第77章 Barrels!...Barrels!..(2)

I made him touch the mirrors and the iron tree and the branches and explained to him, by optical laws, all the luminous imagery by which we were surrounded and of which we need not allow ourselves to be the victims, like ordinary, ignorant people.

"We are in a room, a little room; that is what you must keep saying to yourself.And we shall leave the room as soon as we have found the door."And I promised him that, if he let me act, without disturbing me by shouting and walking up and down, I would discover the trick of the door in less than an hour's time.

Then he lay flat on the floor, as one does in a wood, and declared that he would wait until I found the door of the forest, as there was nothing better to do! And he added that, from where he was, "the view was splendid!" The torture was working, in spite of all that I had said.

Myself, forgetting the forest, I tackled a glass panel and began to finger it in every direction, hunting for the weak point on which to press in order to turn the door in accordance with Erik's system of pivots.This weak point might be a mere speck on the glass, no larger than a pea, under which the spring lay hidden.

I hunted and hunted.I felt as high as my hands could reach.

Erik was about the same height as myself and I thought that he would not have placed the spring higher than suited his stature.

While groping over the successive panels with the greatest care, I endeavored not to lose a minute, for I was feeling more and more overcome with the heat and we were literally roasting in that blazing forest.

I had been working like this for half an hour and had finished three panels, when, as ill-luck would have it, I turned round on hearing a muttered exclamation from the viscount.

"I am stifling," he said."All those mirrors are sending out an infernal heat! Do you think you will find that spring soon?

If you are much longer about it, we shall be roasted alive!"I was not sorry to hear him talk like this.He had not said a word of the forest and I hoped that my companion's reason would hold out some time longer against the torture.But he added:

"What consoles me is that the monster has given Christine until eleven to-morrow evening.If we can't get out of here and go to her assistance, at least we shall be dead before her!

Then Erik's mass can serve for all of us!"And he gulped down a breath of hot air that nearly made him faint.

As I had not the same desperate reasons as M.le Vicomte for accepting death, I returned, after giving him a word of encouragement, to my panel, but I had made the mistake of taking a few steps while speaking and, in the tangle of the illusive forest, I was no longer able to find my panel for certain! I had to begin all over again, at random, feeling, fumbling, groping.

Now the fever laid hold of me in my turn...for I found nothing, absolutely nothing.In the next room, all was silence.We were quite lost in the forest, without an outlet, a compass, a guide or anything.Oh, I knew what awaited us if nobody came to our aid...

or if I did not find the spring! But, look as I might, I found nothing but branches, beautiful branches that stood straight up before me, or spread gracefully over my head.But they gave no shade.

And this was natural enough, as we were in an equatorial forest, with the sun right above our heads, an African forest.

M.de Chagny and I had repeatedly taken off our coats and put them on again, finding at one time that they made us feel still hotter and at another that they protected us against the heat.I was still making a moral resistance, but M.de Chagny seemed to me quite "gone."He pretended that he had been walking in that forest for three days and nights, without stopping, looking for Christine Daae!

From time to time, he thought he saw her behind the trunk of a tree, or gliding between the branches; and he called to her with words of supplication that brought the tears to my eyes.And then, at last:

"Oh, how thirsty I am!" he cried, in delirious accents.

I too was thirsty.My throat was on fire.And, yet, squatting on the floor, I went on hunting, hunting, hunting for the spring of the invisible door...especially as it was dangerous to remain in the forest as evening drew nigh.Already the shades of night were beginning to surround us.It had happened very quickly:

night falls quickly in tropical countries...suddenly, with hardly any twilight.

Now night, in the forests of the equator, is always dangerous, particularly when, like ourselves, one has not the materials for a fire to keep off the beasts of prey.I did indeed try for a moment to break off the branches, which I would have lit with my dark lantern, but I knocked myself also against the mirrors and remembered, in time, that we had only images of branches to do with.

The heat did not go with the daylight; on the contrary, it was now still hotter under the blue rays of the moon.I urged the viscount to hold our weapons ready to fire and not to stray from camp, while I went on looking for my spring.

Suddenly, we heard a lion roaring a few yards away.

"Oh," whispered the viscount, "he is quite close!...Don't you see him?...There...through the trees...in that thicket!

If he roars again, I will fire!..."

And the roaring began again, louder than before.And the viscount fired, but I do not think that he hit the lion; only, he smashed a mirror, as I perceived the next morning, at daybreak.We must have covered a good distance during the night, for we suddenly found ourselves on the edge of the desert, an immense desert of sand, stones and rocks.

It was really not worth while leaving the forest to come upon the desert.Tired out, I flung myself down beside the viscount, for I had had enough of looking for springs which I could not find.

I was quite surprised--and I said so to the viscount--that we had encountered no other dangerous animals during the night.

Usually, after the lion came the leopard and sometimes the buzz of the tsetse fly.These were easily obtained effects; and Iexplained to M.de Chagny that Erik imitated the roar of a lion on a long tabour or timbrel, with an ass's skin at one end.