CHAPTER XVI.THE RESIDUUM OF A CONTINENT.
Almost unconsciously, the voyagers in the Dobryna fell
into the habit of using Gallia as the name of the new
world in which they became aware they must be making
an extraordinary excursion through the realms of space.
Nothing, however, was allowed to divert them from their
ostensible object of making a survey of the coast of the
Mediterranean, and accordingly they persevered in following
that singular boundary which had revealed itself to
their extreme astonishment.
Having rounded the great promontory that had barred
her farther progress to the north, the schooner skirted its
upper edge until it brought her to the bearings of the city
of Barcelona. But that busy port, with all the adjacent
coast, had disappeared, and the surf was beating against a
barrier of cliffs that seemed to have been upheaved a little
in the rear of the old sea-margin, and which, after a considerable
distance, took a sudden turn and rebutted into
the sea close to the proper site of Cape Creus.
Of Cape Creus, however, there was no vestige left.
A few more leagues and they ought to be abreast of
the shores of France. Yes, of France.
But who shall describe the feelings of Hector Servadac
when, instead of the charming outline of his native land, he
beheld nothing but a solid boundary of savage rock?
Who shall paint the look of consternation with which he
gazed upon the stony rampart—rising perpendicularly for
a thousand feet—that had replaced the shores of the
smiling south? Who shall reveal the burning anxiety
with which he throbbed to see beyond that cruel wall?
But there seemed no hope. Onwards and onwards the
yacht made her way, and still no sign of France. Cape
Beam was not there. Neither Port Vendres, nor the pools
of St. Nazaire and Salces, nor any other relic of the
Pyrénées-Orientales could be traced. The picturesque
Narbonne, beautiful with its alternate isles and lakelets,
was nowhere to be distinguished. Not a vestige of Cette
or of Frontignan could be recognized. The arrondissement
of Nismes no longer was seen projecting into the
waters of the Mediterranean. The estuary of the Rhone
had disappeared. Martignes was gone. Marseilles gone,
too. Was it not to be feared that France itself had been
annihilated?
It might have been supposed that Servadac's previous
experiences would have prepared him for the discovery
that the catastrophe which had overwhelmed other sites
had brought destruction to his own country as well But
he had failed to realize how it might extend to France;
and when now he was obliged with his own eyes to witness
the waves of ocean rolling over what once had been the
lovely shores of Provence, he was well-nigh frantic with
desperation.
“Am I to believe that Gourbi Island, that little shred
of Algeria, constitutes all that is left of our glorious France?
No, no; it cannot be. Not yet have we reached the pole
of our new world. There is—there must be—something
more behind that frowning rock. Oh, that for a moment
we could scale its towering height and look beyond! By
Heaven, I adjure you, let us disembark, and mount the
summit and explore! France lies beyond.”
Disembarkation, however, was an utter impossibility
There was no semblance of a creek in which the Dobryna
could find an anchorage. There was no outlying ridge on
which a footing could be gained. The precipice was
perpendicular as a wall, its topmost height crowned with
the same conglomerate of crystallized lamellae that had all
along been so pronounced a feature.
With her steam at high pressure, the yacht made rapid
progress towards the east. The weather remained perfectly
fine, the temperature became gradually cooler, so
that there was little prospect of vapours accumulating in
the atmosphere; and nothing more than a few cirri, almost
transparent, veiled here and there the clear azure of the
sky. Throughout the day the pale rays of the sun, apparently
lessened in its magnitude, cast only faint and somewhat
uncertain shadows; but at night the stars shone with
surpassing brilliancy. Of the planets, some, it was observed,
seemed to be fading away in remote distance. This
was the case with Mars, Venus, and that unknown orb
which was moving in the orbit of the minor planets; but
Jupiter, on the other hand, had assumed splendid proportions;
Saturn was superb in its lustre, and Uranus, which
hitherto had been imperceptible without a telescope, was
pointed out by Lieutenant Procope, plainly visible to the
naked eye. The inference was irresistible that Gallia was
receding from the sun, and travelling far away across the
planetary regions.
On the 24th of February, after following the sinuous
course of what before the date of the convulsion had been
the coast line of the department of Var, and after a
fruitless search for Hyeres, the peninsula of St. Tropez, the
Lérius Islands, and the gulfs of Cannes and Jouar, the
Dobryna arrived upon the site of the Cape of Antibes.
Here, quite unexpectedly, the explorers made the discovery
that the massive wall of cliff had been rent from the
top to the bottom by a narrow rift, like the dry bed of a
mountain torrent, and at the base of the opening, level
with the sea, was a little strand upon which there was just
space enough for their boat to be hauled up.
“Joy! joy!” shouted Servadac, half beside himself
with ecstasy; “we can land at last!”
Count Timascheff and the lieutenant were scarcely less
impatient than the captain, and little needed his urgent
and repeated solicitations—
“Come on! Quick! Come on! no time to lose!”
It was half-past seven a.m. when they set their foot
upon this untried land. The bit of strand was only a few
square yards in area, quite a narrow strip. Upon it might
have been recognized some fragments of that agglutination
of yellow limestone which is characteristic of the coast of
Provence. But the whole party was far too eager to wait
and examine these remnants of the ancient shore; they
hurried on to scale the heights.
The narrow ravine was not only perfectly dry, but
manifestly had never been the bed of any mountain torrent.
The rocks that rested at the bottom—just as those which
formed its sides—were of the same lamellous formation as
the entire coast, and had not hitherto been subject to the
disaggregation which the lapse of time never fails to work.
A skilled geologist would probably have been able to assign
them their proper scientific classification, but neither
Servadac, Timascheff, nor the lieutenant could pretend
to any acquaintance with their specific character.
