Jules Verne (30 page)

For the space of half a mile Dick Sand and his companions must march
over this spongy soil. It even became so bad that Mrs. Weldon was
obliged to stop, for she sank deep in the mire. Hercules, Bat, and
Austin, wishing to spare her the unpleasantness more than the fatigue
of a passage across this marshy plain, made a litter of bamboos, on
which she consented to sit. Her little Jack was placed in her arms,
and they endeavored to cross that pestilential marsh in the quickest
manner.

The difficulties were great. Acteon held Cousin Benedict firmly. Tom
aided Nan, who, without him, would have disappeared several times in
some crevice. The three other blacks carried the litter. At the head,
Dick Sand sounded the earth. The choice of the place to step on was
not made without trouble. They marched from preference on the edges,
which were covered by a thick and tough grass. Often the support
failed, and they sank to the knees in the slime.

At last, about five o'clock in the evening, the marsh being cleared,
the soil regained sufficient firmness, thanks to its clayey nature;
but they felt it damp underneath. Very evidently these lands lay below
the neighboring rivers, and the water ran through their pores.

At that time the heat had become overwhelming. It would even have
been unbearable, if thick storm clouds had not interposed between the
burning rays and the ground. Distant lightnings began to rend the sky
and low rollings of thunder grumbled in the depths of the heavens. A
formidable storm was going to burst forth.

Now, these cataclysms are terrible in Africa: rain in torrents,
squalls of wind which the strongest trees cannot resist, clap after
clap of thunder, such is the contest of the elements in that latitude.

Dick Sand knew it well, and he became very uneasy. They could not pass
the night without shelter. The plain was likely to be inundated, and
it did not present a single elevation on which it was possible to seek
refuge.

But refuge, where would they seek it in this low desert, without a
tree, without a bush? The bowels of the earth even would not give it.
Two feet below the surface they would find water.

However, toward the north a series of low hills seemed to limit the
marshy plain. It was as the border of this depression of land. A few
trees were profiled there on a more distant, clearer belt, left by the
clouds on the line of the horizon.

There, if shelter were still lacking, the little band would at least
no longer risk being caught in a possible inundation. There perhaps
was salvation for all.

"Forward, my friends, forward!" repeated Dick Sand. "Three miles more
and we shall be safer than in these bottom-lands."

"Hurry! hurry!" cried Hercules.

The brave black would have wished to take that whole world in big arms
and carry it alone.

Those words inspired those courageous men, and in spite of the fatigue
of a day's march, they advanced more quickly than they had done at the
commencement from the halting-place.

When the storm burst forth the end to be attained was still more than
two miles off. Now—a fact which was the more to be feared—the rain
did not accompany the first lightnings exchanged between the ground
and the electrical clouds. Darkness then became almost complete,
though the sun had not disappeared below the horizon. But the dome of
vapors gradually lowered, as if it threatened to fall in—a falling in
which must result in a torrent of rain. Lightnings, red or blue, split
it in a thousand places, and enveloped the plain in an inextricable
network of fire.

Twenty times Dick and his companions ran the risk of being struck by
lightning. On this plateau, deprived of trees, they formed the only
projecting points which could attract the electrical discharges. Jack,
awakened by the noise of the thunder, hid himself in Hercules' arms.
He was very much afraid, poor little boy, but he did not wish to let
his mother see it, for fear of afflicting her more. Hercules, while
taking great steps, consoled him as well as he could.

"Do not be afraid, little Jack," he repeated. "If the thunder comes
near us, I will break it in two with a single hand. I am stronger than
it!"

And, truly, the giant's strength reassured Jack a little.

Meanwhile the rain must soon fall, and then it would in torrents,
poured out by those clouds in condensing. What would become of Mrs.
Weldon and her companions, if they did not find a shelter?

Dick Sand stopped a moment near old Tom.

"What must be done?" said he.

"Continue our march, Mr. Dick," replied Tom. "We cannot remain on this
plain, that the rain is going to transform into a marsh!"

"No, Tom, no! But a shelter! Where? What? If it were only a hut—"

Dick Sand had suddenly broken off his sentence. A more vivid flash of
lightning had just illuminated the whole plain.

