by Jules Vernes
The road was cut less than ten yards away from us. ‘Cut’ is the very word; it might have been slashed with a knife. Beyond the sharp crest in which it ended, there was emptiness, a shadowy gulf in whose depths it was impossible to distinguish anything.
We turned round bewildered, sure that our last hour had come. The ocean which had pursued us even on to heights was bound to catch up with us in a few seconds...
Except for the unhappy Anna and her daughters, who were sobbing as though their hearts were breaking, we gave a cry of joyful surprise. No, the water was no longer moving upwards, or, more precisely, the earth had stopped falling. The shaking we had just felt had no doubt been the last manifestation of the phenomenon. The ocean had halted, and its level was still nearly a hundred yards below the point where we were grouped around our car, which was still throbbing, like an animal out of breath after a rapid run.
Shall we be able to get out of this predicament? We cannot know until daybreak. Until then, we shall have to wait. One after another we stretched ourselves out on the ground, and I think, God forgive me, that I must have fallen asleep...
During the night
I am suddenly aroused by a terrible noise. What time is it? I don’t know. Moreover, we are still drowned in the shadows of night.
The noise is coming from the impenetrable gulf into which the road has collapsed. What has happened?... I could swear that masses of water were falling in cataracts, that gigantic waves were violently crashing together... Yes, it must be that, for swirls of foam are reaching us, and we are covered by the spray.
Then gradually calm returns... Silence covers everything... The sky is getting lighter... It’s daybreak.
May 25th
What agony, the slow realisation of our actual position! At first we can distinguish only our immediate surroundings, but the circle widens, grows ever wider, as if our disappointed hopes were lifting one after another an infinite number of flimsy veils; – and at last it is broad daylight, which dispels the last of our illusions.
Our situation is quite simple and can be summed up in a few words: we are on an island. The sea surrounds us on every side. Yesterday we should have seen a whole ocean of summits, several higher than the one on which we now find ourselves. These summits have vanished while, for reasons which must remain forever unknown, our own, though more humble, has been stopped in its gentle fall: in their place is a boundless sheet of water. On all sides, nothing but the sea. We are occupying the only solid point within the immense circle of the horizon.
A glance is enough to reveal the whole extent of the islet upon which some extraordinary chance has found us a refuge. It is indeed quite small: 1,000 yards long at most, and 500 in the other direction. To north, west, and south, its crest, rising only about a hundred yards above the waves, joins them by a fairly gentle slope. To the east, on the other hand, the islet ends in a cliff falling sheerly down into the ocean.
It is above all to that side that we turn our eyes. In that direction we ought to see range upon range of mountains, and beyond them the whole of Mexico. What a change in the space of a short spring night! The mountains have vanished. Mexico has been swallowed up! In their place is a boundless desert, the arid desert of the sea!
We stare at each other, terrified. Penned up, without food, without drinking-water, on this bare narrow rock, we cannot cherish even the faintest hope. We grimly lie down on the ground and set ourselves to wait for death.
On board the Virginia, June 4th
What happened during the next few days? I can’t remember. Presumably I ended by at last losing consciousness; I only came back to my senses on board the vessel which picked us up. Then only did I learn that we had spent ten whole days on the islet, and that two of our number, Williamson and Rowling, had died of hunger and thirst. Of the fourteen people whom my home had sheltered at the moment of the disaster, there were now only nine: my son Jean and my ward Hélène, my chauffeur Simonat, inconsolable at the loss of his machine, Anna Raleigh and her two daughters, Dr Bathurst and Dr Moreno – and lastly myself, I who hasten to jot down these lines for the edification of future peoples, assuming, that is, that they will ever be born.
The Virginia, which is carrying us, is a ‘mixed’ vessel – with steam and sails – of about2,000 tons, devoted to merchant traffic. She is a fairly old ship, rather a slow sailer. Captain Morris has twenty men under his command; he and his crew are English.
The Virginia left Melbourne under ballast a little over a month ago, sailing for Rosario. No incident had marked her voyage except, on the night of May 24th, a series of deep-sea waves rising to a prodigious height; but they were of a proportionate length and this made them inoffensive. However strange they might be these waves could not have forewarned the captain of the cataclysm which was taking place at that time.
So he was amazed to find nothing but the sea where he had expected to make Rosario and the Mexican coast. Of that shore, there remained nothing but an islet. One of the Virginia’s boats put off to that islet, on which eleven inanimate bodies were found. Two were only corpses; the nine others were taken on board. It was in this way we were saved.
On land – January or February
An interval of eight months separates the last of the preceding lines from the first which follow. I date these January or February because it is impossible to be more precise, for I have no longer any exact notion of time.
These eight months formed the most atrocious of our trials, those during which, getting ever more strictly rationed, we realised the full extent of our misfortune.
