Читать книгу Voyage Beneath the Waves - Jules Rengade - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

THE MARVELOUS MACHINE

One Sunday morning, after mass, a man whose face appeared to be imprinted with a bleak sadness was making his way through the crowd in the main square of Calais.

All the people who noticed him looked at him with expressions of profound commiseration; some of them talked to one another about the misfortunes that had overtaken him; others came up to him respectfully to shake his hand and tell him how sorry they were for his troubles.

The man who was the object of so much sympathy was about fifty years old. His talents and inventive genius had won him a reputation for ten leagues around, and although he did not possess any medical qualification no one ever addressed him by any other title than “Doctor Trinitus.”

Unfortunately, like many poor and timid inventors. Trinitus had suffered a great deal from the jealousy and bad faith of his rivals. He had almost been financially ruined in trying to realize the machines and items of apparatus that he was incessantly imagining, and the scientific academies of Paris and London had turned a deaf ear to his communications.

The last blow that had struck him had completed his misfortune. His wife Thérèse, the daughter of a rich English family, and his daughter Alice, only eighteen years old, had perished in a shipwreck on their way to collect the immense fortune of a relative who had died six months earlier in Australia.

The insouciance of the English in undertaking long voyages is well-known. Trinitus, retained in France by important work on which he had founded great hopes, had not looked upon the departure of his wife and daughter without great apprehension, but he had been obliged to give in to the pleas and tears of the former and the reckless temperament of the latter.

At any rate, the two voyagers, perhaps driven as much by curiosity as by their financial interests, had departed, under the protection of Thérèse’s cousin, Sir William Hervey, the ship’s doctor on the Richmond, which was to take them to Botany Bay. As far as Timor, where the vessel has refueled, the crossing had been very pleasant, but it seemed that a storm must have assailed the ship in the Coral Sea, for the French steamer Espérance, returning from the Marquesas Islands, had discovered the wreckage of the Richmond some time afterwards on the coast of an island in the Louisiade Archipelago.

When he heard that terrible news, Trinitus was working mysteriously in his house, situated on the edge of the sea on the road to Gravelines, a short distance from Calais. The mental impact he had sustained was so intense that, for three or four days, it was feared that he might commit suicide in a fit of despair.

For a month he had remained indoors without seeing anyone, only listening to the consolations of Nicaise, a former mariner who had become his gardener, and whom he had adopted as a confidant.

Nicaise had a nephew named Marcel, about twenty-five years old, who was hoping to make a career in the merchant marine. Marcel had long felt a keen affection for Alice, Trinitus’ daughter, but, being too poor to aspire to her hand, he had always kept the passion that was devouring him secret. On learning about the wreck of the Richmond, he had initially experienced great anguish, but had eventually found in the terrible event a generous idea that gave birth in his heart to a previously-unimagined hope.

Thus, on the Sunday when Trinitus had finally emerged from his house to go to Calais, Marcel, perceiving him in the crowd, hastened to go to him. After having told the scientist how he shared his suffering, he asked him to accord him a few minutes’ conversation.

“Would you care to accompany me back to the house?” Trinitus asked him. “You’ll be able to see your Uncle Nicaise.”

Marcel accepted the offer enthusiastically.

Once they were outside the town, the young man, moved to tears, opened his heart to the scientist. “I’ve always hidden from you,” he told him, “the affection I experienced for Alice. Our situations were too far apart for me ever to be bold enough to ask you for her hand. If, however, saved by Providence, Alive were still alive, and if I were to have the honor of bringing her back to you one day, would you, in recompense for my devotion, give her to me as a wife?”

Two large tears escaped the scientist’s eyes. “Marcel,” he said, shaking the young man’s hand, “from now on I regard you as my soon. I’ve resolved to go in search of my child and my beloved Thérèse myself. If you’re not afraid to go with me, we can leave in four days.”

“In four days! That’s impossible…the English steamer doesn’t leave London until the end of the month, and it’s only the sixteenth today.”

“We shan’t wait for the steamer.”

“But how…?”

“We’ll depart in a vessel of my own invention.…”

“A vessel of your invention? To go to Australia?”

“The steamer takes a hundred and ten days to make the journey; we’ll only take two weeks.”

“What! Two weeks! Did you say two weeks?”

“And we’ll travel underwater, like the fish.”

On hearing these last words, Marcel uttered a cry of alarm and stopped, amazed.

