Four days later, Farandoul and his seconds, with Rising Moon, made their triumphal entrance in New York.
The Farandoulist crisis was not over; people were liquidating positions. The Bikelowists, having lost fabulous sums, made no attempt to conceal their fury, while among the happy and proud Farandoulists, there was talk of nothing less than offering Saturnin Farandoul as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. The former committees refused to dissolve themselves and claimed to have become electoral committees, in view of the presidential election that was to take place in six months time. Our hero’s popularity was, therefore, immense.
Unfortunately all these events had made considerable inroads into the fortune made in Brazil. Many thousands of dollars had been swallowed up, not only in Salt Lake City but in all the expenses necessitated by the duel—which, for pride’s sake, our hero had not wanted to leave to the responsibility of the committees. On the other hand, the position of a constitutional head of state subject to a parliament did not tempt him; his instincts as a man of action made it out of the question. To the great disappointment of his partisans, Farandoul declined any candidature.
He was supported in this resistance by his new friend Horatius Bixby, the Central Pacific Railroad’s expert engineer. During the two nights and three days they had spent together on the locomotive, they had had time to weigh one another up and get to know one another.
Horatius Bixby was a truly remarkable man. An authentic pure-blooded Yankee, and an engineer, inventor and machine-builder of rare distinction to boot, a thoroughgoing scientist, the grandeur and profundity of his ideas was combined with an audacity and stubbornness in action characteristic of his adventurous race. His story was known throughout America. He had once provided a striking illustrative example of the grandeur and power of SCIENCE, with which man might, with the most slender means—or even without any means at all—overcome every difficulty and triumph over all obstacles.
In 1850 or thereabouts, Horatius Bixby, exploring and prospecting for gold in the plains of Sonora in Mexico, had had the misfortune to fall into the hands of a party of ferocious Indians, after a violent conflict in which all the men in his expedition had been killed and scalped. Bixby, having been struck down in the first volley of arrows, had recovered consciousness after the Indians had gone. Entirely naked, covered with wounds and even scalped, he had dragged himself as far as possible from the scene of the massacre. The discovery of an Indian canoe had saved him. Utterly exhausted, he had lain down in the bottom of the frail craft and had abandoned himself to the caprice of the waves.
A full two hours later, when he recovered consciousness again, he found himself at sea, buffeted by a frightful tempest. Bixby had a cat’s nine lives; he did not give in, and his canoe survived the turbulence of the sea. After 12 or 15 days adrift, land appeared—or, rather, an islet, a deserted rock, pounded incessantly by the immense Pacific waves.
Bixby disembarked, and his first concern was to find a shelter in which he might rest his weary body. A week later, he was well on his way to being healed; his wounds had scarred over and his appetite had come back. The convalescent explored his domain, in search of nourishment.
The islet was absolutely deserted. Bixby, naked and scalped as he was, did not despair. He set to work courageously to create a Robinsonian existence as comfortable as was possible. He observed that the Indians had not scalped him completely and that he still had three hairs. These three hairs, with a pen-knife recovered from the site of the battle, were his only resources. This feeble assistance sufficed, however, for him to get through the affair by means of prodigies of industry that science alone can explain. That was the sole point of departure of the marvels that this Robinson performed by scientific means.
With his three hairs, Bixby first manufactured a snare, with the aid of which he trapped several birds, whose feathers served to braid a string for a bow fabricated with the pen-knife. The arrows were furnished by their sharpened bones. Stronger animals were struck down and Bixby soon found himself comfortably nourished and dressed with sufficient elegance for an island so rarely visited.
In two years, his island was transformed. Bixby had a house, furniture, pots made of iron and tinplate, a metallurgical workshop of sorts, a sugar factory, and so on. He had exploited the iron ores and oil deposits that he had discovered, and the industrial future of his isle was assured.50 Already, he was thinking of equipping a few railway lines to establish communications between his various houses, and setting up an electric telegraph. His long evenings had been devoted to the cultivation of the gentle arts—which consisted, for a man as positive as he was eminent, of transcendental mathematics, statistical studies, research in physics, chemistry and so on. Only one thing annoyed him: no confidant was within reach to whom he might express the joy of his triumphs and the enthusiasm of his scientific discoveries.
