Across the Zodiac (2 page)

"I have," I answered, "an intense interest in all occult phenomena;
believing in regard to alleged magic, as the scientists say of
practical science, that every one branch of such knowledge throws
light on others; and if there be nothing in your story which it is
personally painful to relate, you need not be silenced by any
apprehension of discourteous criticism on my part."

"I assure you," he said, "I have no such wish now to tell the story as
I had at first. It is now associated with the most painful incident of
my life, and I have lost altogether that natural desire for sympathy
and human interest in a matter deeply interesting to myself, which,
like every one else, I felt at first, and which is, I suppose, the
motive that prompts us all to relate often and early any occurrence
that has keenly affected us, in whatever manner. But I think that I
have no right to suppress so remarkable a fact, if by telling it I can
place it effectually on record for the benefit of men sensible enough
to believe that it may have occurred, especially since somewhere in
the world there must yet exist proof that it did occur. If you will
come to my rooms in — Street tomorrow, Number 999, I will not
promise, but I think that I shall have made up my mind to tell you
what I have to tell, and to place in your hands that portion of the
evidence which is still at my command—evidence that has a
significance of its own, to which my experience is merely episodical."

I spent that evening with the family of a friend, one of several
former officers of the Confederacy, whose friendship is the one
permanent and valuable result of my American tour. I mentioned the
Colonel's name, and my friend, the head of the family, having served
with him through the Virginian campaigns, expressed the highest
confidence in his character, the highest opinion of his honour and
veracity; but spoke with bitter regret and pain of the duels in which
he had been engaged, especially of one which had been fatal; remarking
that the motive in each instance remained unknown even to the seconds.
"I am sure," he said "that they were not, could not have been, fought
for the one cause that would justify them and explain the secrecy of
the quarrel—some question involving female honour or reputation. I
can hardly conceive that any one of his adversaries could have called
in question in any way the personal loyalty of Colonel A—; and, as
you remarked of General M—, it is too absurd for a man who had
faced over and over again the fire of a whole brigade, who had led
charges against fourfold numbers, to prove his personal courage with
sword or pistol, or to think that any one would have doubted either
his spirit or his nerve had he refused to fight, whatever the
provocation. Moreover, in each case he was the challenger."

"Then these duels have injured him in Southern opinion, and have
probably tended to isolate him from society?"

"No," he replied. "Deeply as they were regretted and disapproved, his
services during the war were so brilliant, and his personal character
stands so high, that nothing could have induced his fellow-soldiers to
put any social stigma upon him. To me he must know that he would be
most welcome. Yet, though we have lived in the same city for five
years, I have only encountered him three or four times in the street,
and then he has passed with the fewest possible words, and has neither
given me his address nor accepted my urgent invitations to visit us
here. I think that there is something in the story of those duels that
will never be known, certainly something that has never been guessed
yet. And I think that either the circumstances in which they must have
had their origin, or the duels themselves, have so weighed upon his
spirits, perhaps upon his conscience, that he has chosen to avoid his
former friends, most of them also the friends of his antagonists.
Though the war ruined him as utterly as any of the thousands of
Southern gentlemen whom it has reduced from wealth to absolute
poverty, he has refused every employment which would bring him before
the public eye."

"Is there," I asked, "any point of honour on which you could suppose
him to be so exceptionally sensitive that he would think it necessary
to take the life of a man who touched him on that point, though
afterwards his regret, if not repentance, might be keen enough to
crush his spirit or break his heart?"

The General paused for a moment, and his son then interposed—

"I have heard it said that Colonel A— was in general the least
quarrelsome of Confederate officers; but that on more than one
occasion, where his statement upon some point of fact had been
challenged by a comrade, who did not intend to question his veracity
but simply the accuracy of his observation, their brother officers had
much trouble in preventing a serious difficulty."

The next day I called as agreed upon my new-found friend, and with
some reluctance he commenced his story.

