wooded and rich in pastures, like that of the corral, which bordered on the west the valley of the Fall River, and on the east the valley of the Red Creek. These two streams, changed lower down into rivers by the absorption of some tributaries, were formed of all the waters of the mountain and thus determined the fertility of its southern portion. As for the Mercy, it was more directly fed by abundant springs, lost under the cover of the jacamar wood, and it was likewise springs of this nature which, spreading in a thousand threads, watered the soil of the Serpentine Peninsula.

Now, of these three valleys where water was not lacking, one might have served as a retreat for some solitary who would there have found all things necessary to life. But the colonists had already explored them, and nowhere had they been able to establish the presence of man.

Was it then at the bottom of these arid gorges, amid the rock-falls, in the harsh ravines of the north, between the lava flows, that this retreat and its host would be found?

The northern part of Mount Franklin consisted solely at its base of two valleys, wide, shallow, without appearance of verdure, strewn with erratic blocks, striped with long moraines, paved with lavas, broken by great mineral swellings, powdered with obsidians and labradorites. This part demanded long and difficult explorations.

There opened a thousand cavities, uncomfortable no doubt, but absolutely concealed and of difficult access. The colonists even visited gloomy tunnels dating from the plutonian epoch, still blackened by the passage of former fires, and which plunged into the mass of the mount. They traversed these dark galleries, they carried flaming resins through them, they dug into the slightest excavations, they sounded the least depths. But everywhere silence, darkness. It did not seem that a human being had ever set foot in these ancient corridors, that his arm had ever moved a single one of these blocks. Such as they were, such the volcano had projected them above the waters at the epoch of the island's emergence.

However, if these substructions appeared absolutely deserted, if the darkness there was complete, Cyrus Smith was forced to recognize that absolute silence did not reign there.

On arriving at the bottom of one of these gloomy cavities, which extended for a length of several hundred feet inside the mountain, he was surprised to hear dull rumblings, whose intensity the sonority of the rocks increased.

Gideon Spilett, who accompanied him, likewise heard these distant murmurs, which indicated a revivification of the subterranean fires. Several times, both listened, and they agreed on this point, that some chemical reaction was elaborating in the bowels of the soil.

"The volcano is not then totally extinguished?" said the reporter.

"It is possible that, since our exploration of the crater," replied Cyrus Smith, "some work has been accomplished in the lower strata. Any volcano, although considered extinct, may evidently rekindle."

"But if an eruption of Mount Franklin were preparing," asked Gideon Spilett, "would there not be danger for Lincoln Island?"

"I do not think so," replied the engineer. "The crater, that is to say the safety valve, exists, and the overflow of vapors and lavas will escape, as it formerly did, by its accustomed outlet."

"Unless these lavas should open themselves a new passage toward the fertile parts of the island!"

"Why, my dear Spilett," replied Cyrus Smith, "why should they not follow the route naturally traced for them?"

"Eh! Volcanoes are capricious!" replied the reporter.

"Observe," resumed the engineer, "that the inclination of the whole mass of Mount Franklin favors the outflow of matter toward the valleys we are now exploring. It would require an earthquake to change the center of gravity of the mountain for this outflow to be modified."

"But an earthquake is always to be feared in these conditions," observed Gideon Spilett.

"Always," replied the engineer, "especially when the subterranean forces begin to awaken and the bowels of the globe risk being obstructed, after a long repose. Also, my dear Spilett, an eruption would be for us a grave event, and it would be much better that this volcano had not the inclination to wake up? But we can do nothing about it, can we? In any case, whatever happens, I do not believe that our domain of Grand-View can be seriously threatened. Between it and the mountain, the soil is noticeably depressed, and if ever the lavas took the path of the lake, they would be thrown back upon the dunes and the neighboring portions of Shark Gulf."

"We have not yet seen at the head of the mount any smoke indicating some near eruption," said Gideon Spilett.

"No," replied Cyrus Smith, "not a vapor escapes from the crater, whose summit I precisely observed yesterday. But it is possible that, at the lower part of the chimney, time has accumulated rocks, ashes, hardened lavas, and that this valve of which I spoke is too loaded momentarily. But, at the first serious effort, every obstacle will disappear, and you may be certain, my dear Spilett, that neither the island, which is the boiler, nor the volcano, which is the chimney, will burst under the pressure of the gases. Nevertheless, I repeat, it would be better that there were no eruption."

"And yet we are not mistaken," resumed the reporter. "One does distinctly hear dull rumblings in the very bowels of the volcano!"

"Indeed," replied the engineer, who listened again with extreme attention, "there is no mistaking it... there a reaction is taking place whose importance and definitive result we cannot evaluate."

Cyrus Smith and Gideon Spilett, after coming out, rejoined their companions, to whom they made known this state of things.

"Good!" cried Pencroff, "this volcano that would fain do its tricks! But let it try! It will find its master!..."

"Who then?" asked Nab.

"Our genius, Nab, our genius, who will gag its crater, if it so much as makes a move to open!"

As may be seen, the sailor's confidence in the special god of his island was absolute, and certainly the occult power which had manifested itself hitherto by so many inexplicable acts appeared to be without limits; but, likewise, it knew how to escape the minute researches of the colonists, for, despite all their efforts, despite the zeal, more than zeal, the tenacity they brought to their exploration, the strange retreat could not be discovered.

From the 19th to the 25th of February, the circle of investigations was extended to the whole northern region of Lincoln Island, whose most secret recesses were ransacked. The colonists came to sound each rocky wall, as agents do the walls of a suspect house. The engineer even took a very exact survey of the mountain, and carried his diggings to the last foundations that supported it.

