BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE WOMAN OF MYSTERY
THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE
THE SECRET OF SAREK
EYES OF INNOCENCE
THE THREE EYES
THE EIGHT STROKES OF THE CLOCK

"You don't regret anything, Isabel?" he whispered.

THE
TREMENDOUS EVENT

BY
MAURICE LE BLANC

TRANSLATED BY
ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA de MATTOS

NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
THE MACAULAY COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The tremendous event of the 4th. of June, whose consequences affected the relations of the two great Western nations even more profoundly than did the war, has called forth, during the last fifty years, a constant efflorescence of books, memoirs and scientific studies of truthful reports and fabulous narratives. Eye-witnesses have related their impressions; journalists have collected their articles into volumes; scientists have published the results of their researches; novelists have imagined unknown tragedies; and poets have lifted up their voices. There is no detail of that tragic day but has been brought to light; and this is true likewise of the days which went before and of those which came after and of all the reactions, moral or social, economic or political, by which it made itself felt, throughout the twentieth century, in the destinies of the world.

There was nothing lacking but Simon Dubosc's own story. And it was strange that we should have known only by reports, usually fantastic, the part played by the man who, first by chance and then by his indomitable courage and later still by his clear-sighted enthusiasm, was thrust into the very heart of the adventure.

To-day, when the nations are gathered about the statue over-looking the arena in which the hero fought, does it not seem permissible to add to the legend the embellishment of a reality which will not misrepresent it? And, if it is found that this reality trenches too closely upon the man's private life, need we object?

It was in Simon Dubosc that the western spirit first became conscious of itself and it is the whole man that belongs to history.

CONTENTS

PART THE FIRST

The Tremendous Event

CHAPTER I
THE SUIT

"Oh, but this is terrible!" cried Simon Dubosc. "Edward, just listen!"

And the young Frenchman, drawing his friend away from the tables arranged in little groups on the terraces of the club-house, showed him, in the late edition of the Argus, which a motorcyclist had just brought to the New Golf Club, this telegram, printed in heavy type:

"Boulogne, 20 May.—The master and crew of a fishing-vessel which has returned to harbour declare that this morning, at a spot mid-way between the French and English coasts, they saw a large steamer lifted up by a gigantic waterspout. After standing on end with her whole length out of the water, she pitched forward and disappeared in the space of a few seconds.

"Such violent eddies followed and the sea, until then quite calm, was affected by such abnormal convulsions that the fishermen had to row their hardest to avoid being dragged into the whirlpool. The naval authorities are sending a couple of tugs to the site of the disaster."

"Well, Rolleston, what do you think of it?"

"Terrible indeed!" replied the Englishman. "Two days ago, the Ville de Dunkerque. To-day another ship, and in the same place. There's a coincidence about it. . . ."

"That's precisely what a second telegram says," exclaimed Simon, continuing to read:

"3. O. p. m.—The steamer sunk between Folkestone and Boulogne is the transatlantic liner Brabant, of the Rotterdam-Amerika Co., carrying twelve hundred passengers and a crew of eight hundred. No survivors have been picked up. The bodies of the drowned are beginning to rise to the surface.

"There is no doubt that this terrifying calamity, like the loss of the Ville de Dunkerque two days ago, was caused by one of those mysterious phenomena which have been disturbing the Straits of Dover during the past week and in which a number of vessels were nearly lost, before the sinking of the Brabant and the Ville de Dunkerque."

The two young men were silent. Leaning on the balustrade which runs along the terrace of the club-house, they gazed beyond the cliffs at the vast circle of the sea. It was peaceful and kindly innocent of anger or treachery; its near surface was crossed by fine streaks of green or yellow, while, farther out, it was flawless and blue as the sky and, farther still, beneath the motionless cloud, grey as a great sheet of slate.

But, above Brighton, the sun, already dipping towards the downs, shone through the clouds; and a luminous trail of gold-dust appeared upon the sea.

"La perfide!" murmured Simon Dubosc. He understood English perfectly, but always spoke French with his friend. "The perfidious brute: how beautiful she is, how attractive! Would you ever have thought her capable of these malevolent whims, which are so destructive and murderous? Are you crossing to-night, Rolleston?"

"Yes, Newhaven to Dieppe."

"You'll be quite safe," said Simon. "The sea has had her two wrecks; she's sated. But why are you in such a hurry to go?"

"I have to interview a crew at Dieppe to-morrow morning; I am putting my yacht in commission. Then, in the afternoon, to Paris, I expect; and, in a week's time, a cruise to Norway. And you, Simon?"

Simon Dubosc did not reply. He had turned toward the club-house, whose windows, in their borders of Virginia creeper and honeysuckle, were blazing with the sun. The players had left the links and were taking tea beneath great many-coloured sunshades planted on the lawn. The Argus was passing from hand to hand and arousing excited comments. Some of the tables were occupied by young men and women, others by their elders and others by old gentlemen who were recuperating their strength by devouring platefuls of cake and toast.

To the left, beyond the geranium-beds, the gentle undulations of the links began, covered with turf that was like green velvet; and right at the end, a long way off, rose the tall figure of a last player, escorted by his two caddies.

"Lord Bakefield's daughter and her three friends can't take their eyes off you," said Rolleston.

Simon smiled:

"Miss Bakefield is looking at me because she knows I love her; and her three friends because they know I love Miss Bakefield. A man in love is always something to look at; a pleasant sight for the one who is loved and an irritating sight for those who are not."

This was spoken without a trace of vanity. For that matter, no man could have possessed more natural charm or displayed a more alluring simplicity. The expression of his face, his blue eyes, his smile and something personal, an emanation compounded of strength and suppleness and healthy gaiety, of confidence in himself and in life, all contributed to give this peculiarly favoured young man a power of attraction to whose spell the onlooker readily surrendered.

Devoted to out-door games and exercises, he had grown to manhood with those young postwar Frenchmen who made a strong point of physical culture and a rational mode of life. His movements and his attitudes alike revealed that harmony which is developed by a logical training and is still further refined, in those who comply with the rules of a very active intellectual existence, by the study of art and a feeling for beauty in all of its forms.

For him, indeed, as for many others, liberation from the lecture-room had not meant the beginning of a new life. If, by reason of a superfluity of energy, he was impelled to give much of his time to games and to attempts at establishing records which took him to all the running-grounds and athletic battle-fields of Europe and America, he never allowed his body to take precedence of his mind. Every day, come what might, he set apart the two or three hours of solitude, of reading and meditation, which the intellect requires for its nourishment, continuing to learn with the enthusiasm of a student who is prolonging the life of the school and university until events compel him to make a choice among the paths which he has opened up for himself.

His father, to whom he was bound by ties of the liveliest affection, was puzzled:

"After all, Simon, what are you aiming at? What's your object?"

"I am training."

"For what?"

"I don't know. But an hour strikes for each of us when we must be fully prepared, well equipped, with our ideas in good order and our muscles absolutely fit. I shall be ready."

And so he reached his thirtieth year. It was at the beginning of that year, at Nice, through Edward Rolleston, that he made Miss Bakefield's acquaintance.

"I am sure to see your father at Dieppe," said Rolleston. "He will be surprised that you haven't returned with me, as we arranged last month. What shall I say to him?"

"Say that I'm stopping here a little longer . . . or no, don't say anything. . . . I'll write to him . . . to-morrow perhaps . . . or the day after. . . ."

He took Rolleston's arm:

"Tell me, old chap," he said, "tell me. If I were to ask Lord Bakefield for his daughter's hand, what do you think would happen?"

Rolleston appeared to be nonplussed. He hesitated and then replied:

"Miss Bakefield's father is a peer, and perhaps you don't know that her mother, the wonderful Lady Constance, who died some six years ago, was the grand-daughter of a son of George III. Therefore she had an eighth part of blood royal running in her veins."

Edward Rolleston pronounced these words with such unction that Simon, the irreverent Frenchman, could not help laughing:

"The deuce! An eighth! So that Miss Bakefield can still boast a sixteenth part and her children will enjoy a thirty-second! My chances are diminishing! In the matter of blood royal, the most that I can lay claim to is a great-grandfather, a pork-butcher by trade, who voted for the death of Louis XVI.! That doesn't amount to much!"

He gave his friend a gentle push:

"Do me a service. Miss Bakefield is alone for the moment. Keep her friends engaged so that I can speak to her for a minute or two: I shan't be longer."

Edward Rolleston, a friend of Simon's who shared his athletic tastes, was a tall young man, too pale, too thin and so long in the back that he had acquired a stoop. Simon knew that he had many faults, including a love of whisky and the habit of haunting private bars and living by his wits. But he was a devoted friend, in whom Simon was conscious of a genuine and loyal affection.

The two men went forward together. Miss Bakefield came to meet Simon, while Rolleston accosted her three friends.

Miss Bakefield wore an absolutely simple wash frock, without any of the trimmings that were then the fashion. Her bare throat, her arms, which showed through the muslin of her sleeves, her face and even her forehead under her hat were of that warm tint which the skin of some fair-haired women acquires in the sun and the open air. Her eyes were almost black, flecked with glittering specks of gold. Her hair, which shone with metallic glints, was dressed low on the neck in a heavy coil. But these were trivial details which you noted only at leisure, when you had in some degree recovered from the glorious spectacle of her beauty in all its completeness.

Simon had not so recovered. He always paled a little when he met Miss Bakefield's eyes, however tenderly they rested on him.

"Isabel," he said, "are you determined?"

"Quite as much as yesterday," she said, smiling; "and I shall be still more so to-morrow, when the moment comes for action."

"Still. . . . We have known each other hardly four months."

"Meaning thereby? . . ."

"Meaning that, now that we are about to perform an irreparable action, I invite you to use your judgment. . . ."

"Rather than listen to my love? Since I first loved you, Simon, I have not been able to discover the least disagreement between my judgment and my love. That's why I am going with you to-morrow morning."

"Isabel!"

"Would you rather that I left to-morrow night with my father? On a voyage lasting three or four years? That is what he proposes, what he insists upon. It's for you to choose."

While they exchanged these serious words, their faces displayed no trace of the emotion which thrilled the very depths of their beings. It was as though, in being together, they experienced that sense of happiness which gives strength and tranquillity. And, as the girl, like Simon, was tall and bore herself magnificently, they received a vague impression that they were one of those privileged couples whom destiny selects for a life more strenuous, nobler and more passionate than the ordinary.

"Very well," said Simon. "But let me at least appeal to your father. He doesn't know. . . ."

"There is nothing he doesn't know, Simon. And it is precisely because our love displeases him and displeases my step-mother even more that he wants to get me away from you."

"I insist on this, Isabel."

"Speak to him, then, Simon, and, if he refuses, don't try to see me to-day. To-morrow, a little before twelve o'clock, I shall be at Newhaven. Wait for me by the gangway of the steamer."

He had something more to say:

"Have you seen the Argus?"

"Yes."

"You're not frightened of the crossing?"

She smiled. He bowed over her hand and kissed it and said no more.