"What have I seen there, a quarter of a mile off?" exclaimed Dick
Sand.

"Yes, I also, I have seen—" replied old Tom, shaking his head.

"A camp, is it not?"

"Yes, Mr. Dick, it must be a camp, but a camp of natives!"

A new flash enabled them to observe this camp more closely. It
occupied a part of the immense plain.

There, in fact, rose a hundred conical tents, symmetrically arranged,
and measuring from twelve to fifteen feet in height. Not a soldier
showed himself, however. Were they then shut up under their tents, so
as to let the storm pass, or was the camp abandoned?

In the first case, whatever Heaven should threaten, Dick Sand must
flee in the quickest manner. In the second, there was, perhaps, the
shelter he asked.

"I shall find out," he said to himself; then, addressing old Tom:
"Stay here. Let no one follow me. I shall go to reconnoiter that
camp."

"Let one of us accompany you, Mr. Dick."

"No, Tom, I shall go alone. I can approach without being seen. Stay
here."

The little troop, that followed Tom and Dick Sand, halted. The young
novice left at once and disappeared in the darkness, which was
profound when the lightning did not tear the sky.

Some large drops of rain already began to fall.

"What is the matter?" asked Mrs. Weldon, approaching the old black.

"We have perceived a camp, Mrs. Weldon," replied Tom; "a camp—or,
perhaps, a village, and our captain wished to reconnoiter it before
leading us to it."

Mrs. Weldon was satisfied with this reply. Three minutes after, Dick
Sand was returning.

"Come! come!" he cried, in a voice which expressed his entire
satisfaction.

"The camp is abandoned?" asked Tom.

"It is not a camp," replied the young novice; "it is not a village.
They are ant-hills!"

"Ant-hills!" exclaimed Cousin Benedict, whom that word aroused.

"Yes, Mr. Benedict, but ant-hills twelve feet high, at least, and in
which we shall endeavor to hide ourselves."

"But then," replied Cousin Benedict, "those would be ant-hills of the
warlike termite or of the devouring termite. Only those ingenious
insects raise such monuments, which the greatest architects would not
disown."

"Whether they be termites or not, Mr. Benedict," replied Dick Sand,
"we must dislodge them and take their place."

"They will devour us. They will be defending their rights."

"Forward! Forward!"

"But, wait now!" said Cousin Benedict again. "I thought those
ant-hills only existed in Africa."

"Forward!" exclaimed Dick Sand, for the last time, with a sort of
violence. He was so much afraid that Mrs. Weldon might hear the last
word pronounced by the entomologist.

They followed Dick Sand with all haste. A furious wind had sprung up.
Large drops crackled on the ground. In a few moments the squalls of
wind would become unbearable. Soon one of those cones which stood on
the plain was reached. No matter how threatening the termites might
be, the human beings must not hesitate. If they could not drive the
insects away, they must share their abode.

At the bottom of this cone, made with a kind of reddish clay, there
was a very narrow hole. Hercules enlarged it with his cutlass in a few
moments, so as to give a passage even to a man like himself.

To Cousin Benedict's extreme surprise, not one of the thousands of
termites that ought to occupy the ant-hill showed itself. Was, then,
the cone abandoned?

The hole enlarged, Dick and his companions glided into it. Hercules
disappeared the last, just as the rain fell with such rage that it
seemed to extinguish the lightnings.

But those wind squalls were no longer to be feared. A happy chance had
furnished this little troop with a solid shelter, better than a tent,
better than a native's hut.

It was one of those termite cones that, according to Lieutenant
Cameron's comparison, are more astonishing than the pyramids of Egypt,
raised by the hands of men, because they have been built by such small
insects.

"It is," said he, "as if a nation had built Mount Everest, the highest
mountain of the Himalaya chain."

At this moment the storm burst with a violence unknown in temperate
latitudes.

It was providential that Dick Sand and his companions had found this
refuge!

