“He’s still alive!” Farandoul cried. “To work, my friends!”
Hatchet-blows rained like hailstones upon the shell of the oyster, which defended itself feebly with its feet. The monster soon had to open up slightly, in order to breathe, and a few stifled words emerged from its interior. It was Mandibul, shouting: “Help me! I’ve got the pearl!”
Farandoul attacked the oyster at the hinge, causing the upper shell to jerk spasmodically. They forced it open with their arms, and the interior of the ferocious animal appeared at last. Lieutenant Mandibul, who was in a sorry state, was quickly lifted clear, while the oyster was finished off with pistol-shots.
Lieutenant Mandibul had secured a pearl as big as his head! In the aftermath of this adventure, though, he had to take to his bed for several days—which annoyed him greatly.
La Belle Léocadie returned through the Torres Strait and found herself once again approaching the Sunda islands.
“Ventre de phoque!” Lieutenant Mandibul grumbled from his sick-bed, “I once dropped a cherished pipe into the water in these parts—perhaps I can retrieve it by means of our diving-suits!”
The three-master made its way through the shallow waters around the Sunda Islands, not far from the island of Timor. Saturnin, who had suddenly become fond of solitary submarine excursions, would not consent to leave this dangerous region.
According to the maps, half of the island of Timor belonged to the Dutch, the masters of the archipelago, and the other half to the Portuguese—which is to say that both nations had a few trading-posts on its shores. In reality, the whole island, land and population alike, belonged to the Rajah, the aged and ferocious Ra-Tafia: an excessively absolute monarch who, in return for a few concessions, permitted the Dutch and the Portuguese to undertake commerce at various points on the coast.
Ra-Tafia, an old white-beard Malay, who had been a great lover of piracy in his youth, now spent his life secluded in his palace with his wives and his bottles of liqueur. His people accused him of favoring the Dutch at the expense of the Portuguese, in recognition of the tribute of curaçao paid by the Batavian government. We shall not allow ourselves to indulge in political criticism; after all, a monarch may have his preferences, and his tastes are not under his command.
The old Rajah Ra-Tafia had but one daughter, the young and beautiful Mysora, a dove hatched in a vulture’s nest. Mysora was the daughter of a Frenchwoman carried off by Ra-Tafia during one of his expeditions to the Indian Ocean. Ra-Tafia had still had a heart in those days, and, that heart having quickened its beat, the poor little Frenchwoman had been spared. The slave soon became the Queen of Timor.
If we want to meet the Rajah’s daughter, Mysora, we have only to go down one of the dark footpaths that lead from his palace to the sea-shore; we must, however, beware of letting ourselves be seen by the ferocious Malays who watch over every pathway with spears in their hands. These sentries protect the part of the shore where Mysora and her maids of honor take their daily bath from all indiscreet eyes. Sheer rocks covered with lianas shelter a tranquil little bay, where the young girls frolic on the sand. Such merry games in the clear water! Such bursts of laughter! Such joyful swimming-parties! Mysora is distinguished from the young Malays by the paleness of her skin, the long black hair cascading to her shoulders and her modest dress.
All of a sudden, a sharp cry raised by the 15 young girls causes Mysora to lift her head. A fantastic apparition in thrusting up from the foam of the sea: a man-fish with an iron head, who tries to reassure the bathers with benevolent gestures. To no avail—they all hasten out of the water with cries of terror. They flee into the rocks without even gathering up their clothes. Mysora alone, sitting on a spur of rock that forms a sort of islet, has been unable to flee.
The apparition came closer.
“Fear not, O Queen of Timor!” said a voice that we would have recognized as that of our friend Farandoul.
“Who are you?” stammered the beautiful Mysora.
“O Mysora,” Farandoul replied, “I am he who burns for you with a love that all the waters of the Ocean are insufficient to extinguish!”
The confused young woman covered her face with her hands.
“O flower of the tropics,” Farandoul went on, “I have known you for a week, I see you every day like a Malay siren, playing among the foamy waves of the fortunate Ocean!”
“O Monsieur!” said Mysora, becoming even more confused.
