And on that note of vulgar buffoonery, the Technical Director unleashes a dprolonged burst of laughter. The staff were sharing his cheerfulness, and even the Martian servant has to let go of his levers momentarily to wipe the obscuring mist from his spectacle lenses.
A murderous desire, as violent as a stab of pain, wrenched my diaphragm. I put my hands in my pockets in order to clench my fists more easily, my fingernails drawing blood from my palms. I pressed my forehead against the hot crystal of the wall. How much pleasure…but there was nothing, nothing I could do—I could no more strangle these swine than uproot the observation-post and hurl it into that thundering tornado 100 meters in front of me. Impossible to halt the evisceration of my poor native planet. It must be endured it in silence, while observing, waiting and hoping that, in future…hope!
At 6 p.m. I disembarked from the volvite at the Red Palace, and chief A24—Nazir Bey, still wearing is fez, who had not accompanied us—came towards me. Turning his eyes away, he handed me a TSF message. News of Raymonde! I opened it avidly, overcome by the remorse of having forgotten her for several hours….
From Transport Helicopter RT28, Panama, 15:32.
Today at 14.:00, while flying over country 6 km north of Panama to embark shaggies, observed volvite AS1 (Amazons of the Sphinx) landing to port. Retained by difficulties of embarkation, impossible for us to help Amazons against Humans in time. Our helicopter too slow to catch Humans fleeing in captured volvite. Found cadavers, Humans and Amazons. Before dying, one Amazon declared that empress and pilot PA17 remained in volvite, abducted by Humans.
CRT281.
It was too much. I bowed my head beneath the sledgehammer blow, closing myself in with my distress, unable to respond. Besides, the technicians would have noticed. Successive telephoned calls inform me that a pursuit has been organized…that two volvites from the base in Mexico are en route…have caught sight of the fugitive and are giving chase…gaining on it…
Then the ringing eases off…nothing further received: the volvites have fallen silent. I stayed up all night waiting for the fatal news, in vain…despair, solitude. The cool evening air comes in through the open window, along with the immense rumor of the city, lit up by all its floodlights, while loudspeakers proclaim the imminent victory of the Martians from the height of the Monument of the Shell every quarter of an hour. In the intervals, bands of shaggies, obscenely drunk, howl on the Esplanade.
IX. In the Crater of Cotopaxi
The hull of the disquieting vehicle—a glass bolide, one might have thought—that cleft through the air 1000 meters above the ocean, with a jet of artificial fire spurting out, as if in anticipation of a final explosion, was built to accommodate twenty disciplined aviators. Twice that number of fugitive Terrans was crammed into it confusedly, still dazed by the battle and the escape. The volvite was hardly a suitable place for subsequent deliberations, or even coherent reflections.
The apparatus was much noisier than ordinary helicopters, in any case, and it was not until Raymonde had moderated its speed, the pursuers having disappeared, that it became possible to hear.
“Do you still want to go to Tahiti?” she asked.
“Yes,” replied Nibot, who was sitting next to her. “Can’t you take us there?”
“Unfortunately not. The volvites, not yet perfected, have a rather limited range. The one that’s carrying you needs to change its activators in Mexico. The fuel we have left will scarcely take us 1000 kilometers.”
There was an anguished silence, suddenly broken by the harsh voice of the second Amazon. She had surreptitiously worked free of her bonds and had taken advantage of the general inattention to get to the TSF apparatus.
“Ah, Terran wretches,” she raged, gripping the manipulator. “You’ll be taken this time…along with you, odious traitress—and your R’rdô…” But she had not finished giving the location when she was dragged away from the apparatus and tied up again.
Raymonde groaned. “I’d forgotten that woman—I’ll never be able to see my husband again!” She briefly explained, in a halting voice, the role that she and I had undertaken to play among the Martians for the salvation of humankind.
“It’s obvious,” said the Abbé, “that this woman might ruin both of you…”
“She must die!” cried Nibot.
