Part 46

Cyrus Smith and his companions had left Granite House at nine twelve. At nine forty-seven, they had covered a distance of three miles out of the five that separated the mouth of the Mercy from the corral. At that moment, great whitish flashes were bursting above the island and tracing in black the jagged outlines of the foliage. These intense bursts dazzled and blinded. The storm, evidently, could not be long in breaking loose. The lightning gradually became more rapid and more luminous. Distant rumblings rolled through the depths of the sky. The atmosphere was stifling.

The colonists went on, as if driven forward by some irresistible force.

At a quarter past nine, a vivid flash revealed the palisaded enclosure to them, and they had not yet passed through the gate when the thunder burst with formidable violence.

In an instant the corral was crossed, and Cyrus Smith found himself before the dwelling.

It was possible that the house was occupied by the unknown, since it was from the house itself that the telegram must have been sent. However, no light shone from its window.

The engineer knocked at the door.

No answer.

Cyrus Smith opened the door, and the colonists entered the room, which was profoundly dark. A spark was struck by Nab, and, a moment later, the lantern was lit and passed into every corner of the room...

There was no one there. Things were just as they had been left.

"Have we been the dupes of an illusion?" murmured Cyrus Smith.

No! It was not possible! The telegram had indeed said: "Come to the corral with all haste."

They approached the table that was specially set apart for the wire service. Everything was in its place, the battery and the box containing it, as well as the receiving and transmitting apparatus.

"Who came here last?" asked the engineer.

"I did, Mr. Smith," answered Ayrton.

"And that was?..."

"Four days ago."

"Ah! A notice!" cried Harbert, who pointed out a paper lying on the table.

On this paper were written these words, in English: "Follow the new wire."

"Onward!" cried Cyrus Smith, who understood that the dispatch had not come from the corral, but from the mysterious retreat which an additional wire, connected to the old one, joined directly to Granite House.

Nab took the lit lantern, and all left the corral.

The storm then broke loose with extreme violence. The interval that separated each flash from each clap of thunder was sensibly diminishing.

The meteor would soon dominate Mount Franklin and the entire island. By the glare of the intermittent lights, one could see the summit of the volcano plumed with vapors.

There was, in the whole portion of the corral that separated the house from the palisaded enclosure, no telegraphic communication. But, after passing through the gate, the engineer, running straight to the first post, saw by the light of a flash that a new wire fell from the insulator to the ground.

"There it is!" said he.

This wire trailed along the soil, but throughout its whole length it was surrounded by an insulating substance, like a submarine cable, which ensured the free transmission of the currents. By its direction, it seemed to enter the woods and the southern spurs of the mountain, and, consequently, it ran toward the west.

"Let us follow it!" said Cyrus Smith.

And now by the light of the lantern, now amid the fulgurations of the lightning, the colonists launched themselves upon the path traced by the wire.

The rollings of the thunder were continuous then, and their violence such that no word could have been heard. Besides, it was not a matter of speaking, but of going forward.

Cyrus Smith and his men first climbed the spur raised between the valley of the corral and that of the Falls River, which they crossed at its narrowest part. The wire, now stretched on the low branches of the trees, now unrolling on the ground, guided them surely.

The engineer had supposed that this wire would perhaps stop at the bottom of the valley, and that there would be the unknown retreat.

It was nothing of the sort. They had to remount the southwest spur and descend again upon that arid plateau terminated by the wall of basalts so strangely heaped up. From time to time, one or another of the colonists bent down, felt the wire with his hand and corrected the direction if need be. But it was no longer doubtful that this wire ran directly to the sea.

There, no doubt, in some depth of the igneous rocks, was hollowed the dwelling so vainly sought until then.

The sky was on fire. One flash did not wait for another. Several struck the crest of the volcano and plunged into the crater amid the thick smoke. One might have believed, at moments, that the mount was projecting flames.

At ten minutes to ten, the colonists had arrived on the high edge that dominated the ocean to the west. The wind had risen. The surf was roaring five hundred feet below.