Lord Bakefield, a peer of the United Kingdom, had been married first to the aforesaid great-grand-daughter of George III. and secondly to the Duchess of Faulconbridge. He was the owner, in his own right or his wife's, of country-houses, estates and town properties which enabled him to travel from Brighton to Folkestone almost without leaving his own domains. He was the distant player who had lingered on the links; and his figure, now less remote, was appearing and disappearing according to the lay of the ground. Simon decided to profit by the occasion and to go to meet him.

He set out resolutely. In spite of the young girl's warning and though he had learnt, from her and from Edward Rolleston, something of Lord Bakefield's true character and of his prejudices, he was influenced by the memory of the cordial welcome which Isabel's father had invariably accorded him hitherto.

This time again the grip of his hand was full of geniality. Lord Bakefield's face—a round face, too fat for his thin and lanky body, too florid and a little commonplace, though not lacking in intelligence—lit up with satisfaction.

"Well, young man, I suppose you have come to say good-bye? You have heard that we are leaving?"

"I have, Lord Bakefield; and that is why I should like a few words with you."

"Quite, quite! You have my attention."

He bent over the tee, building up, with his two hands, a little mound of sand on whose summit he placed his ball; then, drawing himself up, he accepted the brassy which one of his caddies held out to him and took his stand, perfectly poised, with his left foot a little advanced and his knees very slightly bent. Two or three trial swings, to assure himself of the precise direction; a second's reflection and calculation; and suddenly the club swung upwards, descended and struck the ball.

The ball flew through the air and suddenly veered to the left; then, curving to the right after passing a clump of trees which formed an obstacle to be avoided, it fell on the putting-green at a few yards' distance from the hole.

"Well done!" cried Simon. "A very pretty screw!"

"Not so bad, not so bad," said Lord Bakefield, resuming his round.

Simon did not allow himself to be disconcerted by this curious method of beginning an interview and broached his subject, without further preamble:

"Lord Bakefield, you know who my father is, a Dieppe ship-owner, with the largest merchant-fleet in France. So I need say no more on that side."

"Capital fellow, M. Dubosc," said Lord Bakefield, approvingly. "I had the pleasure of shaking hands with him at Dieppe last month. Capital fellow."

Simon continued, delightedly:

"Let us consider my own case. I'm an only son. I have an independent fortune from my poor mother. When I was twenty, I crossed the Sahara in an aeroplane without touching ground. At twenty-one, I made the record for the running mile. At twenty-two, I won two events at the Olympic Games: fencing and swimming. At twenty-five, I was the world's champion all-round athlete. And mixed up with all this was the Morocco campaign: four times mentioned in dispatches, promoted lieutenant in the reserve, awarded the military medal and the medal for saving life. That's all. Oh no, I was forgetting: licentiate in letters, laureate of the Academy for my essays on the Grecian ideal of beauty. There you are. I am twenty-nine years of age."

Lord Bakefield looked at him with the tail of his eye and murmured:

"Not bad, young man, not bad."

"As for the future," Simon continued, without waiting, "that won't take long. I don't like making plans. However, I have the offer of a seat in the Chamber of Deputies at the coming elections, in August. Of course, politics don't much interest me. But after all . . . if I must. . . . And then I'm young: I shall always manage to get a place in the sun. Only, there's one thing . . . at least, from your point of view, Lord Bakefield. My name is Simon Dubosc. Dubosc in one word, without the particule . . . without the least semblance of a title. . . . And that, of course. . . ."

He expressed himself without embarrassment, in a good-humoured, playful tone. Lord Bakefield, the picture of amiability, was quite imperturbed. Simon broke into a laugh:

"I quite grasp the situation; and I would much rather give you a more elaborate pedigree, with a coat-of-arms, motto and title-deeds complete. Unfortunately, that's impossible. However, if it comes to that, we can trace back our ancestry to the fourteenth century. Yes, Lord Bakefield, in 1392, Mathieu Dubosc, a yeoman in the manor of Blancmesnil, near Dieppe, was sentenced to fifty strokes of the rod for theft. And the Duboscs went on valiantly tilling the soil, from father to son. The farm still exists, the farm du Bosc, that is du Bosquet, of the clump of trees. . . ."

"Yes, yes, I know," interrupted Lord Bakefield.

"Oh, you know," repeated the younger man, somewhat taken back.

He intuitively felt, by the old nobleman's attitude and the very tone of the interruption, the full importance of the words which he was about to hear.

And Lord Bakefield continued:

"Yes, I happen to know. . . . When I was at Dieppe last month, I made a few inquiries about my family, which sprang from Normandy. Bakefield as you may perhaps not be aware, is the English corruption of Bacqueville. There was a Bacqueville among the companions of William the Conqueror. You know the picturesque little market-town of that name in the middle of the Pays de Caux? Well, there is a fourteenth-century deed in the records at Bacqueville, a deed signed in London, by which the Count of Bacqueville, Baron of Auppegard and Gourel, grants to his vassal, the Lord of Blancmesnil, the right of administering justice on the farm du Bosc . . . the same farm du Bosc on which poor Mathieu received his thrashing. An amusing coincidence, very amusing indeed: what do you think, young man?"

This time, Simon was pierced to the quick. It was impossible to imagine a more impertinent answer couched in more frank and courteous terms. Quite baldly, under the pretence of telling a genealogical anecdote, Lord Bakefield made it clear that in his eyes young Dubosc was of scarcely greater importance than was the fourteenth-century yeoman in the eyes of the mighty English Baron Bakefield and feudal lord of Blancmesnil. The titles and exploits of Simon Dubosc, world's champion, victor in the Olympic Games, laureate of the French Academy and all-round athlete, did not weigh an ounce in the scale by which a British peer, conscious of his superiority, judges the merits of those who aspire to his daughter's hand. Now the merits of Simon Dubosc were of the kind which are amply rewarded with the favour of an assumed politeness and a cordial handshake.

All this was so evident and the old nobleman's mind, with its pride, its prejudice and its stiff-necked obstinacy, stood so plainly revealed that Simon, who was unwilling to suffer the humiliation of a refusal, replied in a rather impertinent and bantering tone:

"Needless to say, Lord Bakefield, I make no pretension to becoming your son-in-law just like that, all in a moment and without having done something to deserve so immense a privilege. My request refers first of all to the conditions which Simon Dubosc, the yeoman's descendant, would have to fulfil to obtain the hand of a Bakefield. I presume that, as the Bakefields have an ancestor who came over with William the Conqueror, Simon Dubosc, to rehabilitate himself in their eyes, would have to conquer something—such as a kingdom—or, following the Bastard's example, to make a triumphant descent upon England? Is that the way of it?"

"More or less, young man," replied the old peer, slightly disconcerted by this attack.

"Perhaps too," continued Simon, "he ought to perform a few superhuman actions, a few feats of prowess of world-wide importance, affecting the happiness of mankind? William the Conqueror first, Hercules or Don Quixote next? . . . Then, perhaps, one might come to terms?"

"One might, young man."

"And that would be all?"

"Not quite!"

And Lord Bakefield, who had recovered his self-possession, continued, in a genial fashion:

"I cannot undertake that Isabel would remain free for very long. You would have to succeed within a given space of time. Do you consider, M. Dubosc, that I shall be too exacting if I fix this period at two months?"

"You are much too generous, Lord Bakefield," cried Simon. "Three weeks will be ample. Think of it: three weeks to prove myself the equal of William the Conqueror and the rival of Don Quixote! It is longer than I need! I thank you from the bottom of my heart! For the present, Lord Bakefield, good-bye!"

And, turning on his heels, fairly well-satisfied with an interview which, after all, released him from any obligation to the old nobleman, Simon Dubosc returned to the club-house. Isabel's name had hardly been mentioned.

"Well," asked Rolleston, "have you put forward your suit?"

"More or less."

"And what was the reply?"

"Couldn't be better, Edward, couldn't be better! It is not at all impossible that the decent man whom you see over there, knocking a little ball into a little hole, may become the father-in-law of Simon Dubosc. A mere nothing would do the trick: some tremendous stupendous event which would change the face of the earth. That's all."

"Events of that sort are rare, Simon," said Rolleston.

"Then, my dear Rolleston, things must happen as Isabel and I have decided."

"And that is?"

Simon did not reply. He had caught sight of Isabel, who was leaving the club-house.

On seeing him, she stopped short. She stood some twenty paces away, grave and smiling. And in the glance which they exchanged there was all the tenderness, devotion, happiness and certainty that two young people, can promise each other on the threshold of life.

CHAPTER II
THE CROSSING

Next day, at Newhaven, Simon Dubosc learnt that, at about six o'clock on the previous evening, a fishing-smack with a crew of eight hands had foundered in sight of Seaford. The cyclone had been seen from the shore.

"Well, captain," asked Simon, who happened to know the first officer of the boat which was about to cross that day, having met him in Dieppe, "well captain, what do you make of it? More wrecks! Don't you think things are beginning to get alarming?"

"It looks like it, worse luck!" replied the captain. "Fifteen passengers have refused to come on board. They're frightened. Yet, after all, one has to take chances. . . ."

"Chances which keep on recurring, captain, and over the whole of the Channel just now. . . ."

"M. Dubosc, if you take the whole of the Channel, you will probably find several hundred craft afloat at one time. Each of them runs a risk, but you'll admit the risk is small."

"Was the crossing good last night?" asked Simon, thinking of his friend Rolleston.

"Very good, both ways, and so will ours be. The Queen Mary is a fast boat; she does the sixty-four miles in just under two hours. We shall leave and we shall arrive; you may be sure of that, M. Dubosc."

The captain's confidence, while reassuring Simon, did not completely allay the fears which would not even have entered his mind in ordinary times. He selected two cabins separated by a state-room. Then, as he still had twenty-five minutes to wait, he repaired to the harbour station.

There he found people greatly excited. At the booking-office, at the refreshment-bar and in the waiting-room where the latest telegrams were written on a black-board, travellers with anxious faces were hurrying to and fro. Groups collected about persons who were better-informed than the rest and who were talking very loudly and gesticulating. A number of passengers were demanding repayment of the price of their tickets.

"Why, there's Old Sandstone!" said Simon to himself, as he recognized one of his former professors at a table in the refreshment-room.

And, instead of avoiding him, as he commonly did when the worthy man appeared at the corner of some street in Dieppe, he went up to him and took a seat beside him:

"Well, my dear professor, how goes it?"

"What, is that you, Dubosc?"

Beneath a silk hat of an antiquated shape and rusty with age was a round, fat face like a village priest's, a face with enormous cheeks which overlapped a collar of doubtful cleanliness. Something like a bit of black braid did duty as a necktie. The waist-coat and frock-coat were adorned with stains; and the over-coat, of a faded green, had three of its four buttons missing and acknowledged an age even more venerable than that of the hat.

Old Sandstone—he was never known except by this nickname—had taught natural science at Dieppe College for the last twenty-five years. A geologist first and foremost and a geologist of real merit, he owed his by-name to his investigations of the sedimentary formations of the Norman coast, investigations which he had extended even to the bottom of the sea and which, though he was nearly sixty years of age, he was still continuing with unabated enthusiasm. Only last year, in the month of September, Simon had seen him, a big, heavy man, bloated with fat and crippled with rheumatism, struggling into a diver's dress and making, within sight of Saint-Valéry-en-Caux, his forty-eighth descent. The Channel from Le Havre to Dunkirk and from Portsmouth to Dover, no longer had any secrets for him.

