by Theo Varlet
He rectified the aim of the instrument and Frédérique, Lefébure and I took turns to put our eyes to the ocular for a few seconds. Slowly, but with an undeniable motion, the needle was rising, the white cross of the reference-point being displaced behind the thread of the reticule.
“The angular movement,” Gripert went on, “which is to say, the rotation of the two blocks around their theoretical axis, situated on the ocean bed, is accelerating rapidly. Until yesterday evening, there was only half a minute of arc, and the separation was increasing by about a meter an hour. When I saw you this morning, Lefébure, it was three-quarters of a minute of arc. Now it’s reached a minute and a half…which is three meters of separation per hour.”
“A catastrophe’s imminent, then?” Lefébure queried. “How many days do you think…?”
“It’s only a matter of hours.”
“But we need to evacuate the island!” Frédérique exclaimed, just as I was about to say the same thing.
Gripert shrugged his shoulders. “The engineers don’t want to hear it.”
“Even so,” my wife replied, “we don’t have the right to risk the lives of all these poor people…three or four hundred workers…the crews of the two cargo vessels.…”
“What do you expect? Reasons of State…”
At that moment, the Ile-de-France’s launch disembarked the second cohort of excursionists. The first, having completed the tour of Port Erebus, was spreading out over the slopes. The Jolliots had spotted us and were coming toward us.
“If Reasons of State prevent the evacuation of the workers, nothing obliges us to leave the Condominium people here. We need to warn them...”
“To start a panic?” I objected. “No—impossible. Not directly.”
“I’ll go warn Commander Barcot,” Lefébure decided. “He’s a man of action. He’ll know what to do. Would you care to go with me, Madame, and you, Antoine? I’ll put you aboard the Ile-de-France.”
“Do you want to, Frédérique?”
“No. That would be cowardly. We’ll leave with the others. Here’s the Jolliots—they’ve seen us. We can’t avoid them.”
“What about you, Gripert?”
“Me? Never in this life! I haven’t yet witnessed the dislocation of an island, much less a bolide-island. I’m staying until the last moment.”
“As you please. But above all, not a word to the others about the danger.”
And Lefébure went down the slope at a rapid pace toward the Erebus II’s dinghy.
The Jolliots joined us, the director enthused by his tour and sweating under the double weight of his camera and his basket of provisions, the star declaring that she was dying of hunger.
The picnic! That hour of secret anguish in which it was necessary for us to simulate enjoyment, eat and swill champagne in imitations of the other groups disseminated over the iron slopes, beneath a jolly sky of milky clouds.
Fortunately, barbed wire forbade access to the dangerous regions situated to the north of the peak, where landslides were heaping up a talus of debris at the foot of the vertical cliff whose summit was even overhanging.
The last passengers from the launch had completed their tour of Port Erebus and were searching in their turn for a place to settle down. How did they have the insouciance to eat their foie gras and drink their champagne, on the quivering ground that was about to give way beneath them?
Frédérique was suffering visibly. She had something akin to a physical presentiment of the catastrophe, and her eyes only quit the peak of the Golden Rock to dart apprehensive glances at me. In that atmosphere, Jolliot’s jokes fell very flat.
Suddenly, stopping in mid-sentence, my wife’s eyes widened with stupor and fear, and I turned round mechanically, while a rumble resounded and a stronger quake shook the ground.
The overhanging crest of the peak had just collapsed, toward the north, less than a kilometer away from us, pouring its materials over the iron plain from on high.
Cries went up from all the groups; people got up indecisively, ready to flee—but as they were unaware of the supreme menace of that collapse, and it was not renewed, the excursionists gradually reassured themselves...
In Port Erebus the machines were functioning, the trains rolling along their tracks, the aerial skips filing along their taut cables, the loads of gold resounding in the holds of the two cargo ships...
We finished the champagne. A further quarter of an hour of anxiety. Frédérique and I were watching out for the tremors in the ground, which did not seem to have increased. Had Gripert been mistaken? What was Lefébure doing?
Ah! Finally! The Erebus II’s dinghy, returning from its visit to the Ile-de-France, and Lefébure and Commander Barcot disembarking at Port Erebus, accompanied by a dozen colonial infantry soldiers.
And almost immediately, the shrill siren of the launch launches its appeal, repeated three times—the agreed signal to return to the shop.
“Eh? What do they want us to do?” Joliot exclaimed. “We were told that the return would be at seventeen hundred…it’s scarcely fourteen hundred...”
“We haven’t even finished eating,” said the star, who was digging into tinned pineapples.”
“Too bad—let them whistle. The others aren’t budging either. Let’s stay here.”
But that circumstance had been anticipated. The soldiers launched themselves up the slope at the double toward the picnicking groups, in order to force them to break camp. By their gestures, it was obvious that the lunchers were furious at being brought back manu militari.
Lefébure arrived breathlessly and whispered to me: “The slippage is getting worse. We’ve reached fifty centimeters a minute.”
A hundred of the more docile excursionists had reached he launch. It was overflowing when we reached the quay, where Commander Barcot was striving by voice and gesture to hasten the laggards. As they arrived, they interrogated one another anxiously, questioning the commander.
