Chapter XVII: A Freak of Nature

Letting down his legs cautiously, Pierre tried the ground. The level bare soil reassured him: he stood upright. Searching the night with his glance, he made a few steps before him at random, trying to explore his surroundings. He realized that he was on a narrow platform of rock; some thirty yards below he thought he could see the bottom of the fissure revealed by a dark patch made by a clump of trees. A gentle slope led down to it. Crouching down, the young man felt the ground in front of him and found it covered with grass, and here and there spotted with patches of lichen. He made a gesture of satisfaction: it would be possible to walk without making a noise.

Undoing the rope which was round his body under the armpits, he returned to the foot of the rocky wall. He gave three quick jerks at equal intervals, the signal agreed upon, and an answer came to him in a few seconds: three answering jerks, which set the rope swinging, and while it was being slowly pulled up he leant his back against the wall of rock and waited.

The minutes passed. Around him silence reigned; opposite him the fires continued to burn, but now in order to see them he had to raise his head, and he estimated at a guess that he must be sixty yards above the level of the bottom of the crevasse. He also tried to calculate the height of the rock walls by recalling approximately the time he had taken in reaching the bottom; but he had no exact idea of the rate of his descent so that he gave that up. Moreover, violent emotion was keeping his ideas in a whirl, and although he compelled himself to remain calm his heart, haunted continually by the image of Wanda, beat wildly with an irregular feverish rhythm. She was there in the heart of this rocky mass which contained the temple, and of which these winking lights certainly indicated the entrance. His hands clenched, a shivering fit ran through him. How was he going to find her? For he was now certain of seeing her again. Concerning that he had no doubt whatever. This certainty had come to him suddenly, and took possession of him as an article of faith or an instinct which dominated him and concerning which there could be no argument. He was going to see her again! soon ... tomorrow ... in a few days perhaps, what would it matter! He would have again before him her subtle face, her luminous and tender eyes, her long pale hands and her warm lips, all of those lineaments, the exact image of which he treasured in the recesses of his memory.

A scraping above his head made him raise his eyes. He drove away the thought-phantom and called softly:

"Ravennes!"

The missionary's voice, discreetly muffled, came down to him:

"Here I am.... But what an oven! I can't see a yard in front of me...."

Pierre raised his arms and found the legs of the missionary.

"Let yourself go ... there ... that's right ... you're there."

Getting rid of the ropes which surrounded him, the priest whispered:

"Ouf! I thought I should never get here. Do you know how much rope is left unused up there? Less than thirty yards including the binding ropes of the elephants' pack-saddles. Two hundred and sixty yards of perpendicular depth. You were not very far out in your calculations."

A kind of deep joy seemed to animate him. His voice was full of restrained vibration. He drew himself up to his full height. Pierre heard his joints crack; he asked:

"You have left instructions with Ngur and Pâa?"

"Yes," said the missionary, "they are to pull up the rope as soon as I have given them the signal. There, that's done! Their orders are to remain continually on the edge of the cliff and wait for us. At a single revolver shot they are to send down the rope: at the second shot they are to haul it up. The mahouts will help them. That is for the day-time, but all night, and every night, the rope is to be left down. Three pulls is a signal that they are to haul up, two pulls, they are to send down provisions. This is to go on for fifteen days. If between now and then they have no news of us they are to return to the Post. They understood thoroughly, and on this point we can remain perfectly at ease. Anything new on your side?"

"Nothing," said Pierre. "The bottom of the crevasse lies at the foot of this short descent. Do you see that clump of trees, there, opposite? I think that the best thing we could do would be to make for it and wait for the day there."

The missionary peered into the darkness.

"Yes, I am beginning to see a little better ... your advice seems excellent, let us follow it at once: the dawn will not be long in breaking."

With his hand he brushed the rocky wall.

"Good," said he, "the rope is no longer here. They have begun to pull it up. Let us start."

Slowly trying out the ground with every step they made their way down towards the bottom of the ravine. The wet grass wound round their legs and made them stumble. The ground sloped gently, regularly, without obstacles. The thick silence was broken by no creaking of insects, no rustling of leaves, the air was motionless, heavy and stagnant.

They reached the threshold of the wood and made their way in. The darkness became even thicker around them: between the black trunks was a mass of tangled bushes, making a double layer of vegetation: on the top the trees with their bushy crowns forming a dome, and below, the compact undergrowth--a tangle of bushes, interlacing creepers and giant tree-ferns.