Cyrus Smith calculated that he and his companions had covered a distance of a mile and a half since the corral.

At this point, the wire entered among the rocks, following the rather steep slope of a narrow and capriciously traced ravine.

The colonists entered it, at the risk of provoking some landslide of ill-balanced rocks and of being precipitated into the sea. The descent was extremely perilous, but they did not reckon with danger, they were no longer masters of themselves, and an irresistible attraction drew them toward that mysterious point, as the magnet draws iron. So they descended almost unconsciously that ravine, which, even in full daylight, would have been well-nigh impracticable. The stones rolled and shone like flaming bolides, when they crossed the zones of light. Cyrus Smith was in front. Ayrton brought up the rear.

Here, they went step by step; there, they slipped on the polished rock; then they rose and continued their route. At last, the wire, making a sudden angle, touched the rocks of the shore, a veritable scattering of reefs that the high tides must beat against. The colonists had reached the lower limit of the basaltic wall.

There spread a narrow ledge that ran horizontally and parallel to the sea. The wire followed it, and the colonists entered upon it. They had not gone a hundred paces, when the ledge, inclining by a moderate slope, thus arrived at the very level of the waves.

The engineer seized the wire, and he saw that it sank into the sea.

His companions, halted near him, were stupefied. A cry of disappointment, almost a cry of despair, escaped them! Must they then cast themselves under those waters and seek there some submarine cavern? In the state of moral and physical overexcitement in which they found themselves, they would not have hesitated to do so. A reflection from the engineer stopped them.

Cyrus Smith led his companions under a cleft of the rocks, and there:

"Let us wait," said he. "The sea is high. At low tide, the way will be open."

"But what makes you believe...?" asked Pencroff.

"He would not have called us, if the means were to fail for reaching him!"

Cyrus Smith had spoken with such an accent of conviction that no objection was raised.

His observation, moreover, was logical. It must be admitted that an opening, practicable at low tide, which the flood obstructed at that moment, opened at the foot of the wall.

It was some hours to wait. The colonists therefore remained silently huddled under a sort of deep portico, hollowed in the rock. The rain then began to fall, and it was soon in torrents that the clouds rent by the lightning condensed. The echoes reverberated the crash of the thunder and gave it a grandiose sonority.

The emotion of the colonists was extreme. A thousand strange, supernatural thoughts crossed their brains, and they evoked some great and superhuman apparition which alone could have answered to the idea they had formed of the mysterious genius of the island.

At midnight, Cyrus Smith, carrying the lantern, descended to the level of the strand in order to observe the disposition of the rocks. There were already two hours of ebb tide.

The engineer had not been mistaken. The arch of a vast excavation was beginning to show above the waters. There, the wire, bending at a right angle, penetrated into that gaping mouth.

Cyrus Smith returned near his companions and said to them simply:

"In an hour, the opening will be practicable."

"It exists then?" asked Pencroff.

"Have you doubted it?" replied Cyrus Smith.

"But this cave will be filled with water to a certain height," observed Harbert.

"Either this cave dries out completely," answered Cyrus Smith, "and in that case we will traverse it on foot, or it does not dry out, and some means of transport will be placed at our disposal."

An hour passed. All descended under the rain to the level of the sea. In three hours, the tide had fallen fifteen feet. The top of the arch traced by the vault dominated its level by at least eight feet. It was like the arch of a bridge, under which the waters, mingled with foam, passed. Leaning over, the engineer saw a black object that floated on the surface of the sea. He drew it to him.

It was a boat, moored by a rope to some inner projection of the wall. This boat was made of bolted sheet metal. Two oars were in the bottom, under the thwarts.

"Let us embark," said Cyrus Smith.

An instant later, the colonists were in the boat.

Nab and Ayrton had taken the oars, Pencroff the tiller. Cyrus Smith at the bow, the lantern placed on the stem, lighted the way.