“Stay calm,” the latter relied. “You’ve been called back to the ship, that’s all. Wait for the launch.”
A further incident increased the disturbance, however. In the depths of Port Erebus, this time, a series of landslides followed one after another, which swept over the mine-face like curtains of red mud.
Work stopped. There was a panicked stampede, in spite of the remonstrations of the engineers. The workers ran to take refuge in the two cargo ships. One of them was equipped with Diesel engines, which started up immediately as it made ready to sail without further delay. The funnel of the other began to smoke vigorously.
The members of the Commission became agitated, taking fright. Like me, they could see with the naked eye that the other side of the creek was drawing away. The rip was accentuating under water. The ground shook, like the metal plates of a boiler under pressure. In the distance, auriferous masses continued to tumble down from the peak. An overhead cable broke, hurling its skips away. One of them fell on the deck of the first cargo ship, which was then passing in front of us, making its exit from the creek, with its deck crowded with howling men. The excursionists joined in the chorus.
“Calm down! Calm down!” repeated Monsieur Barcot. “Don’t worry. Here comes the launch.”
“Twenty-five centimeters a second!” howled Gripert, who was struggling in the hands of two soldiers commissioned with embarking him by force. “Twenty-five centimeters a second!” he repeated, relentlessly, furious at having been dragged away from his instruments.
“Gag him!” ordered Monsieur Barcot.
From the peak, the landslides were pouring down in ever-greater profusion. Boulders were rolling as far as the bridge of the second cargo vessel, which was having difficulty casting off its moorings. At sea, the alarm had been raised; the Ile-de-France had been set in motion and was slowly drawing away, along with the other sips.
“We’re doomed! They’re abandoning us! We’re all going to die!” cried the women, wringing their hands.
“Every man for himself!”
brayed the men, shoving their way to the launch, which was coming alongside.
“The first man who jumps the queue will have his brains blown out!” proclaimed Monsieur Barcot. “Lefébure, keep a weather-eye open! Four men on guard at the gangplank, and everyone goes over one by one!”
“What about you, Commander?”
“Lefébure and I will stay to get the engineers into the Erebus II’s dinghy. Embark! Embark! The troopers now! Get moving! Full speed ahead!”
And with its engine sputtering, our vessel headed out to sea, shaken by the eddies that the submarine aspiration of the moving walls was hollowing out in the water of the inlet.
Up above, the peak was visibly disintegrating, the rain of debris was running incessantly over its walls. The second overhead cable snapped in its turn; the conveyor belt was overturned...
“Faster!” shouted the officer at the helm. “Full ignition!”
In the launch, the members of the Mission, astounded, had fallen silent. On the starboard bench, an English lady who had fainted was trailing her hand in the water. Frédérique was huddling close to me.
Anxiously, we followed the maneuvering of the second cargo vessel, which was now detached from the quay and had set off to flee. Alas, it did not have time. The whole of the remaining summit of the Golden Rock—millions of tons of chloride and nuggets—collapsed with a thunderous roar, covering the rear of the cargo vessel with its mass. The vessel was upended for two seconds, hurling its human insects into the water, projecting its bowsprit into the air and exposing the underside of its hull, painted with red lead and plastered with wrack.
“Watch out for the shock wave! Hold on tight!”
The marine wave surging from the inlet picked up in Erebus II’s dinghy as it passed, submerging and carrying away in its furious wake the dozen men who were ready to embark thereon: the engineers, Lefébure, Commander Barcot...
Then it reached us, lifted us up, drenched us, as we screamed in fright, and tossed us about madly…but the engine kept sputtering, and we continue to speed toward the Ile-de-France, which was drawing away—fleeing with desperate slowness the accursed land prey to the catastrophe.
We were a kilometer from Port Erebus when it happened.
It was completed in two stages and lasted some sixty seconds—thus enabling us to gain another four hundred meters.
Up above, the decapitated and completely disaggregated peak finished its collapse, and spread out in a quasi-fluid sheet over the northern part of the island. The latter swayed beneath the overload and sank beneath the ocean, slowly and progressively, so gently that it hardly left an eddy.
The southern section remained intact, and it was possible to believe, for a moment, that it might subsist; its iron cliffs still offered their illusory aspect of a shore solidly anchored to the ocean bed...
There is a minute of intense suspense, while our launch bounds over the waves at top speed, with the precipitate clatter of the engine. Frédérique has grabbed my wrist and I can feel her fingernails digging into my flesh.
We gaze at the long black and regular frieze of the iron cliff, which extends over four kilometers, all the way to the American establishment, where smoke and ships close to the shore mark the location…and it is from that point that a spray of foam springs up, at the same time as the line of the crest outlined on the horizon tilts, shifting as if by some theatrical trick...
With an enormous anguish, we understand that it is the end for those hundreds, those thousands of living beings out there…and at the same time, egotistical hope is magnified; we congratulate ourselves on being safe from that destruction...
The surface of the island brushes the surface, like a sinister black reef. It is sinking, sinking...
It disappears.
