Chalet in the Sky

by Albert Robida

  “It was necessary to see the anguished populations gathering in the evenings in the grand plazas of cities or on hills to watch the monster rise over the horizon. The people bent down beneath the terrible menace, huddled against one another, some lying flat on the ground hiding their heads in their hands, eyes closed. People spoke in whispers. News items circulated, all causing greater anguish to some than others; there was talk of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the antipodes and everywhere…eruptions that were doubtless only the first sparks of a general explosion of our unfortunate condemned world!

  “And when the bolide, lit up by a sinister flame, began to rise over the horizon, a great cry went up above the crowds, who, standing up abruptly, started to flee in all directions in search of illusory refuges, no matter where—in the depths of woods, behind some molehill, or even in the cellars of houses.

  “And by day, the sinister shadow of the formidable bolide arrived over us, covering the countryside and the cities—a terrifying eclipse that lasted for long minutes and augmented the panic. A few more upheavals were produced on the surface, for we saw jets of vapor shooting up from various places and swirling for a long time in heavy cloudy masses.

  “That final phase of the event lasted for months on end; it was soon evident to the scientists, resigned to everything, and the people who had conserved a little calm, that the denouement was near. Finally!

  “For all those who were still resisting the universal panic, it was a veritable relief; it was the end of the torture.

  “The monstrous bolide was orbiting ever more closely, and closer still; the details of its surface were discernible, the bristling of mountains and hollows where shiny threads ran, which had to be rivers or streams. It arrived amid a frightful rumbling of hurricanes and storms which went on for weeks, incessantly…

  “And suddenly, the end came. One morning, I remember, the Sun didn’t rise—or, rather, couldn’t pierce the thick layer of black cloud that covered all of nature! In that Stygian obscurity, we waited. The Earth seemed to be holding its breath beneath our feet. For hours on end there were earthquakes, the rumbling and growling of storms without end; then the release; the noise diminished slowly; it seemed that nature was uttering long sighs. Gradually, everyone raised their heads; we looked at one another, pale and trembling, without daring to ask questions, but with the sensation that the peril had passed.

  “Where had the event taken place? How? What region of the world had been crushed by the impact?

  “For a day and a night, we knew nothing. Communication by wireless radio and other means was totally disrupted, confused in crazy currents of rays and waves. It was necessary to wait, to be patient! But we were safe, that was the main thing. Egotistical reasoning, but natural to everyone….

  “The observatories already knew; eventually, the news arrived and was spread!”

  XIII. The Great Tidal Wave

  “There it was! The morsel of an unknown planet, projected toward us by some unknown fabulous explosion from the extremity of the solar world, had not grazed any continental region or pulverized any capital. The great terror was over!

  “It had fallen into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the place where it would do the least harm. That was providential! What a stroke of luck!

  “Before having the details, we feared for the sixth continent; we were quickly reassured. The point of impact had been south of the equator, between the Marquesas, the little Hawaiian archipelago and the sixth continent constructed in the 20th century.

  “A few islets in the dust of islands scattered in that region undoubtedly disappeared beneath the enormous mass, along with ships and indigenous canoes, unless everything that had been at sea had fled from the menace much earlier. A large island was born, 400 kilometers long and 300 kilometers broad—a considerable island, rocky and mountainous, as much so and more than any mountainous corner of our old Earth bristling with peaks torn to shreds, pitted with holes and difficult of access.

  “The bolide’s fall led to frightful catastrophes, which disturbed a large part of the world. Terrifying tidal waves ravaged the coasts of North and South America; the waters broke through all the weak points the isthmus of Panama, Yucatan and Costa Rica, devastating regions, causing all the volcanic cauldrons of the coast to explode and ruining hundreds of towns, from the coasts of China and Japan on the Asian side to the glacial seas of the North, where Kamchatka suffered particularly badly. It was the same for the Australian coasts and the regions of the South Pole.

  “That fantastic tidal wave, a fury of waves, was propagated by successive shocks as far as the coasts of Normandy and Brittany. Fortunately, people didn’t go sea bathing much during the great menace, otherwise there would have been many more casualties.

