After having examined my provisions, I believed in the possibility of spending at least three years in this vault without dying of hunger and thirst. But at the end of fifteen days of this existence, insipid and monotonous as sleep, I found myself exposed to an intolerable suffering produced by the exceptional kind of life which I was leading. But before I say anything further about this unforeseen calamity, I have to speak of another misery by which I was beset. My poor clothes, which had been in rags for a long time past through their owner’s tribulations, had one fine day the coolness to leave me entirely. As I had neither needle nor thread to draw the rags together again, I was obliged to resign myself to going about perfectly naked.
The inconvenience was great, for we had just entered on the season when the nights were damp and frequently as cold as they are in Europe, and I had nothing whatever to cover me. The apes had taken possession of every scrap of clothing and every vestige of drapery. Joined to the scantiness of my Adamite costume, this change in the temperature affected my health. I had excessive pains in the joints, accompanied by a low fever which would not leave me. The graver inconvenience of which I have to speak is this. I have already said that water was not abundant in the offices of the verandah. In the first few days the deprivation of this natural necessary affected me but little. I drank the different wines contained in the cases and hampers. These wines, as I have already mentioned, were very powerful, and the necessity of quenching one’s thirst exclusively with these ardent liquids without the moderating admixture of water parched up my throat to that extent that I was always thirsty, and the more I drank the more thirsty I became. How could I appease this thirst? Ah! with how much delight I would have given a hundred bottles of champagne for a single glass of water! For an entire fortnight I endured this suffering, which became every hour more poignant; the crisis, however, was approaching; my tongue was as dry as a piece of leather, my eyes were swollen and bloodshot, my hands were burning with fever, my brain throbbed against my skull.
In my lucid moments I demonstrated to myself how very false our tastes are in our artificial life of civilisation. People in a certain position would never condescend to drink water, despised water, and yet partaking continuously for a fortnight of the best wines and rarest liquors had almost made me mad. Since this painful passage of my existence I have always had a religious respect for rivers, and I admire the Hindoos, who rightly regard the Ganges, my beautiful Indian river, as sacred.
With my blood heated by fever, and driven to extremities by suffering, I darted one day up the staircase which led to Admiral Campbell’s study, opened the cupboard containing the arms, and loaded the thirty fowling-pieces which I found there; I then carried them with the packets of ammunition to the bell-tower, where I proceeded to break two panes of glass in the turret, so as to make loopholes of them. This done, and vowing the death of my adversaries or else my own, I place myself in a position to open fire against those who prevent my obtaining water from the lake, the beautiful blue of which I could perceive in the distance.
But what an unexpected spectacle met my sight through the loopholes of my tower, which would become a redoubt in a few seconds’ time! I had left two or three thousand apes on the watch on the day when I descended from it, with the intention of never again re-ascending. To-day they are increased to twenty thousand at the very least! But who could pretend to count them? As well try to count the insects swarming in the ocean of space on a summer’s evening under the line! A month ago the apes had gathered near them only some insignificant heaps of stones; now these heaps have increased to that enormous extent that they are perfect hills of projectiles, placed, too, so close to one another that they have raised, as it were, the field of battle and the camp of the besiegers to the highest point of the verandah. The bell-tower, which formerly overlooked everything, is now itself overlooked. Instead of being elevated above all around, it is depressed.
But no matter! I determine to open fire; and I do so, letting fly right into the midst of this mass of living creatures. I had loaded each gun with six small bullets, so that at the first fire I knock over an ourang-outang, a mandrill, and a baboon; what besides I know not. It was necessary that I should kill, and I do kill. I seize with a like frenzy another gun, and fire with the same result; I make gaps in their line twenty-four feet in extent. But at the moment when, drunk with my heroic slaughter, I am about to fire my third gun, a dense shower of stones descends on the front, sides, and indeed every part of the verandah. What a frightful row! The noise of this shower of stones mixed with handfuls of sand, and accompanied as it was by sneering grunts from foul mouths overflowing with abuse, is not possible to be rendered in words. To convey any idea of them it would be necessary to have the instruments themselves, to have rough steel files grating harshly against angles of granite. Amidst this horrible din the report of my guns even can be no longer heard. All that I am certain of, all that I can distinguish clearly, is that I keep on killing; I kill by twenties, by hundreds, in fact; but these twenties, these hundreds who utter their death-shriek and fall over, are immediately replaced. The moment at last arrives when I am obliged to pause to reload my arms. But my adversaries do not pause! They simply redouble their fire. It is then I perceive that the great art of war is not a whit less familiar to animals than to men. Both alike have recourse to the most subtle ruses. For instance, at the very moment when I was about to give way, Karabouffi, till then hidden behind some trees, made his appearance, to give, as it were, a new inspiration to his troops. The great Condé used to rush forward and throw his marshal’s baton within Senef’s lines. Karabouffi, like the great French general, threw his baton of defiance through the air.
It caused my overthrow. The baboon’s stick was so well aimed that it entered like an arrow through the turret of the bell-tower, struck me, and sent me rolling to the bottom. My rage was unbounded.
Although somewhat dizzy from my fall, I nevertheless remounted as quickly as I had descended. But from this moment such a fearful storm of projectiles rained on the turret that it soon became unroofed. The four sides seemed as though they were about to fall. It was time vigorously to retake the offensive, and I do so. I recommence firing, although my face was lacerated, several of my teeth broken, my fingers literally flayed, and my breast bleeding. The reader has not forgotten that I was naked. Twenty times before night, which never before seemed to me so slow in coming, I reloaded my thirty guns. What desperate work! The greater part of them, however, were beginning to be no longer of any use, for they required cleaning; three had burst in my hands. Fortunately, night at length came and threw its mantle over this scene of carnage, without parallel, I believe, in the world’s history. Animals, although they are said to be more wicked than men, do not fight at night. They ceased their fire and I ceased mine. Victory was for the time undecided.
To tell the truth, however, it was they who had already gained it, since an enemy who can reinforce himself without ceasing, were he twenty times, were he indeed a hundred times, less clever and brave than his adversary, must triumph in the end. Victory, then, is only number.
I descended into my vault more ill than ever. Excitement had joined itself to fever, and fever to despair. A cold shivering took possession of me, my teeth chattered. The air was far more chilly than it had been during the preceding nights. I felt that I should perish with the cold, unless I had the marvellous good luck to find some covering to throw over me. While I was feeling in one of Lord Campbell’s boxes for some ammunition for the next day, I placed my hand on the thick fur of a skin, soft as silk. Delighted at the discovery, I examined it all over, and while considering its prodigious size was struck with the idea that this fine fur must be the skin of the gigantic mandrill killed by Admiral Campbell, that same mandrill whose skeleton, hanging to a mimosa, had struck me with surprise and fear in the dim glimmering moonlight.