Because of the enormous suction, in the place where Île Féréor had been a few moments before, fifteen hundred meters away from us, before our eyes, an almighty tempest explodes, in a sudden upheaval of tormented waves and aspirating whirlpools...
A massive swell is launched in our direction. Clinging to the side of the boat with one hand, while the other clutches Frédérique’s torso—where I can hear the heart hammering beneath my fingers—I turn away from the liquid alp in order to look into her eyes, those dear eyes, before the supreme engulfment...
Drowned!
A giant force absorbs us, rips my hand away from the rim, and for an indefinite lapse of horror I feel myself being dragged down into the water, drunk in by the abyss, in the turbulent viridity that is stirring me in its giant eddies. I have not let go of Frédérique, and amid the conflict of superhuman forces, my vertiginous soul concentrates exclusively on that grip...
Asphyxia comes…the mental kaleidoscope that precedes death...
But no! It’s no longer downwards but upwards that I am being hurled, still with the same violence…the chaotic viridity brightens…and we break the surface, coughing, spluttering…resurrected!
Ah! Air! Blissful air, respired into full lungs! While swimming, half-blinded by the saline water, in the undulant tumult…and the liberating ecstasy of feeling that my wife is also alive and swimming , swimming like me, ardently, in spite of the paralyzing hindrance of our garments...
But a mass, a cliff-face, obstructs the sky ahead of us…the flank of the Ile-de-France! Twenty meters away! And calls for help mingle, our voices coalescing…she with a great musical shout, me with a savage and furious hoarseness...
We’ve been seen, up above! A buoy plunges down, splashing me. I seize it, that resistant object, which sustains me. I shove it toward her; she grabs hold of it…and we wait to be fished out, breathless, painting, but saved—saved!
And I kiss that dear mouth, which, without the blind hazard of the eddies, a moment ago, would now be cold and inert, under water...
“Ahoy there! Hold hard!” shouts a voice close at hand.
“Bravo the lovers!” proffers another.
And raising my head, I utter a nervous burst of laughter. In the bow of the approaching, dancing boat is my friend Jolliot, kneeling on the edge, aiming his cinema camera at us, turning away, filming the scene of the rescue of the castaways...
XI. Deliverance
Like the head of a charmed snake, when the charmer’s clarinet suddenly stops playing, all the avarice extended toward the vanished bolide immediately faded away.
It was nineteen hundred hours in Paris when the news began to appear on the luminous ribbon of the Paris-Projecteur. The passers-by, while walking, and those who were on their way home for dinner on the top deck of an autobus read:
…PÉRITIF…GOLDEN ROCK ENGULFED BY CATACLYSM...
And then, in the midst of the lights and the crowds, it is as if everyone were suddenly in a black desert, feeling a chill in the heart, and very poor...
But they would be joyful instead, the Parisians, if they only knew…and over there, beyond the Channel, the people of London…for that engulfment will enable them to sleep peacefully, in that beautiful calm night, in which Paris is haloed by a vast red aura…that night exceedingly propitious for air raids...
Orders have been countermanded. In the Black Forest, the two thousand four-engined bombers that were awaiting hour H, each with its four five-hundred-kilo hyperclastite missiles or its panathanatic gas, have been returned to their hangars…and the zeppelins already en route to the rendezvous at Taunus have turned round and are returning to their bases...
XXII. Epilogue
The European ships—including the first cargo vessel that had already emerged from the inlet—had had time to get far enough away from the island, and none of them had sunk or sustained serious damage. The eddies and whirlpools died down after ten minutes, and the dinghies exploring the waters of the disaster were able to pick up a few more survivors from the launch. No one from the second cargo vessel survived, however, nor any of the people still on the island—among others, Gripert, the heroic Commander Barcot and my old friend Lefébure.
The total number of vict
ims remains unknown. Eighteen members of the Mission were lost; that is the only figure about which we can be precise.
On the American side, the losses were even more considerable. Too far from the peak to understand the gravity of the danger, and not having immediately obeyed the signals of alarm sent by radio from the Ile-de-France, they had, according to a wireless message from the Lexington, lost two cargo ships and a destroyer, plus the personnel of Iron City: several thousand individuals, including engineers, mariners and coolies.
With any object of rivalry abolished, we sent them our condolences, and the loudspeaker in the saloon relayed their thanks. As a sign of mourning, there was no dancing that evening. The joyful and frantic zest nourished by gold fever had lapsed. Everyone felt sad and at a loss, conversing with constraint and in hushed voices, as in a mortuary chamber.
With a common accord, the entire fleet spent the night in the place where the Golden Rock had been, as if waiting…for what?
At daybreak, two radio messages from America, twenty minutes apart, informed us of the advance of Japanese squadrons toward Hawaii, and that the Pacific fleet, not yet entirely in the Atlantic, had turned back and was moving through the Panama Canal in haste.
During that day, the twelfth of October, when the Ile-de-France, leaving the warships to observe, resumed its route to Le Havre, the fate of races and of white and yellow civilization hung in the balance…but Japan doubtless feared seeing the European fleet join forces with the Americans. The aggression was merely sketched out, without so much as a cannon-shot being fired. The Japanese squadrons returned to their bases after their so-called maneuvers.