The hostelry was mediocre; it had nothing to serve them but friend leeches from the nearby lakes. As they were in the process of searching the kitchens, unsuspectingly, in the hope of discovering some food of a less Chinese nature, a whirlwind of tiger warriors suddenly fell upon them and succeeded in knocking them down and tying them up inextricably.
They were prisoners, and, to put the cap on their misfortune, they had been recognized. A mandarin in a blue hat arrived to examine them with a scroll of paper in his hand, and established their exact resemblance to the description sent from Nanking of the barbarians who had broken the Porcelain Tower. The mandarin rubbed his hands and gave the order to take them to the small town of Koufau six leagues away.
As soon as they arrived in Koufau, the mandarin consulted his wife, a somewhat mature woman but one capable of wise counsel, with regard to a matter that was worrying him. Ought he to have the sentence of the judges in Nanking carried out immediately, or send the guilty parties to Peking to flatter the Son of Heaven?
A nice torture is a pleasant thing to contemplate, but advancement takes precedence, so the mandarin’s wife inclined towards sending them to Peking. The people of Koufau would have to settle for a little exhibition.
In consequence, the leader Farandoul was locked in a narrow iron cage suspended from a hook at the town gate, four meters above the ground. His accomplices, each one lodged in a barrel hermetically sealed and nailed shut, with only his head outside, were arranged in two rows to either side of the gate to await their departure for Peking.
The mandarin’s idea was a runaway success. The entire population, save for invalids, considered it a duty to come to contemplate the horrible criminals. Children of both sexes amused themselves greatly throughout the day by playing jokes on the unfortunate marines exposed as talking severed heads; the girls tickled the poor mariners’ noses with their fans; the boys pulled their hair or made their defenseless noses breathe in powdered tobacco. Fits of sneezing followed which plunged the entire society into intense joy. Poor Tournesol, irascible by nature, became the butt of the nastiest jokes. He could only reply, alas, with explosions of Marseillaise curses, which posed little danger to his persecutors.
One wearies of everything, even the purest pleasures. At dusk the condemned men were left alone with their reflections and a sentry from the regiment of tiger warriors. The poor man had a six-hour tour of duty. He sought a few distractions to while away the time, and amused himself by exercising his skill at throwing stones, aiming at the heads of the most distant mariners.
Farandoul had not remained idle. Overheated by the Sun all day, frozen by the cold of the night, he had employed all his strength—multiplied tenfold by fury—in silently demolishing the bottom of his cage. His hands were bloody, but the cage was already half-broken.
At about 10 p.m., when the town was completely silent and the guard-unit of tigers established 50 meters away on the rampart seemed to be asleep, he resolved to finish the job with one final effort. He waited for the moment when the marching Chinese sentry would pass underneath the cage; when he saw him coming he broke through it with a formidable kick and remained suspended by his arms from the upper bars.
The heavy wooden board fell on top of the sentry with a dull thud and laid him on the ground, unconscious. Farandoul immediately let himself fall to earth and made a grab for the sentry’s weapons, in order to defend himself should the need arise. The soldier had two swords, a dagger, a wheel-lock musket and a shield. Farandoul took them all and put on his uniform.
The event made little noise; there was no movement in the guard-post. Slightly reassured, Farandoul ran to his friends, who were following his movements anxiously.
“Alas,” said Mandibul, “Chinese coopers do their work well. It’ll need tools and time to extract us!”
Farandoul examined the barrels and frowned. The barrels were very nearly proof against a hatchet; the lids had been nailed shut with the greatest care. The matter was serious.
Suddenly, Farandoul slapped his forehead. He had an idea!
“From the height of my cage,” he said, “I saw a little river which seemed to me to flow eastwards along the Great Wall. I’ll roll your barrels to it and put them in the water. After that, we’ll see.”
“Forward!” exclaimed Mandibul. “But start with the others; I’m an officer—I’ll stay until last.”