Trinitus, attempting to smile, looked at him calmly. “I’m not mad,” he told him. “You’ll see my nutshell, and if you don’t have any confidence in her, you can take the steamer.…”

Trinitus’ strange proposal was utterly incomprehensible to Marcel. He looked at the scientist with a bewildered expression, not knowing how to respond, and wondering whether it was really possible, rationally, to make such inventions.

So, he said to himself, under the water, in a machine constructed by this man, we’re going to go from Calais to Australia, in the middle of Oceania? The very idea is insane! We’re two madmen, the scientist and I!

While devoting himself to these reflections, however the young man continued walking alongside Trinitus.

After an hour they arrived at the house and were greeted by Nicaise. The master of the house went to fetch the keys to his laboratory.

In the meantime, Marcel stayed in the garden with his uncle. “Tell me frankly,” he said to him, “is the doctor’s mind a little deranged?”

“Get away! You’re joking. Why do you ask?”

“He wants to take me to Australia, under water, in a fortnight.…”

Bewildered, Nicaise looked his nephew in the face. “What are you saying?” he said, dazedly.

“He’s built a boat capable of doing that…come on, you must know something about it?”

“A boat, you say? Hang on!” Nicaise’s face suddenly lit up. “For ten years we’ve been working on something of which I’ve only seen the separate parts. The doctor has assembled the machine himself, in secret, keeping it hidden in the big room adjacent to his laboratory. That must be the boat!”

At that moment Trinitus emerged from the house carrying a bunch of keys and headed toward the outbuilding in which he had set up his laboratory.

“Come on,” he said to Marcel, and then added: “You too, Nicaise.…”

He opened the door of his workshop, then that of the large room into which only he had entered for ten years, and he invited Nicaise and is nephew to come in. The intense darkness prevented anything from being discernible.

“I’ll switch the light on,” said Trinitus.

Immediately, four beams of light, as bright and dazzling as that of the sun, sprang from the four corners of the room. Marcel and his uncle, inundated by the glare, stepped back to the doorway, and uttered a double exclamation of surprise and admiration.

An enormous machine in shiny copper, as voluminous as a railway carriage, occupied the center of the room, which it partly filled. It was shaped like an immense egg, slightly flattened underneath and at the sides. Four large portholes made of extremely thick sheets of glass were integrated into its walls. As many large pallets, similar to fins, emerged from its flanks, and beneath the rudder set at the rear, the unparalleled boat was fitted with a helical propeller.

Marcel and Nicaise, their hands pressed together and their mouths open, gazed at the monstrosity.

Trinitus, proud of the astonishment into which they had been plunged, opened one of the portholes and climbed up on the footplate that had just been lowered therefrom.

“This is our carriage,” he said. “Come and look inside.”

The three men went into the machine and descended on to a horizontal floor set about forty centimeters below the widest diameter.

The interior side-walls, made of sheet metal coated with gutta-percha, extended like a dome overhead. A multitude of rings, buttons, knobs, each connected to some ingenious mechanism, protruded at various heights. Trinitus pointed them out to the two visitors.

“The whole secret of its control is there,” he told them. Then, indicating the floor, he added: “The engine producing the motive force of the boat is beneath our feet. It consists of enormous electric piles, furnishing a considerable quantity of electricity: large coils, a hundred times more powerful than Ruhmkorff’s. With the aid of the handle you can see over there, we can control them at our ease. By pressing the button alongside, we can light the electric lamp suspended overhead. By lifting up the trap-door that opens in the middle of the floor we can descend into the sea as easily as by means of a diving-bell, without a single drop of water getting into the ship. You’ll see that later.

“At present, take note of that iron rod protruding from the interior extremity of the vessel. It goes through the wall and projects a spike about three meters long outside. It’s an intelligent prow. When it strikes an obstacle, it recoils slightly, presses on a small spring, and the electricity immediately acts in a contrary direction; the ship retreats abruptly, in order to escape the danger. There’s no possibility of an accident. The windows, as you can see, are arranged in such a fashion that one can see what’s happening on all sides, and even above the boat.

“The hull, which is extremely solid, caused me a great deal of difficulty. It’s more than twenty meters thick, and yet it’s very light. Lined with copper externally, it’s formed of a primary envelope of oak, a layer of rubber ten centimeters thick, a second envelope of oak and a plate of metal covered in gutta-percha.

“This, my dear Marcel, is the whole of what I have to offer you.…”

The dazzled young man could have believed that he was in the power of an enchanter. The extraordinary machine seemed to him to be the work of a supernatural being. “Doctor,” he exclaimed, “Do with me as you will; I’m ready to follow you to the ends of the earth!”

