The Eternal Adam and other stories (39 page)

The road was cut
less than ten yards away from us. ‘Cut’ is the very word; it might have been
slashed with a knife. Beyond the sharp crest in which it ended, there was
emptiness, a shadowy gulf in whose depths it was impossible to distinguish
anything.

We turned round
bewildered, sure that our last hour had come. The ocean which had pursued us
even on to heights was bound to catch up with us in a few seconds...

Except for the
unhappy Anna and her daughters, who were sobbing as though their hearts were
breaking, we gave a cry of joyful surprise. No, the water was no longer moving
upwards, or, more precisely, the earth had stopped falling. The shaking we had
just felt had no doubt been the last manifestation of the phenomenon. The ocean
had halted, and its level was still nearly a hundred yards below the point
where we were grouped around our car, which was still throbbing, like an
anim
al
out of breath after a rapid run.

Shall we be able to get out of this
predicament? We cannot know until daybreak. Until then, we shall have to wait.
One after another we stretched ourselves out on the ground, and I think, God
forgive me, that I must have fallen asleep...

I am suddenly aroused by a
terrible noise. What time is it? I don’t know. Moreover, we are still drowned
in the shadows of night.

The noise is
coming from the impenetrable gulf into which the road has collapsed. What has
happened?... I could swear that masses of water were falling in cataracts, that
gigantic waves were violently crashing together... Yes, it must be that, for
swirls of foam are reaching us, and we are covered by the spray.

Then gradually calm returns... Silence
covers everything... The sky is getting lighter... It’s daybreak.

What agony, the
slow realisation of our actual position! At first we can distinguish only our
immediate surroundings, but the circle widens, grows ever wider, as if our
disappointed hopes were lifting one after another an infinite number of flimsy
veils; – and at last it is broad daylight, which dispels the last of our
illusions.

Our situation is
quite simple and can be summed up in a few words: we are on an island. The sea
surrounds us on every side. Yesterday we should have seen a whole ocean of
summits, several higher than the one on which we now find ourselves. These
summits have vanished while, for reasons which must remain forever unknown, our
own, though more humble, has been stopped in its gentle fall: in their place is
a boundless sheet of water. On all sides, nothing but the sea. We are occupying
the only solid point within the immense circle of the horizon.

A glance is
enough to reveal the whole extent of the islet upon which some extraordinary
chance has found us a refuge. It is indeed quite small: 1,000 yards long at
most, and 500 in the other direction. To north, west, and south, its crest,
rising only about a hundred yards above the waves, joins them by a fairly gentle
slope. To the east, on the other hand, the islet ends in a cliff falling
sheerly down into the ocean.

It is above all
to that side that we turn our eyes. In that direction we ought to see range
upon range of mountains, and beyond them the whole of Mexico. What a change in
the space of a short spring night! The mountains have vanished. Mexico has been
swallowed up! In their place is a boundless desert, the arid desert of the sea!

We stare at each other, terrified.
Penned up, without food, without drinking-water, on this bare narrow rock, we
cannot cherish even the faintest hope. We grimly lie down on the ground and set
ourselves to wait for death.

What happened
during the next few days? I can’t remember. Presumably I ended by at last
losing consciousness; I only came back to my senses on board the vessel which
picked us up. Then only did I learn that we had spent ten whole days on the
islet, and that two of our number, Williamson and Rowling, had died of hunger
and thirst. Of the fourteen people whom my home had sheltered at the moment of
the disaster, there were now only nine: my son Jean and my ward Hélène, my
chauffeur Simonat, inconsolable at the loss of his machine, Anna Raleigh and
her two daughters, Dr Bathurst and Dr Moreno – and lastly myself, I who hasten
to jot down these lines for the edification of future peoples, assuming, that
is, that they will ever be born.

The
Virginia,
which is carrying us, is a ‘mixed’ vessel – with steam and sails – of about2,000
tons, devoted to merchant traffic. She is a fairly old ship, rather a slow
sailer. Captain Morris has twenty men under his command; he and his crew are
English.

The
Virginia
left Melbourne under ballast a little over a month ago, sailing for Rosario. No
incident had marked her voyage except, on the night of May 24th, a series of
deep-sea waves rising to a prodigious height; but they were of a proportionate
length and this made them inoffensive. However strange they might be these
waves could not have forewarned the captain of the cataclysm which was taking
place at that time.

So he was amazed to find nothing
but the sea where he had expected to make Rosario and the Mexican coast. Of
that shore, there remained nothing but an islet. One of the
Virginia’s
boats put off to that islet, on which eleven inanimate bodies were found. Two
were only corpses; the nine others were taken on board. It was in this way we
were saved.

An interval of
eight months separates the last of the preceding lines from the first which
follow. I date these January or February because it is impossible to be more
precise, for I have no longer any exact notion of time.

These eight
months formed the most atrocious of our trials, those during which, getting
ever more strictly rationed, we realised the full extent of our misfortune.

After picking us
up, the
Virginia
cruised on at full steam towards the east. When I
regained my senses, the islet where we had barely escaped death had long been
below the horizon. According to our bearings, which the captain obtained from a
cloudless sky. we were then sailing exactly over the place where Mexico should
have been. But of Mexico there remained not a trace – no more than they had
been able to find, while I was unconscious, of its central mountains; no more
than any land whatever could be distinguished anywhere, no matter how far they
looked. Everywhere, nothing but the infinity of the sea.

