by Theo Varlet
It is fourteen hundred hours. Presided over by Monsieur Germain-Lucas, the banquet at the Hôtel de Ville has been held, the speeches have been made. We are now embarked. Leaning on the rail of the first-class promenade deck, among our new colleagues, we are looking down from the height of a fifth floor on the quay where Rivier, his wife and daughter, on the official podium, are waving at us from afar...
Around them there are the band, the horizon-blue troops that are doing the honors, the innumerable crowd. On the lower decks, we can see by leaning over, the heads of the colonials, who are waving the flowers with which the ladies of the town have heaped them. The band is playing Sambre-et-Meuse; the bells of Le Havre are beginning to ring. Hydroplanes are soaring in the splendid October sky, circling the dirigible Méditerranée, which will escort us as far as the exit from the Channel.
From the ship’s four funnels the white oil-smoke is spiraling into the sky; the bells of the bridge are launching orders to the engine-room. A long blast of the siren fills the air; it’s the signal for departure. The sirens of all the boats in the harbor respond. The band plays the Marseillaise; the members of the crowd take off their hats and wave handkerchiefs… and while the cannon of La Hève fire a twenty-one gun salute, the monumental Ile-de-France draws away from the quay, gliding over the yellow waters of the Seine estuary, at a speed of eighteen knots, rapidly distancing us from the Lilliputian host of flag-decked tugs laden with curiosity-seekers, which follow us briefly. Two destroyers precede us, as scouts.
It was a genuine honeymoon trip, for us, for although we were both delegates of the Banque Rivier et Cie, charged with watching over enormous interests, our task remained putative on the Ile-de-France. The principal aim of our mission was to divide up Île Féréor, to share it out in syndicate between the nations, under the guardianship of the Condominium—and it was necessary for us to be on the spot to assess that. We had no map of the island, no plans—nothing but the photographs brought back by the Erebus II and the Cornouaille, prints of which were passed from hand to hand in the vast first-class saloon, where we were trying to make everyone’s acquaintance after dinner.
Our naval escort increased significantly before leaving European waters. Firstly, off Cherbourg at about eighteen hundred hours, two battleships, the Paris and the Porthos, came to flank us, accompanied by the Erebus II herself, which took up a position on our port side, like a minuscule boat—and Lefébure shouted a joyful bonjour at me through a loudhailer. Then, at twenty-three hundred hours, we stopped in Plymouth harbor to receive the English delegates, under the intersecting searchlights of warships, two of which—the Trafalgar and the King Edward II—joined our convoy.
The following day, we had left European waters. The dirigible had turned back, and our fleet was advancing in orderly formation, the destroyers in the van and the battleships on the flanks. For three days we did not allow ourselves to think about that argonautical expedition sailing triumphantly to the conquest of the Golden Rock. Every evening, at sunset, we admired the magical spectacle. Trailing their long wakes of foam over the green extent, sparkling with red reflections, the eight ships seemed to be heading straight toward the red globe of the disappearing sun...
And thus it was that, on the seventh, we had the opportunity to see that rare and prestigious phenomenon, the “green ray.”22
Our journey was partly spent in breathing the sea air and strolling back and forth along the two hectometers of the promenade deck. We gladly exchanged a few words with the other strollers, French or English, but without letting them take possession of us. I confess that even had a slight dread of being harassed by the exuberant Jolliot, but although he was officially part of the mission, he obtained greater pleasure in second class with the journalists and cameramen. The star, tormented by sea-sickness in spite of the calmness of the sea, remained invisible throughout the crossing.
Immediately after sunset we went down to the saloon to take tea while listening to the news, after which there was dinner, and the evening was completed by two or three hours of dancing, most frequently to the trains of a cowboy jazz band borrowed from second class to add spice to our orchestra, which we deemed to be to old-fashioned.
The news.
