第83章 What Is It?(2)

The extreme diffuseness of the light enabled me to see the smallest objects in the distant copses.I thought I saw-no,Ireally did see with my own eyes-immense,gigantic animals moving about under the mighty trees.Yes,they were truly gigantic animals,a whole herd of mastodons,not fossils,but living,and exactly like those discovered in 1801,on the marshy banks of the great Ohio,in North America.

Yes,I could see these enormous elephants,whose trunks were tearing down large boughs,and working in and out the trees like a legion of serpents.I could hear the sounds of the mighty tusks uprooting huge trees!

The boughs crackled,and the whole masses of leaves and green branches went down the capacious throats of these terrible monsters!

That wondrous dream,when I saw the antehistorical times revivified,when the Tertiary and Quaternary periods passed before me,was now realized!

And there we were alone,far down in the bowels of the earth,at the mercy of its ferocious inhabitants!

My uncle paused,full of wonder and astonishment.

"Come!"he said at last,when his first surprise was over,"Come along,my boy,and let us see them nearer.""No,"replied I,restraining his efforts to drag me forward,"we are wholly without arms.What should we do in the midst of that flock of gigantic quadrupeds?Come away,Uncle,I implore you.No human creature can with impunity brave the ferocious anger of these monsters.""No human creature,"said my uncle,suddenly lowering his voice to a mysterious whisper,"you are mistaken,my dear Henry.Look!look yonder!It seems to me that I behold a human being-a being like ourselves-a man!"I looked,shrugging my shoulders,decided to push incredulity to its very last limits.But whatever might have been my wish,I was compelled to yield to the weight of ocular demonstration.

Yes-not more than a quarter of a mile off,leaning against the trunk of an enormous tree,was a human being-a Proteus of these subterranean regions,a new son of Neptune keeping this innumerable herd of mastodons.

Immanis pecoris custos,immanior ipse!

The keeper of gigantic cattle,himself still more gigantic!

Yes-it was no longer a fossil whose corpse we had raised from the ground in the great cemetery,but a giant capable of guiding and driving these prodigious monsters.His height was above twelve feet.

His head,as big as the head of a buffalo,was lost in a mane of matted hair.It was indeed a huge mane,like those which belonged to the elephants of the earlier ages of the world.

In his hand was a branch of a tree,which served as a crook for this antediluvian shepherd.

We remained profoundly still,speechless with surprise.

But we might at any moment be seen by him.Nothing remained for us but instant flight.

"Come,come!"I cried,dragging my uncle along;and,for the first time,he made no resistance to my wishes.

A quarter of an hour later we were far away from that terrible monster!

Now that I think of the matter calmly,and that I reflect upon it dispassionately;now that months,years,have passed since this strange and unnatural adventure befell us-what am I to think,what am I to believe?

No,it is utterly impossible!Our ears must have deceived us,and our eyes have cheated us!we have not seen what we believed we had seen.No human being could by any possibility have existed in that subterranean world!No generation of men could inhabit the lower caverns of the globe without taking note of those who peopled the surface,without communication with them.It was folly,folly,folly!nothing else!

I am rather inclined to admit the existence of some animal resembling in structure the human race-of some monkey of the first geological epochs,like that discovered by M.Lartet in the ossiferous deposit of Sansan.

But this animal,or being,whichsoever it was,surpassed in height all things known to modern science.Never mind.However unlikely it may be,it might have been a monkey-but a man,a living man,and with him a whole generation of gigantic animals,buried in the entrails of the earth-it was too monstrous to be believed!