“What good would it do?” said Raymonde. The massacre of the Amazons is known; they’ll know that I’ve consented to fly the volvite. I’m thoroughly compromised. The only way to take the responsibility away from my husband…alas, I can’t ever go back to him—it’s over! But I shall keep my promises, at least: I shall try to save you. Poor Léon! How anxious he must be!”
“We have to make a decision,” Doctor Goulliard cut in. “We’re squandering kilometers of flight…”
The only thing to do, since refueling at a Martian camp was unthinkable, was to go back to the coast and visit the equatorial ports, where they would eventually find a boat capable of taking them to Tahiti.
Since leaving Panama, Raymonde had been heading south-west; a 90-degree turn displayed the long snowy wall of the cordillera of the Andes on the horizon—but it also displayed two minuscule moving points low in the northern sky.
“They’re following us!” the unfortunates lamented.
“Head for the mountains!” ordered the Abbé. “It’s the only hope.”
Raymonde steered to the south and opened the accelerator wide. The volvite roared and set off like a shell.
“756 kph,” Nibot observered, terrified.
That speed was sustained for a few minutes. The enemies on the horizon lost ground. The mountains grew before their eyes. Several were crowned with volcanic smoke.
“Reference point: Cotopaxi,” said the geographer Baumsen, pointing. He murmured details of the region—but the propulsive jet was losing its impetus. The accumulators were running out. The needle of the tachymeter descended from 700 to 650, then to 600. The Martian volvites were gaining again.
“We must get over that, though!” declare the Abbé, referring to a vast cliff towards which they were heading, as if to smash themselves against it.
A pass opened up on the snow-line, to the south of Cotopaxi. Raymonde steered towards it, demanding an ascension from the machine of which it was becoming less capable by the second…
They did not get over. There was a rattling sound, and the remaining propulsive force could only slow the fall, permitting an uncomfortable landing on a rocky platform, out of sight of the enemy.
Nibot was the first to leap down. “Blasters! Torches! All the levers and iron bars that are aboard—and quickly, quickly, over there!”
He pointed to a sort of gaping cavern whose floor descended gently into darkness.
“Is everyone here? Don’t forget the prisoner! As for the volvite—four strong men!”
A precipice, at least 1000 meters deep, opened out on the edge of the terrace. The volvite was rolled into it, and its fall, awakening echoes, sent two gigantic condors—a male and a female—soaring aloft in large spirals, driven from their eyrie.
“That should put the Martians off the track. They’ll spend a good hour searching for the pieces of our bodies down there. Forwards!” Nibot plunged into the vault as he gave the order, lighting his torch.
“Follow him,” confirmed the Abbé. “It’s the only thing we can do.”
A few women were hesitant to go into the bowels of the volcano, but the icy air of the heights transported the distant blasts of the sirens on the Martian volvites, which were arriving thunderously; that decided them, and the little troop set off.
The opening was evidently that of an ancient crater; lava had hollowed out a passage there long ago, while Cotopaxi projected its igneous plume into the sky, as high as that of it rival Chimborazo. For the moment, though, its activity was dormant—except that dull rumbling sounds attested that a reawakening would occur one day or another. Near the entrance, stalactites produced by the infiltration of water suspended their alabaster dr
aperies from the roof; the torchlight played with them capriciously. Lower down, the stalactites disappeared, and the tunnel’s ceiling, like its walls and floor, was no more than volcanic rock: black basalt, whose large blocks, cut away by the cooling process, sounded hollow underfoot, like an iron floor succeeded by an even more sonorous phonolith. Then their footsteps became duller on an expanse of obsidian.
Monsieur Schwann, the professor of geology, was in Heaven, and had to be prevented from stopping every few minutes to stuff mineralogical specimens into his pockets. He muttered the names of sparkling crystals: agates, chrysoliths, amethysts, chalcedonies. He demanded that his companions admire pyrites, manganese ores, pitchblende, long shiny needles of antimony, blocks of quartz illuminated in all their facets like enormous diamonds….but no one was listening.