Farandoul had to roll 17 barrels more than 150 meters away from the town. When he had got them all to the bank he launched them gently into the stream; the rapid current soon bore them away.
“Oof!” said Mandibul, when he felt himself bobbing on the waves. “That feels better already.”
The 17 barrels floating in convoy made a rather bizarre spectacle. The poor prisoners stuffed in up to the shoulders could do nothing to assist their progress; sometimes they went astray and threatened to get caught in the reeds or spin round without moving forward. It was hardly a common-or-garden escape. Fortunately, at a particular moment, all the barrels were stopped by the guide-rope of a ferry. Farandoul cut it, doubled it up and used it to tie all the barrels together like a chaplet. When he had united them all, he leapt into the ferry-boat, attached them to the stern, and continued downstream, rowing vigorously with both oars, followed by his chaplet.
At dawn, after three hours of navigation, Farandoul judged it prudent to disembark. He landed, with all his barrels, on a wooded islet and carefully hid his men and his boat.
“Well,” said Mandibul, “what do we do now?”
“You’ll see,” replied Farandoul. “We must get you out of your barrels, mustn’t we? Now, as I have no tools and no time to spare, only one means remains. I’ll light a fire with the Chinese sentry’s powder; I’ll put you on the fire, and when the planks of your barrels are sufficiently charred and disjointed, I’ll roll you into the water to put you out. It will be easy to demolish the barrels thereafter.”
The operation went smoothly; in two hours it was complete. The joyful sailors stretched their numbed arms and legs sensuously. Farandoul was very tired; he alone had been working rather than floating idly downriver in a barrel; nevertheless, he got to his feet and gave the signal to depart.
The Great Wall stood out on the horizon. They arrived without incident at the foot of the gigantic structure, but it was necessary to find a means of getting over it, because they could not go through the gates, which were always guarded. By night, the mariners discovered a sufficiently degraded section, which permitted them to attempt to scale it. After a few violent efforts, they succeeded in hoisting themselves up to the crest of the wall.
The descent was even more difficult than the ascent; they went along it for leagues without being able to find a less elevated spot. From time to time, they came to stout towers built at intervals along the wall. In moving around one of these keeps, Farandoul was surprised to hear a murmur of voices emerging from a loophole.
The interpreter had scarcely cocked an ear to a voice that reached him when he let out a stifled exclamation and nearly fell over.
“What is it?” demanded Farandoul, holding him up.
“It’s them!” he murmured. “The pirates!”
“Ah!” exclaimed Farandoul. “Chance brings us together again! I knew that we’d catch up with them. But what are they doing in this tower? What are they saying?”
“Hang on! They’re arguing…they’re…”
“What?”
“Heavens! The elephant! The elephant!”
“Well?”
“They’re going to eat it!”
“Eat it! Eat our white elephant, damn it! But we’re here. Translate their words for us…”
They were, indeed, arguing inside the tower. Voices elevated in pitch by anger resonated clearly beneath the immense vault.
This is what the interpreter heard:
“Well, Nao, I tell you that only one course remains to us and we must hasten to take it. They’ve been on our track for a long time now; it’s been two months sin
ce our shipwreck in Korea, and we’ve always been on the point of been captured and massacred by the mariners or by the Chinese! Now famine’s taken a hand; it’s a week since we hid in this tower to escape our enemies, and…”
“They won’t find us; the breach we discovered in order to get in has been carefully masked…”
“That’s not the point. The breach is sealed, but the famine’s in here! We’re dying of hunger. Well, let’s eat the elephant!”
“Eat the elephant! So you’re renouncing the reward?”
“Bah! With people on the lookout for us everywhere, as they are now, it’ll be impossible for us to get through the Chinese provinces with it. The elephant is both useless and injurious, so we’d do better to eat it. Isn’t that so, comrades? Do you agree?”
“Yes, yes. He’s right—let’s eat the elephant!”
