第21章 Fiat Lux!

The Vorloper and his little band had been gone nine days.What couldhave delayed them?Had men or animals formed an insurmountable obstacle?Why their delay?Was it to be concluded that Michel Zorn and William Emery had been completely stopped?Their friends hardly dared think they might be lost altogether.

The dread,the alternate feelings of hope and fear felt hour to hour by the astronomers imprisoned on the Scorzef,may well be imagined.Their colleagues had been gone for nine days,when in six or at most in seven they should have arrived at their destination.They were active,brave,and devoted to the cause of science.The success of the whole enterprise depended on their reaching the Volquiria peak;they knew it:they must have neglected no means of success.They could not be to blame for the delay.So if after nine days no beacon blazed out from the summit of the Volquiria,they must be either dead or the prisoners of some wandering tribe.

Such were the depressing reflections,the painful conjectures,formed in the minds of Colonel Everest and his companions.How impatiently they waited for the sun to disappear below the horizon,so as to renew their nightly watch!How careful they were!

All their hopes were centred on the eyepiece of the telescope which was to announce the presence of the distant light:their whole lives concentrated on its field of view.The whole of 3rd March they wandered up and down the mountain hardly exchanging a word,all impressed with the same idea,and suffering as they had never suffered before.No,neither the excessive heat of the desert,nor the fatigues of a daily march under the rays of a tropical sun,nor the agonies of thirst,had reduced them to such distress.

They had finished the last of the ant-eater,and they were now reduced to the insufficient nourishment supplied by the ant-hill.

Night came at last:there was no moon,the sky was clear,and very favourable for taking observations,but not a gleam,could be seen on the Volquiria.Colonel Everest and Matthew Strux took it by turns to watch until dawn,but nothing was visible,and the sun soon made observations impossible.

There still seemed to be nothing to fear from the natives.The Makololos seemed determined to reduce the garrison by famine,and they could not fail to succeed.On 4th March the prisoners on the Scorzef suffered torments from hunger,and their only resource was to chew the few bulbous roots growing in the fissures of the rocks on the mountainside.

Prisoners!No,not prisoners—for they could not be prisoners while the steam launch lay at anchor in the little bay,and could,at aword,take them across the Ngami to a fertile country where there was no lack of game,fruit,or vegetables!They had often thought of sending the hunter to the north shore to hunt for food,but the attempt would be seen by the natives,and it would be risking the launch,and consequently the safety of them all,should any other tribes happen to bar that shore.So this proposal was rejected:they must all retreat or all stay together.As to leaving the Scorzef without completing their task,such a suggestion had never been made.They must wait until every chance of success had disappeared.It was only a question of patience.They would be patient.

Colonel Everest reminded his companions‘When Arago,Biot and Rodriguez,’when they went to extend the meridian of Dunkirk to the Isle of Ivica,these savants were almost in a situation similar to ours.The question was how to connect the island with the Spanish coast by a triangle whose sides exceeded a hundred and twenty miles in length.The astronomer Rodriguez took up his lodging in one of the peaks on the island and kept the lamps alight,while the French savants lived under a tent more than a hundred miles away in the middle of the Las Palmas desert.‘For sixty nights Arago and Biot watched for the light,whose bearings they were anxious to ascertain.Discouraged,they were about to give up when,on the sixty-first night,a speck of light,which only its fixity kept from being mistaken for a star of the sixth magnitude,could be seen in the field of the telescope.Wait,for sixty-one nights!Well,gentlemen,what two French astronomers have done in the cause of science,cannot English and Russian astronomers do?’

The answer of the savants was a cheer;and yet they might have told Colonel Everest that neither Arago nor Biot was starving during their weary stay in the Las Palmas desert.

There was a stir that day among the Makololos encamped at the foot of the Scorzef,and their frequent coming and going made the bushman uneasy.Were they about to renew their assault on the mountain that night,or were they about to raise the siege?

Mokoum,after watching them attentively,came to the conclusion that some hostile movement was intended.The Makololos were getting their weapons ready.The women and children who had joined them had left the camp and were making for the east,under the escort of several guides.So it was quite possible that the besiegers were about to make a last attempt to carry the fortress before finally retreating to their capital,Makete.