In fact, the rain did not fall in distinct drops, but in streams of
various thickness. Sometimes it was a compact mass forming a sheet of
water, like a cataract, a Niagara. Imagine an aerial basin, containing
a whole sea, being upset. Under such showers the ground was hollowed
out, the plains were changed to lakes, the streams to torrents, the
rivers, overflowing, inundated vast territories. In temperate zones
the violence of the storms decreases according to their duration; but
in Africa, however heavy they are, they continue for several entire
days. How can so much electricity be collected in the clouds? How
can such quantities of vapor be accumulated? It is very difficult to
comprehend this. However, such are the facts, and one might suppose
himself transported to the extraordinary epochs of the diluvian
period.

Fortunately, the ant-cone, with its thick walls, was perfectly
impervious. A beaver's hut, of well-beaten earth, could not have been
more water-tight. A torrent could have passed over it without a single
drop of water filtering through its pores.

As soon as Dick Sand and his companions had taken possession of the
cone they occupied themselves in examining its interior arrangement.
The lantern was lighted, and the ant-hill was sufficiently
illuminated. This cone, which measured twelve feet in height inside,
was eleven feet wide, except in its upper part, which rounded in the
form of a sugar loaf. Everywhere the walls were about one foot in
thickness, and there was a distance between the stories of cells which
adorned them.

We may be astonished at the construction of such monuments, due to
these industrious swarms of insects, but it is true that they are
frequently found in the interior of Africa. Smeathman, a Dutch
traveler of the last century, with four of his companions, occupied
the top of one of these cones. In the Lounde, Livingstone observed
several of these ant-hills, built of reddish clay, and attaining a
height of fifteen and twenty feet. Lieutenant Cameron has many a time
mistaken for a camp these collections of cones which dotted the plain
in N'yangwe. He has even stopped at the foot of great edifices, not
more than twenty feet high, but composed of forty or fifty enormous
rounded cones, flanked with bell-towers like the dome of a cathedral,
such as Southern Africa possesses.

To what species of ant was due, then, the prodigious style of
architecture of these cones?

"To the warlike termite," Cousin Benedict had replied, without
hesitating, as soon as he had recognized the nature of the materials
employed in their construction.

And, in fact, the walls, as has been said, were made of reddish clay.
Had they been formed of a gray or black alluvian earth, they must have
been attributed to the "termes mordax" or the "termes atrox." As we
see, these insects have not very cheering names—a fact which cannot
but please a strong entomologist, such as Cousin Benedict.

The central part of the cone, in which the little troop had first
found shelter, and which formed the empty interior, would not have
contained them; but large cavities, in close contact, made a number
of divisions, in which a person of medium height could find refuge.
Imagine a succession of open drawers, and at the bottom of those
drawers millions of cells which the termites had occupied, and the
interior disposition of the ant-hill is easily understood. To sum up,
these drawers are in tiers, like the berths in a ship's cabin. In the
upper ones Mrs. Weldon, little Jack, Nan, and Cousin Benedict took
refuge. In the lower row Austin, Bat, and Acteon hid themselves. As
for Dick Sand, Tom, and Hercules, they remained in the lower part of
the cone.

"My friends," then said the young novice to the two blacks, "the
ground is becoming damp. We must fill it up by crumbling the red clay
from the base; but take care not to obstruct the hole by which the air
enters. We cannot risk being smothered in this ant-hill."

"We have only one night to spend here," replied old Tom.

"Well, let us try and make it recover us from our fatigue. This is the
first time in ten days that we have not to sleep in the open air."

"Ten days!" repeated Tom.

"Besides," added Dick Sand, "as this cone forms a solid shelter,
perhaps we had better stay here twenty-four hours. During that time, I
will go in search of the stream that we are in need of; it cannot be
very distant. I think that until we have constructed our raft, it will
be better not to quit this shelter. The storm cannot reach us here.
Let us make the floor stronger and dryer."

Dick Sand's orders were executed at once. Hercules, with his ax,
crumbled the first story of cells, which was composed of crisp red
clay. He thus raised, more than a foot, the interior part of the
swampy earth on which the ant-hill rested, and Dick Sand made sure
that the air could freely penetrate to the interior of the cone
through the orifice pierced at its base.