CHAPTER VII.BEN ZOOF WATCHES IN VAIN.
In a few minutes the governor-general and his population
were asleep. The gourbi being in ruins, they were obliged
to put up with the best accommodation they could find in
the adjacent erection. It must be owned that the captain's
slumbers were by no means sound; he was agitated by
the consciousness that he had hitherto been unable to
account for his strange experiences by any reasonable
theory. Though far from being advanced in the knowledge
of natural philosophy, he had been instructed, to a
certain degree, in its elementary principles; and, by an
effort of memory, he managed to recall some general laws
which he had almost forgotten. He could understand
that an altered inclination of the earth's axis with regard
to the ecliptic would introduce a change of position in the
cardinal points, and bring about a displacement of the sea;
but the hypothesis entirely failed to account, either for
the shortening of the days, or for the diminution in the
pressure of the atmosphere. He felt that his judgment
was utterly baffled; his only remaining hope was that the
chain of marvels was not yet complete, and that something
farther might occur which would throw some light upon
the mystery.
Ben Zoofs first care on the following morning was to
provide a good breakfast. To use his own phrase, he
was as hungry as the whole population of three million
Algerians, of whom he was the representative, and he
must have enough to eat The catastrophe which had
overwhelmed the country had left a dozen eggs uninjured,
and upon these, with a good dish of his famous couscous,
he hoped that he and his master might have a sufficiently
substantial meal. The stove was ready for use, the copper
skillet was as bright as hands could make it, and the beads
of condensed steam upon the surface of a large stone
alcaraza gave evidence that it was supplied with water.
Ben Zoof at once proceeded to light a fire, singing all the
time, according to his wont, a snatch of an old military
refrain—
“Veal! veal! is there any veal,
Enough to make a stew?
Salt 1 salt! is there any salt,
To season what we do?”
Ever on the look-out for fresh phenomena, Captain
Servadac watched the preparations with a curious eye,
It struck him that perhaps the air, in its strangely modified
condition, would fail to supply sufficient oxygen, and that
the stove, in consequence, might not fulfil its function
But no; the fire was lighted just as usual, and fanned into
vigour by Ben Zoof applying his mouth in lieu of bellows,
and a bright flame started up from the midst of the twigs
and coal. The skillet was duly set upon the stove, and
Ben Zoof was prepared to wait awhile for the water to
boil. Taking up the eggs, he was surprised to notice that
they hardly weighed more than they would if they had
been mere shells; but he was still more surprised when he
saw that before the water had been two minutes over the
fire it was at full boil.
“By jingo!” he exclaimed, “this is a precious hot
fire!”
Servadac reflected. In a few moments he said—
“It cannot be that the fire is hotter; the peculiarity
must be in the water.”
And taking down a centigrade thermometer, which he
had hung upon the wall, he plunged it into the skillet
Instead of 100°, he found that the instrument registered
only 66°.
“Take my advice, Ben Zoof,” he said: “leave your
eggs in the saucepan a good quarter of an hour.”
“Boil them hard! That will never do,” objected the
orderly.
“You will not find them hard, my good fellow. Trust
me, we shall be able to dip our sippets into the yolks
easily enough.”
The captain was quite right in his conjecture, that this
new phenomenon was caused by a diminution in the pressure
of the atmosphere. Water boiling at a temperature
of 66° was itself an evidence that the column of air above
the earth's surface had become reduced by one-third of its
altitude. The identical phenomenon would have occurred
at the summit of a mountain 35,000 feet high; and had
Servadac been in possession of a barometer, he would have
immediately discovered the fact that only now for the first
time, as the result of experiment, revealed itself to him—a
fact, moreover, which accounted for the compression of
the blood-vessels which both he and Ben Zoof had experienced,
as well as for the attenuation of their voices and
their accelerated breathing.
“And yet,” he argued with himself, “if our encampment
has been projected to so great an elevation, how is
it that the sea remains at its proper level?”
Once again Hector Servadac, though capable of tracing
consequences, felt himself totally at a loss to comprehend
their cause; hence his agitation and bewilderment! Inde iræ!
After their prolonged immersion in the boiling water,
the eggs were found to be only just sufficiently cooked;
the couscous was very much in the same condition; and
Ben Zoof came to the conclusion that in future he must
be careful to commence his culinary operations an hour
earlier than he had been accustomed. He was rejoiced
at last to help his master, who, in spite of his perplexed
pre-occupation, seemed to have a very fair appetite for
breakfast.