“Be reassured, queen of my soul—it was only from a distance, while hiding myself beneath the waves, that I dared to lift my eyes towards you! Today, for the first time, I have passed through the girdle of reefs that protect this inlet. O Mysora! I am the Captain of that three-master which you saw eight hours ago cruising off Timor. For eight hours, my heart has plunged fully-clad into the waters of passion—and that heart, which has never quickened its beat for any other, is ready to lower its colors before you!”
As he spoke these words, Farandoul knelt down and lowered the head of his diving-suit towards her hand, which Mysora allowed him to take. The poor girl understood that her own young heart, full of emotion, had begun to beat in a different way.
“O Captain,” she said, finally, “make haste to depart; my followers, by fleeing, must have raised the alarm among the servants of my father, the terrible Ra-Tafia, Rajah of Timor! He will come to kill you before my very eyes.”
“So be it! Death will be sweet if the heart of Mysora is averse to me! If I must never see you again, they shall kill me!”
“Don’t say that, Captain! See how troubled I am by emotion, and take pity on me! Go... and come back when night falls on the shore...”
Shouting could be heard in the rocks; the Malays were coming at a run.
Farandoul lifted Mysora’s hand passionately to his iron lips, and vanished beneath the waves.
The appearance of a sea-monster totally unknown in the archipelago caused a good deal of talk in Timor; the Malays did not dare to venture out to sea for a fortnight. Many would not even go down to the shore, and Mysora’s followers gave up their sea-bathing.
That same evening, however, Mysora was running over the deserted beach; she had seen such determination in the Captain that she feared some imprudence on his part.
Farandoul was there. He had brought a second diving-suit, which Mysora put on, in order to follow the adventurous Farandoul into regions where they would be in no danger of any surprise.
Mysora felt herself subjugated, little by little. The poor girl’s heartbeat quickened until it was overwhelmed by an immense and profound invasion of love.
What delectable moments! The hours fled by during this submarine conversation, whose purest poetry refreshed them both. The two young people, sitting one beside the other hand-in-hand, seemed lost in the azure realms of a dream. Time no longer existed while their two souls melted in the ardent light of love. Farandoul had taken the precaution of bringing a pocket telephone so that their conversation, conducted at a depth of seven or eight meters, would not require excessive vocal effort.14
In the end, it was necessary for them to separate. Mysora left her diving-suit in a hollow, hidden beneath the hectic vegetation hanging down the cliff. She promised to return in daylight on the following day, and to descend in her diving-suit to the bottom of the bay.
Farandoul had proposed to Mysora that he should ask her father for her hand in marriage. He spoke of arriving in great pomp, at the head of his crew, to present his request to Ra-Tafia, but Mysora had put him off the plan. Knowing her father well, she thought that the old Rajah, infatuated with the nobility and antiquity of his race—whose tradition of piracy had been handed down from father to son for 15 centuries—would never consent to give his daughter to a simple merchant Captain. At the mere mention of such a misalliance, she knew that Ra-Tafia would leap up from his throne and strike Farandoul’s head from his shoulders. It was therefore necessary, until circumstances were altered, to keep their love secret. As it was impossible for them to see
one another on land, they would meet each day to spend long hours in the oceanic depths, far from all terrestrial noise, and anything else that might trouble their poetic chat.
No, we shall not attempt to report everything that they said during those divine hours, when their two hearts beat as one as the lovers flew away to the ethereal realms! That would be the work of a poet—a poet born and bred to describe, in emotion-laden verse, the sublime modulations of their submarine duet. Only a poet could do justice to the two motionless creatures, so young and so beautiful, quartered on a rock beneath the floating reflections of a vague and indecisive light, in the tremulous green water. Never could the eye of a painter—if painters had frequented those depths—have found a more seductive subject! O diver Romeo, O submarine Juliet!