The bushman warned the Europeans,who decided to keep a stricter watch all night,and to keep their arms in readiness.The number of assailants must be great;nothing could prevent several hundreds from attacking the sides of the Scorzef at once;the broken wall round the fort would easily admit a band of natives.So it seemed prudent to Colonel Everest to make arrangements in case they should have to retreat,and to abandon their station for a time.The steam launch was kept ready to get under weigh at a moment’s notice,and her engineer received orders to keep steam up.But he was to wait till sunset,so that the natives might not realise the existence of the steam launch on those waters.

The evening meal consisted of nuts and roots—very poor food for men on the eve of fighting for their lives.But they were determined.They were above all weakness and they waited fearlessly for the moment to come.

About six in the evening,when it became dark with the rapidity peculiar to inter-tropical regions,the engineer crept down the slopes of the Scorzef and set about getting up steam.It need not be said that Colonel Everest intended to retreat only if it became impossible to stay.It grieved him to abandon his observatory,especially at night,for at any moment Emery and Zorn might light their beacon on the Volquiria peak.

The other seamen were posted at the foot of the outer wall with orders to defend it to the last.Their arms were all ready,the mitrailleuse loaded and,with an ample supply of cartridges beside it,it projected its formidable barrels through the embrasure.They waited for several hours.

The Colonel and the Russian,posted in the narrow tower,and mounting guard by turns,kept continual watch on the summit of the peak visible in the telescope.The horizon kept dark,while the most beautiful constellations in the firmament were glittering above their heads.Not a breath stirred the air.This complete stillness of nature was very impressive.

Standing on a projecting piece of rock,the bushman was listening to the sounds rising from the plain.By degrees they became more distinct.Mokoum was right;the Makololos were getting ready to assault the Scorzef for the last time.

Until ten the assailants,did not stir.Their fires had been put out,and camp and plain were alike indistinguishable.All at once the bushman saw figures crawling along the sides of the mountain;the assailants were not more than a hundred yards from the terrace on which the fort stood.

‘Look out!Look out!’he cried.

The little garrison at once rushed forward,and began a wellsupported fire on the assailants.The Makololos replied by shouting their war-cry,and in spite of the incessant firing they continued to gain ground.By the flashes of musketry one could distinguish a swarm of natives,so dense indeed that all resistance seemed impossible.The bullets,not one of which was wasted,must have caused a frightful slaughter among them:scores of the Makololos fell,rolling over one another down the mountain.In the short intervals between the reports the besieged could hear them howling like wild beasts.But nothing stopped them.They still continued to climb in close order,never drawing a bow-they gave themselves no time for it-but determined to reach the summit of the Scorzef at any price.

Colonel Everest was fighting at the head of his men;his companions seconded him bravely,not even excepting Palander,who was handling a rifle for the first time in his life.Sir John was here at one moment,there at another,sometimes kneeling,sometimes lying down,firing at the enemy till his rifle became almost too hot to hold.As for the bushman,in this bloody struggle he had once more become the cool,patient hunter he was before.

The crowd of besiegers was rapidly occupying not only the southern face of the Scorzef,but all its side slopes,and notwithstanding the courage of the besieged,the sureness of their aim,and the rapidity of their fire,they could do nothing against the human torrent which was rising against them.If one native fell,there were twenty to take his place,and that was too much for a dozen Europeans.After fighting for half-an-hour Colonel Everest saw he would be outflanked.The bodies of the dead served as steps for the living flood of natives.Some of them made shields of the dead bodies,and thus protected climbed to the assault.All this,only momentarily seen by the flash of a rifle,was frightful and discouraging.The garrison knew well they had no quarter to expect from such enemies.It was an attack by wild beasts,these plunderers thirsting for blood,and worse than the most savage brutes of all Africa.Their ferocity even rivalled that of the tiger,which their continent does not boast.

At half-past ten the first of the natives reached the summit.The besieged dared not come to close quarters with them,and thus lose the advantage their arms gave them;so they sought shelter behind the wall.Fortunately they were all unhurt,for the Makololos had made no use of arrows or assegais.

‘Back!’the Colonel’s voice rose above the tumult of the fight.

And after a last volley the besieged,followed by their leader,retreated behind the walls of the fort.

Their withdrawal was followed by formidable shouts,and the natives at once appeared in front of the breach in the wall.

