Five Weeks in a Balloon
“But the wind is carrying us directly over it,” replied Kennedy.
“Very well, we shall cross it then at a safe height!” said the doctor.
Three hours later, the _Victoria_ was right among the mountains. Her
exact position was twenty-four degrees fifteen minutes east longitude,
and four degrees forty-two minutes north latitude, and four degrees
forty-two minutes north latitude. In front of her a volcanic crater was
pouring forth torrents of melted lava, and hurling masses of rock to an
enormous height. There were jets, too, of liquid fire that fell back in
dazzling cascades—a superb but dangerous spectacle, for the wind with
unswerving certainty was carrying the balloon directly toward this
blazing atmosphere.
This obstacle, which could not be turned, had to be crossed, so the
cylinder was put to its utmost power, and the balloon rose to the
height of six thousand feet, leaving between it and the volcano a space
of more than three hundred fathoms.
From his bed of suffering, the dying missionary could contemplate that
fiery crater from which a thousand jets of dazzling flame were that
moment escaping.
“How grand it is!” said he, “and how infinite is the power of God even
in its most terrible manifestations!”
This overflow of blazing lava wrapped the sides of the mountain with a
veritable drapery of flame; the lower half of the balloon glowed redly
in the upper night; a torrid heat ascended to the car, and Dr. Ferguson
made all possible haste to escape from this perilous situation.
By ten o’clock the volcano could be seen only as a red point on the
horizon, and the balloon tranquilly pursued her course in a less
elevated zone of the atmosphere.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THIRD.
Joe in a Fit of Rage.—The Death of a Good Man.—The Night of watching by
the Body.—Barrenness and Drought.—The Burial.—The Quartz Rocks.—Joe’s
Hallucinations.—A Precious Ballast.—A Survey of the Gold-bearing
Mountains.—The Beginning of Joe’s Despair.
A magnificent night overspread the earth, and the missionary lay
quietly asleep in utter exhaustion.
“He’ll not get over it!” sighed Joe. “Poor young fellow—scarcely thirty
years of age!”
“He’ll die in our arms. His breathing, which was so feeble before, is
growing weaker still, and I can do nothing to save him,” said the
doctor, despairingly.
“The infamous scoundrels!” exclaimed Joe, grinding his teeth, in one of
those fits of rage that came over him at long intervals; “and to think
that, in spite of all, this good man could find words only to pity
them, to excuse, to pardon them!”
“Heaven has given him a lovely night, Joe—his last on earth, perhaps!
He will suffer but little more after this, and his dying will be only a
peaceful falling asleep.”
The dying man uttered some broken words, and the doctor at once went to
him. His breathing became difficult, and he asked for air. The curtains
were drawn entirely back, and he inhaled with rapture the light breezes
of that clear, beautiful night. The stars sent him their trembling
rays, and the moon wrapped him in the white winding-sheet of its
effulgence.
“My friends,” said he, in an enfeebled voice, “I am going. May God
requite you, and bring you to your safe harbor! May he pay for me the
debt of gratitude that I owe to you!”
“You must still hope,” replied Kennedy. “This is but a passing fit of
weakness. You will not die. How could any one die on this beautiful
summer night?”
“Death is at hand,” replied the missionary, “I know it! Let me look it
in the face! Death, the commencement of things eternal, is but the end
of earthly cares. Place me upon my knees, my brethren, I beseech you!”
Kennedy lifted him up, and it was distressing to see his weakened limbs
bend under him.
“My God! my God!” exclaimed the dying apostle, “have pity on me!”
His countenance shone. Far above that earth on which he had known no
joys; in the midst of that night which sent to him its softest
radiance; on the way to that heaven toward which he uplifted his
spirit, as though in a miraculous assumption, he seemed already to live
and breathe in the new existence.
His last gesture was a supreme blessing on his new friends of only one
day. Then he fell back into the arms of Kennedy, whose countenance was
bathed in hot tears.
“Dead!” said the doctor, bending over him, “dead!” And with one common
accord, the three friends knelt together in silent prayer.
“To-morrow,” resumed the doctor, “we shall bury him in the African soil
which he has besprinkled with his blood.”
During the rest of the night the body was watched, turn by turn, by the
three travellers, and not a word disturbed the solemn silence. Each of
them was weeping.
The next day the wind came from the south, and the balloon moved slowly
over a vast plateau of mountains: there, were extinct craters; here,
barren ravines; not a drop of water on those parched crests; piles of
broken rocks; huge stony masses scattered hither and thither, and,
interspersed with whitish marl, all indicated the most complete
sterility.
Toward noon, the doctor, for the purpose of burying the body, decided
to descend into a ravine, in the midst of some plutonic rocks of
primitive formation. The surrounding mountains would shelter him, and
enable him to bring his car to the ground, for there was no tree in
sight to which he could make it fast.
But, as he had explained to Kennedy, it was now impossible for him to
descend, except by releasing a quantity of gas proportionate to his
loss of ballast at the time when he had rescued the missionary. He
therefore opened the valve of the outside balloon. The hydrogen
escaped, and the _Victoria_ quietly descended into the ravine.
