It is not possible, thought I, that the apes—though the effects of their claws and their perversity were visible everywhere—could have made themselves masters, either by surprise or force, of a garrison composed of brave sailors and excellent officers; that they could have massacred every living man among them, and have then installed themselves in their dwellings and appropriated all their uniforms, furniture, and flags.
Saïmira’s pressing solicitations to me to proceed prevented me from continuing my reflections, and ere many minutes had elapsed she and I had disappeared in the dense shade of a neighbouring wood, where we walked for more than three hours under the dark leaves of the banyans.
It was only after having seen me take refuge in a natural grotto formed of rocks clothed with thick moss and those thousand vegetable productions which cover the ground of Australia, that Saïmira decided to leave me. But before she departed, she gave me a look full of fear and compassion, an eloquent farewell, which I interpreted into an express recommendation to me not to leave my retreat.
Why did I not follow this advice? Simply because, after eight days’ seclusion in the grotto, I grew tired of it, and not even Saïmira’s attentive care, although she came to see me every day, could reconcile me to it. I shall never forget the efforts she made to raise her intelligence in some degree to the level of my own. She would caress me, would now and then sleep with her two little arms twined round my neck, or while I was asleep myself, would go and gather from the topmost branches of the trees fruit which she would place at the entrance to my retreat.
It was not alone weariness which decided me to leave my place of concealment, where I lived without doubt in security; my dignity as a man also urged me to this course. I was ashamed to be held, as it were, in check by certain inferior creatures, authority over whom nature has delegated to our race. Moreover, to pass my life in this grotto seemed an intolerable idea. I thought to myself that I must leave it some day or other, and that I might just as well leave it at once; and this is how it was I left.
I had been accustomed to roam some distance from my cave after nightfall, both for exercise and to seek for wood-pigeons’ eggs, which I cooked in a hole dug in the sand, at the bottom of which I was accustomed to make up a fire.
The matches which, being a smoker, I had about me when I was shipwrecked, enabled me to kindle a fire whenever I required one. Thanks to the leaden box which contained these matches, the sea water had not injured them in the slightest degree, whilst my tobacco, on the contrary, had suffered much.
On the last evening of my stay in the forest, while standing at the entrance of my grotto, I perceived, some distance off, a fire like that which I had seen the day following my shipwreck. Who is it, I asked myself, that lights up these great fires? It cannot be the work of apes, it must be done by men, and yet I dared no longer believe in their existence on this enigmatical island, since on this point I had been so often deceived. I directed my steps in a straight line towards the fire, which I imagined to be situated somewhere between my grotto and the sacked houses of the English station. In less than an hour-and-a-half’s walking, I found myself getting nearer and nearer to it, and when I was only some hundred paces off from it the ground, till then level, rose in a steep incline. The soil crumbled and rattled under my feet, and I concluded that I had reached the side of a volcano, and that I was walking over the old lava. This, however, did not astonish me, for I knew well enough that in nearly all the islands of Oceania there are volcanoes, either extinct or in a state of eruption. But how was it that I had observed these flames only on two occasions? How was it that they had disappeared to burst forth again after an interval of eight days? This was not in accordance with the usual course of these physical convulsions.
In a few minutes all my uncertainties ceased.
