“Only a few hours of traveling,” Ossipoff replied.
Meanwhile, Farenheit had picked up his traveling-blanket and thrown it over his shoulders like a shawl. “Brrr,” he complained. “It isn’t warm, you know. We were grilled a little while ago, now we’re freezing, and it wouldn’t take much more to catch a chill.”103
“It’s an advance notification of the temperature that awaits us on Venus,” said Gontran, following the American’s example.
“It’s proof of the density of the atmosphere, which forms a screen between the planet and the Sun whose thickness protects it from the solar rays.” Ossipoff had taken his place at the guard-rail again, telescope in hand, and was impatiently examining the new world that was silhouetted in space.
“You’ll ruin your eyes doing that, my dear Monsieur,” said Fricoulet, shrugging his shoulders. As he spoke, and with no warning of the abrupt change in temperature, the mists cleared, the grey clouds fleeing in all directions, and Venus appeared to the Terran’s marveling eyes, radiantly illuminated by the Sun.
“Finally!” murmured Ossipoff.
By a curious phenomenon of perspective—which the aeronauts of our world cannot describe, never having been launched to such prodigious heights—the planet extended an immense panorama beneath the voyagers’ feet, whose horizon appeared to be at eye-level, thus forming a gigantic funnel ready to receive those who were arriving there from the depths of space.
“One thing that astonishes me,” Fricoulet said, suddenly, “is that we’re not closer to the ground—we’re at least 15 kilometers away, which I find unusual, given that the attraction of this globe is almost as great as that of the Earth.”
Ossipoff, who had heard the engineer’s observation, turned to him and said: “You’re doubtless leaving out of account the action of the parachute, which is playing the role of a powerful brake. Then again, when you mention the Earth, I’m obliged to remind you that the Venusian atmosphere is twice as dense as the terrestrial atmosphere. Moreover you can see that we’re breathing perfectly well at an altitude of 15 kilometers, a league and a half higher than the point at which Sivel and Crocé-Spinelli,104 the courageous terrestrial aeronauts, died; you can imagine, in consequence, the density of this air at ground level.”
“But we’ll be drowned and crushed by the pressure!” cried Flammermont.
Fricoulet shook his head. “You’re mistaken,” he replied. “We’ll adapt to the pressure gradually, and the action of our lungs will become progressively accustomed to the density of the air. One can live perfectly well at a pressure of four and a half atmospheres—on Earth, divers and hydraulic engineers working in caissons, subject to pressures even more considerable, don’t die. Don’t worry, my dear chap—we’ll find our sojourn on this new world quite comfortable.”
“Oh, I’m not afraid for myself,” protested Flammermont.
“For whom, then?”
“For Selena—her fragile constitution…”
“Can only draw elements of force and vigor from the excess of oxygen that the Venusian atmosphere contains.”
Gontran seemed to be relieved of a keen anxiety, and his care-worn face cleared somewhat.
“Ah, my dear boy,” Ossipoff said to him, “it’s very unfortunate that you went to sleep 24 hours ago. You’d certainly have experienced great pleasure in studying the planet’s phases with me.”
“It’s very kind of you to think of me,” the young man replied, with the utmost seriousness, “but fatigue knocked me out. Before going to sleep, though, I was able to observe that Venus resembled the Moon in its first quarter yesterday.”
“That’s quite easy to understand,” added the old man, hastily giving an explanation that no one had asked for. “The orbit of Venus being interior to that of Earth, that planet sometimes turns its illuminated face towards us, sometimes its dark hemisphere, and sometimes parts of each.”
“When is Venus closest to the Earth?” asked Farenheit.
The old man sighed profoundly. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that’s when it’s new and completely dark. When it’s full, it’s on the far side of the Sun—which is to say, more than 60,000,000 leagues away instead of ten. That’s one of the causes of the difficulty that we experience in studying the world’s geography; when it’s closest to us, one can only see a tiny part of it.”