We were abundantly provided with it by the loudspeakers in the saloons and dining-room. Six wireless operators working shifts two at a time, were constantly on duty at the ship’s antennae, receiving mostly from Saint-Assise in Melun—50 kilowatts—which retransmitted the news from the Tower. Signals from the island, disentangled from long-wave signals of every kind, in all languages, with which they were mingled, coming from dozens of ships en route, like us, for the sector of the ocean, finally reached us direct from the evening of the eighth onwards.
After the American reconnaissance aircraft, the island had received the visit of ships baring the star-spangled banner: the aircraft-carrier Lexington, four long-range torpedo-boats and three cargo vessels. As they had not headed for Port Erebus the French destroyers allowed them to pass by and land four kilometers away on the southern cost of the island, where they had disembarked machinery and an army of Japanese coolies, who dug into the iron cliff with oxyacetylene torches, as into a safe...
On the ninth—we were due to reach the island the following day—two hydroplanes launched from the Porthos were able to fly over the island on reconnaissance and bring back photographs and films, immediately developed and projected that evening on the screen in the saloon.
Vision: we are looking down vertically from two thousand meters above sea level at waves feathered by solar reflections, rocked by the gentle pendular movement of aerial displacement. Ships, like the backs of aquatic beetles, on most of which small round turrets stand out, with the thin barrels of cannon. There’s the long American aircraft-carrier, its upper deck bare for two-thirds of its length, it catapult-platform...and six other ships, also American, deployed in a crescent around the southern part of the island, where fissures stripe the edge of the cliff...
The entire island, from the vertical angle, looks like a relief-map; its form is somewhat reminiscent of a shoe, narrower in its median part, where the Golden Rock makes a granitic stain, eaten away on its flanks by streams. The stain is further diminished toward the north, as if the peak posed on the iron pedestal constituted the toe of the shoe.
It is toward the heel—to maintain the analogy—that the Americans have landed. Something like a shiny notch can be distinguished, carved into the height of the gorge when the first reconnaissance from the Erebus II landed. An ant-hill-like activity already reigns there: minuscule dots are moving around machines, and puffs of white smoke mark the explosion of mines in the process of eating away the mass of iron along the fissures of cleavage.
Among the two hundred spectators of the film there was a cry of indignation when two further white explosions were produced before our eyes—but in the air, not on the ground, Shrapnel bursts beneath the objective lens, evidently fired at the aircraft.
We understand then why the observer is circling at such an altitude, at a rather inconvenient distance.
Moreover, the observer himself—Monsieur de Silfrage—beings speaking at that moment, and tells us by megaphone that he has been ordered to withdraw.
Will the tolerance of allowing the Americans to land on the island hasten conflict instead of avoiding it? Will the game won in Europe thanks to the Franco-Britannic alliance be rejoined, this time with canon-fire, around the bolide? Is the statement from New York issued by the loudspeaker immediately after the cinema session—that the Pacific fleet is in the process of passing through the Panama Canal and will head for Île Féréor—an intimidation or an ultimatum? Its arrival can be expected in five or six days—and what then?
The danger is understood in Europe. Saint-Assise transmits a message saying that the Vatican station has addressed an encyclical from the Sovereign Pontiff to Christianity. The pope adjures his spiritual children to beware of the forces of Evil that are sowing dissent among them. He exho
rts them to peace, union against the infidels.
The infidels! Translation: yellow people; the Japanese.
In spite of the unanimous silence of the Hertzian waves regarding the actions and deeds of the rival race, we believe we can sense it, separated from us by the thickness of the planet, meditating some evil coup, thanks to this American imprudence. The United States are presenting themselves to us as competitors, and we feel less intimacy than indignation in their regard; the thirst for gold—for this exploitation of the iron is merely a bluff, or a beginning—is making them neglect their duty as champions of white civilization in the face of the yellow, irreducible enemies beneath their progressivist make-up. The true guarantee of peace in the Far East was the American fleet, far more the few units maintained by France in Indochina and England in India. Will even formidable Singapore, the lock set upon massive treasures in the Strait of Malacca, hold firm before a Japanese shock attack?