  “The great wave did not reach us until three days after the fall. What a mess! The formidable wave turned everything upside-down, lifting up and bearing away boats, beach cabins and the roofs of collapsed villas—and hurling all of that far inland, over jetties, cliffs and dykes. The tidal wave made the rivers and streams that emptied into the sea around our coasts flow backwards.

  “I have a little personal souvenir of the effect of the tidal wave on us—perhaps I’ve told you about it already. Three or four days after the event, my parents were leaving for the seaside to calm their emotions and recover a taste for life after such a threat, for we, like everyone else, were both joyful and worn out, like convalescents going out for the first time after a serious illness.

  “We were entitled to a little vacation anyway; it was the right time—the beginning of August. My father judged that the bank could do without him for another five or six weeks; it was necessary to give business the time to wake up from its deep torpor. We were in our nice little villa in Poulingen; your mother was playing with her dolls or her friends on the beach. As for me, I began to find existence delightful again, and rolled in the sand in front of the house without a care.

  “Although the weather as fine and very warm, the sea was rough away from the shore, but I was finally able to try out my hydroplane and my little rowing canoe in an inlet. I had finished with the hydroplane; the weather became duller, and I was rowing slowly when the foaming wave suddenly arrived, without warning, with the noise of a hurricane, scaling and breaking everything. I was on the crest of it before I could say oof! I was lifted up, carried off and thrown over I don’t know what—walls, sheds, beach huts—and hurled with a pell-mell of little pieces of broken objects on to a clump of flowering bushes at the back of a garden…without sustaining any damage, fortunately, splashing in a tide of foam, bewildered, beneath torrents of dirty water that continued to pour from the open sea over my head, with bunches of algae torn from the sea-bed.

  “What a shower! Around me, plunged in the tide, beach-huts arrived by way of the air, with loungers, deck-chairs, ladies and gentlemen who had taken a similar route, children and nurses, a donkey, legs in the air, and geese even more bewildered than me.

  “A violent bore swept up the Loire, carrying away all the boats; ships in port were dragged away with their anchors and followed the boats they met or ran aground on the bank, in the grass, when they did not end up in the riverside houses, where the water rose as far as the upper floors. Bridges cracked under the pressure of the water and were also carried away.

  “During this time, I shook myself, rubbed myself and, as I definitely had not broken anything, watched the phenomenon open-mouthed while waiting for the next phase. Nearby, women and children bearded with foam were still splashing around; I helped them to get out of the lake and climb into the house, where the water as cascading down the stairs. The women were weeping and crying that it was another bolide, a second one, raining from the sky. It was the end; the universe was coming apart; the worlds, their foundations having been worn away for such a long time, were being demolished and the pieces were falling on our heads!

  “You can imagine what I went through, emotionally! Finally, observing that nothing more was coming
, that the sea was continuing the racket it made in bad weather but no longer seemed to be thinking of overflowing, I reassured myself conclusively and set forth to make sure that my parents were safe and that the house hadn’t suffered serious damage.

  “As for my boats, I could be proud of them; they had both made the voyage to Nantes in the state of bits of wood, for the stern of the canoe was recovered a little while later on the old Quai de la Fosse and the prow of my little hydroplane in the Île Feydeau.

  “That wasn’t all. The following day, at the same time, there was a further tidal wave, a little less violent; the day after that, another, further diminished, and every day for three weeks there was a similar palpitation of the Atlantic, of decreasing strength, until the Ocean too recovered from its great shock.”

  “I wish I’d been there!” said Moderan.

  “Me too!” said Andoche, looking at his uncle with envious eyes.