Robinson had had Friday, but Bixby seemed condemned to solitude. Our energetic scientist having resolved to fill this lacuna, he meditated for two days and then invented the phonograph. Let us say right away that this phonograph was not the simple instrument that we know, but a complete phonograph, still unknown in Europe—for, on his return to the United States Bixby, preoccupied with new problems, neglected to take credit for that wonderful invention. One of his colleagues, the savant Edison, partially repeated his discovery and launched into the astonished world the phonograph that everyone in Paris was once able to hear in the hall of the Faubourg des Capucines, but that imperfect phonograph only recapitulates Bixby’s invention in part; it repeats what is confided to it but does not reply.
Bixby, therefore, had no more need of a companion; his phonograph was his Friday. No more boredom, no more solitude; he had a confidant for his exuberant soul. All his thoughts could be confided to the phonograph—which, being superior to the vulgar phonograph, replied to him. When the weary scientist was avid for a long conversation by his fireside, he began a pleasant conversation with his phonograph that sometimes lasted long into the evening.
Led by his meditations to think that, although resin, tallow, wax, gas and oxyacetylene have successively dethroned one another in our bulbs as means of illumination, the wan rays of moonlight are no more luminous than in the earliest days of street-lighting, Horatius Bixby had a new idea: that of finding some means of improving the old Moon by brightening it with electric light.
Our scientific Robinson was on the brink of finding this means when a ship, attracted by the sight of a factory chimney on an islet recorded on all the maps as deserted, dropped anchor one day at Bixby’s island. A few emigrants on their way to Australia decided that it would be better to colonize such a well-prepared an island. Bixby City, the capital of Bixby Island, was founded, and the engineer only left the ex-desert island when the continued prosperity of the colony was assured.
This was the man with whom Farandoul had associated himself! Horatius Bixby had made him party to a discovery he had made in Patagonia, of diamond mines so superior in their yield to those in South Africa that the indigenes, full of scorn for such common pebbles, simply used them as ammunition for their slings or door-handles for their lodges.
Thus far, Horatius Bixby had not been able to profit from his discovery, the difficulty of the enterprise, the dangers that would have to be confronted and the querulousness of his countrymen had put off all those to whom it had been proposed. It was exactly what Farandoul and the men of La Belle Léocadie needed. Farandoul leapt at the idea and obtained their enthusiastic consent.
A week later, an expedition was well on the way to completing its organization. Weapons, powder, provisions and tents had been bought, and passage booked on a steamboat bound for Buenos Aires. Farandoul was the commander-in-chief, with Horatius Bixby and Mandibul as his lieutenants.
As for Rising Moon, the young brunette having insistently asked to accompany the expedition, the affectionate Farandoul had consented, knowing full well that she would not become a burden in any event and could, if
need be, use a carbine and war-hatchet with perfect familiarity.
V.
On a beautiful morning in July, the diamond-hunting expedition left the city of Buenos Aires and set forth across the pampas, heading for Patagonia.
The first part of the journey was, so to speak, nothing but a long pleasure trip; they marched southwards, hunting all the while, and only two months after its departure, the expedition arrived on the bank of the Rio Negro, the frontier of Patagonia.
The difficulties began there. The Rio Negro, augmented by recent rain and swollen by numerous tributaries flowing from the mountains, had overflowed its narrow bed and covered the plain as far as the eye could see. The expedition went upriver in the hope of finding a crossing. There was water everywhere; there were only a few clumps of trees or a few hillocks to be seen emerging from the immensity of the flood.
The expedition had not encountered a single living soul for a week: no more gauchos, no more marauding Indians, no more haciendas, no more of the vast herds of cattle encountered in the north. On the morning of the fifth day, however, Mandibul, who had gone on ahead to reconnoiter the terrain, was greatly surprised to hear a number of rifle-shots in the distance. He returned to Farandoul at a gallop; the expedition halted and everyone, pricking up their ears, heard further and more numerous detonations.