“Personally,” declared Gontran, earnestly, “I know that my illustrious namesake has not been able, thus far, to distinguish clearly the markings observed by certain other astronomers on Venus’s disk.”
“Bravo!” Fricoulet whispered in his ear, truly amazed by his friend’s aplomb.
“Continents célestes page 163,” Flammermont retorted, in the same fashion.
“What did you say?” asked the old man, abruptly turning round, having already taken up his telescope again.
It was the engineer who replied. “Gontran was in the process of giving me some very interesting details of the work already done by Bianchini, Cassini, Denning…”105
“It’s Bianchini who has had the most success, for he managed to draw up a rudimentary map showing three seas in the equatorial region and one in the polar region. The map also features continents, promontories, straits…”
“But it was in 1726 that Bianchini drew that map,” Fricoulet said, “and since that time, it must have been considerable augmented and modified.”
“Absolutely false, my dear Monsieur,” replied the aged scientist. “Not only has that map not been modified, but its indications have not even been verified, in spite of the progress in optics.”
“But to make studies that no one coming after him has been able to check,” said Farenheit, “Bianchini must have had marvelous instruments.”
“It’s to the purity of the fine Italian sky, above all, that Bianchini must owe the discoveries he has made.”
“Or thought he made…” Gontran put in.
The old man shuddered. “What are you saying?” he said, in an anxious tone.
“I’m saying, or thought he made—for my illustrious namesake has been unable to make out these features clearly…”
“Errare humanum est,” declared Ossipoff sententiously. “Still, if Bianchini was the victim of an optical illusion, Cassini, Webb, Denning and others were equally mistaken, for they too have seen these features—oceans, continents and promontories.”106
He had pronounced these words in a vibrant and slightly aggressive tone, causing Flammermont to reply dryly: “You’ll permit me to hold to the opinion of my illustrious namesake, for, with respect to these continents, who knows?”
“I’ve already told you, and I repeat, that by virtue of its location in space, Venus presents considerable difficulties to those who venture to study it, which militate against our having as exact a notion of it as we have, for example, of the Moon or Mars. However in 1833 and 1836 the selenographers Beer and Mädler drew a likeness of Venus. Their drawings were revised in 1847 by Gruithuisen, and in 1881 by Niesten,107 at the Brussels Observatory.”
“That’s all well and good,” said Farenheit, curtly, “but what was the result?”
“The result is that we’re certain of the existence of very high mountains on Venus; the geographical relief is considerable and, the forces in action of the Earth being similarly active on this world, it follows that there are volcanoes, mountain chains—but as for precise measurements of their location, we have none.”
“So, Les Continents célestes is right!” cried Flammermont, triumphantly.
“Did I say that it was wrong?” replied the aged scientist, in a piqued tone.
To provide a diversion, Fricoulet asked: “I’ve sometimes heard the thesis advanced that Venus has a satellite.”108
Gontran considered his friend in amazement, thinking that he had gone mad, but his surprise was greater still when he heard Ossipoff reply, while nodding his head: “Indeed, many astronomers have believed that they saw the satellite you mention. For myself, despite the numerous papers published on
the subject, I persist in thinking of its existence as problematic. On the other hand, you might reply to me that it’s difficult to admit that scientists like Cassini, Horrebow, Short and Montaigne were bad observers, or could have been victims of an optical illusion.”
“How can it be explained, then?”
“For me, there are two possible explanations: either they mistook a small planet passing through the same optical field for a satellite of Venus, or that satellite, being very small, is only visible from Earth in very exceptional conditions.”
“It might also be the case,” Gontran put in, “that, since these observations were made, the satellite might have fallen on to the planet.”
“That hypothesis is not entirely implausible; no natural law forbids such a phenomenon from occurring.”
They had reached this point in their conversation when Fricoulet, who had taken out his chronometer, suddenly exclaimed: “What the Devil! How is it that we aren’t descending more rapidly? We should have arrived some time ago.”
“It seems that we aren’t moving at all,” added Farenheit.