"During the last campaign, in February 1865, I was sent by General Lee
with despatches for Kirby Smith, then commanding beyond the
Mississippi. I was unable to return before the surrender, and, for
reasons into which I need not enter, I believed myself to be marked
out by the Federal Government for vengeance. If I had remained within
their reach, I might have shared the fate of Wirz and other victims of
calumnies which, once put in circulation during the war, their
official authors dared not retract at its close. Now I and others,
who, if captured in 1865, might probably have been hanged, are neither
molested nor even suspected of any other offence than that of
fighting, as our opponents fought, for the State to which our
allegiance was due. However, I thought it necessary to escape before
the final surrender of our forces beyond the Mississippi. I made my
way to Mexico, and, like one or two Southern officers of greater
distinction than myself, entered the service of the Emperor
Maximilian, not as mere soldiers of fortune, but because, knowing
better than any but her Southern neighbours knew it the miserable
anarchy of Mexico under the Republic, we regarded conquest as the one
chance of regeneration for that country, and the Emperor Maximilian as
a hero who had devoted himself to a task heroic at once in its danger
and difficulty—the restoration of a people with whom his house had a
certain historical connection to a place among the nations of the
civilised world. After his fall, I should certainly have been shot had
I been caught by the Juarists in pursuit of me. I gained the Pacific
coast, and got on board an English vessel, whose captain—loading for
San Francisco—generously weighed anchor and sailed with but half a
cargo to give me a chance of safety. He transferred me a few days
afterwards to a Dutch vessel bound for Brisbane, for at that time I
thought of settling in Queensland. The crew was weak-handed, and
consisted chiefly of Lascars, Malays, and two or three European
desperadoes of all languages and of no country. Her master was barely
competent to the ordinary duties of his command; and it was no
surprise to me when the first storm that we encountered drove us
completely out of our course, nor was I much astonished that the
captain was for some days, partly from fright and partly from drink,
incapable of using his sextant to ascertain the position of the ship.
One night we were awakened by a tremendous shock; and, to spare you
the details of a shipwreck, which have nothing to do with my story, we
found ourselves when day broke fast on a coral reef, about a mile from
an island of no great size, and out of sight of all other land. The
sextant having been broken to pieces, I had no means of ascertaining
the position of this island, nor do I now know anything of it except
that it lay, in the month of August, within the region of the
southeast trade winds. We pulled on shore, but, after exploring the
island, it was found to yield nothing attractive to seamen except
cocoa-nuts, with which our crew had soon supplied themselves as
largely as they wished, and fish, which were abundant and easily
caught, and of which they were soon tired. The captain, therefore,
when he had recovered his sobriety and his courage, had no great
difficulty in inducing them to return to the ship, and endeavour
either to get her off or construct from her timbers a raft which,
following the course of the winds, might, it was thought, bring them
into the track of vessels. This would take some time, and I meanwhile
was allowed to remain (my own wish) on
terra firma
; the noise, dirt,
and foul smells of the vessel being, especially in that climate,
intolerable.

