“We must wait till to-morrow,” he repeated; adding, for he had become distrustful of the future, “that is to say, if to-morrow ever comes.”
Although not very learned in astronomy, Servadac was acquainted with the position of the principal constellations. It was therefore a considerable disappointment to him that, in consequence of the heavy clouds, not a star was visible in the firmament. To have ascertained that the pole-star had become displaced would have been an undeniable proof that the earth was revolving on a new axis; but not a rift appeared in the lowering clouds, which seemed to threaten torrents of rain.
It happened that the moon was new on that very day; naturally, therefore, it would have set at the same time as the sun. What, then, was the captain’s bewilderment when, after he had been walking for about an hour and a half, he noticed on the western horizon a strong glare that penetrated even the masses of the clouds.
“The moon in the west!” he cried aloud; but suddenly bethinking himself, he added. “But no, that cannot be the moon; unless she had shifted very much nearer the earth, she could never give a light as intense as this.”
And as he spoke the screen of vapour was illuminated to such a degree that the whole country was as it were bathed in twilight.
“What can this be?” soliloquized the captain. “It cannot be the sun, for the sun set in the east only an hour and a half ago. Would that those clouds would disclose what enormous luminary lies behind them! What a fool I was not to have learnt more astronomy! Perhaps, after all, I am racking my brain over something that is quite in the ordinary course of nature.”
But, reason as he might, the mysteries of the heavens still remained impenetrable. For about an hour some luminous body, its disc evidently of gigantic dimensions, shed its rays upon the upper strata of the clouds; then, marvellous to relate, instead of obeying the ordinary laws of celestial mechanism, and descending upon the opposite horizon, it seemed to rise in a line perpendicular to the plane of the equator, and vanished.
The darkness that returned to the face of the earth was not more profound than the gloom which fell upon the captain’s soul. Everything was incomprehensible. The simplest mechanical rules seemed falsified; the planets had defied the laws of gravitation; the motions of the celestial spheres were erroneous as those of a watch with a defective mainspring, and there was only too much reason to fear that the sun would never again shed his radiance upon the earth.
But the captain’s fears were groundless. In three hours’ time, without any intervening twilight, the morning sun made its appearance in the west, and day once more had dawned. On consulting his watch, Servadac found that night had lasted precisely six hours. Ben Zoof, who was unaccustomed to so brief a period of repose, was still slumbering soundly.
“Come, wake up!” said Servadac, shaking him by the shoulder; “it is time to start.”
“Time to start?” exclaimed Ben Zoof, rubbing his eyes. “I feel as if I had only just gone to sleep.”
“You have slept all night, at any rate,” replied the captain; “it has only been for six hours, but you must make it enough.”
“Enough it shall be, sir,” was the submissive rejoinder.
“And now,” continued Servadac, “we will take the shortest way back to the gourbi, and see what our horses think about it all.”
“They will think that they ought to be groomed,” said the orderly.
“Very good; you may groom them and saddle them as quickly as you like. I want to know what has become of the rest of Algeria: if we cannot get round by the south to Mostaganem, we must go eastwards to Tenes.”
And forthwith they started. Beginning to feel hungry, they had no hesitation in gathering figs, dates, and oranges from the plantations that formed a continuous rich and luxuriant orchard along their path. The district was quite deserted, and they had no reason to fear any legal penalty for their depredations.
In an hour and a half they reached the gourbi. Everything was just as they had left it, and it was evident that no one had visited the place during their absence. All was desolate as the shore they had quitted.
The preparations for the expedition were brief and simple. Ben Zoof saddled the horses and filled his pouch with biscuits and game; water, he felt certain, could be obtained in abundance from the numerous affluents of the Shelif, which, although they had now become tributaries of the Mediterranean, still meandered through the plain. Captain Servadac mounted his horse Zephyr, and Ben Zoof simultaneously got astride his mare Galette, named after the mill of Montmartre. They galloped off in the direction of the Shelif, and were not long in discovering that the diminution in the pressure of the atmosphere had precisely the same effect upon their horses as it had had upon themselves. Their muscular strength seemed five times as great as hitherto; their hoofs scarcely touched the ground, and they seemed transformed from ordinary quadrupeds into veritable hippogriffs. Happily, Servadac and his orderly were fearless riders; they made no attempt to curb their steeds, but even urged them to still greater exertions. Twenty minutes sufficed to carry them over the four or five miles that intervened between the gourbi and the mouth of the Shelif; then, slackening their speed, they proceeded at a more leisurely pace to the south-east, along what had once been the right bank of the river, but which, although it still retained its former characteristics, was now the boundary of a sea, which extending farther than the limits of the horizon, must have swallowed up at least a large portion of the province of Oran. Captain Servadac knew the country well; he had at one time been engaged upon a trigonometrical survey of the district, and consequently had an accurate knowledge of its topography. His idea now was to draw up a report of his investigations: to whom that report should be delivered was a problem he had yet to solve.