But serious thoughts can be left until tomorrow! The cords of the instruments and cowboy jazz are calling us to the great saloon, and there will be dancing until three o’clock in the morning on the Ile-de-France, en route for the Golden Rock.
XX. Adieu, Baskets!
The blare of the Ile-de-France’s sirens, to which the various howls of its convoy and other vessels reply—a formidable herd of machine-beasts of the Industrial Age—dragged Frédérique and me us from our bunks. After switching on the electric light and dressing in haste, we ran to the elevator and went up to the promenade deck.
In the pale October dawn, our flotilla was slowing down as it arrived among ships with red, white and green lights, and searchlight-beams.
Two kilometers ahead of us, a kind of luminous town rose up above the waves, in a mist of vapor and smoke blurring the silhouette of the island.
“Port Erebus!” de Silfrage told me.
A great deal of work had been done since the departure of the Erebus II! Where we had left a single excavator and a decauville, there was a veritable factory-city, seething with activity. The racket of machines reached us clearly, borne by the surface of the sea, in an interval of silence, with the impact of loads of gold, extracted from a mountainous stock shining vaguely beneath the arms of machines and poured into the holds of two moored cargo vessels.
The daylight brightened; we drew closer. I uttered an exclamation, and seized Frédérique’s arm, when my gaze finally discerned the silhouette of the Golden Rock outlined in black against the gray background of the sky. And even though I considered the expression as pure rhetoric, which had never had any living reality for me, even before the most amazing spectacle, I will say that “I rubbed my eyes”—for the silhouette of the peak was transformed!
I saw it again in my memory, that pointed peak, white with snow at the top, red at the base, but shaped as an almost-regular cone...
Now, there was no longer any trace of snow, except at the summit, whose altitude had diminished by a third. The southern slope was cut vertically, and everywhere on the flanks there were large streaks of auriferous mud. It really was the “sagging candle” that Lefébure had mentioned to us.
The Ile-de-France, saluted by artillery salvos, came to a halt five hundred meters from the shore, a little way inside the blockade line formed by the ships that had arrived previously, which were now joined by the Porthos, the Paris, the Trafalgar and the King Edward VII. The Erebus II advanced as far as the harbor entrance, and immediately landed its personnel.
For us, the staff of the Mission—the only ones authorized to leave the ship that day—methodical work was about to commence with our initial descent on to the island. In view of the spirit of joyfulness that reigned among us, however, it ought not to exclude amusement. Jolliot and a few other fun-lovers organized a picnic. Thanks to the stewards, the two hundred and forty “representatives of the Condominium” were issued with provisions: canned preserves, terrines of foie gras, bottles of champagne, and we gathered in sympathetic groups. Jolliot was carrying a miniature camera, a kind of baby Pathé. The English all had Kodaks. Frédérique and I, still on honeymoon, with all the riches of the present and the future, neglected those avaricious precautions against future forgetfulness...
The motor launch, as large as a small tug, was big enough to take us all ashore in two trips. We were in the first party, which left at eleven o’clock.
The inlet was full of a demonic din. The confusion of machines with huge arms perched on their stilts of metal beams was reminiscent of the vision of the Martians that Wells evokes for us in The War of the Worlds. We disembarked at the entrance to the inlet, where the agitation and clutter were less intense.
On the shore I recognized Lefébure, who was waving to us. A little further away, flanked by two armed Senegalese, the engineer charged with piloting our group hailed us, waving a small flag: “This way! Come alongside!”
We had not all disembarked yet when the guide was already beginning to draw the group away, announcing through a megaphone: “Come, on Mesdames et Messieurs…Ladies and Gentlemen…line up along the rails to the right, and don’t walk on the track—watch out for the trains! Pay attention, too, when you pass under the overhead cables—mud falls from the skips. Stop! Here, first of all, is nugget-bunker number one. It’s a reserve, containing approximately...”
In the front rank of the group, Kodak’s were clicking; Jolliot was beginning to operate his baby Pathé. The star was uncertain as to where to put her feet in the red chloride mud that was making the iron ground sticky—but Lefébure took possession of Frédérique and me.