Farandoul’s tall frame gained even more stature in the liquid element, and no suited diver had ever displayed more charming contours or a more graciously undulant figure than Mysora’s. Schools of fish halted in stupefaction before the pair. Enormous tuna and indiscreet rays made circuits of the two young people without distracting them from their ecstasy, even when the dazed fish bumped into the floating tubes which conveyed breathable air to them. Sometimes, whole assemblies would gather round. Farandoul took no precautions against them; knowing from experience that submarine monsters only showed themselves in the greatest depths, he had no fear of encountering one a mere eight meters below the surface.
One day, though, Mysora wanted to take an excursion in his arms, into the submarine valleys that he traversed every day in order to come to her—and Farandoul did not have the heart to refuse to satisfy her whim, even though he was fully conscious of the risk.
The two young people had moved without any hindrance to a certain distance from the coast. Farandoul, by means of a little pocket pressure-gauge, had established that they had attained a depth of 150 meters, when an unexpected spectacle suddenly presented itself to them.
A terrible battle was raging, a short distance away, between a small whale and a sea-serpent more than 100 meters in length. The poor whale had been attacked from behind by the horrible constrictor, whose immense mouth had snatched it by the tail and was striving to swallow it, despite its desperate resistance. The whale’s head and a part of its body were still protruding from that mouth, further ingestion having been halted by the fins. The constrictor, in order to finish the job, was twisting its body in terrible effort while its convulsively-rolling coils were striking the sea-bed with a frightful noise.
It was obvious that the whale must succumb. Mysora, seized by pity, begged Farandoul to hurry to its aid.
“Take your hatchet, my handsome Farandoul,” she said, “and slay the monster.” And when Farandoul hesitated, she added: “Don’t worry about me—save the whale!”
Farandoul leapt forward. His hatchet in his hand, he fell upon the serpent as if he were on horseback. Despite the reptile’s sliminess, he pulled his way to the head, which he struck furiously. The serpent, which had paid no attention to this new adversary until that moment, thrashed about in a terrifying manner.
Without allowing himself to be unseated, Farandoul redoubled his hatchet-blows, so effectively that the monster’s skull finally burst asunder with a great crack! The two jaws opened as wide as possible, while the reptile shuddered convulsively, and the whale freed itself with a sudden effort.
At the same moment—to Farandoul’s great horror, and before he could throw himself forward to prevent it—the whale advanced with two thrusts of its right fin upon Mysora, who was following the vicissitudes of the combat with interest. Within a second, its immense maw had engulfed the unfortunate young woman.
An appalling darkness of the soul! The monstrous cetacean could offer no better acknowledgement of the sweet girl who had saved it than to swallow its benefactress whole!
The monster, doubly delighted to have escaped the serpent at the same time as it had snapped up a fine windfall, hurled itself towards the light in order to enjoy its good fortune in peace. As it passed him by, the maddened Farandoul grabbed hold of a cord that was still dangling from its mouth, and arrived at the wave-tossed surface at exactly the same time.
What Farandoul had seized was the floating tube which conveyed breathable air to Mysora’s diving-suit. His only hope was that it was still attached; he did not want to let go of the last thread upon which Mysora’s life might possibly depend.
By an extraordinary stroke of luck, on arriving in daylight, Farandoul perceived his ship only a few cables distant. A certain tumult was evident on board, the crew having caught sight of the monster and decided to attack it, by way of passing the time. Farandoul waved his arms above his head, and a general cry went up in response—and, in less time than it takes to say so, the long-boat had put to sea.
Lieutenant Mandibul, harpoon in hand, gestured to the men, urging them to row vigorously. Two minutes later, the long-boat had reached Farandoul—who seized the harpoon and, throwing with a sure hand, hit the monster’s flank. Lieutenant Mandibul had once been a whaler. He noticed that, contrary to the habit of whales—which usually dived with vertiginous speed and threaded their way into the depths as soon as they were hit—this one was only moving feebly. Evidently, it sensed that it had fallen prey to some profound difficulty.
No crime ever goes unpunished, and Providence the Avenger would doubtless have struck it fatally soon enough, but the whale’s hour of punishment had sounded and the crime that could not weigh upon its non-existent conscience was weighing upon its stomach!