"Are you going back to Dieppe presently, professor?"

"On the contrary, I have just come from Dieppe. I crossed last night, as soon as I heard of the wreck of the English fishing-smack, you know, between Seaford and Cuckmere Haven. I have already begun to make inquiries this morning, of some people who were visiting the Roman camp and saw the thing happen."

"Well?" said Simon, eagerly.

"Well, they saw, at a mile from the coast, a whirl of waves and foam revolving at a dizzy speed round a hollow centre. Then suddenly a column of water gushed straight up, mixed with sand and stones, and fell back on all sides, like a rain of rockets. It was magnificent!"

"And the fishing-smack?"

"The fishing-smack?" echoed Old Sandstone, who seemed not to understand, to take no interest in this trivial detail. "Oh, yes, the fishing-smack, of course! Well, she disappeared, that's all!"

The young man was silent, but the next moment continued:

"Now my dear professor, tell me frankly, do you think there's any danger in crossing?"

"Oh, that's absurd! It's as though you were to ask me whether one ought to shut one's self in one's room when there is a thunder-storm. Of course the lightning strikes the earth now and again. But there's plenty of margin all round. . . . Besides, aren't you a good swimmer? Well, at the least sign of danger, dive into the sea without delay: don't stop to think; just dive!"

"And what is your opinion, professor? How do you explain all these phenomena?"

"How? Oh, very simply! I will remind you, to begin with, that in 1912 the Somme experienced a few shocks which amounted to actual earthquakes. Point number one. Secondly, these shocks coincided with local disturbances in the Channel, which passed almost unnoticed; but they attracted my attention and were the starting point of all my recent investigations. Among others, one of these disturbances in which I am inclined to see the premonitory signs of the present water-spouts, occurred off Saint-Valéry. And that was why you caught me one day, I remember, going down in a diving-suit just at that spot. Now, from all this, it follows. . . ."

"What follows?"

Old Sandstone interrupted himself, seized the young man's hand and suddenly changed the course of the conversation:

"Now tell me, Dubosc," he said, "have you read my pamphlet on The Cliffs of the Channel? You haven't, have you? Well, if you had, you would know that one of the chapters, entitled, 'What will occur in the Channel in the year 2000,' is now being fulfilled. D'you understand? I predicted the whole thing! Not these minor incidents of wrecks and water-spouts, of course, but what they seem to announce. Yes, Dubosc; whether it be in the year 2000, or the year 3000, or next week, I have foretold in all its details the unheard-of, astounding, yet very natural thing which will happen sooner or later."

He had now grown animated. Drops of sweat beaded his cheeks and forehead; and, taking from an inner pocket of his frock-coat a long narrow wallet, with a lock to it and so much worn and so often repaired that its appearance harmonized perfectly with his green over-coat and his rusty hat:

"You want to know the truth?" he exclaimed. "It's here. All my observations and all my hypotheses are contained in this wallet."

And he was inserting the key in the lock when loud voices were raised on the platform. The tables in the refreshment-room were at once deserted. Without paying further heed to Old Sandstone, Simon followed the crowd which was rushing into the waiting-room.

Two telegrams had come from France. One, after reporting the wreck of a coasting-vessel, the Bonne Vierge, which plied weekly between Calais, Le Havre and Cherbourg, announced that the Channel Tunnel had fallen in, fortunately without the loss of a single life. The other, which the crowd read as it was being written, stated that "the keeper of the Ailly lighthouse, near Dieppe, had at break of day seen five columns of water and sand shooting up almost simultaneously, two miles from the coast, and stirring up the sea between Veules and Pourville."

These telegrams elicited cries of dismay. The destruction of the Channel Tunnel, ten years of effort wasted, millions of pounds swallowed up: this was evidently a calamity! But how much more dreadful was the sinister wording of the second telegram! Veules! Pourville! Dieppe! That was the coast which they would have to make for! The steamboat, in two hours' time, would be entering the very region affected by the cataclysm! On sailing, Seaford and Hastings; on nearing port, Veules, Pourville and Dieppe!

There was a rush for the booking-office. The station-master's and inspectors' offices were besieged. Two hundred people rushed on board the vessel to recover their trunks and bags; and a crowd of distraught travellers, staggering under the weight of their luggage, took the up-train by assault, as though the sea-walls and the quays and rampart of the cliffs were unable to protect them from the hideous catastrophe.

Simon shuddered. He could not but be impressed by the fears displayed by these people. And then what was the meaning of this mysterious sequence of phenomena, which seemed incapable of any natural explanation? What invisible tempest was making the waves boil up from the depths of a motionless sea? Why did these sudden cyclones all occur within so small a radius, affecting only a limited region?

All around him the tumult increased, amid repeated painful scenes. One of these he found particularly distressing; for the people concerned were French and he was better able to understand what they were saying. There was a family, consisting of the father and mother, both still young, and their six children, the smallest of whom, only a few months old, was sleeping in its mother's arms. And the mother was imploring her husband in a sort of despair:

"Don't let us go, please don't let us go! We're not obliged to!"

"But we are, my dear: you saw my partner's letter. And really there's no occasion for all this distress!"

"Please, darling! . . . I have a presentiment. . . . You know I'm always right. . . ."

"Would you rather I crossed alone?"

"Oh no! Not that!"

Simon heard no more. But he was never to forget that cry of a loving wife, nor the grief-stricken expression of the mother who, at that moment, was embracing her six children with a glance.

He made his escape. The clock pointed to half-past eleven; and Miss Bakefield ought to be on her way. But, when he reached the quay, he saw a motor-car turning the corner of a street; and at the window of the car was Isabel's golden head. In a moment all his gloomy thoughts were banished. He had not expected the girl for another twenty minutes; and, though he was not afraid of suffering, he had made up his mind that those last twenty minutes would be a period of distress and anxiety. Would she keep her promise? Might she not meet with some unforeseen obstacle? . . . And here was Isabel arriving!

Yesterday he had determined, as a measure of precaution, not to speak to her until they had taken their places on the boat. However, as soon as Simon saw her step out of the car, he ran to meet her. She was wrapped in a grey cloak and carried a rug rolled in a strap. A sailor followed with her travelling-bag.

"Excuse me, Isabel," said Simon, "but something so serious has happened that I am bound to consult you. The telegrams, in fact, mention a whole series of catastrophes which have occurred precisely in the part which we shall have to cross."

Isabel did not seem much put out:

"You're saying this, Simon, in a very calm tone which does not match your words at all."

"It's because I'm so happy!" he murmured.

Their eyes met in a long and penetrating glance. Then she continued:

"What would you do, Simon, if you were alone?"

And, when he hesitated what to answer:

"You would go," she said. "And so should I. . . ."

She stepped onto the gangway.

Half an hour later, the Queen Mary left Newhaven harbour. At that instant, Simon, who was always so completely his own master and who, even in the most feverish moments of enthusiasm, claimed the power of controlling his emotions, felt his legs trembling beneath him, while his eyes grew moist with tears. The test of happiness was too much for him.

Simon had never been in love before. Love was an event which he awaited at his leisure; and he did not think it essential to prepare for its coming by seeking it in adventures which might well exhaust his ardour:

"Love," he used to say, "should blend with life, should form a part of life and not be added to it. Love is not an aim in itself: it is a principle of action and the noblest in the world."

From the first day when he saw her, Isabel's beauty had dazzled him; and he needed very little time to discover that, until the last moment of his life, no other woman would ever mean anything to him. The same irresistible and deliberate impulse drove Isabel towards Simon. Brought up in the south of France, speaking French as her native tongue, she did not feel and did not evoke in Simon the sense of embarrassment that almost invariably arises from a difference of nationality. That which united them was infinitely stronger than that which divided them.

It was a curious thing, but during these past four months, while love was blossoming within them like a plant whose flowers were constantly renewed and constantly increasing in beauty, they had had none of those long conversations in which lovers eagerly question each other and in which each seeks to find entrance into the unknown territory of the other's soul. They spoke little and rarely of themselves, as though they had delegated to gentle daily life the task of raising the veils of the mystery one by one.

Simon knew only that Isabel was not happy. After losing at the age of fifteen a mother whom she adored, she failed to find in her father the love and the caresses that might have consoled her. Moreover, Lord Bakefield almost immediately fell under the dominion of the Duchess of Faulconbridge, a vain, tyrannical woman, who rarely stirred from her villa at Cannes or her country-seat near Battle, but whose malign influence exerted itself equally close at hand and far away, in speech and by letter, on her husband and on her step-daughter, whom she persecuted with her morbid jealousy.

Naturally enough, Isabel and Simon exchanged a mutual promise. And, naturally enough, on coming into collision with Lord Bakefield's implacable will and his wife's hatred, they arrived at the only possible solution, that of running away. This was proposed without heroic phrases and adopted without any painful struggle or reluctance. Each formed a decision in perfect liberty. To themselves their action appeared extremely simple. Loyally determined to prolong their engagement until the moment when all obstacles would be smoothed away, they faced the future like travellers turning to a radiant and hospitable country.

In the open Channel a choppy sea was beginning to rise before a steady light breeze. In the west the clouds were mustering in battle array, but they were distant enough to promise a calm passage in glorious sunshine. Indifferent to the assault of the waves, the vessel sped straight for her port, as though no power existed which could have turned her aside from her strict course.

Isabel and Simon were seated on one of the benches on the after deck. The girl had taken off her cloak and hat and offered to the wind her arms and shoulders, protected only by a cambric blouse. Nothing more beautiful could be imagined than the play of the sunlight on the gold of her hair. Though grave and dreamy, she was radiant with youth and happiness. Simon gazed at her in an ecstasy of admiration:

"You don't regret anything, Isabel?" he whispered.

"No!"

"You're not frightened?"

"Why should I be, with you? There is nothing to threaten us."

Simon pointed to the sea:

"That will, perhaps."

"No!"

He told her of his conversation with Lord Bakefield on the previous day and of the three conditions upon which they had agreed. She was amused, and asked him:

"May I too lay down a condition?"

"What condition, Isabel?"

"Fidelity," she replied, gravely. "Absolute fidelity. No lapses! I could never forgive anything of that sort."

He kissed her hand and said:

"There is no love without fidelity. I love you."

There were few people around them, for the panic had affected mainly the first-class passengers. But, apart from the two lovers, all those who had persisted in crossing betrayed by some sign their secret uneasiness or their alarm. On the right were two old, very old clergymen, accompanied by a third, a good deal younger. These three remained unmoved, worthy brothers of the heroes who sang hymns on the sinking Titanic. Nevertheless, their hands were folded as though in prayer. On the left was the French couple whose conversation Dubosc had overheard. The young father and mother, leaning closely on each other, searched the horizon with fevered eyes. Four boys, the four older children, all strong and robust, their cheeks ruddy with health, were coming and going, in search of information which they immediately brought back with them. A little girl sat crying at her parents' feet, without saying a word. The mother was nursing the sixth child, which from time to time turned to Isabel and smiled at her.