“Come on, then! You don’t need to paddle through all that. I’ll show you something far more curious.” And he drew us toward the huts situated to the right of the iron slope.
Half-way there, he brought us to a halt.
“Oh!” said Frédérique. “How the ground shakes! One can still feel the trepidation of the machines here.”
The mariner smiled enigmatically.
“Good—you can feel it. That’s already something—and you, Antoine, don’t you notice something else? Look at the creek.”
Only then did the double transformation leap to my eyes. The ravine that once prolonged the inlet was now a true fjord, the waters of which came to bathe the very base of the peak sliced into by the excavation. Furthermore, the breadth of the sheet of water between the two “quays” had increased considerably; whereas the Erebus II had once found it narrow, as in a floating dock, the two 6000-ton cargo ships that were moored there today, one to the right and one to the left, only occupied a third of its width.
“Damn!” I said, simply.
“How can the disaggregation of the peak possibly produce that effect?” asked Frédérique.
“I told you in Paris, didn’t I?” Lefébure went on. “Île Féréor is clearing off. But let’s go up to Gripert’s place. He’ll give you the explanation you want, Madame.”
We resumed the ascent, and found Gripert in a sort of hangar, in the process of observing a white cross placed on the other shore of the inlet through a telescope. He was genuinely pleased to see me again, and looked at Frédérique approvingly in her capacity as a doctor of science. “It’s accelerating, you know,” he said to Lefébure. The rate of separation has doubled since I last saw you.”
“Doubled! Do you hear, Antoine? But that’s right—you need an explanation first. Tell our friends what’s happening, Gripert—they aren’t up to date.”
Gripert shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. “Can you feel the tremor in the ground, Madame? And you, Doctor?”
“Yes—Lefébure’s already pointed it out to us.”
It was evident here that the muted and continuous trepidation that was agitating the mass of the bolide was not coming from the machines; we were more than five hundred meters from the mine-face where the excavators were at work, and no less distant from the quay where the decauville trains were rolling and the tractors, conveyor belts and elevators were roaring.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? A chi
ld couldn’t mistake the fact that the island’s in the process of breaking up? In spite of that, no one wants to believe me, and the Académie hasn’t yet published my communication related to the geological structure of the island. No matter—this is it. According to my latest research, the island is formed of two enormous blocks of iron, cemented together by the pudding-stone of chloride and nuggets filling the vertical fracture represented by the Port Erebus cutting. It’s necessary to believe that the bolide came from a planet entirely devoid of water, where the chloride was able to subsist for many millennia without contact with it. At any rate, since it fell into the ocean, that chloride cement has begin to dissolve, and you can see that the thalweg of the ravine has disappeared.
“That wouldn’t matter if the two fragments of the island were firmly set on the ocean bed, but the measurement of the gravitational field that I’ve been able to make with my improvised instruments have permitted me to determine the form of the immersed sections and the thickness of their masses. The two blocks are each tapered toward the base, and are resting on the bed on their tips. While they remain welded together, the assemblage remains upright—but take away the cement, and the peak that forms the key to the vault, and the two pyramids will each fall sideways, under the water...
“Now, I repeat, the cement has been dissolving like sugar for five weeks, and there’s no longer anything between the two blocks, all the way to the ocean bed, but water.”
“But Monsieur Gripert,” Frédérique put in, “there remains, as you’ve just said, the key to the vault—the peak itself. It might still last for months...”
“No. It’s visibly eroded, profoundly disaggregated. Its equilibrium is getting less and less stable—and might perhaps collapse en masse at any minute on the northern part of the island, which would complete the dislocation. A slightly larger landslide would suffice…and they’re happening every day; two workmen were killed yesterday at the face. Even at the present rate, the dislocation is proceeding apace. The southern block of the island is gradually drawing away, in a slow slide. Here, judge for yourselves. This is the collimator lens by means of which I’m tracking the progress made...”