XXXV

XXXV

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21.—THE next day, the magnificent geyser has disappeared. The wind has become colder, and has rapidly carried us away from Axel Island. The roar has gradually faded.

The weather, if it is appropriate to call it that, will change before long. The atmosphere fills up with steam clouds that carry with them electricity generated by the evaporation of the salt water. The clouds sink perceptibly lower, and take on a uniform olive-colored hue. The electric rays can scarcely penetrate through this opaque curtain, drawn on the theater in which the drama of a thunderstorm is about to be staged.

I feel particularly affected, as do all creatures on earth just before a cataclysm. The piled-up cumulus cloudsbo in the south look sinister; they have that ‘merciless’ look that I have often noticed at the beginning of a thunderstorm. The air is heavy, the sea is calm.

In the distance the clouds resemble big bales of cotton, piled up in picturesque disorder; by degrees they dilate, and lose in number what they gain in size. Their weight is such that they cannot lift from the horizon; but in the breeze of air currents high up, they dissolve little by little, grow darker and soon turn into a single, formidable-looking layer. From time to time a ball of steam, still lit up, bounces off this grayish carpet and soon loses itself in the opaque mass.

The atmosphere is obviously saturated with liquid; I am impregnated with it; my hair bristles on my head as it would close to an electrical appliance. It seems to me that if my companions touched me at that moment, they would receive a powerful shock.

At ten in the morning the symptoms of a storm become more pronounced; it seems as if the wind lets up only to catch its breath; the cloud bank resembles a huge goatskin in which hurricanes are building up.

I am reluctant to believe in the threatening signs from the sky, and yet I cannot keep from saying:

“Here’s some bad weather coming on.”

The professor gives no answer. He is in a murderous mood as he sees the ocean stretching out indefinitely before him. He shrugs his shoulders at my words.

“We’ll have a thunderstorm,” I exclaim, pointing at the horizon. “Those clouds are coming down on the sea as if they were going to crush it!”

General silence. The wind stops. Nature looks as if it is dead and breathes no more. On the mast, where I already see a small St. Elmo’s fire sprouting, the tensionless sail hangs in heavy folds. The raft lies motionless in the middle of a sluggish sea without waves. But if we no longer move, why leave that sail on the mast, which could wreck us at the first onslaught of the tempest?

“Let’s reef the sail and take the mast down!” I say. “That’s safer.”

“No, by the Devil!” shouts my uncle. “A hundred times no! Let the wind seize us! Let the thunderstorm take us away! But let me finally see the rocks of a shore, even if our raft were to be smashed to smithereens!”

The words are hardly out of his mouth when a sudden change takes place on the southern horizon. The built-up steam condenses into water, and the air, violently attracted to the voids produced by the condensation, turns into a hurricane. It rushes in from the farthest recesses of the cavern. The darkness deepens. I can scarcely jot down a few incomplete notes.

The raft rises up, takes a leap. My uncle falls. I crawl to him. He has firmly gripped the end of a thick rope and seems to watch this spectacle of unbridled elements with pleasure.

Hans does not move. His long hair, blown by the hurricane and falling over his immobile face, gives him a strange physiognomy, because each of its ends is tipped with little luminous feathers. His frightening mask is that of a prehistoric man, a contemporary of the ichthyosaurus and the megatherium.

The mast holds firm yet. The sail stretches tight like a bubble ready to burst. The raft flies at a speed I cannot guess, but not as fast as the drops of water it pushes aside below itself in straight, clear lines of speed.

“The sail! the sail!” I say, motioning to lower it.

“No!” replies my uncle.

“Nej!” repeats Hans, gently shaking his head.

But now the rain is like a roaring waterfall in front of that horizon toward which we speed like madmen. But before it reaches us, the veil of clouds breaks apart, the sea begins to boil, and the electricity produced by a powerful chemical reaction in the upper layers comes into play. Glittering flashes of lightning mix with crashes of thunder; innumerable flashes interlace in the midst of detonations; the mass of steam glows white-hot; hailstones light up as they hit the metal of our tools and of our weapons; the heaving waves resemble fire-breathing hills, each belching forth its own interior flames, and every crest is plumed with dancing fire. My eyes are blinded by the dazzling light, my ears are stunned by the roar of thunder. I have to hold on to the mast, which bends like a reed under the violence of the hurricane!!!