Meanwhile, the breeze was growing colder. Simon leant toward his companion:

"You're not feeling chilly, Isabel?" he said.

"No, I'm used to it. . . ."

"Still, though you left your bag below you brought your rug on deck, very wisely. Why don't you undo it?"

The rug was still rolled up in its straps; and Isabel had even passed one of the straps around an iron rod, which fastened the bench to the deck, and buckled it.

"My bag contains nothing of value," she said.

"Nor the rug, I presume?"

"Yes, it does."

"Really? What?"

"A miniature to which my poor mother was very much attached, because it is a portrait of her grandmother painted for George III."

"It has just a sentimental value, therefore?"

"Oh dear no! My mother had it set in all her finest pearls, which gives it an inestimable value to-day. Thinking of the future, she left me, in this way, a fortune of my own."

Simon laughed:

"And that's the safe!"

"Yes, that's the safe!" she said, joining in his laughter. "The miniature is pinned to the middle of the rug, between the straps where no one would think of looking for it. You're laughing, but I am superstitious where that miniature is concerned. It's a sort of talisman. . . ."

For some time they spoke no further. The coast had disappeared from sight. The swell was increasing and the Queen Mary was rolling a little.

At this moment they were passing a beautiful white yacht.

"That's the Comte de Bauge's Castor," cried one of the four boys. "She's on her way to Dieppe."

Two ladies and two gentlemen were lunching under an awning, Isabel bowed her head so as to hide her face.

This thoughtless movement displeased her; for, a moment later, she said (and all the words which they exchanged during these few minutes were to remain engraved on their memories):

"Simon, you really believe, don't you, that I was entitled to leave home?"

"Why," he exclaimed, in surprise, "don't we love each other?"

"Yes, we love each other," she murmured. "And then there's the life which I was leading with a woman whose one delight was to insult my mother. . . ."

She said no more. Simon had laid his hand on hers and nothing could reassure her more effectually than the fondness of that pressure.

The four boys, who had disappeared again, came running back:

"You can see the company's mail-boat that left Dieppe at the same time that we left Newhaven. She's called the Pays de Caux. We shall pass her in a quarter of an hour. So you see, mama, there's no danger."

"Yes, but it's afterwards, when we get closer to Dieppe."

"Why?" objected her husband. "The other boat hasn't signalled anything extraordinary. The danger is altering its position, moving farther away. . . ."

The mother made no reply. Her face retained the same piteous expression. The little girl at her knee was still silently crying.

The captain passed Simon and saluted.

And a few more minutes elapsed.

Simon was whispering words of love which Isabel did not catch very distinctly. The little girl's constant tears were causing her some distress.

Shortly after, a gust of wind made the waves leap higher. Here and there streaks of white, seething foam appeared. There was nothing remarkable in this, as the wind was gaining in force and lashing the crests of the waves. But why did these foaming billows appear only in one part and that precisely the part which they were about to cross?

The father and mother had risen to their feet. Other passengers were leaning over the rails. The captain was seen running up the poop-steps.

And it came suddenly, in a moment.

Before Isabel and Simon, sitting self-absorbed, had the least idea of what was happening, a frightful clamour, made up of a thousand shrieks, rose from all parts of the boat, from port and starboard, from stem to stern, even from below; from every side, as though the minds of all had been obsessed by the possibility of disaster, as though all eyes, from the moment of departure, had been watching for the slightest premonitory sign.

A monstrous sight. Three hundred yards ahead, as though in the centre of a target at which the bows of the vessel were aimed, a hideous fountain had burst from the surface of the sea, bombarding the sky with masses of rock, blocks of lava and flying masses of spray, which fell back into a circle of foaming breakers and yawning whirlpools. And a wind of hurricane force gyrated above this chaos, bellowing like a bull.

Suddenly silence fell upon the paralysed crowd, the deathly silence that precedes an inevitable catastrophe. Then, yonder, a rattle of thunder that rent the air. Then the voice of the captain at his post, roaring out his orders, trying to shout down the monster's myriad voices.

For a moment there seemed some hope of salvation. The vessel put forth so great an effort that she appeared to be gliding along a tangent away from the infernal circle into which she was on the point of being drawn. But it was a vain hope! The circle seemed to be increasing in size. Its outer waves were approaching. A mass of rock crushed one of the funnels.

And again there were shrieks, followed by a panic and an insane rush for the life-boats; already some of the passengers were fighting for places. . . .

Simon did not hesitate. Isabel was a good swimmer. They must make the attempt.

"Come!" he said. The girl, standing beside him, had flung her arms about him. "We can't stay here! Come!"

And, when she struggled, instinctively resisting the course which he had proposed, he took a firmer hold of her.

She entreated him:

"Oh, it's horrible . . . all these children . . . the little girl crying! . . . Couldn't we save them?"

"Come!" he repeated, in a masterful tone.

She still resisted him. Then he took her head in his two hands and kissed her on the lips:

"Come, my darling, come!"

The girl fainted. He lifted her in his arms and threw one leg over the rail:

"Don't be afraid!" he said. "I will answer for your life!"

"I am not afraid," she said. "I am not afraid with you. . . ."

They leapt into the water.

CHAPTER III
GOOD-BYE, SIMON

Twenty minutes later, they were picked up by the Castor, the yacht which by this time had passed the Queen Mary. As for the Pays de Caux, the steamer sailing from Dieppe, subsequent enquiries proved that the passengers and the crew had compelled the captain to flee from the scene of the disaster. The sight of the huge waterspout, the spectacle of the ship lifting her stern out of the waves, rearing up bodily and falling back as though into the mouth of a funnel, the upheaval of the sea, which seemed to have given way beneath the assault of maniacal forces and which, within the circumference of the frenzied circle, revolved upon itself in a sort of madness: all this was so terrifying that women fainted and men threatened the captain with their levelled revolvers.

The Castor also had begun by fleeing the spot. But the Conte de Bauge, detecting through his field-glasses the handkerchief which Simon was waving, persuaded his sailors, despite the desperate opposition of his friends, to put about, while avoiding contact with the dangerous zone.

For that matter, the sea was subsiding. The eruption had lasted less than a minute; and it was as though the monster was now resting, sated, content with its meal, like a beast of prey after its kill. The squall had passed. The whirlpool broke up into warring currents which opposed and annulled one another. There were no more breakers, no more foam. Beneath the great undulating shroud which the little waves, tossing in harmless frolic, spread above the sunken vessel, the tragedy of five hundred death-struggles was consummated.

Under these conditions, the rescue was an easy task. Isabel and Simon, who could have held out for hours longer, were taken to the two cabins and supplied with a change of clothing. Isabel had not even lost consciousness. The yacht sailed away immediately. Those on board were eager to escape from the accursed circle. The sudden subsidence of the sea seemed as dangerous as its fury.

Nothing occurred before they reached the French coast. The oppressive, menacing lull continued. Simon Dubosc, directly he had changed his clothes, joined the count and his party. A little embarrassed in respect of Miss Bakefield, he spoke of her as a friend whom he had met by chance on the Queen Mary and by whose side he had found himself at the moment of the catastrophe.

For the rest, he was not questioned. The company on board the yacht were still profoundly uneasy; the thought of what might happen obsessed them. Further events were preparing. All had the impression that an invisible enemy was prowling stealthily around them.

Twice Simon went below to Isabel's cabin. The door was closed and there was no sound from within. But Simon knew that Isabel, though she had recovered from her fatigue and was already forgetting the dangers which had threatened them, nevertheless could not shake off the horror of what she had seen. He himself was still terribly depressed, haunted by the vision so frightful that it seemed the extravagant image of a nightmare rather than the memory of an actual thing. Was it true that they had one and all lost their lives: the three clergymen with their austere faces, the four happy, cheerful boys, their father and mother, the little girl who had cried, the child that had smiled at Isabel, the captain and every single individual of all those who had covered the Queen Mary's decks?

About four o'clock, the clouds, unrolling in blacker and denser masses, had conquered the heavens. Already the watchers felt the first breath of the great squalls whose precipitous onset was at hand, whose battalions, let loose across the Atlantic, were about to rush into the narrow straits of the Channel and mingle their devastating efforts with the mysterious forces rising from the depths of the sea. The horizon was blotted out as the clouds released their contents.

But the yacht was nearing Dieppe. The Count and Simon Dubosc, each gazing through a pair of binoculars, cried out as with one voice, struck at the same moment by the most unexpected sight. Looking at the row of buildings, which line the long sea-front like a tall rampart of brick and stone, they could plainly see that the roof and upper storey of the two largest hotels, the Imperial and the Astoria, situated in the middle, had collapsed. And the next instant they caught sight of other houses which were tottering, leaning forward, fissured and half-demolished.

Suddenly a flame shot up from one of these houses. In a few minutes there was a violent outbreak of fire; and on every side, from one end of the sea-front to the other, a panic-stricken crowd, whose shouts they could hear, came pouring down the streets and running to the beach.

"There is no doubt about it," spluttered the Count. "There has been an earthquake, a very violent shock, which must have synchronized with the sort of waterspout in which the Queen Mary disappeared."

When nearer, they saw that the sea must have risen, sweeping over the sea-wall, for long streaks of mud marked the lawns, while the beach to right and left was covered with stranded shipping.

And they saw too that the end of the jetty and the light-house had disappeared, that the breakwater had been carried away and that boats were drifting about the harbour.

The wireless telegram announcing the wreck of the Queen Mary had redoubled the panic. No one dared fly from the peril on land by taking to the open sea. The relatives of the passengers stood massed together, in witless and hopeless waiting, on the landing stage and what remained of the jetty.

In the midst of all this turmoil, the yacht's arrival passed almost unperceived. Each was living for himself, without curiosity, heedless of all but his own danger and that of his kinsfolk. A few distraught journalists were darting about feverishly for news; and the port-authorities subjected Simon and the Count to a hasty and perfunctory enquiry. Simon evaded their questions as far as possible. Once free, he escorted Isabel to the nearest hotel, saw her comfortably settled and asked her for permission to go in search of information. He was uneasy, for he believed his father to be in Dieppe.

The Duboscs' house stood at the first turning on the great slope which climbs to the top of the cliffs on the left, itself hidden behind a clump of trees and covered with flowers and creepers, it had a series of terraced gardens which overlooked the town and the sea. Simon was at once reassured on learning that his father was in Paris and would not be home until next day. He was also told that they had felt only a slight shake on this side of Dieppe.

He therefore went back to Isabel's hotel. She was still in her room, however, needing rest, and sent down word that she would rather be alone until the evening. Somewhat astonished by this reply, the full meaning of which he was not to understand till later, he went on to his friend Rolleston's place, failed to find him in, returned to his own house, dined and went for a stroll through the streets of the town.

The damage was not so widespread as he had supposed. What is usually described as the first Dieppe earthquake, to distinguish it from the great upheaval of which it was the forerunner, consisted at most of two preliminary oscillations, which were followed forty seconds later by a violent shock accompanied by a tremendous noise and a series of detonations. As for the tidal wave, improperly called an eagre, which rushed up the sea-front, it had but a very moderate height and a quite restricted force. But the people whom Simon met and those with whom he talked remembered those few seconds with a terror which the hours did not appear to diminish. Some were still running with no idea of where they were going, while others—and these were the greater number—remained in a state of absolute stupefaction, making no reply when questioned or answering only with incoherent sentences.