The realisation
of this was indeed terrifying. We feared that our minds would give way. What! All
Mexico swallowed up!... We exchanged horrified glances, silently asking one
another how far the ravages of this frightful cataclysm extended...

Wishing to clear
this matter up, the captain steered towards the north: even if Mexico no longer
existed, it was unthinkable that this could be true of the whole continent of
America.

Yet true it was.
We cruised vainly northwards for twelve days without sighting land, nor did we
sight it when we put about and steered southwards for nearly a month. However
paradoxical it might appear, we had to give way to the evidence; yes, the whole
of the American continent had been engulfed by the waves!

Then had we been
saved only to experience the agonies of death a second time? We had certainly
good reason to fear so. Without speaking of the food, which would give out
sooner or later, a more urgent danger threatened us: what would become of us
when our engines came to a standstill for lack of fuel? So the heart of an
animal stops beating for lack of blood.

This was why, on
July 14th – we were then almost at the former position of Buenos Aires – Captain
Morris let the fires die out and hoisted the sails. That done, he mustered all
the personnel of the
Virginia,
passengers and crew, explained the
position to us in a few words, and asked us to think it over and to make any
suggestions we could at the council he meant to hold next day.

I do not know
whether any of my companions in misfortune could think of any more or less
ingenious expedient. For my part, I must admit. I was still hesitating, quite
uncertain what to suggest, when the question was settled by a tempest that
sprang up during the night. We had to fly westwards, swept along by a
tempestuous gale, always on the point of being swallowed up by a raging sea.

The hurricane lasted
thirty-five days, without a minute’s interruption, or even a momentary lull. We
were beginning to despair of its ever ending when, on August 19th, the fine
weather returned as suddenly as it had stopped. The captain seized the
opportunity to take our bearings: his calculations showed 40° north latitude
and 114° east longitude. These were the coordinates of Pekin!

Thus we had sped
over Polynesia, and perhaps even over Australia, without realising it. There,
where we were now floating, had once been the capital of an empire numbering
400 million souls!

Then Asia had
suffered the fate of America?

We were soon
convinced of this. The
Virginia,
still heading for the south-west,
reached the latitude of Tibet and then that of the Himalayas. Here ought to
have towered the highest summits of earth. Yet wherever we looked, nothing
emerged from the surface of the sea. We had to believe that there no longer
existed, anywhere on earth, any solid land other than the islet which had saved
us – that we were the only survivors of the cataclysm, the last inhabitants of
a world wrapped in the moving shroud of the sea!

If this were so,
it would not be long before we too in our turn would perish. In spite of our
strict rationing, our store of provisions was diminishing, and we had to give
up all hopes of renewing them...

I will not dwell
on the record of that frightful voyage. If, to describe it in detail, I were to
try to relive it day by day, its memory would drive me mad. However strange and
terrible were the events which preceded and followed it, however distressing
the future seems – a future which I shall never see – it was during that
infernal voyage that we reached the height of our fear.

Oh, that eternal
cruise over an endless sea! To expect every day to get somewhere, and to see
the end of the journey forever receding!

To live poring
over the maps on which human hands had traced the irregular line of the coast,
and to realise that nothing, absolutely nothing, remained of these lands which
had once been thought eternal! To tell ourselves that the earth, quivering with
innumerable lives, that the millions of men and the myriads of animals which
had traversed it in every direction or had soared through the air, had gone out
like a tiny flame in a breath of wind! To look everywhere for our fellows and
to look in vain! To become little by little convinced that nowhere around us
was any living thing, to realise ever more clearly our loneliness in the midst
of a pitiless universe!...

Have I found
words suitable for expressing my anguish? I do not know. In no language
whatever are there terms adequate for so completely unprecedented a situation.

After
ascertaining that where the Indian peninsula had once been the sea now flowed,
we headed to the north-west. Without the slightest change in our condition, we
crossed the Ural chain – which had now become a submarine range of mountains – and
sailed on over what once had been Europe. We then descended southwards, to
twenty degrees beyond the Equator. Next, weary of our fruitless search, we made
our way back towards the north and traversed, even over the Pyrenees, the sheet
of water which covered Africa and Spain.

To tell the
truth, we were beginning to get used to our terror. Wherever we went, we marked
our route on our charts, and said to one another: Here, this was Moscow...
Warsaw... Berlin Vienna... Rome... Tunis... Timbuctoo... St Louis... Or an...
Madrid...’ But we spoke with growing indifference, and, having become
habituated to it, we were at last able to pronounce these words, really so full
of tragedy, without the slightest emotion.

But so far as I
was concerned I had not yet exhausted my capacity for suffering. I can see it
still, that day – it was about December 11th – when Captain Morris told me
‘Here, this was Paris...’ At these words I felt that my heart was being torn
out. That the universe might be swallowed up, well and good. But France – my
France! – and Paris, which symbolised her!...

From beside me
came something like a sob. I turned round; it was Simonat who was weeping.

For another four
days we pushed on towards the north; then, having reached the latitude of
Edinburgh, we turned towards the south-west in search of Ireland, and then
towards the east... We were really wandering about at random, for there Was no
reason to go in one direction rather than in any other...

We sailed above
London, whose liquid tomb was saluted by the whole crew. Five days later, when
we were at the latitude of Danzig, the captain decided to go about and gave
orders that we were to head to the south-west. The helmsman obeyed passively.
What difference could that make to him? Wasn’t it the same on every side?...

It was when we
had sailed in that direction for nine days that we swallowed our last scrap of
biscuit.