As soon as the car touched the ground, the doctor shut the valve. Joe
leaped out, holding on the while to the rim of the car with one hand,
and with the other gathering up a quantity of stones equal to his own
weight. He could then use both hands, and had soon heaped into the car
more than five hundred pounds of stones, which enabled both the doctor
and Kennedy, in their turn, to get out. Thus the _Victoria_ found
herself balanced, and her ascensional force insufficient to raise her.
Moreover, it was not necessary to gather many of these stones, for the
blocks were extremely heavy, so much so, indeed, that the doctor’s
attention was attracted by the circumstance. The soil, in fact, was
bestrewn with quartz and porphyritic rocks.
“This is a singular discovery!” said the doctor, mentally.
In the mean while, Kennedy and Joe had strolled away a few paces,
looking up a proper spot for the grave. The heat was extreme in this
ravine, shut in as it was like a sort of furnace. The noonday sun
poured down its rays perpendicularly into it.
The first thing to be done was to clear the surface of the fragments of
rock that encumbered it, and then a quite deep grave had to be dug, so
that the wild animals should not be able to disinter the corpse.
The body of the martyred missionary was then solemnly placed in it. The
earth was thrown in over his remains, and above it masses of rock were
deposited, in rude resemblance to a tomb.
The doctor, however, remained motionless, and lost in his reflections.
He did not even heed the call of his companions, nor did he return with
them to seek a shelter from the heat of the day.
“What are you thinking about, doctor?” asked Kennedy.
“About a singular freak of Nature, a curious effect of chance. Do you
know, now, in what kind of soil that man of self-denial, that poor one
in spirit, has just been buried?”
“No! what do you mean, doctor?”
“That priest, who took the oath of perpetual poverty, now reposes in a
gold-mine!”
“A gold-mine!” exclaimed Kennedy and Joe in one breath.
“Yes, a gold-mine,” said the doctor, quietly. “Those blocks which you
are trampling under foot, like worthless stones, contain gold-ore of
great purity.”
“Impossible! impossible!” repeated Joe.
“You would not have to look long among those fissures of slaty schist
without finding peptites of considerable value.”
Joe at once rushed like a crazy man among the scattered fragments, and
Kennedy was not long in following his example.
“Keep cool, Joe,” said his master.
“Why, doctor, you speak of the thing quite at your ease.”
“What! a philosopher of your mettle—”
“Ah, master, no philosophy holds good in this case!”
“Come! come! Let us reflect a little. What good would all this wealth
do you? We cannot carry any of it away with us.”
“We can’t take any of it with us, indeed?”
“It’s rather too heavy for our car! I even hesitated to tell you any
thing about it, for fear of exciting your regret!”
“What!” said Joe, again, “abandon these treasures—a fortune for
us!—really for us—our own—leave it behind!”
“Take care, my friend! Would you yield to the thirst for gold? Has not
this dead man whom you have just helped to bury, taught you the vanity
of human affairs?”
“All that is true,” replied Joe, “but gold! Mr. Kennedy, won’t you help
to gather up a trifle of all these millions?”
“What could we do with them, Joe?” said the hunter, unable to repress a
smile. “We did not come hither in search of fortune, and we cannot take
one home with us.”
“The millions are rather heavy, you know,” resumed the doctor, “and
cannot very easily be put into one’s pocket.”
“But, at least,” said Joe, driven to his last defences, “couldn’t we
take some of that ore for ballast, instead of sand?”
“Very good! I consent,” said the doctor, “but you must not make too
many wry faces when we come to throw some thousands of crowns’ worth
overboard.”
“Thousands of crowns!” echoed Joe; “is it possible that there is so
much gold in them, and that all this is the same?”
“Yes, my friend, this is a reservoir in which Nature has been heaping
up her wealth for centuries! There is enough here to enrich whole
nations! An Australia and a California both together in the midst of
the wilderness!”
“And the whole of it is to remain useless!”
“Perhaps! but at all events, here’s what I’ll do to console you.”
“That would be rather difficult to do!” said Joe, with a contrite air.
“Listen! I will take the exact bearings of this spot, and give them to
you, so that, upon your return to England, you can tell our countrymen
about it, and let them have a share, if you think that so much gold
would make them happy.”
“Ah! master, I give up; I see that you are right, and that there is
nothing else to be done. Let us fill our car with the precious mineral,
and what remains at the end of the trip will be so much made.”
And Joe went to work. He did so, too, with all his might, and soon had
collected more than a thousand pieces of quartz, which contained gold
enclosed as though in an extremely hard crystal casket.
The doctor watched him with a smile; and, while Joe went on, he took
the bearings, and found that the missionary’s grave lay in twenty-two
degrees twenty-three minutes east longitude, and four degrees
fifty-five minutes north latitude.
Then, casting one glance at the swelling of the soil, beneath which the
body of the poor Frenchman reposed, he went back to his car.
He would have erected a plain, rude cross over the tomb, left solitary
thus in the midst of the African deserts, but not a tree was to be seen
in the environs.
“God will recognize it!” said Kennedy.
An anxiety of another sort now began to steal over the doctor’s mind.
He would have given much of the gold before him for a little water—for
he had to replace what had been thrown overboard when the negro was
carried up into the air. But it was impossible to find it in these arid
regions; and this reflection gave him great uneasiness. He had to feed
his cylinder continually; and he even began to find that he had not