The vault, very low at first, under which the boat passed, rose abruptly; but the obscurity was too profound, and the light of the lantern too insufficient, for one to be able to make out the extent of this cave, its width, its height, its depth. Amid this basaltic substructure reigned an imposing silence.

No sound from without penetrated there, and the flashes of lightning could not pierce its thick walls.

There exist in some parts of the globe these immense caverns, sorts of natural crypts that date from its geological epoch. Some are invaded by the waters of the sea; others contain entire lakes in their flanks.

Such is the cave of Fingal, in the island of Staffa, one of the Hebrides, such the caves of Morgat, on the bay of Douarnenez, in Brittany, the caves of Bonifacio, in Corsica, those of the Lyse-fjord, in Norway, such the immense mammoth cave, in Kentucky, five hundred feet high and more than twenty miles long! In several points of the globe, nature has hollowed these crypts and preserved them for the admiration of man.

As for this cavern that the colonists were then exploring, did it extend then to the center of the island? For a quarter of an hour, the boat had been advancing with the turnings that the engineer indicated to Pencroff in a brief voice, when, at a certain moment:

"More to the right!" he commanded.

The craft, modifying its direction, came at once alongside the right wall. The engineer wished, with reason, to ascertain if the wire still ran along this wall.

The wire was there, hooked to the projections of the rock.

"Forward!" said Cyrus Smith.

And the two oars, plunging into the black waters, bore the boat onward.

The boat went on for a quarter of an hour more, and, since the opening of the cave, it must have covered a distance of half a mile, when the voice of Cyrus Smith was heard again.

"Stop!" said he.

The boat stopped, and the colonists perceived a vivid light that illuminated the enormous crypt, so deeply hollowed in the bowels of the island.

It was then possible to examine this cavern, of whose existence nothing had been able to give a suspicion.

At a height of a hundred feet a vault rounded off, supported on shafts of basalt that seemed all to have been cast in the same mold. Irregular fallings, capricious veins leaned on these columns that nature had raised by thousands in the first epochs of the formation of the globe. The basaltic sections, fitted one into another, measured forty to fifty feet in height, and the water, peaceful despite the agitations without, came to bathe their base. The glow of the light-center, signaled by the engineer, seizing each prismatic edge and pricking them with points of fire, penetrated, so to speak, the walls as if they had been diaphanous and changed into so many sparkling cabochons the slightest projections of this substructure.

By virtue of a phenomenon of reflection, the water reproduced these various gleams on its surface, so that the boat seemed to float between two scintillating zones.

There was no mistaking the nature of the irradiation projected by the luminous center whose rays, clear and rectilinear, broke at every angle, at every vein of the crypt.

This light proceeded from an electric source, and its white color betrayed the origin. It was there the sun of this cavern, and it filled it entirely. At a sign from Cyrus Smith, the oars fell back, making a veritable rain of carbuncles spring up, and the boat directed itself toward the luminous center, from which it was soon no more than half a cable's length away. At this place, the width of the sheet of water measured about three hundred fifty feet, and one could perceive, beyond the dazzling center, an enormous basaltic wall that closed all issue on that side. The cavern had therefore considerably widened, and the sea there formed a small lake. But the vault, the lateral walls, the wall of the apse, all these prisms, all these cylinders, all these cones were bathed in the electric fluid, to such a point that this gleam seemed proper to them, and one might have said of these stones, cut in facets like precious diamonds, that they sweated light! In the center of the lake, a long fusiform object floated on the surface of the waters, silent, motionless. The glow that issued from it escaped its flanks, like two mouths of a furnace that had been heated to a welding white. This apparatus, similar to the body of an enormous cetacean, was about two hundred fifty feet long and rose ten to twelve feet above the level of the sea.

The boat approached it slowly. At the bow, Cyrus Smith had risen. He looked, prey to a violent agitation. Then, suddenly, seizing the arm of the reporter:

"But it is he! It can be no one but him!" he cried, "he!..."