They advanced with the greatest difficulty, climbing between the bushes until their faces and their hands were scarred with scratches and the sweat rolled down them, often mingled with their blood. They took turns in carrying the bag which contained the three days' provisions which they had brought down with them from the plateau. From time to time, Pierre stopped and raised his head looking for the lights in the caves. And suddenly, as for perhaps the tenth time he searched, he saw them before him on the right. They had reached the west angle of the wood.

They stopped there for a considerable time, panting, unable to think, simply exhausted with the efforts that they had made.

In front of the thicket, and extending from the wood proper, some scattered shrubs pushed out. Their shadows made dark patches on the surface of a swamp, the fog arising from which prevented Lursac and Father Ravennes from seeing how far it stretched. They could see nothing whatever of the rest of their surroundings. The fog buried everything and stretched around the two men a pallid veil only pierced by the seven fires on the cliff. A faint sweet scent floated in the air.

Father Ravennes, seated by Pierre, fingered the trunk of a tree. He pulled off strips of bark and murmuring to himself turned them about and about. Pierre caught fragments of phrases.

"Strange!... I should have said it was the smell of the prickly Brazil tree ... hard, compact tissue ... sugary taste...."

Pierre saw him searching the ground around him.

"Flat seed pods, oblong, spongy, four seeds.... It certainly is ... the Brazil tree ... in the middle of the Moï country! But then? But then?..."

He had got up, a prey to violent agitation.

"What is it?" said Pierre. "What is the matter?"

The question of the young man seemed to pacify him suddenly. He sat down again.

"Ah!" said he, "I have just made a most astounding discovery: a tree essentially characteristic of the Brazilian flora, here, in Indo-China! Admit that there is something to be surprised about in that...."

Pierre, with his eyes passionately fixed on the lights of the cliff, remained indifferent to this botanical problem. His thoughts, circling about the caves, awoke in him contradictory and confused ideas, and he answered absent-mindedly:

"Truly remarkable!"

But the vague and careless voice showed no curiosity. Falling back into their silence they resumed their watch. The damp enwrapped them and made them shiver from time to time. The fatigue, stillness and silence weighed heavily upon them. A torpor stole upon them and overcame them. They slept heavily.

A shrill cry brought them to their feet at a bound facing each other. Some time had passed.... Some time ... minutes or hours? They did not know.

"Did you hear?" asked Pierre.

"Yes," said the priest, "it seemed to me...."

They took a few steps and listened. The silence was unbroken.... Looking about them they began to distinguish the details of the valley, above which now floated the dawn.

The light, clearer each minute, sucked up the fog and dissolved it, and the surroundings little by little stood revealed. Immediately in front of them the swamp stretched with its dead waters, its muddy banks marked out with giant grasses. It appeared large and triangular in shape, with its sharpest angle pointing towards the wood. Beyond, rising from the mist the whole depth of the ravine lay visible. Lursac and the missionary looked at it eagerly. It was very long, longer than they had believed. The wood in which they were, extended on their right and joined itself to the edge of a forest of which the dark solidly-packed frondage, filling the entire width of the valley, ran up against the cliffs on both sides and lost itself in the distance. On the left of the marsh spread a great grassy plain, seven or eight miles in length, dotted with thick copses and bristling with rocky masses: beyond it, a second forest stretched towards the south, strangled between the walls of the ravine, which there drew closer together until its further end was lost to sight beyond a turn in the rock.

The fog, drawn up by the sun, grew thinner and thinner, and the cliffs, revealed in their full height, were gradually clothed in the glory of the warm and luminous morning. Straight and sheer they fell perpendicularly into the valley, shutting it round with enormous unscalable walls. A little to the right of the marsh, about two hundred and fifty yards from the threshold of the first forest, the caves cut dark mouths in the rock. Pierre counted seven of them, grouped on the same level, close together. They were all dug in the face of the rock about fifty yards above the ground, with a gentle grass-covered slope leading up to them.

With his face stretched forward, and his eyes fixed eagerly on the cliff, the priest began to talk to himself.

"Yes, it's certainly that: Gneiss! ... a solid fragment of a prehistoric mountain-chain ... a whole block of the land of Gondwana.... Hairy elephants ... my tree of last night.... _Elephas primigenius_.... Brazilian tree...."

He followed Pierre, who had begun to go forward. While advancing, the young man explained:

"We will reach the forest and work along the edge of it. Taking advantage of the cover of the trees, we shall be able, without showing ourselves, to get near the caves and establish ourselves in their neighborhood to keep watch over them."