During the four hours of daylight that still remained. the travellers rode about twenty-one miles from the river mouth. To their vast surprise, they did not meet a single human being. At nightfall they again encamped in a slight bend of the shore, at a point which on the previous evening had faced the mouth of the Mina, one of the left-hand affluents of the Shelif, but now absorbed into the newly revealed ocean. Ben Zoof made the sleeping accommodation as comfortable as the circumstances would allow; the horses were clogged and turned out to feed upon the rich pasture that clothed the shore, and the night passed without special incident.
At sunrise on the following morning, the 2nd of January, or what, according to the ordinary calendar, would have been the night of the 1st, the captain and his orderly remounted their horses, and during the six-hours’ day accomplished a distance of forty-two miles. The right bank of the river still continued to be the margin of the land, and only in one spot had its integrity been impaired. This was about twelve miles from the Mina, and on the site of the annex or suburb of Surkelmittoo. Here a large portion of the bank had been swept away, and the hamlet, with its eight hundred inhabitants, had no doubt been swallowed up by the encroaching waters. It seemed, therefore, more than probable that a similar fate had overtaken the larger towns beyond the Shelif, and that Mazagran, Mostaganem, and Orleansville had all been annihilated. After skirting the small bay thus formed by the rupture of the shore. Captain Servadac found himself again upon the river bank, exactly opposite the site once occupied by the mixed community of Ammi-Moossa, the ancient Khamis of Beni-Ooragh; but not a vestige of the place remained. Even the Mankara Peak, below which it had been built, and which was more than three thousand feet in height, had totally disappeared.
In the evening the explorers encamped, as previously, in a nook of the shore which here abruptly terminated their new domain, not far from where they might have expected to find the important village of Memounturroy; but of this, too, there was now no trace.
“I had quite reckoned upon a supper and a bed at Orleansville to-night,” said Servadac, as, full of despondency, he surveyed the drear waste of water.
“Quite impossible,” replied Ben Zoof, “except you had gone by a boat. But cheer up, sir, cheer up; we will so
on devise some means for getting across to Mostaganem.”
“If, as I hope,” rejoined the captain, “we are on a peninsula, we are more likely to get to Tenes; there we shall hear the news.”
“Far more likely to carry the news ourselves,” answered Ben Zoof, as he threw himself down for his night’s rest.
Six hours later, only waiting for sunrise, Captain Servadac set himself in movement again to renew his investigations. At the spot last chosen for encampment, the shore, that hitherto had been running in a southeasterly direction, turned abruptly to the north, being no longer formed by the natural bank of the Shelif, but consisting of an absolutely new coast-line. No land was in sight. Nothing could be seen of Orleansville, which ought to have been about six miles to the south-west; and Ben Zoof, who had mounted the highest point of view attainable, could distinguish sea, and nothing but sea, to the farthest horizon.
Quitting their encampment and riding on, the bewildered explorers kept close to the new shore. This, since it had ceased to be formed by the original river-bank, had considerably altered its aspect. Frequent landslips occurred, and in many places deep chasms rifted the ground; great gaps furrowed the fields, and trees, half uprooted, overhung the water—some old olives being especially remarkable by the fantastic distortions of their gnarled trunks, looking as though they had been chopped by a hatchet.
The sinuosities of the coast-line, alternately gully and headland, had the effect of making a devious progress for the travellers, and at sunset, although they had accomplished more than twenty miles, they had only just arrived at the foot of the Merdeyah Mountains, which, before the cataclysm, had formed the extremity of the chain of the Little Atlas, The ridge, however, had been violently ruptured, and now rose perpendicularly from the water.
On the following morning Servadac and Ben Zoof traversed one of the mountain gorges; and next, in order to make a more thorough acquaintance with the limits and condition of the section of Algerian territory of which they seemed to be left as the sole occupants, they dismounted, and proceeded on foot to the summit of one of the highest peaks. From this elevation they ascertained that from the base of the Merdeyah to the Mediterranean, a distance of about eighteen miles, a new coast-line had come into existence; no land was visible in any direction; no isthmus existed to form a connecting link with the territory of Tenes, which had entirely disappeared. The result was that Captain Servadac was driven to the irresistible conclusion that the tract of land which he had been surveying was not, as he had at first imagined, a peninsula; it was actually an island.
Strictly speaking, this island was quadrilateral, but the sides were so irregular that it was much more nearly a triangle, the comparison of the sides exhibiting these proportions:—The section of the right bank of the Shelif, seventy-two miles; the northern boundary from the Shelif to the chain of the Little Atlas, twenty-one miles; from the Little Atlas to the shore of the Mediterranean, eighteen miles; and sixty miles of the shore of the Mediterranean itself, making in all an entire circumference of about 171 miles.
“What does it all mean?” exclaimed the captain, every hour growing more and more bewildered.
“The will of Providence, and we must submit,” replied Ben Zoof, calm and undisturbed.
With this reflection, the two men silently descended the mountain and remounted their horses, which had been grazing quietly on the luxuriant herbage.