Although, however, the bottom of the chasm had never
as yet been the channel of a stream, indications were not
wanting that at some future time it would be the natural
outlet of accumulated waters; for already, in many places,
thin layers of snow were glittering upon the surface of the
fractured rocks, and the higher the elevation that was
gained, the more these layers were found to increase in
area and in depth.
“Here is a trace of fresh water, the first that Gallia has
exhibited,” said the count to his companions, as they toiled
up the precipitous path.
“And probably,” replied the lieutenant, “as we ascend
we shall find not only snow but ice. We must suppose
this Gallia of ours to be a sphere, and if it is so, we must
now be very close to her Arctic regions; it is true that her
axis is not so much inclined as to prolong day and night
as at the poles of the earth, but the rays of the sun must
reach us here only very obliquely, and the cold, in all likelihood,
will be intense.”
“So cold, do you think” asked Servadac, “that animal
life must be extinct?”
“I do not say that, captain,” answered the lieutenant;
“for, however far our little world may be removed from the
sun, I do not see why its temperature should fall below
what prevails in those outlying regions beyond our system
where sky and air are not.”
“And what temperature may that be?” inquired the
captain with a shudder.
“Fourier estimates that even in those vast unfathomable
tracts the temperature never descends lower than
60°,” said Procope.
“Sixty! Sixty degrees below zero!” cried the count.
“Why, there's not a Russian could endure it!”
“I beg your pardon, count. It is placed on record
that the English have survived it, or something quite approximate,
upon their Arctic expeditions. When Captain
Parry was on Melville Island, he knew the thermometer to
fall to 56°.”
As the explorers advanced, they seemed glad to pause
from time to time, that they might recover their breath;
for the air, becoming more and more rarefied, made respiration
somewhat difficult and the ascent fatiguing. Before
they had reached an altitude of 600 feet they noticed a
sensible diminution of the temperature; but neither cold
nor fatigue deterred them, and they were resolved to persevere.
Fortunately, the deep striae or furrows in the surface
of the rocks that made the bottom of the ravine
in some degree facilitated their progress, but it was not
until they had been toiling up for two hours more that they
succeeded in reaching the summit of the cliff.
Eagerly and anxiously did they look around. To the
south there was nothing but the sea they had traversed;
to the north, nothing but one drear, inhospitable stretch.
Servadac could not suppress a cry of dismay. Where
was his beloved France? Had he gained this arduous
height only to behold the rocks carpeted with ice and
snow, and reaching interminably to the far-off horizon?
His heart sank within him.
The whole region appeared to consist of nothing but
the same strange, uniform mineral conglomerate, crystallized
into regular hexagonal prisms. But whatever was its
geological character, it was only too evident that it had
entirely replaced the former soil, so that not a vestige of
the old continent of Europe could be discerned. The
lovely scenery of Provence, with the grace of its rich and
undulating landscape; its gardens of citrons and oranges
rising tier upon tier from the deep red soil; its long
avenues of pepper-plants, mimosas, palm-trees, and eucalyptus;
its bowers of clambering geraniums, interspersed
with glowing gladioli and crowned with the clustering
yuccas; its rocks upon the shore, oxydized with the most
radiant of tints; and the mountains in the background,
clad in their vesture of dark conifers—all, all had vanished.
Of the vegetable kingdom, there was not a single representative;
the most meagre of Arctic plants, the most
insignificant of lichens, could obtain no hold upon that
stony waste. Nor did the animal world assert the feeblest
sway; no petrel, puffin, or guillemot could find a meal
upon that wide expanse of arid rock. The mineral kingdom
reigned supreme.
Captain Servadac's deep dejection was in strange contrast
to his general hilarity. Silent and tearful, he stood
upon an ice-bound rock, straining his eyes across the
boundless vista of the mysterious territory.
“It cannot be!” he exclaimed. “We must somehow
have mistaken our bearings. True, we have encountered
this barrier; but France is there beyond! Yes, France is
there! Come, count, come! By all that's pitiful, I entreat
you, come, and explore the farthest verge of the ice-bound
track!”
He pushed onwards along the rugged surface of the
rock, but had not proceeded far before he came to a sudden
pause. His foot had come in contact with something hard
beneath the snow, and, stooping down, he picked up a little
block of stony substance, which the first glance revealed
to be of a geological character altogether alien to the
universal rocks around. It proved to be a fragment of
discoloured marble, on which several letters were inscribed,
of which the only part at all decipherable was the syllable
“Vil.”
“Vil—Villa!” he cried out, in his excitement dropping
the marble, which was broken into atoms by the fall.
What else could this fragment be but the sole surviving
remnant of some sumptuous mansion that once had stood
on this unrivalled site? Was it not the residue of some
edifice that had crowned the luxuriant headland of
Antibes, overlooking Nice, and commanding the gorgeous
panorama that embraced the Maritime Alps and reached
beyond Monaco and Mentone to the Italian height of
Bordighera? And did it not give in its sad and too convincing
testimony that Antibes itself had been involved in
the great destruction?
Servadac gazed upon the shattered marble, pensive and
disheartened.
Count Timascheff laid his hand kindly on the captain's
shoulder, and said—
“My friend, do you not remember the motto of the old
Hope family?”
He shook his head mournfully.
“Orbe fracto, spes illœsa,” continued the count—“Though
the world be shattered, hope is unimpaired.”
Servadac smiled faintly, and replied that he felt rather
compelled to take up the despairing cry of Dante—
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”
“Nay, not so,” answered the count; “for the present
at least, let our maxim be Nil desperandum!”