The tunnel, whose dimensions were nearly uniform—three or four meters high and as many broad—sloped downwards evenly, at an angle of fifteen or twenty degrees. No one was talking any longer; only the noise of footsteps echoed in the vaults. They went down mechanically, save for a halt of ten minutes, when Nibot lay down and put his ear to the ground. Then he got up and shook his head: the Martians were not coming yet.
“Damn it!” mumbled Doctor Goulliard, after an hour, wiping his forehead with a large blue-checkered handkerchief. “Where the Devil is he taking us? The centee of the Earth? I’m starting to melt!”
The fugitives had just emerged into a large cavern—a “bubble” in the Earth’s crust—whose exceedingly high dome was lost in the darkness. One might have thought it a crossroads where the various chimneys of the volcano came together. The true crater opened in the middle of the grotto—a sheer gulf from which dull rumblings and the muffled sound of explosions emerged. The ground trembled underfoot like the lid of a saucepan. The heat was, indeed, intolerable.
“I’m looking for a way out,” Nibot replied—for his companions, following Doctor Goulliard’s example, were giving voice to their anxiety.
The painter set about making a tour of the cavern, examining each fissure attentively. The others, distressed, idled somnolently at the tunnel entrance. A few were talking about “going back.” But Nibot, moistening his finger with saliva and raising it above his head, had come to a halt in front of a tortuous and irregular gallery, bristling with rocky protrusions, which was almost vertical.
“Here it is,” he said.
A coolness was palpable at the end of his index finger, as if a slight air current were moving into the gallery. It had to communicate with the exterior.
“The question is, will it be practicable?”
At that moment, the geologist, who had been prowling around the central crater for several minutes, cried out: “An eruption!” And he pointed into the gulf.
Everyone came running.
Lava was rising up! Five or six meters below the ground-level of the crypt, a dark red liquid surface, like iron in a forge, was slowly oscillating, giving off a suffocating heat, groaning and rattling like a consumptive’s chest. It moved from high to low, then from low to high, but each change of level brought it a little higher.
Mouths agape, hypnotized by that formidable threat, the Terrans were still staring when the Abbé, who had not left his listening-post, whispered: “The Martians!”
They were coming. From afar, perhaps several kilometers, the corridor, acting like an echo chamber, brought the faint but clear and characteristic sound of their march, with distant racket of their raucous voices.
Two women fainted. Others were weeping hesitantly. The bravest listened to Nibot giving his instructions.
“They’ve found a clue. They know that we’re here. Good. What to do: first, decamp—and I’ve found a route, perhaps not very comfortable, but too bad! Second, slow them down, so that when they get here the eruption will stop them. How much time do we have, Monsieur Schwann?”
“In 20 minutes or half an hour, the lava will overflow.”
“Let’s say 20 minutes…to work, with the iron bars!”
The walls of the tunnel were volcanic tuff, cracked and friable. Twenty pairs of strong hands, stimulated by the danger, soon levered off enough rock to block the tunnel for an extent of several meters. A cat could not have got through.
“It’ll take them a good half-hour to demolish that—longer if they haven’t brought the necessary tools. By then, the crypt will sufficiently flooded with lava to make them recoil from the foot-bath. Let’s go!”
They were just in time. The molten magma was coming over the lip of the enormous basin, and the air-temperature was rising rapidly. They had to follow the wall of the crypt to gain entry to the vertical tunnel.
“En route!”
The danger of “getting stuck” there lent wings to the heaviest. Even the ladies that had had to be revived from their faint scaled the “chimney” with the energy of desperation, with the aid of the projections of the rock and the support that the strongest and most skillful of their companions were ready to give them.
The howls of the Martians echoed, muffled by the barricade, mingling with the rumblings and detonations of the eruption.
“Where’s the prisoner?” asked the Abbé.