After picking us up, the Virginia cruised on at full steam towards the east. When I regained my senses, the islet where we had barely escaped death had long been below the horizon. According to our bearings, which the captain obtained from a cloudless sky. we were then sailing exactly over the place where Mexico should have been. But of Mexico there remained not a trace – no more than they had been able to find, while I was unconscious, of its central mountains; no more than any land whatever could be distinguished anywhere, no matter how far they looked. Everywhere, nothing but the infinity of the sea.
The realisation of this was indeed terrifying. We feared that our minds would give way. What! All Mexico swallowed up!... We exchanged horrified glances, silently asking one another how far the ravages of this frightful cataclysm extended...
Wishing to clear this matter up, the captain steered towards the north: even if Mexico no longer existed, it was unthinkable that this could be true of the whole continent of America.
Yet true it was. We cruised vainly northwards for twelve days without sighting land, nor did we sight it when we put about and steered southwards for nearly a month. However paradoxical it might appear, we had to give way to the evidence; yes, the whole of the American continent had been engulfed by the waves!
Then had we been saved only to experience the agonies of death a second time? We had certainly good reason to fear so. Without speaking of the food, which would give out sooner or later, a more urgent danger threatened us: what would become of us when our engines came to a standstill for lack of fuel? So the heart of an animal stops beating for lack of blood.
This was why, on July 14th – we were then almost at the former position of Buenos Aires – Captain Morris let the fires die out and hoisted the sails. That done, he mustered all the personnel of the Virginia, passengers and crew, explained the position to us in a few words, and asked us to think it over and to make any suggestions we could at the council he meant to hold next day.
I do not know whether any of my companions in misfortune could think of any more or less ingenious expedient. For my part, I must admit. I was still hesitating, quite uncertain what to suggest, when the question was settled by a tempest that sprang up during the night. We had to fly westwards, swept along by a tempestuous gale, always on the point of being swallowed up by a raging sea.
The hurricane lasted thirty-five days, without a minute’s interruption, or even a momentar
y lull. We were beginning to despair of its ever ending when, on August 19th, the fine weather returned as suddenly as it had stopped. The captain seized the opportunity to take our bearings: his calculations showed 40° north latitude and 114° east longitude. These were the coordinates of Pekin!
Thus we had sped over Polynesia, and perhaps even over Australia, without realising it. There, where we were now floating, had once been the capital of an empire numbering 400 million souls!
Then Asia had suffered the fate of America?
We were soon convinced of this. The Virginia, still heading for the south-west, reached the latitude of Tibet and then that of the Himalayas. Here ought to have towered the highest summits of earth. Yet wherever we looked, nothing emerged from the surface of the sea. We had to believe that there no longer existed, anywhere on earth, any solid land other than the islet which had saved us – that we were the only survivors of the cataclysm, the last inhabitants of a world wrapped in the moving shroud of the sea!
If this were so, it would not be long before we too in our turn would perish. In spite of our strict rationing, our store of provisions was diminishing, and we had to give up all hopes of renewing them...
I will not dwell on the record of that frightful voyage. If, to describe it in detail, I were to try to relive it day by day, its memory would drive me mad. However strange and terrible were the events which preceded and followed it, however distressing the future seems – a future which I shall never see – it was during that infernal voyage that we reached the height of our fear.
Oh, that eternal cruise over an endless sea! To expect every day to get somewhere, and to see the end of the journey forever receding!
To live poring over the maps on which human hands had traced the irregular line of the coast, and to realise that nothing, absolutely nothing, remained of these lands which had once been thought eternal! To tell ourselves that the earth, quivering with innumerable lives, that the millions of men and the myriads of animals which had traversed it in every direction or had soared through the air, had gone out like a tiny flame in a breath of wind! To look everywhere for our fellows and to look in vain! To become little by little convinced that nowhere around us was any living thing, to realise ever more clearly our loneliness in the midst of a pitiless universe!...
Have I found words suitable for expressing my anguish? I do not know. In no language whatever are there terms adequate for so completely unprecedented a situation.
After ascertaining that where the Indian peninsula had once been the sea now flowed, we headed to the north-west. Without the slightest change in our condition, we crossed the Ural chain – which had now become a submarine range of mountains – and sailed on over what once had been Europe. We then descended southwards, to twenty degrees beyond the Equator. Next, weary of our fruitless search, we made our way back towards the north and traversed, even over the Pyrenees, the sheet of water which covered Africa and Spain.
To tell the truth, we were beginning to get used to our terror. Wherever we went, we marked our route on our charts, and said to one another: Here, this was Moscow... Warsaw... Berlin Vienna... Rome... Tunis... Timbuctoo... St Louis... Or an... Madrid...’ But we spoke with growing indifference, and, having become habituated to it, we were at last able to pronounce these words, really so full of tragedy, without the slightest emotion.
But so far as I was concerned I had not yet exhausted my capacity for suffering. I can see it still, that day – it was about December 11th – when Captain Morris told me ‘Here, this was Paris...’ At these words I felt that my heart was being torn out. That the universe might be swallowed up, well and good. But France – my France! – and Paris, which symbolised her!...
From beside me came something like a sob. I turned round; it was Simonat who was weeping.