The missionary mechanically acquiesced.

"Yes, yes, excellent!"

But he was not listening. Absorbed in his own thoughts, he pulled feverishly at his beard.

"I know that I am not mistaken.... I know it.... Intuition stronger than reason tells me so. The truth is there, however extraordinary it may be."

They had reached the forest. The undergrowth being too scattered to hide them made it necessary for them to make their way well into it in order to seek the obscurity of its recesses. And as they pushed forward, the trees, at first slender, became larger and taller, and finally enormous, with an entirely changed appearance. The usual vegetation of the Moï country became rarer, altered in appearance and soon an entirely new flora, unknown to Pierre, took its place--an unfamiliar, astounding flora.

Stammering like a drunken man, Father Revenues named the different species as he recognized them, and with each one his agitation increased. He seemed to be struggling against some sort of internal excitement, and his face reflected a mixture of feelings--joy, terror and doubt.

"There ... yes: this enormous bulk of which the rust-covered trunk is perhaps fifty yards round and whose roots spread out over the soil.--Do you know what that is? No? A baobab!... Do you hear, Lursac! A baobab! The _Adamsonia digitata_ of the Soudan, of Darfour and of the Congo; the tree of such long life that it requires from six to ten thousand years to attain its full growth! And there ... there, on the right, that other giant, a mammoth among trees, a _Wellingtonia gigantea_, an extinct species which is preserved only in California on the Sierra Nevada where Lobb discovered them quite recently. This one is at least from four to five thousand years old ... and then look again further along. Yes, that one that looks like a palm tree with all its branches terminating in bunches of fleshy leaves stretched up towards the sky: a _Dracæna draco_ of the Canary Islands, a dragon tree, a more beautiful one and huger even than the specimen at Orotava, celebrated as that is for its size and its age: seven to eight thousand years!... Here again this shrub, an Australian _Banksia_!..."

He had caught Pierre by the arm, and was shaking him as he dragged him from one tree to another. He trembled, patting the wrinkled trunks and caressing them: the excitement which was stirring his whole being broke out in jumbled words, in short confused and unfinished phrases. He jumped from one idea to another in a whirl of excitement.

"Well, what have you got to say about it? Astounding, isn't it? Here in the middle of Indo-China, in the Moï country, at the bottom of this ravine, gathered side by side, not as fossils but alive, thoroughly alive ... specimens of Brazilian flora, trees of Africa, of America, of Australia and even of the Canary Islands! ... growing together as they did formerly ... as they did forty or fifty thousand years ago and perhaps very much earlier[15] when the remains of the great equatorial continent of Gondwana were still in being and the Brazilian-African plateau united in a single mass Central America, Africa, India, Arabia, Indo-China and Australia ... there is the _only_ explanation!... The explanation which several days ago I foresaw and had to face."

[Footnote 15: Father Ravennes was considerably out in his estimate. The continent of Gondwana of which he spoke dates from the first part of the secondary era in which the great Hercynian upheaval took place. The discovery of radium has given us a method of establishing the distance of that era from our time as about four million years. If we admit then that the Gondwana ravine discovered by Lursac and Ravennes only dated from the end of the secondary era it would be separated from the present day by the entire tertiary era and the beginning of the quaternary era in which we now are. According to the calculations of Dana, of Lord Kelvin and of Edmond Perrier, the tertiary era and what has elapsed of the quaternary make a total of at least one million five hundred thousand years.]

Violently he dug his heel into the ground.

"And now it forces itself upon us, bewilderingly, blindingly! However fantastic that may seem, this ground that we are standing on is the same--yes, the very same--as that which in the great geographical periods of the globe cradled the germs of life. We are mounting to the first ages of the world ... we are living backwards ... a great fragment of the past has risen before us, uncovering for us the first hours of Genesis!"

Pierre listened to him with bewilderment.

"The ancient strata of the secondary era," continued the missionary, "pushed aside by the Hercynian movement, and then later by the Alp-Himalayan upheaval, broke up and disappeared; but a vertical crack must have been produced here which the upheavals of succeeding times have left untouched, while around it the great secular changes have worn down mountain summits, parted continents, and dug the seas. This cleft in the rocks, preserved by I know not what mysterious destiny, has remained intact and been preserved unchanged!..."

He remained where he stood, turning round and round and stamping on the ground. Pierre took him by the arm and drew him aside.