“Well, captain?” said Ben Zoof presently, such being
his ordinary way of opening conversation.
“Well, Ben Zoof?” was the captain's invariable response
to his servant's formula.
“What are we to do now, sir?”
“We can only for the present wait patiently where we
are. We are encamped upon an island, and therefore we
can only be rescued by sea.”
“But do you suppose that any of our friends are still
alive?” asked Ben Zoof
“Oh, I think we must indulge the hope that this
catastrophe has not extended far. We must trust that
it has limited its mischief to some small portion of the
Algerian coast, and that our friends are all alive and well.
No doubt the governor-general will be anxious to investigate
the full extent of the damage that has been done,
und will send a vessel from Algiers to explore. It is not
likely that we shall be forgotten. What, then, you have
to do, Ben Zoof, is to keep a sharp look-out, and to be
ready, in case a vessel should appear, to make signals at
once.”
“But if no vessel should appear!” sighed the orderly.
“Then we must build a boat, and go in search of those
who do not come in search of us.”
“Very good, captain. But what sort of a sailor are
you?”
“Every one can be a sailor when he must,” said Servadac
calmly.
Ben Zoof said no more. For several succeeding days
he scanned the horizon unintermittently with his telescope.
His watching was all in vain. No ship appeared
upon the desert sea.
“By the name of a Kabyle!” he broke out impatiently,
“his Excellency is grossly negligent!”
Although the days and nights had become reduced
from twenty-four hours to twelve. Captain Servadac would
not accept the new condition of things, but resolved to
adhere to the computations of the old calendar. Notwithstanding,
therefore, that the sun had risen and set twelve
times since the commencement of the new year, he persisted
in calling the following day the 6th of January.
His watch enabled him to keep an accurate account of
the passing hours. On a pendulum clock, the diminution
of atmospheric pressure would no doubt have caused a
large disturbance; but the spring of a good watch would
be insensibly affected by the change of condition, and,
once regulated to the new physical status, might be expected
to act with fair precision.
In the course of his life, Ben Zoof had read a few
books. After sitting pondering one day, he said—
“It seems to me, captain, that you have turned into
Robinson Crusoe, and that I am your man Friday. I hope
I have not become a nigger.”
“No,” replied the captain. “Your complexion isn't the
fairest in the world, but you are not a nigger yet.”
“Well, I had much sooner be a white Friday than a
black one,” rejoined Ben Zoof.
Still no ship appeared; and Captain Servadac, after
the example of all previous Crusoes, began to consider
it advisable to investigate the resources of his domain.
The new territory of which he had become the monarch
he named Gourbi Island. It had a superficial area of
about nine hundred square miles. Bullocks, cows, goats,
and sheep existed in considerable numbers; and as there
seemed already to be an abundance of game, it was hardly
likely that a future supply would fail them. The condition
of the cereals was such as to promise a fine ingathering of
wheat, maize, and rice; so that for the governor and his
population, with their two horses, not only was there ample
provision, but even if other human inhabitants besides
themselves should yet be discovered, there was not the
remotest prospect of any of them perishing by starvation.
From the 6th to the 13th of January the rain came
down in torrents; and, what was quite an unusual occurrence
at this season of the year, several heavy storms
broke over the island. In spite, however, of the continual
downfall, the heavens still remained veiled in cloud.
Servadac, moreover, did not fail to observe that for the
season the temperature was unusually high; and, as a
matter still more surprising, that it kept steadily increasing,
as though the earth were gradually and continuously
approximating to the sun.
In proportion to the rise of
temperature, the light also assumed greater intensity; and
if it had not been for the screen of vapour interposed
between the sky and the island, the irradiation which
would have illumined all terrestrial objects would have
been vivid beyond all precedent.
But neither sun, moon, nor star ever appeared; and
Servadac's irritation and annoyance at being unable to
identify any one point of the firmament may be more
readily imagined than described. On one occasion Ben
Zoof endeavoured to mitigate his master's impatience by
exhorting him to assume the resignation, even if he did
not feel the indifference, which he himself experienced;
but his advice was received with so angry a rebuff that
he retired in all haste, abashed, to resume his watchman's
duty, which he performed with exemplary perseverance.
Day and night, with the shortest possible intervals of rest,
despite wind, rain, and storm, he mounted guard upon
the cliff—but all in vain. Not a speck appeared upon the
desolate horizon. To say the truth, no vessel could have
stood against the weather. The hurricane raged with
tremendous fury, and the waves rose to a height that
seemed to defy calculation. Never, even in the second
era of creation, when, under the influence of internal heat,
the waters rose in vapour to descend in deluge back upon
the world, could meteorological phenomena have been
developed with more impressive intensity.