For another four days we pushed on towards the north; then, having reached the latitude of Edinburgh, we turned towards the south-west in search of Ireland, and then towards the east... We were really wandering about at random, for there Was no reason to go in one direction rather than in any other...
We sailed above London, whose liquid tomb was saluted by the whole crew. Five days later, when we were at the latitude of Danzig, the captain decided to go about and gave orders that we were to head to the south-west. The helmsman obeyed passively. What difference could that make to him? Wasn’t it the same on every side?...
It was when we had sailed in that direction for nine days that we swallowed our last scrap of biscuit.
As we stared at one another with haggard eyes. Captain Morris unexpectedly ordered the fires to be lighted. What notion was he giving way to? I still ask myself that; but the order was obeyed; the speed of our vessel increased...
Two days later we were suffering cruelly from hunger. After another two days, almost everyone obstinately refused to leave his bunk; there was only the captain, Simonat, a few members of the crew, and myself, with enough energy to keep the ship on course.
The next day, the fifth of our fast, the number of well-disposed steersmen and stokers had decreased still further. Another twenty-four hours and none of us would have the strength to stand.
We had then been travelling for more than seven months. For more than seven months we had been furrowing the sea in every direction. I think it must have been January 8th – I say ‘I think’ for I cannot possibly be more precise, for by now the calendar had lost much of its meaning for us.
And it was on that day, while I was at the wheel and devoting all my flagging attention to the compass, that I seemed to make out something towards the west. Thinking that I was the plaything of some error, I stared...
No, I was not mistaken!
I gave a veritable roar, then, hanging on to the wheel, I shouted at the top of my voice:
‘Land on the starboard bow!’
What a magic effect those words had! All those dying men revived at once, and their haggard faces lined the starboard rail.
‘Yes, land it is,’ said Captain Morris, after scrutinising the cloud rising above the horizon.
Half an hour later, it was impossible to feel the slightest doubt. It was certainly land which, after seeking it in vain all over the former continents, we had found in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean!
About three in the afternoon we could make out the details of the coast which barred our way, and we sank back into despair. In very truth this shore was unlike any other, and not one of us could remember ever seeing a coast so completely, so absolutely wild.
In the countries where we had lived before the disaster, green had always been the most abundant colour. Not one of us had ever known a coast so forsaken, a country so arid, that we could not find upon it a few shrubs, even if only a few tufts of gorse, or a few trails of lichen or moss. Here, nothing of the sort. All we could distinguish was a tall blackish cliff, at whose foot lay a chaos of rocks, without a plant, without a solitary blade of grass. It was the most complete, the most total, desolation that one could imagine.
For two days we coasted that abrupt cliff without finding the smallest gap. It was only towards the evening of the second day that we discovered a large bay. well sheltered against the winds of the open sea, in whose depths we let fall the anchor.
After reaching land in our boats, our first care was to collect some food from the shore, which was covered with turtles by the hundred and shell-fish by the million. In the crevices of the rocks we found fabulous quantities of crabs and lobsters, to say nothing of innumerable fish. To all appearances this sea was so richly inhabited that, failing any other resources, it would suffice to assure our subsistence for an indefinite time.
When we were restored, a gap in the cliff enabled us to reach the plateau, which we found to cover a wide expanse. The appearance of the coast had not deceived us: on all sides, in every direction, there was nothing but arid rocks, covered with seaweed and wrack – most of it dried up – without the smallest blade of grass, with no living thing either on the ground or in the sky.
Here and there were tiny lakes, or rather ponds, gleaming in the sunshine, but when we sought to quench our thirst, we realised that they were salt.
To tell the truth, this did not surprise us. It confirmed what we had thought right from the outset, that this unknown continent was born yesterday and had risen, in one solid mass, from the depths of the sea. This explained both its aridity and its utter loneliness. It moreover explained this thick layer of mud, uniformly spread, which as the result of evaporation was beginning to crack and to fall into dust.
Next day, at noon, our bearings showed 17° 20’ north latitude and 23° 55’ west longitude. On consulting the map, we found that this was right in the open sea, nearly on a level with Cape Verde. And yet towards the west the land, and towards the east the sea, now extended out of sight.
However repulsive and inhospitable was this continent upon which we had set foot, we should have to be satisfied with it. For this reason the unloading of the Virginia was begun without further delay. We carried on to the plateau, at random, everything she contained. First, however, the ship had been securely moored with four anchors, in fifteen fathoms of water. In this quiet bay she was in no danger, and we could quite safely leave her to herself.
As soon as the unloading was complete, our new life began. In the first place we had to...
When he reached this point in his translation Zartog Sofr had to pause. In this place the manuscript had the first of its lacunae; this seemed to involve a large number of pages, and it was followed by several others which to all appearances were larger still. No doubt, in spite of the protection given by the case, many of the sheets had been attacked by damp; there remained only a few more or less lengthy fragments, their context having been destroyed. They were in the following order:
... beginning to get acclimatised.