It was of course different in a town like this from elsewhere. In these long-settled regions, where the soil had assumed its irrevocable configuration hundreds and hundreds of years ago and where volcanic manifestations were not even contemplated as possible, any phenomenon of the kind was peculiarly alarming, illogical, abnormal, and in violent contradiction with the laws of nature and with those conditions of security which each of us has the right to regard as unchanging and as definitely fixed by destiny.

And Simon, who since the previous day had been wandering to and fro in this atmosphere of distraction, Simon, who remembered Old Sandstone's unfinished predictions and who had seen the gigantic waterspout in which the Queen Mary was swallowed up, Simon asked himself:

"What is happening? What is going to happen? In what unforeseen fashion and by what formidable enemy will the coming attack be delivered?"

Though he had meant to leave Dieppe on that night or the following morning, he felt that his departure would be tantamount to a desertion just when his father was returning and when so many symptoms announced the imminence of a final catastrophe.

"Isabel will advise me," he said to himself. "We will decide together what we have to do."

Meantime night had fallen. He returned to the hotel at nine o'clock and asked that Isabel should be told. He was amazed, almost stunned by the news that Miss Bakefield had gone. She had come down from her room an hour earlier, had handed in at the office a letter addressed to Simon Dubosc and had suddenly left the hotel.

Disconcerted, Simon asked for explanations. There seemed to be none to give, except that one of the waiters said that the young lady had joined a sailor who seemed to be waiting for her in the street and that they had gone off together.

Taking the letter, Simon moved away with the intention of going to a café or entering the hotel, but he had not the courage to wait and it was by the light of a street lamp that he opened the envelope and read:

"I am writing to you with absolute confidence, feeling happy in the certainty that everything I say will be understood and that you will feel neither bitterness nor resentment, nor, after the first painful shock, any real distress.

"Simon, we have made a mistake. It is right that our love, the great and sincere love which we bear each other, should dominate all our thoughts and form the object of our whole lives, but it is not right that this love should be our only rule of conduct and our only obligation. In leaving England we did what is only permissible to those whose fate has persistently thwarted all their dreams and destroyed all their sources of joy. It was an act of liberation and revolt, which people have a right to perform when there is no other alternative than death. But is this the case with us, Simon? What have we done to deserve happiness? What ordeals have we suffered? What efforts have we made? What tears have we shed?

"I have done a great deal of thinking, Simon. I have been thinking of all those poor people who are dead and gone and whose memory will always make me shudder. I have thought of you and myself and my mother. Her too I saw die. You remember: we were speaking of her and of the pearls which she gave me when dying. They are lost; and that distresses me so terribly!

"Simon, I don't want to consider this and still less all the horrors of this awful day as warnings intended for us two. But I do want them to help us to look at life in a different way, to help us put up a prouder and pluckier fight against the obstacles in our path. The fact that you and I are alive while so many others are dead forbids us to suffer in ourselves any sort of weakness, untruth or shuffling, anything that cannot face the broad light of day.

"Win me, Simon. For my part, I shall deserve you by confidence and steadfastness. If we are worthy of each other, we shall succeed and we shall not need to blush for a happiness for which we should now have to pay—as I have felt many times to-day—too high a price of humiliation and shame.

"You will not try to find me, will you, Simon?

"Your promised wife,

"Isabel."

For a few moments Simon stood dumbfounded. As Isabel had foreseen, the first shock was infinitely painful. His mind was full of conflicting ideas which eluded his grasp. He did not attempt to understand nor did he ask himself whether he approved of Isabel's action. He suffered as he had never known that it was possible to suffer.

And suddenly, in the disorder of his mind, among the incoherent suppositions which occurred to him, there flashed a horrible thought. It was obvious that Isabel, determined to submit to her father before the scandal of her flight was noised abroad, had conceived the intention of returning to Lord Bakefield. But how would she put her plan into execution? And Simon remembered that Isabel had left the hotel in the most singular fashion, abruptly, on foot and accompanied by a sailor carrying her bag. Now the landing-stage of the Newhaven steamers was close to the hotel; and the night-boat would cast off her moorings in an hour or two.

"Can she be thinking of crossing?" he muttered, shuddering as he remembered the upheavals of the sea and the wreck of the Queen Mary.

He rushed towards the quay. Despite Isabel's expressed wish, he intended to see her; and, if she resisted his love, he would at least implore her to abandon the risk of an immediate crossing.

Directly he reached the quay, he perceived the funnels of the Newhaven steamer behind the harbour railway-station. Isabel, without a doubt, was there, in one of the cabins. There were a good many people about the station and a great deal of piled-up luggage. Simon made for the gangway, but was stopped by an official on duty:

"I have no ticket," said Simon. "I am looking for a lady who has gone on board and who is crossing to-night."

"There are no passengers on board," said the official.

"Really? How's that?"

"The boat is not crossing. There have been orders from Paris. All navigation is suspended."

"Ah!" said Simon Dubosc, with a start of relief. "Navigation is suspended!"

"Yes; that is to say, as far as the line's concerned."

"What do you mean, the line?"

"Why, the company only troubles about its own boats. If others care to put to sea, that is their look-out; we can't prevent them."

"But," said Simon, beginning to feel uneasy, "I suppose none has ventured to sail just lately?"

"Yes, there was one, about an hour ago."

"Oh? Did you see her?"

"Yes, she was a yacht, belonging to an Englishman."

"Edward Rolleston, perhaps?" cried Simon, more or less at a venture.

"Yes, I believe it was, . . . Rolleston. Yes, yes, that's it: an Englishmen who had just put his yacht in commission."

Simon suddenly realized the truth. Rolleston, who was staying at Dieppe, happened to hear of Isabel's arrival, called at her hotel and, at her request, gave orders to sail. Of course, he was the only man capable of risking the adventure and of bribing his crew with a lavish distribution of bank-notes.

The young Englishman's behaviour gave proof of such courage and devotion that Simon at once recovered his normal composure. Against Rolleston he felt neither anger nor resentment. He mastered his fears and determined to have confidence.

The clouds were gliding over the town, so low that their black shapes could be distinguished in the darkness of the night. He crossed the front and leant upon the balustrade which borders the Boulevard Maritime. Thence he could see the white foam of the heavy breakers on the distant sands and hear their vicious assault upon the rocks. Nevertheless, the expected storm was not yet unleashed. More terrible in its continual, nerve-racking menace, it seemed to be waiting for reinforcements and to be delaying its onslaught only to render it more impetuous.

"Isabel will have time to reach the other side," said Simon.

He was now quite calm, full of faith in the present and the future. In absolute agreement with Isabel, he approved of her departure; it caused him no suffering.

"Come," he thought, "it is time to act."

He now recognized the purpose in view of which he had been preparing for years and years: it was to win a woman who was dearer to him than anything on earth and whose conquest would force him to claim that place in the world which his merits deserved.

He had done with hoarding. His duty was to spend, ay, to squander, like a prodigal scattering gold by the handful, without fear of ever exhausting his treasure.

"The time has come," he repeated. "If I am good for anything, I must prove it. If I was right to wait and husband my resources, I must prove it."

He began to walk along the boulevard, his head erect, his chest expanded, striking the ground with a ringing step.

The wind was rising to a gale. Furious showers swept the air. These were trifles to a Simon Dubosc, whose body, clad at all times of the year in light materials, took no heed of the rough weather and, even at the end of a day marked by so many trials, did not betray the slightest symptom of fatigue.

In truth, he felt inaccessible to ordinary weaknesses. His muscles were capable of unlimited endurance. His arms, his legs, his chest, his whole body, patiently exercised, were able to sustain the most violent and persistent efforts. Through his eyes, ears and nostrils he participated acutely in every vibration of the outer world. He was without a flaw. His nerves were perfectly steady. His will responded to every demand. He had the faculty of making up his mind at the first warning. His senses were always on the alert, but were controlled by his reason. He had keen intelligence and a clear, logical mind. He was ready.

He was ready. Like an athlete at the top of his form, he owed it to himself to enter the lists and accomplish some feat of prowess. Now, by a wonderful coincidence, it seemed that events promised him a field of action in which this feat of prowess might be performed in the most brilliant fashion. How? That he did not know. When? That he could not say. But he felt a profound intuition that new paths were about to open up before him.

For an hour he walked to and fro, fired by enthusiasm, quivering with hope. Suddenly a squall leapt at the sea-front, as though torn from the crest of the waves; and the rain fell in disorderly masses, hurtling downwards in all directions.

The storm had broken and Isabel was still at sea.

He shrugged his shoulders, refusing to admit a return of anxiety. If they had both escaped from the wreck of the Queen Mary, it was not in order that one of them should now pay for that unexpected boon. No, come what might, Isabel would reach the other side. Fate was protecting them both.

Through the torrents of rain pouring across the parade and by the flooded streets, Simon returned to the Villa Dubosc. An indomitable energy bore him up. And he thought with pride of his beautiful bride, who, disdainful like himself of the day's accumulated ordeals and untiring as he, had gone forth bravely into the terrors of the night.

CHAPTER IV
THE GREAT UPHEAVAL

The next five days were of those whose memory oppresses a nation for countless generations. What with hurricanes, cyclones, floods, swollen rivers and tidal waves, the coasts of the Channel and in particular the parts about Fécamp, Dieppe and Le Tréport suffered the most infuriate assaults conceivable.

Although a scientist would not admit the least relation between this series of storms and the tremendous event of the 4th of June, that is to say, of the last of these five days, what a strange coincidence it was! How could the masses ever since help thinking that these several phenomena all formed part of one connected whole?

In Dieppe, the undoubted centre of the first seismic disturbances, in Dieppe and the outlying districts hell was let loose. It was as though this particular spot of the earth's surface was the meeting-place of all the powers that attack and devastate and undermine and slay. In the whirlpools, or the water-spouts, or the eddies of overflowing rivers, under the crash of uprooted trees, crumbling cliffs, falling scaffoldings and walls, tottering belfries and factory-chimneys and of all the objects carried by the wind, the deaths increased steadily. Twenty families were thrown into mourning on the first day, forty on the second. As for the number of victims destroyed by the great convulsion which accompanied the tremendous event, it was doubtful whether this was ever accurately estimated.

As happens in such periods of constant danger, when the individual thinks only of himself and those akin to him, Simon knew hardly anything of the disaster save through the manifestations that reached him directly. After receiving a wireless telegram from Isabel which assured him of her safety, he spread the newspapers only to make certain that his flight with her was not suspected. With the rest—details of the foundering of the Queen Mary, articles in which his presence of mind, his courage and Isabel's pluck were extolled, or in which the writer endeavoured to explain the convulsions in the Channel—with all this he had hardly time to concern himself.