But by the night of the 13th the tempest appeared to
have spent its fury; the wind dropped; the rain ceased as
if by a spell; and Servadac, who for the last six days had
confined himself to the shelter of his roof, hastened to join
Ben Zoof at his post upon the cliff. Now, he thought, there
might be a chance of solving his perplexity; perhaps now
the huge disc, of which he had had an imperfect glimpse
on the night of the 31st of December, might again reveal
itself; at any rate, he hoped for an opportunity of observing
the constellations in a clear firmament above.
The night was magnificent. Not a cloud dimmed the
lustre of the stars, which spangled the heavens in surpassing
brilliancy, and several nebulae which hitherto no astronomer
had been able to discern without the aid of a telescope
were clearly visible to the naked eye.
By a natural impulse, Servadac's first thought was to
observe the position of the pole-star. It was in sight, but
so near to the horizon as to suggest the utter impossibility
of its being any longer the central pivot of the siderial
system; it occupied a position through which it was out of
the question that the axis of the earth indefinitely prolonged
could ever pass. In his impression he was more
thoroughly confirmed when, an hour later, he noticed that
the star had sensibly approached still nearer the horizon,
as though it had belonged to one of the zodiacal constellations.
The pole-star being manifestly, thus displaced, it
remained to be discovered whether any other of the
celestial bodies had become a fixed centre around which
the constellations made their apparent daily revolutions.
To the solution of this problem Servadac applied himself
with the most thoughtful diligence. After patient observation,
he satisfied himself that the required conditions
were answered by a certain star that was stationary not far
from the horizon. This was Vega, in the constellation
Lyra, a star which, according to the precession of the equinoxes,
will take the place of our pole-star 12,000 years
hence. The most daring imagination could not suppose
that a period of 12,000 years had been crowded into the
space of a fortnight; and therefore the captain came, as to
an easier conclusion, to the opinion that the earth's axis
had been suddenly and immensely shifted; and from the
fact that the axis, if produced, would pass through a point
so little removed above the horizon, he deduced the inference
that the Mediterranean must have been transported
to the Equator.
Lost in bewildering maze of thought, he gazed long and
intently upon the heavens. His eyes wandered from where
the tail of the Great Bear, now a zodiacal constellation,
was scarcely visible above the waters, to where the stars of
the southern hemisphere were just breaking on his view.
A cry from Ben Zoof recalled him to himself
“The moon!” shouted the orderly, as though overjoyed
at once again beholding what the poet has called—
“The kind companion of terrestrial night;”
and he pointed to a disc that was rising at a spot precisely
opposite the place where they would have expected to see
the sun.
“The moon!” again he cried.
But Captain Servadac could not altogether enter into
his servant's enthusiasm. If this were actually the moon,
her distance from the earth must have been increased by
some millions of miles. He was rather disposed to suspect
that it was not the earth's satellite at all, but some planet
with its apparent magnitude greatly enlarged by its approximation
to the earth. Taking up the powerful fieldglass
which he was accustomed to use in his surveying
operations, he proceeded to investigate more carefully the
character of the luminous orb. But he failed to trace any
of the lineaments, supposed to resemble a human face, that
mark the lunar surface; he failed to decipher any indications
of hill and plain; nor could he make out the aureole
of light which emanates from what astronomers have
designated Mount Tycho.
“It is not the moon,” he said, slowly.
“Not the moon?” cried Ben Zoof “Why not?”
“It is not the moon,” again affirmed the captain.
“Why not?” repeated Ben Zoof, unwilling to renounce
his first impression.
“Because there is a small satellite in attendance.”
And the captain drew his servant's attention to a bright
speck (apparently about the size of one of Jupiter's
satellites seen through a moderate telescope) that was
dearly visible just within the focus of his glass.
Here, then, was a fresh mystery. The orbit of the
planet was assuredly interior to the orbit of the earth,
because it accompanied the sun in its apparent motion;
yet it was neither Mercury nor Venus, because neither one
nor the other of these has any satellite at all.
The captain stamped and stamped again with mingled
vexation, agitation, and bewilderment.
“Confound it!” he cried, “if this is neither Venus nor
Mercury, it must be the moon; but if it is the moon,
whence, in the name of all the gods, has she picked up
another moon for herself?”
The captain was in dire perplexity.