But suddenly a fearful sound,an immense rending noise,like the multiplied reports of an electric discharge,could be heard.It was the mitrailleuse operated by Sir John—those twenty-five barrels,reloaded auto-matically,covered with lead a surface of more than a hundred feet,on which the natives had crowded themselves.In an instant it was swept clear of every living enemy.The explosions were replied to by a tumult of yells,accompanied by a shower of arrows,which could do the besieged no harm.

‘It behaved well then,the darling,’the bushman commented;‘when you’re tired of playing a tune on it—’

But the mitrailleuse was silent.The Makololos had disappeared in search of cover from the shower of bullets;they had scattered to the sides of the fort,leaving the space in front of it covered with their dead.

During this moment’s respite what were Colenel Everest and Matthew Strux doing?They had gone back to their post in the tower,and there they were watching the Volquiria peak with their eyes glued to the telescope.Neither the yells nor the danger could move them;and when,after a short rest,the shouts of the Makololos told them the fight had recommenced,they took it in turn to stand by the precious instrument.

The struggle had broken out again.The mitrailleuse could not reach every native who appeared,howling his war-cry,before every gap in the wall.Yet the fight continued,hand to hand,for more than half-an-hour;the besieged,protected by their firearms,had received only a few scratches from the assegais.

It was at about half-past eleven when the struggle was at the hottest,amidst the din of the rifles and the yells of the natives,that Matthew Strux appeared before Colonel Everest;he seemed both delighted and scared—an arrow had gone through his hat and was quivering just above his head.

‘The beacon!The beacon!’—his eyes were sparkling with joy.

‘What!’exclaimed Colonel Everest,reloading his gun.

‘Yes,the beacon!’

‘You’ve seen it?’

‘Yes!’

The Colonel again fired his rifle,gave a shout of triumph,and rushed into the tower,followed by his intrepid comrade.

There he stooped down,his heart beating,to the eye-piece of the telescope and as he looked all his life seemed summed up in that moment.Yes,there was the beacon shining on the summit of the Volquiria!Yes!The last triangle had just found its apex!

It was wonderful to see the two savants at their work amid the uproar of the battle.The natives had at last forced their way through the wall,though the defenders disputed the ground step by step.The bullets,replied to the arrows of the Makololos,and the axe turned the thrust of the assegai;yet there were Colonel Everest and Matthew Strux bending over their instruments and noting down their observations.They made and corrected their calculations while Nicolas Palander,as impassive as ever,stood by and set down the results in his register.More than once an arrow flew over their heads and stuck in the tower wall,but still they kept their eyes on the Volquiria beacon,compared one instrument with the other,and verified the results.

Just as Matthew Strux had said‘One more observation’an enormous stone knocked the register out of Palander’s hands,struck one of the instruments,and smashed it.

But the observations had been completed!The bearings of the beacon had been calculated to the thousandth part of a second!

And now it was time to retreat so as to preserve the results of these glorious and wonderful labours.The natives were already in the casemate and might at any moment force their way into the tower.Colonel Everest and his companions once more seized their arms,while Palander grasped the precious register,and they retreated through the gap.There their companions were all assembled,some of them slightly wounded,ready to cover their retreat.

But just as they were about to go down the north side of the Scorzef—‘Our own signal!’cried Matthew Strux.

And the beacon light must be answered so that the men on the new station might ascertain the direction of the Scorzef,and no doubt they were anxiously waiting for it.

‘One effort more,’cried the Colonel.And while his friends drove the Makololos back,he entered the tower.This was a complicated construction of wood,and the timber of which it was made was so very dry that a spark would set it ablaze.The Colonel touched it off with some gunpowder;the wood began to crackle,and the Colonel,leaving the tower at once,rejoined his companions.

A few minutes later the Europeans climbed down the precipitous side of the Scorzef under a shower of arrows,letting down before them the mitrailleuse,which they would not abandon.Having once more repulsed the natives by their murderous fire,they reached the launch.

The engineer had obeyed orders and had got up steam.The hawser was cast off,the screw began to turn,and the Queen and Czar moved swiftly over the dark waters of the lake.Soon she was far enough out for the travellers to see the summit of the Scorzef.The tower was in a blaze,and its brilliant light must have been easily distinguished from the peak of the Volquiria.

The English and Russians saluted this gigantic torch with a loud cheer,as its flames were widely reflected on the lake.

William Emery and Michel Zorn would have nothing to complain of.

They had displayed a star,and they were answered by a sun.