He remained with his father. He told him the secret of his love, told him the story of the recent incidents, told him of his plans. Together they wandered through the town or out into the country, both of them drenched and blinded by the showers, staggering under the squalls and bowing their heads beneath the bombardment of slates and tiles. The trees and telegraph-poles along the road were mown down like corn. Trusses of straw, stacks of fodder, faggots of wood, palings, coils of wire were whirled through the air like autumn leaves. Nature seemed to have declared a merciless war upon herself for the sheer pleasure of spoiling and destroying.

And the sea was still trundling its gigantic waves, which broke with deafening roar. All navigation between France and England was suspended. Wireless messages signalled the danger to the great liners coming from America or Germany; and none of them dared enter the hell that was the Channel.

On the fourth day, the last but one, Tuesday the 3rd of June, there was a slight lull.

The final assault was marshalling its forces. M. Dubosc worn out with fatigue, did not get up that afternoon. Simon also threw himself on his bed, fully dressed, and slept until evening. But at nine o'clock a shock awakened them.

Simon thought that the window, which suddenly burst open, had given away under the pressure of the wind. A second shock, more plainly defined, brought down the door of his room; and he felt himself spinning on his own axis, with the walls circling round him.

He ran downstairs and found his father in the garden with the servants, one and all bewildered and uttering incoherent phrases. After a long pause, during which some tried to escape while others were on their knees, there was a violent downpour of rain, mingled with hail, which drove them indoors.

At ten o'clock they sat down to supper. M. Dubosc did not speak a word. The servants were livid and trembling. Simon retained in the depths of his horrified mind an uncanny impression of a shuddering world.

At ten minutes to eleven there was another vibration, of no great violence, but prolonged, with beats that followed one another very closely, like a peal of bells. The china plates fell from the walls; the clock stopped.

All the inmates of the house went out of doors again and crowded into a little thatched summer-house lashed by slanting rain.

Half-an-hour later, the tremors recommenced and from this time onwards, were so to speak, incessant. They were faint and remote at first, but soon grew more and more perceptible, like the shivers of fever which rise from the depths of our flesh and shake us from head to foot.

This ended by becoming a torture. Two of the maids were sobbing. M. Dubosc had flung an arm about Simon's neck and was stammering terrified and meaningless words. Simon himself could no longer endure this execrable sensation of earthquake, this vertigo of the human being losing his foothold. He felt that he was living in a disjointed world and that his mind was registering absurd and grotesque impressions.

From the town arose an uninterrupted clamour. The road was crowded with people fleeing to the heights. A church-bell filled the air with the doleful sound of the tocsin, while the clocks were striking the twelve hours of midnight.

"Let us go away! Let us go away!" cried M. Dubosc.

Simon protested:

"Come, father, there's no need for that! What have we to fear?"

But one and all were seized with panic. Everybody acted at random, making unconscious movements, like a crazy piece of machinery working backwards. The servants went indoors again, looking about them stupidly, as do those who go over a house which they are leaving for the last time. Simon, as in a dream, saw one of them cramming a canvas bag with the gilt candlesticks and silver boxes of which he had charge, while another wrapped himself in a tablecloth and a third filled his pockets with bread and biscuits. He himself, turning by instinct to a small cloak-room on the ground floor, put on a leather jacket and changed his shoes for a pair of heavy shooting-boots. He heard his father saying:

"Here, take my pocket-book. There's money in it, bundles of notes: you'd better have it. . . ."

Suddenly the electric light went out; and at the same time they heard, in the distance, a strange thunder-clap, curiously different from the usual sound of thunder. It was repeated, with a less strident din, accompanied by a subterranean rattling; and then, growing noisier again, it burst a second time in a series of frightful detonations, louder than the roar of artillery.

Then there was a frantic rush for the road. But the fugitives had not left the garden when the frightful catastrophe, announced by so many manifestations, occurred. The earth leapt beneath their feet and instantly fell away and leapt again like an animal in convulsions.

Simon and his father were thrown against each other and then violently torn apart and hurled to the ground. All around them was the stupendous uproar of a tottering world in which everything was collapsing into an incredible chaos. The darkness seemed to have grown denser than ever. And then, suddenly, there was a less distant sound, a sound which touched them, so to speak, a sort of cracking noise. And shrieks rose into the air from the very bowels of the earth.

"Stop!" cried Simon, catching hold of his father, whom he had succeeded in rejoining. "Stop!"

He felt before him, at a distance of a few inches, the utter horror of a gaping abyss; and it was from the bottom of the abyss that the shrieks and howls of their companions rose.

And there were three more shocks. . . .

Simon realized a moment later that his father, clutching his arm, was dragging him away with fierce energy. Both were clambering up the road at a run, groping their way like blind men through the obstacles with which the earthquake had covered it.

M. Dubosc had a goal in view, the Caude-Côte cliff, a bare plateau where they would be in absolute safety. But, on taking a cross-road, they struck against a band of maddened creatures who told them that the cliff had fallen, carrying numerous victims with it. All that these people could think of now was to run to the seashore. With them, M. Dubosc and his son stumbled down the paths which led to the valley of Pourville, whose beach lies in a cove some two miles from Dieppe. The front was obstructed by a crowd of villagers, while others were taking shelter from the rain behind the bathing-huts overturned by the wind. Others again, as the tide was very low, had gone down the sloping shingle and crossed the sands and ventured out to the rocks, as though the danger had ended there and there only. By the uncertain light of a moon which strove to pierce the curtain of the clouds, they could be seen wandering to and fro like ghosts.

"Come, Simon!" said M. Dubosc. "Let's go over there. . . ."

But Simon held him back:

"We are all right here, father. Besides, it seems to be calming down. Take a rest."

"Yes, yes, if you like," replied M. Dubosc, who was in a greatly dejected mood. "And then we will go back to Dieppe. I want to make sure that my boats have not been knocked about too much."

A squall burst, laden with rain.

"Don't move," said Simon. "There's a bathing-hut a few yards off. I'll just go and see. . . ."

He hurried away. But there were already three men lying under the hut, which they had lashed to one of the buttresses of the parade. Others came up and tried to share the shelter. Blows were exchanged. Simon intervened. But the earth shook once more; and they could hear the crash of cliffs falling to right and left.

"Where are you, father?" cried Simon, running back to the spot where he had left M. Dubosc.

Finding no one there, he shouted. But the roar of the gale smothered his voice and he did not know in what direction to seek. Had his father been overcome by fresh fears and gone closer to the sea? Or had he, in his anxiety for his boats, returned to Dieppe as he had hinted?

At a venture—but is it right to apply this term to the unconscious decisions which impel us to follow our destined path?—Simon began to run along the sand and shingle. Then, through the maze of slippery rocks, hampered by the snares spread by the wrack and sea-weed, stumbling into pools of water in which the towering breakers from the open sea had died away in swirling eddies or in lapping waves, he joined the ghostly figures which he had seen from a distance.

He went from one to another and, failing to see his father, was thinking of returning to the parade, when a small incident occurred to make him change his mind. The full moon appeared in the sky. She was covered again immediately, then reappeared; and several times over, between the ragged clouds, her magnificent radiance flooded the sky. At this juncture, Simon, who had veered towards the right of the beach, discovered that the fallen cliffs had buried the shore under the most stupendous chaos imaginable. The white masses were piled one atop the other like so many mountains of chalk. And it looked to Simon as if one of these masses, carried by its own weight, had rolled right into the sea, whence it now rose some three hundred yards away.

On reflection, he could not believe this possible, the distance being far too great; but then what was that enormous shape outstretched yonder like a crouching animal? A hundred times, in his childhood, he had paddled his canoe or come fishing in this part; and he knew for certain that nothing rose above the waters here.

What was it? A sand-bank? But its outlines seemed too uneven and its grey colour was that of the rocks, naked rocks, without any covering of wrack or other sea-weed.

He went forward, actuated in part by an eager curiosity, but still more by some mysterious and all-powerful force, the spirit of adventure. The adventure appealed to him: he must go up to this new ground whose origin he could not help attributing to the recent earthquake.

And he went up to it. Beyond the first belt of sand, beyond the belt of small rocks where he stood, was the final bed of sand over which the waves rolled eternally. But from place to place there rose still more rocks, so that he was able, by a persistent effort, to reach what appeared to be a sort of promontory.

The ground underfoot was hard, consisting of sedimentary deposits, as Old Sandstone would have said. And Simon realized that, as a result of the violent shocks and of some physical phenomenon whose action he did not understand, the bed of the sea had been forced upwards until it overtopped the waves by a height which varied in different places, but which certainly exceeded the level of the highest spring tides.

The promontory was of no great width, for by the intermittent light of the moon Simon could see the foam of the breakers leaping on either side of this new reef. It was irregular in form, thirty or forty yards wide in one part and a hundred or even two hundred in another; and it ran on like a continuous embankment, following more or less closely the old line of the cliffs.

Simon did not hesitate. He set out. The hilly, uneven surface, at first interspersed with pools of water and bristling with rocks which the stubborn labours of the sea had pushed thus far, became gradually flatter; and Simon was able to walk at a fair pace, though hampered by a multitude of objects, often half-buried in the ground, which the waves, not affecting the bottom of the sea, had been unable to sweep away: meat-tins, old buckets, scrap-iron, shapeless utensils of all kinds covered with sea-weed and encrusted with little shells.

A few minutes later, he perceived Dieppe lying on his right, a scene of desolation which he divined rather than saw. The light of conflagrations not wholly extinguished reddened the sky; and the town looked to him like an unhappy city in which a horde of barbarians had sat encamped for weeks on end. The earth had merely shuddered and an even more stupendous disaster had ensued.

At this moment, a fine tracery of grey clouds spread above the great black banks which were driving before the gale; and the moon disappeared. Simon felt irresolute. Since all the light-houses were demolished, how would he find his way if the darkness increased? He thought of his father, who was perhaps anxious, but he thought also—and more ardently—of his distant bride whom he had to win; and, as the idea of this conquest was blended in his mind—he could not have said why—with visions of dangers accepted and with extraordinary happenings, he felt vaguely that he would be right in going on. To go on meant travelling towards something formidable and unknown. The soil which had risen from the depths might sink again. The waves might reconqueror the lost ground and cut off all retreat. An unfathomable gulf might yawn beneath his footsteps. To go on was madness.

And he went on.

CHAPTER V
VIRGIN SOIL

It was hardly later than one o'clock in the morning. The storm was less furious and the squalls had ceased, so that Simon suddenly began to walk as quickly as the trifling obstacles over which he stumbled and the dim light of the sky would permit. For that matter, if he branched off too far in either direction, the nearer sound of the waves would serve as a warning.

In this way he passed Dieppe and followed a direction which, while it varied by reason of curves and sudden turns, nevertheless, in his opinion, ran parallel with the Norman coast. During the whole of this first stage of his journey, he was only half-aware of what he was doing and had no thought but of making headway, feeling certain that his explorations would be interrupted from one minute to the next. It did not seem to him that he was penetrating into unlimited regions, but rather that he was really persistently pushing towards a goal which was close at hand, but which receded so soon as he approached it and which was no other than the extreme point of this miraculous peninsula.

"There," he said to himself. "There it is. I've got there. The new ground goes as far as that. . . ."