...... [Here my notes became quite incomplete. I have only been able to find a few quick observations, jotted down mechanically, so to speak. But their brevity and their obscurity are saturated with the emotion that gripped me, and they convey the gist of the situation better than my memory.]

Sunday, August 23.—Where are we? Driven on at incalculable speed.

The night has been horrible. The thunderstorm does not abate. We live in the midst of noise, a constant explosion. Our ears are bleeding. We cannot exchange a word.

The lightning flashes never stop. I see reverse zigzags that after flashing momentarily rebound back up and strike against the granite vault. What if it crumbled! Other lightning flashes bifurcate or take the shape of fiery spheres that explode like bombshells. But the general noise does not seem to increase when they do; it has exceeded the volume that the human ear can perceive, and even if all the powder kegs of the world exploded at once, we would not hear it anymore.

There is continuous light emission at the surface of the clouds; the electric substance is constantly discharged from their molecules; obviously the gaseous principles in the air have changed; innumerable fountains of water rush upwards into the air and fall back again foaming.

Where are we going? My uncle lies stretched out at the end of the raft.

The heat increases. I look at the thermometer; it indicates ... [the figure is obliterated].

Monday, August 24.—It will never end! Why would the state of this very dense atmosphere, now that it has been changed, not be definitive?

We are worn out by exhaustion. Hans as usual. The raft speeds invariably to the south-east. We have run two hundred leagues since we left Axel Island.

At noon the violence of the storm doubles. We must safely stow every piece of cargo. Each of us ties himself down as well. The waves rise above our heads.

Impossible to address a single word to each other for the last three days. We open our mouths, we move our lips, but no perceptible sound comes forth. Even talking into each other’s ears we cannot hear each other.

My uncle has approached me. He has uttered a few words. I believe he has told me, “We are lost.” But I am not sure.

I decide to write down these words: “Let us lower the sail.”

He nods his consent.

Scarcely has he risen up again when a disk of fire appears at the edge of the raft. Mast and sail are swept away together in one stroke, and I see them fly up to a prodigious height, resembling a pterodactyl, that fantastic bird of the first ages.

We are frozen with fear. The half-white, half-blue ball, as large as a ten-inch bombshell, moves about slowly, but revolves with surprising speed under the whiplash of the hurricane. It goes here and there, it climbs up onto one of the raft’s crossbeams, jumps onto the sack of provisions, comes back down easily, leaps, and skirts along the box of gunpowder. Horror! We’ll blow up! No. The dazzling disk moves away; it approaches Hans, who looks at it steadily; it approaches my uncle, who falls down on his knees to avoid it; it approaches me, pale and trembling in the glare of the light and heat; it spins close to my foot, which I try to pull back. I cannot do it.

A smell of laughing-gas fills the air; it enters the throat, the lungs. We suffocate.

Why am I unable to pull back my foot? It must be riveted to the planks! Ah! the descent of this electric sphere has magnetized all the iron on board; the instruments, the tools, the weapons, move about and clash with a sharp jangle; the nails in my shoes cling tenaciously to a plate of iron set into the wood. I cannot pull my foot away!

At last, I tear it away with a violent effort just when the ball was about to seize it in its gyration and drag me along with it....

Ah! what glaring light! the sphere bursts! we are covered with tongues of fire!

Then all the light goes out. I had the time to see my uncle stretched out on the raft. Hans still at the helm and “spitting fire” under the impact of the electricity that penetrates him.

Where are we going? Where are we going?

Tuesday, August 25.—I come out of a long spell of unconsciousness. The thunderstorm continues; the lightning flashes tear loose like a brood of snakes released in the atmosphere.Are we still on the sea? Yes, we are driven at incalculable speed. We have passed under England, under the channel, under France, under the whole of Europe perhaps!A new noise can be heard! Obviously waves breaking on rocks! ... But then ....