"Come on," said he. "We have no time to lose if we want to reach the neighborhood of the caves before night."

The missionary followed him with docility. They continued their advance. The heat increased and became overwhelming. About midday they halted and hurriedly ate a few biscuits, resuming their journey immediately. They walked side by side without a word and finally it was Pierre who, after a long while, first broke the silence:

"Are you quite sure of that?" he asked.

The priest showed no surprise. He understood that the same thoughts were working in Pierre as in himself.

"Well," he confined himself to saying, "you have seen as much as I have!"

But as the young man made a vague gesture he immediately said:

"I know, I know.... Someone may have planted them, or at least have brought the seeds here. That is your idea!... You see that has already suggested itself to me. I thought of that at once when I found the Brazil tree ... as for that ... it was possible ... but for these others, the age of which varies from six to ten thousand years? The others! The baobabs ... the dragon-trees ... what does that lead to?... Who could have worked to make a sort of botanical garden in this out-of-the-way corner, a kind of forcing-bed for the flora of five continents? No, we are actually on the very land of Gondwana, on the ancient secondary soil."

A shudder shook him: his eyes flashed.

"And I am thinking," said he eagerly, "about the beings who have certainly lived here, of the monstrous reptiles and the prodigious birds that came from it, of the huge mammals and of all the crowd of gigantic beasts which today have disappeared!"

He gave a peculiar smile and continued immediately:

"Disappeared?... Not all of them! ... the invisible herd on the banks of the creek which prowled round our camp on the evening of our first arrival, that herd, one of the members of which Ngur described to me as an elephant with long hair and a mane, was nothing else than a herd of mammoths!"

A cry of stupefaction escaped from the young man:

"Living mammoths? You are crazy!"

The priest did not flinch. Quite calmly he assented.

"That's exactly what I said to myself when the thought came to me the first time with a shock.... I did not want to believe it.... I took it for granted that there must be a race of elephants as yet unknown. Then other ideas came to me which had already been rising obscurely at the back of my brain, other ideas which my successive discoveries have clarified and confirmed...."

"Other ideas?" said Pierre. "What ones?"

The missionary gave him a long look. He hesitated; then shook his head in token of refusal.

"No, don't ask me! In two cases already you have questioned me and each time I have asked you to wait: this will be the last time. Have patience yet for a few hours. I do not want to speak before being certain of what I say. I don't mind your believing me crazy! To change the subject, here we are at the end of the forest, and the further cliffs are before us. We have therefore crossed the entire width of the ravine. Now the question is to get near the caves."

Pierre turned about. Before them, running along almost at the foot of the cliff a hollow way under the trees stretched in a southerly direction. They turned and followed it. It wandered about, making sharp curves, going round swampy spots and avoiding rocky masses overgrown and buried in vegetation. Little by little the trees began to get smaller and shorter and thinned out. The path broadened and finally came to an end in an open circle surrounded by trees. Between the slim trunks they could see that the day was beginning to fade.

The two men hurried on. The tree-trunks became fewer and more scattered; masses of bushes succeeded to them. Gliding between these, Lursac and Father Ravennes came out opposite the left bank of the swamp. The failing light threw a mantle of softness over the valley, above which the clouds and mists stretched to the level plateau forming, as it were, a fleecy and delicate tent. The scene which they had observed at dawn they now saw from another angle. The marsh was not as big as they had thought it. Between it and the cliff in which the caves were a grassy way stretched as far as the plain: beyond that the second forest stood in a compact mass. Looking back, Pierre saw on his left the edge of the wood which they had quit some hours earlier. At the same time he made out the cliff down which they had come.

A hoarse cry suddenly forced itself from his throat.

"The scream ... the scream this morning!" He pointed out the wall of rock against which, halfway up, two corpses attached to a rope, _their_ rope doubtless, were hanging.

The missionary looked back swiftly and his face seemed to shrivel, it went white and his lips trembled.

"Ngur and Pâa," he murmured almost in a whisper.

The breeze, forerunner of the evening dusk, began to blow, making the trees rustle; while against the gray rock wall the naked bodies of the two guides swung gently. Above them on the edge of the plateau three elephants of gigantic proportions were walking in file; and against the mauve background of the sky their hairy bulk and their curved tusks showed up with extraordinary distinctness.

The missionary stretched his hand towards them.

"Mammoths!" said he, in a voice strangely calm.

But Pierre saw his hand tremble.