Without saying a word, the party set off at a gallop. They had entered, without realizing it, a long strip of land hemmed in by the floodwater. Farandoul soon perceived this, but, hoping that it would guide him towards the battlefield, continued to push forward. The tongue of land grew narrower, and was soon no more than a thin strip separating the choppy waters of two lakes.
Finally, having covered more than a kilometer, they perceived a confused mass of covered wagons gathered on a little wooded hill. A few more rifle-shots were still resounding. Farandoul and Mandibul, deeply intrigued, dug their spurs into their mounts’ flanks and ate up the ground.
The hill formed the extreme point of the tongue of land along which the seamen were moving. It was, in fact, an island of sorts, for it was necessary to go through a few 100 meters of knee-deep water. The two riders had been spotted from the hill. A certain tumult was produced when Farandoul eased up, crying from afar: “Amigos! Amigos!”
Having come within a few paces of the island, Farandoul and Mandibul stopped in amazement. On the hill, suffering the double assault of the inundation and enemy savages, there were women, and only women, hiding behind some 50 covered wagons—100, 200, 300 women, at least, and not one man! There were women of every nationality, dressed in costumes of every imaginable sort, speaking all the languages of the globe.
Farandoul and Mandibul rubbed their eyes. Who could have expected to encounter, at the tip of South America, women in European dress, Orientals in harem consumes, Chinese women, Hindu women, Mexicans, North American Indians, and so on? Who could have brought them so far from their respective homelands into these unknown regions?
These ladies, at the end of their tether, were pressing around the mariners and seemed to be pleading for help.
A rifle-shot resounding a short distance away brought new cries of fright from all the women. Farandoul extracted himself from their arms and ran in the direction of the gunshot. At the edge of the water, behind an empty wagon, two men were lying in ambush. They leapt to their feet on hearing footsteps close at hand.
“Amigos!” Farandoul repeated.
Two hands were extended towards him.
“We and our companions are being pursued by a band of gauchos,” said the one who appeared to be in charge, in English. “If you can help us drive them off, we’d be very grateful!”
“A very good day to you,” said the other, in French. “You can help us shoot at these gaucho rogues, who want to take these women off us.”
“Right away!” said Farandoul. “I don’t understand any of this, but we’ll get the explanations later.”
Farandoul went down to the water’s edge. In a single glance, he understood the seriousness of the danger to which the refugees on the islet were exposed. The course of the overflowing river was little more than two or three kilometers away to that side, and a few islets formed by other hills were still diminishing in size. On the nearest of these islets huddled a numerous troop of horsemen, augmented by the minute by other horsemen coming from the opposite bank, their mounts breast-deep in the water. A dozen men armed with rifles and lances were loaded in a boat that was steering slowly towards the covered wagons.
The sailors suddenly appeared at the edge of the water and opened fire. At the sight of these new adversaries, the men in the boat rapidly retraced their course.
“We can now talk in peace,” said Farandoul. “Tell me, pray, how you came to find yourselves in this hornet’s nest—I’m avid for explanations.”
The man to whom Farandoul addressed himself was in no hurry to reply; he buttoned his jacket and put on his gloves. “Sir,” he said, finally, “please be assured of my utmost gratitude; your unexpected arrival has delivered us from great danger. You must have seen, sir, how distressed our companions were.”
“Yes, they must have been very frightened,” said the Frenchman.
“Indeed,” Farandoul replied.
“Well, sir, those wretched gauchos you see over there were chasing us in order to take away our unfortunate companions.”
“But how do you come to be out here on the American pampas,” Farandoul put in, “with African women, Chinese women—and even Europeans, if I judge correctly? Why are there only two of your escorting such a numerous cargo—sorry!—collection of young and pretty ladies? That’s what I don’t understand.”
“What!” said the Frenchman. “Don’t you recognize us?”