But the new ground continued to stretch into the darkness; and a little later he repeated:

"It's over there. The line of breakers is closing up. I can see it."

But the line opened out, leaving a passage by which Simon pursued his way.

Two o'clock. . . . Half-past two. . . . Sometimes the water was up to his knees, sometimes his feet sank into a bed of thicker sand. These were the low-lying parts, the valleys of the peninsula; and there might perhaps be some, thought Simon where these beds would be deep enough to bar his passage. He went on all the more briskly. Ascents rose in front of him, leading him to mounds forty or fifty feet in height, whose farther slopes he descended rapidly. And, lost in the immensity of the sea, imprisoned by it, absorbed by it, he had the illusion that he was running over its surface, along the back of great frozen, motionless waves.

He halted. Before him a speck of light had crossed the darkness, a long, a very long way off. Four times he saw the flame reappear at regular intervals. Fifteen seconds later came a fresh series of flashes, followed by a similar interval of darkness.

"A light-house!" murmured Simon. "A light-house which the disaster has spared!"

Just here the embankment ran in the direction of the light-house; and Simon calculated that it would thus end at Tréport, or perhaps farther north, if the light-house marked the estuary of the Somme, which was highly probable. In that case he would have to walk four or five hours longer, at the same swift pace.

But he lost the intermittent gleams as suddenly as he had caught sight of them. He looked and failed to find them and felt overwhelmed, as though, after the death of these little twinkling flames, he could no longer hope ever to escape from the heavy darkness which was stifling him or to discover the tremendous secret in pursuit of which he had darted. What was he doing? Where was he? What did it all mean? What was the use of making such efforts?

"Forward!" he cried. "At the double! and we don't do any more thinking. I shall understand presently, when I get there. Until then, it's a matter of going on and on, like a beast of burden."

He spoke aloud, to shake off his drowsiness. And, as a protest against a weakness of which he was ashamed, he set off at a run.

It was a quarter past three. In the keener air of the morning he was conscious of a sense of well-being. Moreover, he noticed that the obscurity around him was becoming lighter and was gradually lifting like a mist.

The first glimmer of dawn appeared. The day broke quickly and at last the new land was visible to Simon's eyes, grey, as he had supposed, and yellower in places, with streaks of sand and hollows filled with water in which all sorts of fish were seen struggling or dying, with a whole galaxy of little islands and irregular shoals, beaches of fine, close-packed gravel, tracts of sea-weed and gentle undulations, like those of a rich plain.

And in the midst of it all there was ever a multitude of objects whose real shape could no longer be distinguished, remnants enlarged and swollen by the addition of everything that could be encrusted or fastened on them, or else eaten away, worn out, corroded, or disintegrated by everything that helps to dissolve or to destroy.

They were flotsam and jetsam of all kinds. Past counting, glistening with slime, of all types and of all materials, of an age to be reckoned in months or years, it might be in centuries, they bore witness to the unbroken procession of thousands and thousands of wrecks. And, as many as were these remnants of wood and iron, so many were the human lives engulfed in companies of tens and hundreds. Youth, health, wealth, hope: each wreck represented the destruction of all their dreams, of all their realities; and each also recalled the distress of the living, the mourning of mothers and wives.

And the field of death stretched away indefinitely, an immense, tragic cemetery, such as the earth had never known, with endless lines of graves, tombstones and funeral monuments. To the right and left there was nothing, nothing but a dense fog rising from the water, hiding the horizon as completely as the veils of night and making it impossible for Simon to see more than a hundred yards in front of him. But from this fog new land-formations continued to emerge; and this seemed to him to fall so strictly within the domain of the fabulous and the incredible that he easily imagined them to be rising from the depths on his approach and assuming form and substance to offer him a passage.

A little after four o'clock there was a return of the gale, an offensive of ugly clouds emitting volleys of rain and hail. The wind made a gap in the clouds, which it drove north and south, and then, on Simon's right, parallel with a belt of rosy light which divided the waves from the black sky, the coast-line became visible.

It was a vaguely defined line which might have been taken for a fine streak of motionless clouds; but he knew its general appearance so well that he did not hesitate for a moment. It was the cliffs of the Seine-Inférieurs and the Somme, between Le Tréport and Cayeux.

He rested for a few minutes; then, to lighten his outfit, he pulled off his boots, which were too heavy, and his leather jacket, which was making him too hot. Then taking his father's wallet out of the jacket, he found in one of the pockets two biscuits and a stick of chocolate which he himself had put there, so to speak, unwittingly.

After making a meal of these, he set out again briskly, not with the cautious gait of an explorer who does not know whither he is going and who measures his efforts, but at the pace of an athlete who has fixed his time-table and keeps to it in spite of obstacles and difficulties. A strange light-heartedness uplifted him. He was glad to expend so much of the force which he had been storing for all these years and to expend it on a task of which he knew nothing, but of which he felt the exceptional greatness. His elbows were well tucked in and his head thrown back. His bare feet marked the sand with a faint trail. The wind bathed his face and played in and out of his hair. What joy!

He kept up his pace for nearly four hours. Why should he hold himself in? He was always expecting the new formation to change its direction and, bending suddenly to the right, to join the coast of the Somme. And he went forward in all confidence.

At certain points, progress became arduous. The sea had got up; and here and there the waves, rushing over those places where the sand, though clear of the water, was unprotected by a barrier of rocks, formed in the narrower portions actual rivers, flowing from one side to the other, which Simon had to wade, almost knee-deep in water. Moreover, he had taken so little food that he began to be racked with hunger. He had to slow down. And another hour went by.

The great squalls had blown over. The returning sea-fogs seemed to have deadened the wind and were now closing in on him again. Once more Simon was walking through moving clouds which concealed his path from him. Less sure of himself, attacked by a sudden sense of loneliness and distress, he soon experienced a lassitude to which he was unwilling to surrender.

This was a mistake. He recognized the fact: nevertheless, he struggled on as though in fulfillment of the most imperious duty. With an obstinate ring in his voice, he gave himself his orders:

"Forward: Ten minutes more! . . . You must! . . . And, once more, ten minutes!"

On either side lay things which, in any other circumstances, would have held his attention. An iron chest, three old guns, small-arms, cannon-balls, a submarine. Enormous fish lay stranded on the sand. Sometimes a white sea-gull circled through space.

And so he came to a great wreck whose state of preservation betrayed a recent disaster. It was an overturned steamer, with her keel deeply buried in a sandy hollow, while her black stern stood erect, displaying a broad pink stripe on which Simon read:

"The Bonne Vierge. Calais."

And he remembered. The Bonne Vierge was one of the two boats whose loss had been announced in the telegrams posted up at Newhaven. Employed in the coasting-trade between the north and west of France, she had sunk at a spot which lay in a direct line between Calais and Le Havre; and Simon saw in this a positive proof that he was still following the French coast, passing those seamarks whose names he now recalled: the Ridin de Dieppe, the Bassure de Baas, the Vergoyer and so on.

It was ten o'clock in the morning. From the average pace which he had maintained, allowing for deviation and for hilly ground, Simon calculated that he had covered a distance of nearly forty miles as the crow flies and that he ought to find himself approximately on a level with Le Touquet.

"What am I risking if I push on?" he asked himself. "At most I should have to do another forty miles to pass through the Straits of Dover and come out into the North Sea . . . in which case my position would be none too cheerful. But it will be devilish odd if, between this and that, I don't touch land somewhere. The only trouble is, whether it's forty miles on or forty miles back, those things can't be done on an empty stomach."

Fortunately, for he was feeling symptoms of a fatigue to which he was unaccustomed, the problem solved itself without his assistance. After going round the wreck, he managed to crawl under the poop and there discovered a heap of packing-cases which evidently formed part of the cargo. All were more or less split or broken or gaping at the corners. But one of them, whose lid Simon had no difficulty in prying open, contained tins of syrup, bottles of wine and stacks of canned foods: meat, fish, vegetables and fruits.

"Splendid!" he said, laughing. "Luncheon is served, sir. On top of that, a little rest; and the sooner I'm off the better!"

He made an excellent lunch; and a long siesta, under the vessel, among the packing-cases, restored his strength completely. When he woke and saw that his watch was already pointing to noon, he felt uneasy at the waste of time and suddenly reflected that others must have taken the same path and would now be able to catch him up and outstrip him. And he did not intend this to happen. Accordingly, feeling as fit as at the moment of starting, provided with the indispensable provisions and determined to follow up the adventure to the very end, without a companion to share his glory or to rob him of it, he set off again at a very brisk, unflagging pace.

"I shall get there," he thought, "I mean to get there. All this is an unprecedented phenomenon, the creation of a tract of land which will utterly change the conditions of life in this part of the world. I mean to be there first and to see . . . to see what? I don't know, but I mean to do it."

What rapture to tread a soil on which no one has ever set foot! Men travel in search of this rapture to the utmost ends of the earth, to remote countries, no matter where; and very often the secret is hardly worth discovering. As for Simon, he was having his wonderful adventure in the heart of the oldest regions of old Europe. The Channel! The French coast! To be treading virgin soil here, of all places, where mankind had lived for three or four thousand years! To behold sights that no other eye had ever looked upon! To come after the Gauls, the Romans, the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons and to be the first to pass! To be the first to pass this way, ahead of the millions and millions of men who would follow in his track, on the new path which he would have inaugurated!

One o'clock. . . . Half-past one. . . . More ridges of sand, more wrecks. Always that curtain of clouds. And always Simon's lingering impression of a goal which eluded him. The tide, still low, was leaving a greater number of islands uncovered. The waves were breaking far out to sea and rolling across wide sand-banks as though the new land had widened considerably.

About two o'clock in the afternoon, he came upon higher undulations followed by a series of sandy flats in which his feet sank to a greater depth than usual. Absorbed by the dreary spectacle of a ship's mast protruding from the sand, with its tattered and coloured flag flopping in the wind, he pressed on all unsuspecting. In a few minutes, the sand was up to his knees, then half-way up his thighs. He laughed, still unheeding.

In the end, however, unable to advance, he tried to return: his efforts were useless. He attempted to lift his legs by treading, as though climbing a flight of stairs, but he could not. He brought his hands into play, laying them flat on the sands: they too went under.

Then he broke into a flood of perspiration. He suddenly understood the hideous truth: he was caught in a quicksand.

It was soon over. He did not sink with the slowness that lends a little hope to the agony of despair. Simon fell, so to speak, into a void. His hips, his waist, his chest disappeared. His outstretched arms checked his descent for a moment. He stiffened his body, he struggled. In vain. The sand rose like water to his shoulders, to his neck.

He began to shout. But in the immensity of these solitudes, to whom was his appeal addressed? Nothing could save him from the most horrible of deaths. Then it was that he shut his eyes and with clenched lips sealed his mouth, which was already full of the taste of the sand, and, in a fit of terror, he gave himself up for lost.