"About ten o'clock in the morning of the 25th August 1867, I was lying
towards the southern end of the island, on a little hillock tolerably
clear of trees, and facing a sort of glade or avenue, covered only
with brush and young trees, which allowed me to see the sky within
perhaps twenty degrees of the horizon. Suddenly, looking up, I saw
what appeared at first like a brilliant star considerably higher than
the sun. It increased in size with amazing rapidity, till, in a very
few seconds after its first appearance, it had a very perceptible
disc. For an instant it obscured the sun. In another moment a
tremendous shock temporarily deprived me of my senses, and I think
that more than an hour had elapsed before I recovered them. Sitting
up, somewhat confused, and looking around me, I became aware that some
strange accident had occurred. In every direction I saw such traces of
havoc as I had witnessed more than once when a Confederate force
holding an impenetrable woodland had been shelled at random for some
hours with the largest guns that the enemy could bring into the field.
Trees were torn and broken, branches scattered in all directions,
fragments of stone, earth, and coral rock flung all around.
Particularly I remember that a piece of metal of considerable size had
cut off the tops of two or three trees, and fixed itself at last on
what was now the summit of one about a third of whose length had been
broken off and lay on the ground. I soon perceived that this
miraculous bombardment had proceeded from a point to the
north-eastward, the direction in which at that season and hour the sun
was visible. Proceeding thitherward, the evidences of destruction
became every minute more marked, I might say more universal. Trees had
been thrown down, torn up by the roots, hurled against one another;
rocks broken and flung to great distances, some even thrown up in the
air, and so reversed in falling that, while again half buried in the
soil, they exposed what had been their undermost surface. In a word,
before I had gone two miles I saw that the island had sustained a
shock which might have been that of an earthquake, which certainly
equalled that of the most violent Central American earthquakes in
severity, but which had none of the special peculiarities of that kind
of natural convulsion. Presently I came upon fragments of a shining
pale yellow metal, generally small, but in one or two cases of
remarkable size and shape, apparently torn from some sheet of great
thickness. In one case I found embedded between two such jagged
fragments a piece of remarkably hard impenetrable cement. At last I
came to a point from which through the destruction of the trees the
sea was visible in the direction in which the ship had lain; but the
ship, as in a few moments I satisfied myself, had utterly disappeared.
Reaching the beach, I found that the shock had driven the sea far up
upon the land; fishes lying fifty yards inland, and everything
drenched in salt water. At last, guided by the signs of
ever-increasing devastation, I reached the point whence the mischief
had proceeded. I can give no idea in words of what I there found. The
earth had been torn open, rooted up as if by a gigantic explosion. In
some places sharp-pointed fragments of the coral rock, which at a
depth of several feet formed the bed of the island, were discernible
far below the actual surface. At others, the surface itself was raised
several feet by
dèbris
of every kind. What I may call the
crater—though it was no actual hole, but rather a cavity torn and
then filled up by falling fragments—was two or three hundred feet in
circumference; and in this space I found considerable masses of the
same metallic substance, attached generally to pieces of the cement.
After examining and puzzling myself over this strange scene for some
time, my next care was to seek traces of the ship and of her crew; and
before long I saw just outside the coral reef what had been her
bowsprit, and presently, floating on the sea, one of her masts, with
the sail attached. There could be little doubt that the shock had
extended to her, had driven her off the reef where she had been fixed
into the deep water outside, where she must have sunk immediately, and
had broken her spars. No traces of her crew were to be seen. They had
probably been stunned at the same time that they were thrown into deep
water; and before I came in sight of the point where she had perished,
whatever animal bodies were to be found must have been devoured by the
sharks, which abounded in that neighbourhood. Dismay, perplexity, and
horror prevented my doing anything to solve my doubts or relieve my
astonishment before the sun went down; and during the night my sleep
was broken by snatches of horrible dreams and intervals of waking,
during which I marvelled over what I had seen, scarcely crediting my
memory or my senses. In the morning, I went back to the crater, and
with some tools that had been left on shore contrived to dig somewhat
deeply among the
debris
with which it was filled. I found very
little that could enlighten me except pieces of glass, of various
metals, of wood, some of which seemed apparently to have been portions
of furniture; and one damaged but still entire relic, which I
preserved and brought away with me."

Here the Colonel removed a newspaper which had covered a portion of
his table, and showed me a metallic case beaten out of all shape, but
apparently of what had been a silvery colour, very little rusted,
though much soiled. This he opened, and I saw at once that it was of
enormous thickness and solidity, to which and to favouring
circumstances it owed its preservation in the general ruin he
described. That it had undergone some severe and violent shock there
could be no question. Beside the box lay a less damaged though still
seriously injured object, in which I recognised the resemblance of a
book of considerable thickness, and bound in metal like that of the
case. This I afterwards ascertained beyond doubt to be a metalloid
alloy whereof the principal ingredient was aluminium, or some
substance so closely resembling it as not to be distinguishable from
it by simple chemical tests. A friend to whom I submitted a small
portion broken off from the rest expressed no doubt that it was a kind
of aluminium bronze, but inclined to believe that it contained no
inconsiderable proportion of a metal with which chemists are as yet
imperfectly acquainted; perhaps, he said, silicon; certainly something
which had given to the alloy a hardness and tenacity unknown to any
familiar metallurgical compound.