In the first moments after swallowing its prey without examination, the whale had perceived its roughness. Trusting to the strength of its constitution, however, it had expected to be quickly rid of the extraordinarily lumpy morsel—but within its inner tribunal,15 it now began to regret its gourmandizing, its stomach being over-full. Moreover, the creature that it had swallowed was flinging itself recklessly about—and here, adding to its misfortunes, were yet more enemies attacking it, as if it did not have enough to do to counter the enemy within!
Farandoul made a sign, which Mandibul understood; another harpoon was thrown, and before the whale could make up its mind, the two cables were made fast to the bow of La Belle Léocadie. Farandoul had leapt upon the monster; he strove with all his might to hack through its outer tegument with hatchet-blows, in the hope of making a hole by means of which he could go into its body and save Mysora. Meanwhile, the final preparations were made to haul the whale aboard the ship.
Suddenly, the whale recovered its strength. With a single blow of its tail, it up-ended the long-boat, which nearly turned turtle, and darted southwards like an arrow. La Belle Léocadie, in tow to the monster, took the same course.
The desperate Farandoul was taken aboard with the sailors from the long-boat. It was all over! Mysora seemed to him to be lost forever; even though the air-hose was still afloat, it seemed impossible to him that she could stay alive until La Belle Léocadie caught up with the dying whale.
At any rate, he was determined at least to kill the monster. To do that, it was necessary to follow it until its strength was exhausted. The harpoon-cables were firmly-attached and would not break, all the sails were furled—and La Belle Léocadie, her canvas dry, flew like lightning in the monster’s wake.
V.
Sibilantly skimming the crests of the waves, La Belle Léocadie was drawn along at a prodigious velocity. The whale that was towing her was traveling at an incalculable pace, and it was only very approximately that Farandoul estimated her speed at 40 leagues an hour.16 The sailors were scarcely able to move without falling violently on their behinds, unless they lashed themselves to the stays. They were quite out of breath.
How would the mad dash end?
The ships that they encountered put on full steam in order to escape the path of the infernal ship, which they took for the Flying Dutchman. A big steamship going from Liverpool to Melbourne, full of terrified passengers, was struck amidships and cut in two following an unwise maneuver.
At 15:00, Farandoul saw land on the port bow, which he judged to be the coast of Western Australia, near Perth. If the whale did not change direction within a quarter of an hour, they would be at the south magnetic pole,17 bound to be broken on the polar icebergs or the desolate cliffs of the Antarctic continent.
And Mysora, alas! Could any hope still remain?
The whale suddenly veered eastwards. Cape Leeuwin and King George Point were doubled; the whale’s speed seemed to be increasing even more. It soon began to make such violent leaps and jerks that Farandoul feared the cables would snap. Soon afterwards, a violent tempest was added to the perils of the situation; it seemed that the Heavens were taking the side of the monster against the defenders of the beautiful Mysora. In the midst of the unleashed elements, the whale’s convulsions became even more violent. The monster was blowing hard and suffering.18 For a moment or two, the Australian coast became clearly visible to port; then everything was swallowed up by the blackness of the tempest.
The chase had lasted 23 hours when, at the height of the storm, both cables suddenly broke simultaneously. The whale, abruptly set free, redoubled its velocity and its convulsions, leaving La Belle Léocadie dancing angrily on the waves as the creature was lost to view.
For a further hour, the breathless monster ate up the distance. Whirlpools of foam traced a long wake behind it and every time it vented air from its blowhole immense cascades of water fell upon its head. Every time that huge head emerged from the waves, a sort of bellowing sound was audible. The monster was moaning!
A fisherman named John Bird, who lived in a little maritime cottage in Port Philip, a few leagues from Melbourne, made a fortunate discovery that day. Having not put out to sea because of the storm, he was walking on the beach, taking long puffs on his pipe by way of consolation, when—to his great surprise—he saw a gigantic fish coming straight towards him. He had no time to get out of the way. The whale, at the limit of its strength, ran blindly aground upon the rocks, hurtling at such a speed that it smashed to Earth 50 meters from the waves. Then, lying on its side, exhausted and motionless, it seemed ready to expire at the feet of the stupefied John Bird.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 7