“I beg your pardon,” Gontran countered, “we are, in fact, moving—but in a horizontal sense rather than a vertical one.” He put out his arm in front of him and declared: “We’re making rapid progress in that direction.”
The cloudy screen, which had opened momentarily, had closed again, and the voyagers were plunged once again into the thick mass of the atmosphere. After checking the young Comte’s affirmation and establishing that the apparatus was, indeed, being borne along with prodigious speed by a powerful air current, the old scientist cried: “But we mustn’t let ourselves go off course! We have to go down, as quickly as possible, wherever we are…if not…”
He made a tragic gesture.
“The parachute’s too light,” said Jonathan Farenheit.
“Or the atmosphere’s too dense,” riposted the engineer.
“But what can we do?” complained the American.
“It’s impossible to make ourselves any heavier,” Ossipoff murmured.
They all looked at one another anxiously, not knowing what decision to make.
“Cut the strings connecting us to the parachute,” the American said, suddenly. “Let ourselves fall, at God’s mercy.”
Fricoulet shrugged his shoulders. “That’s madness!” he murmured.
“There are times in life,” growled Farenheit, “when mad things are the only things one can reasonable do.”
“But that mad thing has just given me an idea,” said Flammermont, in his turn.
Ossipoff seized his hands. “Tell us, my dear friend—quickly!”
“I think that if we were to reduce the resistant force of the parachute, we’d fall more rapidly.”
“Easy to say,” grumbled the American, humiliated by the scant success of his suggestion, “but not to do.”
“If we could reduce the surface area of the parachute,” suggested the old scientist.
“Genius!” cried the engineer. He rummage in his tool-box, took out some steel pincers, which he tucked into his belt, and cried: “Let me do it—it’s my job.” With one bond, he leapt on to the guard-rail and grabbed one of the selenium cables that connected the gondola to the parachute in both hands, then pulled himself up—but weight, almost negligible on the Moon, had resumed its empire, and it seemed to the young man that he had become as heavy as lead.
“Fricoulet!” called Flammermont. “Fricoulet!”
But the engineer made no reply and kept climbing, albeit slowly. In spite of his strength, he thought several times that he was about to faint. Finally, his hands reached the edge of the metal plateau, and he clung on to it desperately. Exhausted by the ascent along ten meters of cable no thicker than his little finger, however, his attempts to haul himself up by an operation of his muscles known in gymnastic terminology as a re-establishment were in vain; he could not do it. He was about to give way to discouragement when his foot encountered a goose-foot—as a suture of two threads is called—and, by bracing himself against it, he was finally able to haul himself up on to the parachute. The most difficult part was over, and the courageous engineer, after catching his breath briefly, crawled over the polished surface of the parachute on his hands and knees, using his pincers at intervals to draw out the screws connecting the selenium plates together.
“Come down! Come down!” cried Ossipoff, suddenly. “We’re falling!”
Fricoulet removed a few more plates, which he hurled into space; then he calmly put the pincers back in his belt, let himself slide down a cable, and rejoined his companions, who were waiting for him anxiously. They were, indeed, falling with vertiginous rapidity, passing through the layers of cloud like an arrow.
Suddenly, there was a loud bang, like the sound of ten simultaneous thunderclaps; an intense, blinding light seemed to set the sky aflame, falling on to the parachute like firelight. At the same time the wind, suddenly unleashed, took possession of the apparatus and dragged it toward the ground in a frightful whirlwind.
“A storm!” shouted Mikhail Ossipoff, at the top of his voice, to reassure his companions.
“The sea! The sea!” cried Gontran, in his turn. He was leaning out of the gondola, trying to see through the fiery clouds. Under the force of the wind, the veil that hid the ground had just been torn apart, and a sheet of water appeared a kilometer below the apparatus, extending as far as the eye could see, raising monstrous waves crowned with electric sparks, with a horrible noise.
The spinning parachute fell like a stone.
“Boats! I can see boats!” howled Farenheit, making himself heard in spite of the whistling of the tempest.