Nicaise, however, who had learned to respect the dangers and caprices of the sea in his childhood, was not as easily enthused as his nephew by Trinitus’ “fish-boat.” A host of objections was crowding his skull, making him dread that the scientist’s dream was incapable of realization.

So, when the latter had concluded his explanations, the old mariner, shaking his head, said to him with assurance: “If I didn’t know you, Monsieur Trinitus, I’d think that the Devil had something to do with your machine—but I don’t believe that it will ever take you where you want to go.”

“Why is that, if you please, Master Nicaise?” the scientist asked.

“Because your boat is no bigger than a pill, and the tempest will swallow it whole.”

“Even the most violent tempest only agitates the sea to a feeble depth. It will rumble over our heads, but will never stir the layers of water through which we’re traveling.”

“Good idea—but is it only to be sheltered from tempests that you’ve devised this submarine boat?”

“Certainly not; it’s also in order not to have to worry about the wind, the tides, mists and fogs. I’ve constructed it with the thought that it might enable me to accomplish a strange voyage of which I’ve always dreamed.…”

“Really?” said Marcel.

“Yes. I wanted, with this boat, to reach and traverse the North Pole, passing under the ice.…”

“My God!” cried Nicaise. “You’re not afraid of anything! But merciful Heaven, when you’re at the bottom of the sea, enclosed in this calabash, how the devil will you get back up to the surface again?”

“Nicaise, my friend, have you never watched a fish swim? It has various ways of inclining and moving its fins, which permit it to move forwards or backwards, to maintain itself in equilibrium, to rise or descend—in brief, to move in every direction. Now, the pallets of my boat are nothing but fins. The nervous fluid that moves the organs of the fish is the electric fluid that makes my pallets function as I wish. What more do you want?”

“If you say so! But that’s not all. On what will you live in your prison?”

“On the food that we’ll take with us. It’s very nutritious in low doses, such as compressed beef, the meat extract prepared by the chemist Liebig,1 broth in tablet form, and so on.”

“And where will you get drinkable water?”

“We’ll restock sometimes; in addition, we’ll distill sea water, of which we’ll have plenty.”

“Yes, perhaps, but I’m still unconvinced. How will you breathe? You’ll run out of air very quickly.”

“My dear Nicaise, that problem was resolved a long time ago. We’ll manufacture air.…”

“Get away! Is that possible?”

“It’s child’s play. Air is made up of two gases, oxygen and nitrogen. They both penetrate the lungs together when we breathe, but only the oxygen in absorbed. The nitrogen comes out again as it went in; in consequence, the same quantity can serve indefinitely. It’s inexhaustible. Thus, we have only to attend to the manufacture of oxygen, and we have a hundred methods at our disposal. We could ourselves to decomposing potassium chlorate by means of heat; however, as we’d need to expend ten pounds of that salt per day, I thought that we ought also to have recourse to the decomposition of water by electricity. The oxygen obtained by that method will permit us to save three or four pounds of potassium chlorate per day, which isn’t to be disdained from the viewpoint of the loading of the boat.

“Furthermore, the decomposition of water by the pile will give us another very precious gas, because it can be burned to produce heat—that’s hydrogen. We’ll collect it separately and make use of it for heating and cooking. That’s it, as regards the manufacture of gases, but it’s not just a matter of creating them continuously; it’s also necessary to give some thought to their destruction.

“In our atmosphere, thus composed, we shall have an enemy, carbon dioxide, exhaled by the lungs. Oh well, it will be easy to get ride of it; we shall drown it in a solution of caustic potash. Carbon dioxide, having a very pronounced appetite for potassium, will precipitate itself thereinto of its own accord, and we’ll thus obtain a new chemical product, potassium carbonate, which might be useful to us on occasion.”

While Trinitus was talking, Nicaise’s face cleared rapidly. The theory of the manufacture of air had convinced him completely. “I’ve only one more thing to ask you, Doctor,” he said. “Will you permit me to go with you?”

“So you’re no longer afraid of tempests?”

“I don’t say that…but if we run into trouble en route, I know now that you’ll invent a machine that will take us straight to paradise.”

“Well then, join us. We’re leaving in four days, and we’ll start equipping the ship this evening.”

“Agreed! Things were no different in the time of fairy tales.”

“Fairies no longer exist today, my dear Nicaise. The good fairy is named Science and the bad one Ignorance.”

“Then let’s depart without fear!” exclaimed Marcel. “The good fairy is with us!”