  “Do you think I’ve finished with the more or less serious consequences of the arrival of the traveling island?” Monsieur Cabrol continued. “Oh no! The voyager through interplanetary space, taking its abrupt dive into the middle of the Pacific, caused many other perturbations. Oh, at first, I didn’t even catch cold, in spite of my unexpected bath and the showers that subsequently fell upon my head—nor did anyone else, I believe, for the water was warm; the tidal wave gratified us all with showers that were sometimes even too hot; there were doubtless a few cold billows, but immediately followed by volumes of overheated seawater in which half-cooked fish were dying. Oh, the poor fish!—they were found all along the coast, trying to swim in the fields: shoals of rays, sole or whiting heaped up in the estates, where the peasants, delighted with the windfall, hastened to gather them up. I saw two living seals, jumping, flexing themselves and jumping again, with great difficulty, along the road, trying to get back to the sea, uttering plaintive cries at every hop, like the whimpering of dogs or the wailing of children: the lamentations of innocent animals who had no understanding at all of what had so brutally afflicted their native element.”

  “Poor seals! Did they succeed in getting home?” asked Moderan.

  “Alas, in the main square of Poulingen, when they thought they were almost safe, there was a circus tent that the water was threatening to carry away. The people were working to consolidate its moorings during the final wave; the two joyful seals, barking more loudly, were engulfed by the canvas; there, splashing around, entangled with ropes, chairs and musical instruments, they were easily captured by the acrobats and imprisoned in large basins.”

  “Poor seals!!” the good-hearted Moderan groaned, again.

  “Bah!” said Andoche. “They enjoyed a more agreeable existence thereafter than the depths of the Greenland sea from which they came would have been able to give them. They made their tour of France with the circus and friendly clowns, more amusing than the polar bears of the ice-sheet…”

  “Poor polar bears!” said Monsieur Cabrol.

  “What? Poor polar bears, uncle?”

  “But yes! You don’t know. I can’t tell you about all the repercussions of that formidable tidal wave, which turned all the world’s seas upside down, but there were particularly disagreeable consequences for the polar bears of the North, inhabiting the snowbound countries or the polar ice-cap. Poor beasts!”

  “Nice little animals!” said Andoche.

  “Imagine them, our polar bears, accustomed to their immutable white plains, their icebergs, the solidity of their oceans of ice, shaken up by the first explosions of the ice-sheet, when the waves of the tropical seas arrived in scalding waterspouts! The depths of whole oceans disturbed by the fall of Astra, warm seas thrown over the coasts, awakening volcanoes, creating crazy currents—which, overflowing the old habitual routes, went to assail the barrier ice of the Pole, in the vicinity of Kamchatka, where dozens of volcanoes erupted in flames in their turn, and even reached the shores of Europe through the Panama breaches and went to attack the ice-sheets of Spitzbergen.

  “And there goes the North Pole, heated up by warm squalls above and seething billows below—it was the right time to visit it, but no one thought of it. There goes the ice-cap, bursting and shattering, torrents of warm water spouting from every hole, icebergs melting like sorbets…

  “Can you imagine the distress of the polar bears, or other game-animals of the white solitudes, surprised by the catastrophe? 50 degrees below freezing turning to 40 degrees above, or more, volcanic eruptions under the ice, the boiling of the waves, the vortices of scalding vapor, the geysers of hot water! And the poor polar bears, the seals, the walruses, the penguins, the entire animal population of barely habitable countries, frightened, overheated, burned, cooked, fleeing the hot water for the melting ice—perishing, for the most part!

  “It was like that for a month or two after the event—so many corpses of animals unknown in our country washing up on our coasts. For our part, one morning, we found a half-dead penguin in our garden, and 20 polar bear corpses were collected on the beach at Pornichet, parboiled or drowned!”

  XIV. Here, once, was the Moon.

  The Villa Beauséjour spent a very pleasant week in that little corner of Guatemala: a week of complete tranquility, with the weather set fair; no more worries. There was nothing to do but let themselves live, descending every morning by a rapid path to the beach, in order to bathe, and climbing back up in the afternoon for a siesta in the shade of a mahogany tree whose tumbling lianas made a sort of flowery and moving bower, like a great aviary in which hundreds of variously-plumaged birds lived, fluttered and sang.

  They were so happy there, and yet they thought of nothing but getting away from it.