“That’s right,” said the leader. “Excuse our impoliteness; we’ve forgotten the introductions customary between gentlemen.”
Farandoul bowed. “I’ll begin,” he said. “Saturnin Farandoul, rentier; Monsieur Mandibul, retired general.”
It was the turn of the exceedingly formal gentleman. “Phileas Fogg, esquire, member of the Eccentric Club,”51 he said. “Traveling in the company of Jean Passepartout, his servant and friend.”
Farandoul and Mandibul released exclamations of surprise. “What!” cried Farandoul. “Didn’t you win your bet? Didn’t you go around the world in 80 days?”
“Certainly!” cried Passepartout. “Of course the boss won his bet, but…”
“But what?”
“But having learned, some time after our return, that a trip around the world might be then made in 77 days and eight hours, thanks to a slight change of itinerary, the boss didn’t hesitate. He made another wager and set out again, taking me with him.”
“And?”
“And,” Phileas Fogg interrupted, folding his arms despairingly, “we’ve been en route for three years, eight months and 19 days!”
“And that’s three years, eight months and 19 days, “Passepartout moaned, “that my jets have been burning…”
“At your expense,” said Phileas.
“That’s what’s driving me mad!” howled Passepartout, making as if to tear his hair out. “And it’s all the fault of your women!”
“Silence!” cried Phileas. “Respect the ladies!”
“But what does it all mean?” cried Farandoul.
“As for the jets, that’s quite simple,” Passepartout replied. “Thinking that it had brought good luck to our first journey by forgetting the gas jet in my bedroom, on departing for me second, I lit all the jets in the house—17 in all—which have been burning all this time!”
“At your expense,” Phileas repeated.
“Is it my fault,” Passepartout retorted, “if all the women in the world want to be saved by you? That’s the downside of celebrity—there’s always some woman to get out of a sticky situation. It always falls to us! Personally, I’d send them packing, but the boss has his reputation as a certified savior to think of, so we save, and we save… It’s a
whole new world! Yes, gentlemen, we’ve saved all the ladies that you’ve seen in the covered wagons—all of them! I have a list; it’s me who takes a roll-call every evening to make sure we haven’t lost any along the way. We’ve got 358 of them!”
“Ventre de phoque!” cried Mandibul.
“Yes, 358 ladies that we drag in our wake in our covered wagons, who are 358 nuisances! The boss has run through all his banknotes, and he’s borrowed all my pocket money, so that all we have left in the world is two Argentinean piastres in paper money, which no one in the world will take, because they think they’re fake, and 18 revolver cartridges.”
“What’s that?”
“We fire off so many revolver shots on our journeys! When you think that we’ve saved 358 women, not counting all those who didn’t want to be saved, we’ve had to make continual use of our revolvers. I’m an orderly man, I keep count! We’ve fought 128 battles, not counting brawls, scuffles, pursuits, etc., etc., and between us we’ve fired a 152,000 revolver rounds! That’s the situation we’re in: 358 women on our hands, with one sou and 18 cartridges to spend. A pretty pickle, as you can see! And the knocks we’ve taken! I don’t count them any longer… What grieves me most is what you’ll see if you ask the boss to take off his hat.”
Passepartout and Phileas uncovered their heads briefly. Farandoul cried out in horror—the unfortunates had been scalped!
“Well, what do you think?” Passepartout went on. “That doesn’t do your noggin any good.”
“It must alert you to changes in temperature,” Mandibul observed.
“Yes, that’s one compensation—but it’s not enough! To get back to our journey, be assured that it certainly wasn’t for pleasure that we came here. Always pursued! We’ve gone from Sioux to Apaches, Apaches to Mexicans, etc. etc. Since we’ve been in the Argentine Republic we’ve had gauchos to deal with. We haven’t saved anyone, but these gentlemen, enticed by fresh flesh, fell upon us anyway. Impossible to go to Buenos Aires, as we’d hoped; the gauchos have tracked us across their satanic pampas, and I thought that we were on the point of falling into their hands, with all our goods…”
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 19