Thanks to the feverish activity of Trinitus and his companions, the equipment of every sort necessary to the submarine voyage were loaded into the boat in three days.

Two special bunkers received the food-supplies. A complete laboratory of chemistry and photography was enclosed in a large trunk, along with ropes, glass and rubber tubing of various dimensions, and the instruments most useful to carpenters and mechanics.

Firearms, including two rifles, three shotguns and three six-shot revolvers, were suspended from the walls of the vessel. A crate lined with iron enclosed gunpowder, bullets and a few packets of lead shot.

A table surmounted by two shelves was placed in the vessel’s anterior concavity. On the shelves, Trinitus arranged the apparatus designed for the manufacture of oxygen, both by the decomposition of water and that of potassium chlorate. He also put the receptacle for hydrogen gas there and the jars containing caustic potash, reserving the table for chemical and culinary operations.

Finally, under the table he deposited all the fishing equipment and three-diving suits, indispensable to the travelers for descending from their boat into the sea.

At the other extremity of the cabin, below the lever controlling the rudder, next to the compass, Trinitus placed another small table, which served as a desk for a portable compass, a sextant, and excellent microscope, a few books and several large maps of the Atlantic and Oceania. He also suspended a mercury barometer at that location, and three good thermometers for the air and for the water.

Two folding chairs, two hammocks and a basket containing a few clothes completed the ship’s equipment.

All the preparations having been completed, the departure was set for the next day, at nightfall.

The excited voyagers met up again at two o’clock in the afternoon in Trinitus’ house. The scientist had spent the morning loading the enormous Daniel piles that were to power the boat with acidulated copper sulfate, and he had checked all his calculations one last time.

When Nicaise and Marcel presented themselves, dressed in woolen clothes and shod in tarred gaiters, the skillful technologist shook their hands effusively, and could not help a tear rolling down his cheek.

“My dear friends,” he said, “You have no fear of exposing yourselves, with me, to the thousand dangers that might perhaps await us; let me express all my gratitude, and to regard you from now on as beloved brothers.”

Nicaise and Marcel, their hearts swelling, stammered a few words and went back in with the scientist.

It had been decided that they would eat dinner before leaving, but their emotion was stronger than their appetite. At table, they only talked about the voyage, and especially the dear absentees of whom they were going in search.

Nicaise reminisced about the good Madame Thérèse; he recalled her excellent qualities one by one, saying how gentle, charitable and generous she was.

Marcel, for his part, spoke admiringly about Alice. What a charming child! What pretty eyes she had! What beautiful blonde hair! What a gracious smile!

Trinitus only contrived a few remarks through his tears. Where were they now, those poor beloved women? Had they survived the shipwreck? Perhaps, alas, fallen into the hands of some savage tribe, they were enduring the most atrocious torments!

At that terrible thought, the scientist’s face took on an expression of the most profound dolor. His fists clenched convulsively. He became annoyed with himself for not having left yet.

However, as dusk gradually fell, the three men got up, locked up the house and went to the laboratory.

Trinitus opened a huge door with two battens, separated from the sea by a terrace about thirty meters broad, and the scientist’s two companions understood that it was only necessary to push the machine to set it afloat immediately.

“The way is open!” said Trinitus. “There are little wheels under the boat; we only have to push.…”

“Come on, hard!” exclaimed Nicaise, and ran forward to be the first to lean on the propeller to launch the ship.”

“Off we go!” replied Trinitus and Marcel.

Immediately, a kind of frenzy took hold of the three travelers. The boat, pushed out of the laboratory with an incredible energy, traversed the terrace and slid gently on to the surface of the waves.…

Marcel and Nicaise, transported by enthusiasm, uttered a cry of admiration and surprise, and even Trinitus stood still momentarily in amazement.

“It’s splendid!” he cried.

At that moment, in fact, the moon illuminated the dome of the machine, making it shine like a ruby sphere, and the sky, reflected in the glass of its portholes, was reproduced there with its thousands of stars.

“I’ll embark first!” said Marcel.

“You next, Nicaise,” said Trinitus.

“I’d like that—but before then, I want to baptize the ship.”

“So be it!” said the scientist.

“Let’s call her the Éclair, since lightning is powering her.”

“That name suits her marvelously. We’ll make twenty-five leagues an hour, and tomorrow evening, God willing, we’ll be in the Azores.…”

1. The meat extract produced by Justus von Liebig’s Meat Extract Company, founded in 1865, was eventually trademarked as “Oxo.”