  Andoche and Moderan were dreaming of the island of Astra, a little piece of the planet Mars, fallen so luckily in the great emptiness of the Pacific 30 years before. They were so close to it now—scarcely 1000 kilometers away! Impatience also took hold of Monsieur Cabrol.

  The departure date was finally fixed; one last stroll through the Guatemalan village and the pleasant neighboring town, which felt so distant from the oppressive industrial machinery of the North, and the following day, at the earliest opportunity, they would leave.

  A fine day, a good siesta, a tranquil night. Morning has come. The clearing up for the departure is soon done. The apparatus is checked. Babylas is shut in so that he will not go astray in the exuberant surrounding vegetation in pursuit of small birds. Phanor, more reasonable, watches the preparations from the balcony. He has understood, and seems quite melancholy at the thought of abandoning such a tranquil abode.

  It is 9 a.m. The Villa Beauséjour oscillates on its foundations, stirs, turns round, then gently rises into the air; it surpasses the fans of the highest palms and begins to describe a great circle in the sky in order to review all the details of the landscape.

  All the indigenes of the surrounding area are down below, waving and shouting, bidding them farewell. Signs of amity are made in response, and joyful au revoirs, with which the brave Phanor joins in, capering on the balcony and barking hoarsely. The Aerovilla heads eastwards and gradually gains speed.

  “We have time; it’s sufficient to arrive at Astra in daylight, so we can make a little detour in the direction of the volcanoes; if that’s interesting, we can stay there for a day or two…”

  “No, no, Uncle, I beg you,” said Andoche. “You’ve told us too much about Astra!”

  In less than half an hour the Villa Beauséjour reached the line of volcanoes scattered along the Pacific coast, on the mountain peaks of Guatemala and the isthmus of Tehuantepec. In the daylight, the volcanoes are less imposing. Here and there, smoke rises up in swirls, fumaroles escaping from dark holes with fiery dots at the bottom of profound craters, in a frame of scorched rocks, often devoid of vegetation—and that is all.

  To the south, all the fractures of the former isthmus of Panama were visible: great breaches opened up by the terrible fury of the waves kicked up at the moment of Astra’s fall. They could make o
ut the immense works undertaken to rectify the irregular fractures, consolidate the debris of the isthmus and remodel the bedrock between the two Americas, according to carefully-drawn-up plans.

  This region of the world had suffered an abrupt ruination that was purely accidental; it was not, as it was at home in old Europe, an exhaustion produced by centuries of intensive wear and tear. Here there had been populations that were by no means numerous, in a rich and prodigal nature—the Aztecs the Toltecs, or less well-known Indian tribes. In Europe, so many generations of tenants had succeeded on another, using and abusing the old Earth.

  The Villa Beauséjour, veering deliberately eastwards, gained a few 100 meters in height. A splendid Sun illuminated the atmosphere, where they were fortunate to encounter a light breeze, after the dull heat of the overheated rocks of the mountains.

  Ahead, the entire immensity of the Pacific seemed to be striped by long white waves. To the north and south there was the same immense emptiness. They seemed to be going into space. There was not the slightest interruption: a complete void above and below; not the slightest cloud or any little aircraft in a pure sky; not the smallest island in view in the liquid infinity below.

  Andoche and Moderan stood open-mouthed with admiration, and Monsieur Cabrol no longer breathed a word. It was too vast, too beautiful. Into that infinity they plunged at 50 kilometers an hour, without perceiving the slightest dot moving in the depths of the sky or on the surface of the waves. Monsieur Cabrol, however, suddenly recovered the power of movement and speech. He straightened up, and his arm, describing a great circle, made a tour of the horizon.

  “Well, my boys,” he said, “you can grasp all of this in a single glance—the famous violet hole of the Pacific.”

  “What violet hole, Uncle?”

  “That immensity filled by the sea, the enormous void without a single islet since Mexico and Panama, since the long chain of mountains bordering the coasts without interruption—you can see it clearly.” His gesture embraced the entire horizon. “Here, my boys, is where the Moon used to be!”