“Left her in the crypt,” replied Doctor Goulliard, who had been appointed as her guard. “Don’t worry—I guarantee that she won’t talk.” The surgeon had, in fact, taken advantage of the confusion of the last minutes spent in the vault to disembarrass them of a dangerous enemy and himself of some “inconvenient luggage.” He had sectioned her carotid artery with a thoroughly professional skill, and she had fallen without making a sound; no one had noticed. “The girl would have slowed us down,” he concluded, by way of a funeral oration.
The Abbbé sighed, but said no more.
The inclination of the tunnel became less abrupt, and progress easier. The howls of the Martians became louder, thanks to the demolition of the barricade; then the discovery of the lake of lava filling the crypt changed them to screams of fear, which were soon lost in the distance by virtue of a precipitate retreat. Nothing more could be heard then but the subterranean flatulence of the eruption and the lapping of the lava against the walls of the crypt. Without the hot gusts that enveloped them, like the breath of a furnace, the Last Men would have called a halt, for they were saved now. So far as their enemies were concerned, the lava had, in fact, swallowed them up to the very last, along with the two Amazons—and this was obviously the news that The Martians hastened to transmit to Cairo, as soon as they were aboard the volvites.
While they climbed, the Terrans congratulated themselves on their deliverance. Nervous laughter mingled with the echoes of their footsteps and the sound of pebbles rolling down the slope of the corridor. Soon, a minuscule patch appeared before them. It grew into a fragment of blue framed by the orifice of the gallery. It was daylight—the blessed light of the Sun.
And continuing on their way, careless of the crevasses and the bocks of stone against which they stumbled, the Last Men hurled themselves tumultuously outside the mountain into the open air, dazzled by the splendor of the sky that they had not expected to see again.
Raymonde alone did not share in their delight, and maintained a bleak expression amid the cries of joy, embraces and prayers of thanks. Her brow furrowed, she wept silently, and her heart went out to me, whom she would never see again, and who would believe her dead along with the others…
X. The Banquet of the Sun
The mysteries of telepathy! The caprices of that mysterious force—the Yod of certain metaphysicians of the 19th century, which sometimes establishes between incarnate souls, between their brains, communications as clear, precise and detailed as TSF messages, and colored like a painting besides, like a scene from life!
Many times, in our past life, Raymonde and I had had the opportunity to experiment with this faculty: sentences commenced by one and finished by the other; premonitions of an unexpected return; perception at a distance of an action, a state of mind, or an adventure—but the majorit
y of the messages in question were transmitted in banal circumstances, at no great distance.
I could not decided which of two events was the most grave, but I ought to record the singular fact the Raymonde’s anguish during the Amazons’ battle and her abduction did not give rise to any telepathic phenomenon between us. I had no suspicion of it until the moment when I read the report from the helicopter. By contrast, the escape from Cotopaxi was immediately revealed to me by that mysterious means.
It was 2 a.m. Stretched out in an armchair, I was waiting anxiously for news—I’m certain that I was not asleep—when the divination of a presence caused me to raise my head.
Raymonde! Raymonde, before me! Raymonde, whom I knew to be 10,000 kilometers away!
There was nothing nebulous or phantasmal about the apparition. Her leggings, torn and covered with black dust, her flying-jacket, which was in an even worse state, and her dented helmet, hardly able to restrain her disorderly hair, gave her a tangible three-dimensional quality of absolute reality. Projected by the lamp on my desk, her shadow extended obliquely over the giraffe-skin rug covering the glass floor. Raymonde! She smiled beneath her halo of volcanic ash, and her dear contralto voice filled me with an indescribable emotion.
“Don’t be sad, beloved, I’m alive. I’ve escaped with our friends. Have confidence; we shall see one another again. My heart is with you.” And, taking a flower from her belt, which she had recently picked—a huge lily with a scarlet corolla—she gave it a gracefully amorous kiss and threw it towards me…
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