Then, he fell back on his bench, murmuring a name that Gideon Spilett alone heard.

No doubt, the reporter knew this name, for it produced a prodigious effect upon him, and he answered in a muffled voice:

"Him! A man outside the law!"

"Him!" said Cyrus Smith.

At the engineer's order, the boat drew near this singular floating apparatus. The boat came alongside the left flank, from which escaped a beam of light through a thick pane.

Cyrus Smith and his companions mounted onto the platform. A gaping hatch was there. All sprang through the opening. At the foot of the ladder was outlined an inner passage, lighted electrically. At the end of this passage opened a door that Cyrus Smith pushed. A richly ornamented room, which the colonists rapidly crossed, adjoined a library, into which a luminous ceiling poured a torrent of light. At the back of the library, a wide door, likewise closed, was opened by the engineer. A vast salon, a sort of museum where were heaped, with all the treasures of the mineral nature, works of art, wonders of industry, appeared to the eyes of the colonists, who must have believed themselves fairy-like transported into the world of dreams.

Stretched on a rich divan, they saw a man who did not seem to perceive their presence.

Then Cyrus Smith raised his voice, and, to the extreme surprise of his companions, he pronounced these words:

"Captain Nemo, you asked for us? Here we are."

CHAPTER XVI

At these words, the man lying down rose, and his face appeared in full light: magnificent head, high brow, proud gaze, white beard, abundant hair thrown back.

This man leaned his hand on the back of the divan he had just left. His gaze was calm. One could see that a slow sickness had undermined him little by little, but his voice seemed still strong, when he said in English, and in a tone that announced an extreme surprise:

"I have no name, sir."

"I know you!" replied Cyrus Smith.

Captain Nemo fixed an ardent gaze on the engineer, as if he would have annihilated him.

Then, falling back on the pillows of the divan:

"What does it matter, after all," he murmured, "I am going to die!"

Cyrus Smith approached Captain Nemo, and Gideon Spilett took his hand, which he found burning. Ayrton, Pencroff, Harbert and Nab stood respectfully apart in a corner of this magnificent salon, whose air was saturated with electric effluences.

However, Captain Nemo had immediately withdrawn his hand, and by a sign he begged the engineer and the reporter to sit.

All looked at him with a genuine emotion. He was then there, he whom they called the "genius of the island," the powerful being whose intervention, in so many circumstances, had been so efficacious, this benefactor to whom they owed so large a part of their gratitude! Before their eyes, they had but a man, where Pencroff and Nab believed they found almost a god, and this man was ready to die!

But how was it that Cyrus Smith knew Captain Nemo? Why had the latter so quickly risen on hearing this name pronounced, which he must have believed unknown to all?...

The captain had resumed his place on the divan, and, leaning on his arm, he looked at the engineer, placed near him.

"You know the name I have borne, sir?" he asked.

"I know it," answered Cyrus Smith, "as I know the name of that admirable submarine apparatus..."

"The Nautilus?" said the captain, half smiling.

"The Nautilus."

"But do you know... do you know who I am?"

"I know it."

"And yet it is thirty years since I have had any communication with the inhabited world, thirty years that I have lived in the depths of the sea, the only milieu where I have found independence! Who then could have betrayed my secret?"

"A man who had never taken any engagement toward you, Captain Nemo, and who, consequently, cannot be accused of treachery."

"That Frenchman whom chance cast aboard me sixteen years ago?"

"Himself."

"That man and his two companions then did not perish in the Maelstrom, where the Nautilus had engaged?"

"They did not perish, and there appeared, under the title of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, a work that contains your history."

"My history of but a few months, sir!" replied the captain quickly.

"It is true," resumed Cyrus Smith, "but a few months of that strange life sufficed to make you known..."

"As a great culprit, no doubt?" replied Captain Nemo, letting pass over his lips a haughty smile. "Yes, a rebel, perhaps put beyond the pale of humanity!"

The engineer did not answer.

"Well, sir?"