Farandoul heard no more. He slid through the window-slit on to a staircase that led down into the depths of the keep. It was a wooden staircase supported by iron crampons, whose broken steps offered little security. It did not matter; they could make use of it, and, with great care, they could descend all the way to the bottom. The staircase ended on the first floor of the tower, the half-ruined floor of which was littered with large stones and huge beams. In the middle, a large opening allowed the base and ground floor of the tower to be seen, along with the 20 pirates seated around a dying fire. The emaciated rump of the poor white elephant was distinguishable in a corner.
The pirates, in the heat of their discussion, had heard nothing. Mandibul, sword in hand, was about to jump down into their midst when Farandoul stopped him. “Don’t move! The position is excellent; we can crush them from here—there’s no lack of projectiles—but the elephant might be killed in the combat. Let’s negotiate first.”
“Yes!” cried one of the pirates. “Let’s eat the elephant!”
“Don’t eat anything!” cried the interpreter, in a voice that he tried to render mighty. “You’re trapped. If you move, we’ll crush you like dogs!”
The pirates rose to their feet tumultuously and grabbed their weapons. A gunshot rang out; the bullet passed within two inches of Mandibul’s head. The latter, furious, launched an enormous beam through the aperture.
“Surrender,” the interpreter went on, “or you’re all dead men!”
The sight of the stones and beams suspended over their heads made the pirates think again; they threw down their weapons and flattened themselves against the walls.
“Pass us your weapons!” said the interpreter. “That’s the first condition. Your lives will be spared. Give us the elephant, and you’ll be set free.”
They consulted one another. The leader of the pirates, convinced of the impossibility of defense, bowed his head and silently surrendered the weapons. When all the swords, daggers and rifles had passed from the pirates’ hands into those of the mariners, the latter jumped down to the ground floor of the tower.
“Finally!” cried Farandoul. “I was quite sure of catching up with you, but you’ve done us a great deal of harm!”
One of the mariners revived the fire; the light of the flames suddenly illuminated the face of the pirates’ leader, who was standing in front of Farandoul looking confused.
“Aha!” cried Farandoul. “You’re the man from the Blue River and the bayaderes’ musician—but that’s not all. I finally recognize you. You’re Nao-Ching, the mandarin of the police of Siam!”
“It’s not possible!” cried Mandibul.
The pirate bowed his head. “I admit everything,” Nao-Ching said. “My salary was so rarely paid, and life is so expensive! I have 34 wives to feed, gentlemen—don’t ruin the father of a family! I’m entirely guilty, I confess. It’s me who stole His Majesty the King of Siam’s elephant, me who sold it to the Emperor of Burma, then to the Rajah of Kifir, then to the Chinese bonzes, then to the Prince of Miko! But I repent, gentlemen. Remorse had taken hold of me and I was taking it back to Siam….”
To collect the 60 million reward! I understand your plan!”
“I’m the father of a family!”
“That’s all right! Go get yourself hanged wherever you wish; we have the elephant that has led us such a merry dance, and we’ll hold on to it. That’s all we need, and we shan’t let go of it!”
A loud exclamation, released by the mariners and the pirates simultaneously, made him turn round abruptly. The white elephant, which the mariners had believed to the securely imprisoned, had just passed abruptly through the wall and was fleeing into the countryside.
This is what had happened. When the mariners had revealed themselves, a few of the pirates had run to the breach in the wall to reopen it and get into the open. Once peace was made, though, they had abandoned their work. The white elephant, an intelligent animal, seeing an exit almost open, had launched itself at the wall and had abruptly broken through. Now it was galloping at liberty, far from the thieves and far from those who had gone to so much trouble to recover it.
“This time, it’s the final catastrophe!” cried Mandibul, letting himself collapse on a stone. “It’s over. We’ll never get our hands on it.”
“Get after it!” retorted Farandoul. “No weakness! We must have it, even if we have to comb the depths of the Gobi Desert for it!”
X.
The King of Siam’s white elephant, which had already seen many countries and had caused our friends so much trouble, was destined to force them to cover many more kilometers, by rather disagreeable roads, sometimes in the endless sands of the Gobi Desert, sometimes in the stony ravines of the Mongolian mountains.
