The page containing the foregoing was complete. I eagerly turned over a new leaf to commence the following one, but there was not another line to be seen, not a trace of writing on the page. The admiral’s journal, which I hoped would extend to another fifty pages at least, suddenly ended there. Eh! not a word respecting the fête! Not a word more on the poignard stuck by its point in the sand! Not a word about the return of the Tagals! Good Heaven, what sudden misfortune could have crushed the pen and the noble hand which held it? But what about the Malay pirates and their fleet? And what about the Halcyon? Nothing! absolutely nothing! A sinister blank followed the last line penned by the worthy vice-admiral. What had happened to the colony of Kouparou, and to the admiral himself, since this last entry in his journal? There was no one to answer me. When there was not silence there was desolation, houses partially destroyed, and their contents turned topsy-turvy; savage and vindictive animals wearing, as though with the raillery of a low vengeance, the habiliments of the gallant officers of a noble vessel belonging to the most powerful nation in the world.
CHAPTER X.
A hundred bottles of champagne not worth a glass of water.—My clothes leave me.—I commence the combat.—Great fight of a man against an island full of apes.—The verandah about to fall.—It does not last any longer.—A skin saves me.
For the remainder of the day my haggard eyes, reflecting my troubled mind, hovered over the last lines of this journal, which I pictured to myself as terminating in a description of a fête and a general massacre. But who could have committed this massacre? Hardly the Malays, for they stay to plunder, and there had evidently been no pillage of the station. The only other supposition which flashed across my mind seemed a great deal too absurd to be seriously entertained—no, I could not believe that a conspiracy of apes, although my life depended upon them at the present moment, could have been guilty of so atrocious a crime.
Night came, and it was positively hideous to me with nightmares, hallucinations, and sudden shocks of alarm, which awoke me out of my sleep. By daylight, when I became a little less agitated, I said to myself that if all the people belonging to the station had been assassinated in some mysterious way, I should at least have come across their remains, since, according to my calculations, it was now July, and the journal finished in June, so that a month had elapsed since this outrage was committed.
This very reasonable idea having entered my head, I considered over the facts mentioned in Lord Campbell’s journal, and arrived step by step at the following conclusions:—