"I have not to judge Captain Nemo," answered Cyrus Smith, "at least as concerns his past life. I am ignorant, as is all the world, what were the motives of that strange existence, and I cannot judge of effects without knowing the causes; but what I know, is that a beneficent hand has constantly extended over us since our arrival at Lincoln Island, is that we all owe our lives to a good, generous, powerful being, and that this powerful, generous and good being, it is you, Captain Nemo!"

"It is I," answered the captain simply.

The engineer and the reporter had risen. Their companions had drawn near, and the gratitude that overflowed their hearts was about to translate itself by gestures, by words... Captain Nemo stopped them with a sign, and in a voice more moved than he would have wished, no doubt:

"When you have heard me," said he.

And the captain, in a few clear and hurried phrases, made known his whole life.

His story was brief, and, however, he had to concentrate in himself all the energy he had left to tell it to the end. It was evident that he struggled against an extreme weakness. Several times, Cyrus Smith urged him to take some rest, but he shook his head like a man to whom the morrow no longer belongs, and when the reporter offered him his care:

"It is useless," he answered, "my hours are numbered."

Captain Nemo was an Indian, Prince Dakkar, son of a rajah of the then independent territory of Bundelkund and nephew of the hero of India, Tippo-Saib. His father, from the age of ten, sent him to Europe, in order that he might there receive a complete education and in the secret intention that he might one day struggle, with equal arms, with those whom he considered the oppressors of his country. From ten to thirty years, Prince Dakkar, supremely gifted, great of heart and mind, instructed himself in all things, and in the sciences, in letters, in the arts he pushed his studies high and far.

Prince Dakkar traveled through all Europe. His birth and his fortune made him sought after, but the seductions of the world never attracted him.

Young and handsome, he remained serious, somber, devoured by the thirst to learn, having an implacable resentment riveted to the heart.

Prince Dakkar hated. He hated the only country where he had never wished to set foot, the only nation whose advances he constantly refused: he hated England, and all the more because on more than one point he admired her.

It was that this Indian summed up in himself all the fierce hatreds of the vanquished against the victor.

The invader had found no grace with the invaded.

The son of one of those sovereigns whom the United Kingdom could only nominally assure in servitude, this prince, of the family of Tippo-Saib, raised in the ideas of claim and vengeance, having the inexorable love of his poetic country loaded with English chains, never would set foot on that land by him accursed, to which India owed her enslavement.

Prince Dakkar became an artist whom the marvels of art nobly impressed, a savant to whom nothing of the high sciences was foreign, a man of state who formed himself in the midst of the European courts. In the eyes of those who observed him incompletely, he passed perhaps for one of those cosmopolites, curious to know, but disdainful to act, for one of those opulent travelers, proud and platonical spirits, who incessantly run the world and are of no country.

It was nothing of the sort. This artist, this savant, this man had remained Indian by the heart, Indian by the desire for vengeance, Indian by the hope he nourished of being able to claim one day the rights of his country, to drive out the foreigner, to give it back its independence. So, Prince Dakkar returned to Bundelkund in the year 1849. He married a noble Indian woman whose heart bled like his own at the misfortunes of her country. He had two children whom he cherished. But domestic happiness could not make him forget the enslavement of India. He awaited an occasion. It presented itself.

The English yoke had perhaps become too heavily weighed upon the Hindu populations. Prince Dakkar borrowed the voice of the discontented. He passed into their spirit all the hatred he felt against the foreigner. He traversed not only the countries still independent of the Indian peninsula, but also the regions directly subjected to the English administration. He recalled the great days of Tippo-Saib, heroically dead at Seringapatam for the defense of his country. In 1857, the great revolt of the sepoys burst forth. Prince Dakkar was its soul. He organized the immense uprising. He put his talents and his riches at the service of that cause. He paid with his person; he fought in the front rank; he risked his life like the humblest of those heroes who had risen to free their country; he was wounded ten times in twenty encounters and could not find death, when the last soldiers of independence fell under the English bullets.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”