“We’re bound to take a serious bath,” retorted Fricoulet. “Those boats will save us.”
They were the last words spoken. The gondola had just slid into the crest of a wave; a mountain of water collapsed upon them, capsizing them, rolling them over like a piece of wreckage. Then, drawn by the weight of the parachute—which had also crashed into the sea—it went straight down, dragging Ossipoff and his bold companions into the mysterious depths of the Venusian ocean.
Chapter XXIV
A dip in the Venusian ocean
Scarcely two minutes had gone by since the moment when the gondola had been engulfed by the waves when a head appeared on the surface of the ocean. That head was Jonathan Farenheit’s. While going down vertically, the American had kept his composure; it was not, in any case, his first shipwreck. In the course of numerous crossings that the pork-fat trade had forced him to make from America to Europe and vice versa, Farenheit had, as the saying has it, “drunk from the big cup” more than once. In addition, far from clinging to the rail of the gondola, as his companions had, he had abandoned the apparatus almost immediately and had come back to the surface with a vigorous thrust. In the midst of supreme peril, he had suddenly remembered the boats sighted by Fricoulet and, confident of his strength and his skill, he had resolved to try anything to escape death.
An enormous wave, carrying him along, hoisted him up to its crest, and from that liquid observatory he was able to dart a rapid glance around the immensity that surrounded him. Come on! he thought. As I descend with the wave, which is collapsing into a bottomless pit, it’s a matter of staying on the surface…it will be the very devil if one of those ships doesn’t pass close by…
For anyone but a strong swimmer like him, a similar project would have been folly; the stormy sea was hurling monstrous waves at the sky, whipped and ripped by the tempest howling through the air—but the water and Farenheit were old acquaintances; without trying to fight, he devoted all his efforts to not being submerged, and he succeeded.
Suddenly, as he was lifted up again to the summit of a wave, he uttered a scream of rage and disappointment. The boats on which he had pinned his hopes had disappeared. Had they foundered as they fled before the tempest?
As far as the eye could see, the sea was deserted. Enormous masses of water were rushing to assault on
e another, with a formidable racket. The clouds in the sky were racing like a herd of galloping horses, driven by a terrible wind, momentarily bloodied by bolts of lightning, and large luminous sparks were dancing on the summits of the waves, casting livid light into the abysms hollowed out by the wind.
Farenheit felt his heart gripped by an inexpressible anguish. On the horizon, there was nothing but the tempest, around him, nothing but the infuriated liquid immensity. What good would it do to struggle? His desire for life had had no other end than the satisfaction of his thirst for vengeance against Sharp; now that he had no hope of imminent salvation, persistence would have no other effect than to prolong his agony. Then, with no other regret in his heart than that of dying before having satisfied his hatred, he folded his arms, immobilized his legs, and allowed himself to be swallowed up by an enormous wave that loomed over him.
“The humankind that reigns on the world of Venus,” writes Camille Flammarion, “must offer the greatest resemblance to ours, and also, probably, the greatest moral resemblance. One may suppose, even so—Venus having being born later than the Earth—that its humankind is more recent than ours. Are its populations still in the Stone Age? All conjectures in this regard are, however, evidently superfluous, the paleontological successions possibly having taken a course on that planet different from our own. On the other hand, it is in the mildest climates that humankind is at its most active, and Venus is a world more various and certainly more turbulent than the Earth. In the final analysis, the best conclusion to draw from these general considerations of the state of the planet is that life must be little different there than it is on our world.”
The first of our voyagers who was able to establish the truth of the abovementioned philosophical suppositions with his own eyes was Flammermont, when he opened his eyes in response to the impression of a bizarre odor sensed by his nostrils and transmitted to his brain.
A first, prey to an entirely natural and easily comprehensible phenomenon, he thought that he was no longer alive, having already been transported to another astral existence. “Of course!” he said. “How stupid I am! I’m dead!”
The Extraordinary Adventures of a Russian Scientist Across the Solar System (Vol. 1) Page 46