It was thus explored even to the height of the truncated cone that terminated the first stage of the rocks, then to the upper ridge of this enormous cap at the bottom of which opened the crater.

They did more: they visited the gulf, still extinct, but in the depths of which rumblings were distinctly heard. However, not a smoke, not a vapor, not a heating of the wall indicated a near eruption. But neither there, nor in any other part of Mount Franklin, did the colonists find the traces of him they sought.

The investigations were then directed over the whole region of the dunes. They carefully visited the high lavic walls of Shark Gulf, from base to crest, though it was extremely difficult to reach the very level of the gulf. Nobody! Nothing!

Finally, these two words summed up so much fatigue uselessly expended, so much obstinacy that produced no result, and there was a sort of anger in the disappointment of Cyrus Smith and his companions.

It was necessary then to think of returning, for these researches could not be pursued indefinitely. The colonists were truly entitled to believe that the mysterious being did not reside on the surface of the island, and then the wildest hypotheses haunted their overexcited imaginations. Pencroff and Nab, particularly, were no longer content with the strange and let themselves be carried into the world of the supernatural.

On the 25th of February, the colonists re-entered Granite House, and by means of the double rope, which an arrow carried back to the landing of the door, they re-established communication between their domain and the ground. A month later, they saluted, on the twenty-fifth day of March, the third anniversary of their arrival on Lincoln Island!

CHAPTER XIV

Three years had elapsed since the prisoners of Richmond had escaped, and how often, during those three years, did they speak of the fatherland, ever present to their thought!

They did not doubt that the civil war was then terminated, and it seemed impossible to them that the just cause of the North had not conquered. But what had been the incidents of that terrible war? What blood had it cost? What friends of theirs had succumbed in the struggle? These were things they often talked of, without yet foreseeing the day when it would be granted them to see their country again. To return to it, were it but for a few days, to renew the social tie with the inhabited world, to establish a communication between their fatherland and their island, then to pass the longest, the best perhaps, of their existence in this colony they had founded and which would then be dependent on the metropolis, was that then an unrealizable dream?

But this dream, there were but two ways to realize it: either a ship would one day show itself in the waters of Lincoln Island, or the colonists would themselves build a vessel strong enough to hold the sea as far as the nearest lands.

"Unless," said Pencroff, "our genius himself supplies the means of repatriating us!"

And, truly, one might have come to tell Pencroff and Nab that a three-hundred-ton ship awaited them in Shark Gulf or at Balloon Harbor, they would not even have made a gesture of surprise. In that order of ideas, they expected everything.

But Cyrus Smith, less confident, counseled them to return to reality, and it was with regard to the construction of a vessel, a task truly urgent, since it was a question of depositing as soon as possible at Tabor Island a document indicating Ayrton's new residence.

The Bonadventure no longer existing, six months at least would be necessary for the construction of a new vessel. Now, winter was approaching, and the voyage could not be made before next spring.

"We have then time to put ourselves in condition for the fine season," said the engineer, who was talking of these things with Pencroff. "I think then, my friend, that, since we have to remake our boat, it will be preferable to give it considerably larger dimensions. The arrival of the Scottish yacht at Tabor Island is very problematic. It may even be that, having come several months ago, it has departed again, after vainly seeking some trace of Ayrton.

Would it not then be fitting to build a vessel which, should the case arise, could transport us either to the Polynesian archipelagos or to New Zealand? What do you think of it?"

"I think, Mr. Cyrus," replied the sailor, "I think that you are just as capable of making a large vessel as a small one. Neither wood nor tools are wanting to us. It is only a question of time."

"And how many months would the construction of a vessel of two hundred fifty to three hundred tons require?" asked Cyrus Smith.

"Seven or eight months at least," replied Pencroff. "But we must not forget that winter is coming and that, with the great colds, wood is difficult to work. Let us count then on some weeks of idleness, and, if our craft is ready by next November, we shall have to consider ourselves very happy."

"Well," replied Cyrus Smith, "that would be precisely the favorable epoch for undertaking a crossing of some importance, whether to Tabor Island or to a more distant land."

"Indeed, Mr. Cyrus," replied the sailor. "Make your plans then, the workmen are ready, and I imagine that Ayrton will be able to give us a good hand in the circumstance."

The colonists, consulted, approved the engineer's project, and it was, in truth, the best thing to do. It is true that the construction of a vessel of two to three hundred tons was a heavy task, but the colonists had in themselves a confidence justified by many successes already obtained.

Cyrus Smith then occupied himself with making the plan of the vessel and determining its build. During this time, his companions employed themselves in the felling and hauling of the trees that were to furnish the bends, the frame, and the planking. It was the Far-West forest that gave the best species in oaks and elms. They profited by the clearing already made during the last excursion to open a practicable road, which took the name of Far-West Road, and the trees were transported to the Chimneys, where the construction yard was established.

As for the road in question, it was capriciously traced, and it was a little the choice of woods that determined its course, but it facilitated access to a notable portion of the Serpentine Peninsula.

It was important that these woods be promptly cut and sawn, for they could not be used still green, and it was necessary to leave time to harden them. The carpenters therefore worked with ardor during the month of April, which was troubled only by some equinoctial gales rather violent. Master Jup aided them adroitly, whether he climbed to the top of a tree to fix the felling ropes, or lent his robust shoulders to transport the branchless trunks.

All these woods were piled under a vast lean-to of planks, which was built near the Chimneys, and there they awaited the moment to be put to work.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”