A few passengers suddenly waking from sleep begin to run from the front car.
Suddenly there is an explosion and a shock. The train at first jumps back. Then it continues to move for about half a kilometre.
It stops.
Popof, the major, Caterna, most of the passengers are out on the line in an instant.
A network of scaffolding appears confusedly in the darkness, above the piers which were to carry the viaduct across the Tjon valley.
Two hundred yards further the train would have been lost in the abyss.
CHAPTER XXV.
And I, who wanted “incident,” who feared the weariness of a monotonous voyage of six thousand kilometres, in the course of which I should not meet with an impression or emotion worth clothing in type!
I have made another muddle of it, I admit! My lord Faruskiar, of whom I had made a hero—by telegraph—for the readers of the Twentieth. Century. Decidedly my good intentions ought certainly to qualify me as one of the best paviers of a road to a certain place you have doubtless heard of.
We are, as I have said, two hundred yards from the valley of the Tjon, so deep and wide as to require a viaduct from three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet long. The floor of the valley is scattered over with rocks, and a hundred feet down. If the train had been hurled to the bottom of that chasm, not one of us would have escaped alive. This memorable catastrophe—most interesting from a reporter’s point of view—would have claimed a hundred victims. But thanks to the coolness, energy and devotion of the young Roumanian, we have escaped this terrible disaster.