My chain of cheerful prophecy here got a sudden set back. As I looked at the largest stone in the crack, it split across. In spiderlike ramifications cracks multiplied upon it. It fell apart into rubble. Finally only dust filled the crevice. The rocks were closing even as they had opened. A stratum cleavage was here. It worked uneasily in the travail of the mountain behind—yawning in weariness of the constant convulsions. Now in the rest following the upheaval it was settling together again.
As I stood and pondered these things another eruption roared in the crater mouth. The ground rocked uneasily beneath my feet; I stumbled to my knees. With a snap the jaws of the cliff closed, nothing remaining but the ragged dent where the edges had been riven. As I scrambled to my feet a shrill yell re-echoed above the closing roar of the earthquake. I turned hastily to see a funny sight.
Down the lower slopes of the crag we had camped upon rolled a round object; it emitted screams of the most piercing description, and advanced with gathering speed. I recognized the gorgeous sleeping-suit affected by Lessaution, and the eye-searing yellow tassel of his nightcap. They made a vivid flash of meteoric color down the sombre rocks.
The little savant was scrabbling at the stone stairway as he fled along, tearing unavailingly at clumps of lichen, and snatching at the loose boulders. These last he had managed to set moving in some quantity, and they enveloped him in a clattering halo of pebbles that grew in velocity and in volume. The clamor of his onset was prodigious. He revolved like a catherine-wheel. His expressive countenance glared witheringly out into space during the curt moments it was uppermost, returning with a baffled air to face the earth as he flew swiftly round. His little legs threshed desperately into emptiness. Finally with a preposterous bounce he dropped over a ledge some four feet high, and swept out from the crag foot amid his escort of boulders, squirming fearfully.
Choking back my laughter I ran to him with an expression of deepest solicitude. Before I reached him he had risen, and groaning pathetically, began to slap himself about the more outlying portions of his person, slipping his hand from limb to limb delicately, and cursing with fluency as bruise after bruise became manifest. Fortunately his injured shoulder had been well swathed in lint, and showed no signs of having broken out again.
He explained that he was murdered in effect—yes, he had no whole bone in his body. The horrible boulders had mangled him into a fricassee. He would be tender eating for M. le Dinosaure, to whom his remains would be welcome. He, Emil Saiger Lessaution, had for them no further use—no, in their present unbelievable state they would be of no slightest good. He was one large weal. I might figure to myself that, seeing me below, he had started down to join me. After the disgusting sulphurous stenches of the night before, he had had the intention to smell the freshness of the sea. Thus, when he was half-way down, behold the earthquake had swept him from his feet. Engulfed in tumultuous rubble he had been borne down the cliff as in a torrent. His skin was obtused to the baring of the flesh, and his joints—yes, his joints, let it be observed—strained as by a rack. A thousand thunders! These tremblings of the earth were affrighting. For him—he did not care when he left so unsafe a region.
I armed him gently up the ascent to where the rest of our party—also aroused by the eruption—were watching us. I surrendered him into the hands of Rafferty, who, on the strength of the possession of a case of sticking-plaster, had constituted himself surgeon to the ship’s company. From his hands the Professor emerged a few minutes later, with an intricate pattern decking his features, to receive the full sympathy of us all.
After this we proceeded to breakfast, with certain apprehensions of what might happen in the way of further earthquakes, but still with moderate appetite. There was one slight rocking of the ground, but it did not so much as upset a tumbler, and we concluded that the worst was, for the present, over.
As the morning drew on we descended to the ship to examine her plight. She was leaning over at an angle of forty-five degrees, propped by the edge of the crevasse. Her keel was straining at the splinters jammed in the narrows of the opening. She lay so that her bulge almost covered the chamber in the rock. The hot fumes were still rising from below, smelling, for all the world, like the baths at Aix.
We got aboard and went down into the saloon. Everything was in the wildest disorder. The table, being screwed to the floor, was still unmoved, but everything else was piled in heaps between the floor and the lockers. Hardly a bit of crockery but had its crack or two, and many of the plates and glasses were broken outright. In the hold the bilge was leaking through her strained sides, dripping down the rocks against which she leaned. Not a rat squeaked or scampered in this—their usual stronghold—and their damp footprints were visible leading away from the ship. Evidently this dry dock was not to their liking.