They often had nothing to eat, save for a few meager mountain plants or a few bears even thinner than they were. The dangers were numerous, though fewer than the gastronomic miseries of every sort; to Mandibul’s great astonishment, the marines raised no objection to any condemnation to death, either in Manchuria or Mongolia.
The elephant, often perceived but never captured, led them, after many detours, as far as the land of the Khalkhas on the Siberian border. As you can see, the elephant was getting further and further away from its native land and its gilded palace in Siam, where an entire legion of priests and slaves, attentive to its desires, had once provided it with so easy a life.
Every time the hunters were able to catch a glimpse of the animal, rendered mistrustful by misfortune, they observed a visible diminution of its former plumpness. The elephant was growing thinner with every week that passed, in consequence of so much moral and physical suffering.
To put the cap on their misfortune, a terrible war as devastating these countries. Tartar hordes were ravaging the Russian frontier and threatening Irkutsk. The elephant, closely followed by the mariners, passed into Siberia and went northwards toward the mouth of Lake Baikal.
The cold suddenly descended with a truly Siberian intensity. There was snow and ice everywhere; it was in the remoteness of regions prey to polar horrors that our friends, almost at the point of despair, finally succeeded in encircling the elephant.
Cornered by the lake and numbed by the snow, the elephant could not avoid the mariners’ lassos; after a long resistance, it had to yield to the weight of numbers.
The white elephant had been captured! Everything was forgotten—perils, sufferings, privations—in the joy of triumph.
The mariners found temporary shelter in a ruined and uninhabited isba.99 Another traveler was also resting there. He was a tall fellow dressed as a Russian officer, with a big moustache and a long beard. The fatigue of a long journey had hollowed out his features, shredded his overcoat and afflicted his furs with premature baldness. The man’s name was Michel Strogoff; he was fleeing from the Tartar hordes and trying to reach Irkutsk, which was under threat from them.
The mariners shared the little bear-meat they had left with Michel Strogoff, fraternally. Strogoff was the first civilized person they had encountered in Asia, so they welcomed him as if he were a long-lost friend.
As they had to go at the first lig
ht of what was passed for the Sun in this dismal land, everyone took full advantage of that first night of tranquility after so many alarms, and slept soundly. What fine slumber! The man charged with keeping watch over the safety of the troop could not resist, and slept like the rest, dreaming about the King of Siam’s millions.
Towards morning, however, a slight noise woke Farandoul up with a start. He rolled over a few sleepers and reached the door just as the elephant, mounted by a sort of shadow, made off into the fog.
Farandoul’s yell woke everyone up.
“Who’s stolen our elephant? The Russian’s not here, damn it! It’s him!”
The mariners exploded into wild imprecations. Fate was definitely dead set against them. The Breton Trabadec put forward the suggestion that the astonishing animal must be the Devil in person, and some of the others echoed his opinion.
“Quick!” cried Farandoul, loading the only firearm the entire troop possessed. “Fire to light the wick of my arquebus!”
The antique Chinese musket required 12 minutes to be put into a state of readiness, however; by the time Farandoul, blowing on the wick, launched forth in search of the elephant, the unfortunate animal, spurred on by the thief, was already far away.
“Let’s go!” cried Mandibul. “Strogoff’s going to Irkutsk. He has to follow the shore of Lake Baikal. We can take that direction in all security!”
The mariners hastily picked up their weapons and a few remaining provisions. On making one last inspection of the isba to see whether they had forgotten anything, Mandibul found a piece of paper in the place that Strogoff had occupied, containing these simple words:
I requisition this white elephant
IN THE SERVICE OF THE TSAR.
Michel Strogoff, Imperial courier.
Fortunately for the mariners, the elephant’s tracks were easy to follow. The animal’s heavy legs sank to a depth of two feet into the snow. As its progress was considerably hindered by that layer of snow, Farandoul did not despair of catching up with it.
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul Page 52