Before evening the wayfarers had reached the Mediterranean. On their road they failed to discern a vestige of the little town of Montenotte; like Tenes (of which not so much as a ruined cottage was visible on the horizon), it seemed to be annihilated.
On the following day, the 6th of January, the two men made a forced march along the coast of the Mediterranean, which they found in some degree less altered than the captain had at first supposed; but four villages, Callaat-Chimah, Agniss, Marabout, and Pointe-Basse, had entirely disappeared, and the headlands, unable to resist the shock of the convulsion, had been detached from the mainland.
The circuit of the island had been now completed, and the explorers, after a period of sixty hours, found themselves once more beside the ruins of their gourbi. Five days, or what, according to the established order of things, would have been two days and a half, had been occupied in tracing the boundaries of their new domain; and although not the only living occupants, inasmuch as herds of cattle had been seen, they had ascertained beyond a doubt that they were the sole human inhabitants left upon the island.
“Well, sir, here you are, Governor-General of Algeria!” exclaimed Ben Zoof, as they reached the gourbi.
“With not a soul to govern,” gloomily rejoined the captain.
“How so? Do you not reckon me?”
“Pshaw! Ben Zoof, what are you?”
“What am I? Why, I am the population.”
The captain deigned no reply, but, muttering some expressions of regret for the fruitless trouble he had taken about his rondo, betook himself to rest.
SCIENCE FICTION AND HIDDEN HISTORIES OF SCIENCE, by Katherine Pandora
In the opening decades of the twentieth century, the search for scientific knowledge increasingly was seen as belonging to a select group of people: those with the professional credentials that came with advanced graduate training, full membership in elite disciplinary societies, access to sophisticated laboratories, and the ability to publish research articles that featured technical language and mathematical analysis that was difficult for outsiders to understand. The conventional wisdom said that science was progressing so far, so fast, and under conditions that were so specialized that it was no longer possible for laypeople to grasp the nature of modern scientific thought. After all, hadn’t it been reported that only twelve wise men could comprehend Einstein’s general relativity theory?
If the inward explorations of scientific thought were seen as increasingly remote and inaccessible to ordinary people, it was nonetheless true that they were expected to meet the new demands that came with living in an age of science. As human capabilities expanded in ways that shattered previous boundaries—with near-instantaneous telegraphic messages speeding across the air and under the oceans and earthly beings flying through the atmosphere in machines of their own devising—the very nature of space and time underwent change from one generation to the next. The reorganization of social life in an era of complex interconnected systems brought with it the ability to mesh man and machine in assembly lines that resulted in a complete automobile every three minutes, a determination to sort human potential by standardized testing, and the creation of media transmissions that allowed hundreds of millions of individuals to experience the same event simultaneously. The future belonged to those who wielded the tools of science, blazing a path for the rest of us to follow. As the entrance to the Hall of Science at the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago declared: “Science Finds—Industry Applies—Man Conforms.”
As important as these trends were, contemporaries pointed to one that was still more powerful in scope: “the disenchantment of the world.” Where religion, myth, and sacred wonders had once infused the world with meaning, these frameworks were seen as having been replaced by a demystified worldview based on rationality, skepticism, and objectivity. In the twentieth century, otherworldly sensibilities would necessarily give way before the cold equations of an impersonal Nature known through dissection, quantification, mechanization, and experimentation. Although the disenchantments wrought by science might not be accepted immediately by all, those who lagged behind in accommodating themselves to the new cultural coordinates would find it difficult to navigate the ever-changing landscape of modernity.
At least, these are the explanations that made sense when looking out at the general public from within the confines of professional science. What did the public have to say for themselves? For answers to this question, historians of science have had to shift their focus away from their long-standing preference for studying the official worlds of elite science, and ins
tead explore science in the vernacular, as it emerged from within the sphere of popular culture. Indeed, it appears that within the unauthorized spaces of popular culture, an “intellectual commons” emerged in which vibrant and creative forms of scientific commentary, critique, and speculation circulated—a picture at odds with generalizations about members of the public as disengaged, disenfranchised, and disenchanted. And of the variety of science-inflected popular forms that came to exist within the vernacular sphere, science fiction may be the most significant of all in contributing to the creation and re-creation of cultural understandings across the twentieth century’s age of science.
Far from being intimidated bystanders, the creators and audiences for science fiction could more aptly be seen as active participants in scientific culture (a range of participants that runs the gamut from children to professional scientists themselves, crossing numerous categories). Nor would it make sense to think of science fiction primarily as a literature that confirmed and conformed to the status quo, given its orientation to the future, its quest to explore a plenitude of “what ifs?,” and its world-building ethic. Similarly, the triumph of a disenchanted worldview sits uneasily with the inner workings of science fiction stories, given the warrant they possess for evoking a sense of wonder even as they draw from a scientific foundation (whether strictly conceived in the manner of hard SF, or more flexibly otherwise). As communities of inquiry that call into question the nature of current realities, the world of science fiction represents an experimental space in which ideas about “science” itself can be entertained, offering up the possibility of using science fiction to reveal hidden histories of science in the vernacular.
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction Page 46