CHAPTER VI
TRIUMPH

Afterwards, he never quite understood the chance to which he owed his life. The most that he could remember was that one of his feet touched something solid which served him as a support and that something else enabled him to advance, now a step, now two or three, to lift himself little by little out of his living tomb and to leave it alive. What had happened? Had he come upon a loose plank of the buried vessel whose flag he saw before him? He did not know. But what he never forgot was the horror of that minute, which was followed by such a collapse of all his will and strength that he remained for a long time lying on a piece of wreckage, unable to move a limb and shuddering all over with fever and mental anguish.

He set off again mechanically, under the irresistible influence of confused feelings which bade him go forward and reconnoitre. But he had lost his former energy. His eyes remain obstinately fixed upon the ground. For no appreciable reason, he judged certain spots to be dangerous and avoided them by making a circuit, or even leapt back as though at the sight of an abyss. Simon Dubosc was afraid.

Moreover, after reading on a piece of wood from a wreck the name of Le Havre, that is to say, the port which lay behind him, he asked himself anxiously whether the new land had not changed its direction; whether, by doubling upon itself, it was not leading him into the widest part of the Channel.

The thought of no longer knowing where he was or whither he was going increased his lassitude twofold. He felt overwhelmed, discouraged, terribly alone. He had no hope of rescue, either by sea, on which no boat would dare put out, or from the air, which the sea-fog had made impossible for aeroplanes. What would happen then?

Nevertheless he walked on; and the hours went by; and the belt of land unrolled vaguely before his eyes the same monotonous spectacle, the same melancholy sand-hills, the same dreary landscapes on which no sun had ever shone.

"I shall get there," he repeated, stubbornly. "I mean to get there; I must and shall."

Four o'clock. He often looked at his watch, as though expecting a miraculous intervention at some precise moment, he did not know when. Worn out by excessive and ill-directed efforts, exhausted by the fear of a hideous death, he was gradually yielding beneath the weight of a fatigue which tortured his body and unhinged his brain. He was afraid. He dreaded the trap laid for him by the sands. He dreaded the threatening night, the storm and, above all, hunger, for all his provisions had been lost in the abyss of the quicksand.

The agony which he suffered! A score of times he was on the point of stretching himself on the ground and abandoning the struggle. But the thought of Isabel sustained him; and he walked on and on.

And then, suddenly, an astonishing sight held him motionless. Was it possible? He hesitated to believe it, so incredible did the reality seem to him. But how could he doubt the evidence of his eyes?

He stooped forward. Yes, it was really that: there were footprints! The ground was marked with footprints, the prints of two bare feet, very plainly defined and apparently quite recent.

And immediately his stupefaction made way for a great joy, aroused by the sudden and clear conception of a most undeniable fact: the new land was indeed connected, as he had supposed, with some point on the northern coast of France; and from this point, which could not be very remote, in view of the distance which he himself had covered, one of his fellow-creatures had come thus far.

Delighted to feel that there was human life near at hand, he recollected the incident where Robinson Crusoe discovers the imprint of a naked foot on the sand of his desert island:

"It's Man Friday's footprint!" he said, laughing. "There is a Friday, too, in this land of mine! Let's see if we can find him!"

At the point where he had crossed the trail, it branched off to the left and approached the sea. Simon was feeling surprised at not meeting or catching sight of any one, when he discovered that the author of the footprints, after going round a shapeless wreck, had turned and was therefore walking in the same direction as himself.

After twenty minutes, the trail, intersected by a gully which ran across it, escaped him for a time. He found it again and followed it, skirting the base of a chain of rather high sand-hills, which ended suddenly in a sort of craggy cliff.

On rounding this cliff Simon started back. On the ground, flat on its face, with the arms at right angles to the body, lay the corpse of a man, curiously dressed in a very short, yellow leather waistcoat and a pair of trousers, likewise leather, the ends of which were bell-shaped and slit in the Mexican fashion. In the middle of his back was the hilt of a dagger which had been driven between the shoulder-blades.

What astonished Simon when he had turned the body over was that the face was brick-red, with prominent cheek-bones and long, black hair: it was the undoubted face of a Redskin. Blood trickled from the mouth, which was distorted by a hideous grin. The eyes were wide open, and showed only their whites. The contracted fingers had gripped the sand like claws. The body was still warm.

"It can't be an hour since he was killed," said Simon, whose hand was trembling. And he added, "What the deuce brought the fellow here? By what unheard-of chance have I come upon a Redskin in this desert?"

The dead man's pockets contained no papers to give Simon any information. But, near the body, within the actual space in which the struggle had taken place, another trail of footsteps came to an end, a double trail, made by the patterned rubber soles of a man who had come and gone. And, ten yards away, Simon picked up a gold hundred-franc piece, with the head of Napoleon I. and the date 1807.

He followed this double trail, which led him to the edge of the sea. Here a boat had been put aground. It was now easy to reconstruct the tragedy. Two men who had landed on this newly-created shore had set out to explore it, each taking his own direction. One of them, an Indian, had found, in the hulk of some wreck, a certain quantity of gold coins, perhaps locked up in a strong-box. The other, to obtain the treasure for himself, had murdered his companion, and reëmbarked.

Thus, on this virgin soil, Simon was confronted—it was the first sign of life—with a crime, with an act of treachery, with armed cupidity committing murder, with the human animal. A man finds gold. One of his fellows attacks and kills him.

Simon pushed onwards without further delay, feeling certain that these two men, doubtless bolder than the rest, were only the forerunners of others coming from the mainland. He was eager to see these others, to question them upon the point whence they had started, the distance which they had covered and many further particulars which as yet remained unexplained.

The thought of this meeting filled him with such happiness that he resisted his longing for rest. Yet what a torture was this almost uninterrupted effort! He had walked for sixteen hours since leaving Dieppe. It was eighteen hours since the moment when the great upheaval had driven him from his home. In ordinary times the effort would not have been beyond his strength. But under what lamentable conditions had he accomplished it!

He walked on and on. Rest? And what if the others, coming behind him from Dieppe, should succeed in catching him up?

The scene was always the same. Wrecks marked his path, like so many tomb-stones. The mist still hung above the endless grave-yard.

After walking an hour, he was brought to a stop. The sea barred his way.

The sea facing him! His disappointment was not unmixed with anger. Was this then the limit of his journey and were all these convulsions of nature to end merely in the creation of a peninsula cut off in this meaningless fashion?

But, on scanning from the sloping shore the waves tossing their foam to where he stood, he perceived at some distance a darker mass, which gradually emerged from the mist; and he felt sure that this was a continuation of the newly-created land, beyond a depression covered by the sea:

"I must get across," said Simon.

He removed his clothes, made them into a bundle, tied it round his neck and entered the water. For him the crossing of this strait, in which, besides, he was for some time able to touch bottom, was mere child's-play. He landed, dried himself and resumed his clothes.

A very gentle ascent led him, after some five hundred yards, to a reef, overtopped by actual hills of sand, but of sand so firm that he did not hesitate to set foot on it. He therefore climbed till he reached the highest crest of these hills.

And it was here, at this spot—where a granite column was raised subsequently, with an inscription in letters of gold: two names and a date—it was here, on the 4th of June, at ten minutes past six in the evening, above a vast amphitheatre girt about with sand-hills like the benches of a circus, it was here that Simon Dubosc at last saw, climbing to meet him, a man.

He did not move at first, so strong was his emotion. The man came on slowly, sauntering, as it were, examining his surroundings and picking his way. When at last he raised his head, he gave a start of surprise at seeing Simon and then waved his cap. Then Simon rushed towards him, with outstretched arms and an immense longing to press him to his breast.

At a distance the stranger seemed a young man. He was dressed like a fisherman, in a brown canvas smock and trousers. His feet were bare; he was tall and broad-shouldered. Simon shouted to him:

"I've come from Dieppe. You, what town do you come from? Did you take long to get here? Are you alone?"

He could see that the fisherman was smiling and that his tanned, clean-shaven face wore a frank and happy expression.

They met and clasped hands; and Simon repeated:

"I started from Dieppe at one in the morning. And you? What port do you come from?"

The man began to laugh and replied in words which Simon could not understand. He did not understand them, though he well enough recognized the language in which they were uttered. It was English, but a dialect spoken by the lower orders. He concluded that this was an English fisherman employed at Calais or Dunkirk.

He spoke to him again, dwelling on his syllables and pointing to the horizon:

"Calais? Dunkirk?"

The other repeated these two names as well as he could, as though trying to grasp their meaning. At last his face lit up and he shook his head.

Then, turning round and pointing in the direction from which he had come, he twice said:

"Hastings. . . . Hastings. . . ."

Simon started. But the amazing truth did not appear to him at once, though he was conscious of its approach and was absolutely dumbfounded. Of course, the fisherman was referring to Hastings as his birthplace or his usual home. But where had he come from at this moment?

Simon made a suggestion:

"Boulogne? Wimereux?"

"No, no!" replied the stranger. "Hastings. . . . England. . . ."

And his arm pointed persistently to the same quarter of the horizon, while he as persistently repeated:

"England. . . . England. . . ."

"What? What's that you're saying?" cried Simon. And he seized the man violently by the shoulders. "What's that you're saying? That's England behind you? You've come from England? No, no! You can't mean that. It's not true!"

The sailor struck the ground with his foot:

"England!" he repeated, thus denoting that the ground which he had stamped upon led to the English mainland.

Simon was flabbergasted. He took out his watch and moved his forefinger several times round the dial.

"What time did you start? How many hours have you been walking?"

"Three," replied the Englishman, opening his fingers.

"Three hours!" muttered Simon. "We are three hours from the English coast!"

This time the whole stupendous truth forced itself upon him. At the same moment he realized what had caused his mistake. As the French coast ran due north, from the estuary of the Somme, it was inevitable that, in pursuing a direction parallel to the French coast, he should end by reaching the English coast at Folkestone or Dover, or, if his path inclined slightly toward the west, at Hastings.

Now he had not taken this into account. Having had proof on three occasions that France was on his right and not behind him, he had walked with his mind dominated by the certainty that France was close at hand and that her coast might loom out of the fog at any moment.

And it was the English coast! And the man who had loomed into sight was a man of England!

What a miracle! How his every nerve throbbed as he held this man in his arms and gazed into his friendly face! He was exalted by the intuition of the extraordinary things which the tremendous event of the last few hours implied, in the present and the future; and his meeting with this man of England was the very symbol of that event.

And the fisherman, too, felt the incomparable grandeur of the moment which had brought them together. His quiet smile was full of solemnity. He nodded his head in silence. And the two men, face to face, looking into each other's eyes, gazed at each other with the peculiar affection of those who have never been parted, who have striven side by side and who receive together the reward of their actions performed in common.

The Englishman wrote his name on a piece of paper: William Brown. And Simon, yielding to one of his natural outbursts of enthusiasm, said:

"William Brown, we do not speak the same language; you do not understand me and I understand you only imperfectly; and still we are bound together more closely than two loving brothers could be. Our embrace has a significance which we cannot yet imagine. You and I represent the two greatest and noblest countries in the world; and they are mingled together in our two persons."

He was weeping. The Englishman still smiled, but his eyes were moist with tears. Excitement, excessive fatigue, the violence of the emotions which he had experienced that day, produced in Simon a sort of intoxication in which he found an unsuspected source of energy.

"Come," he said to the fisherman catching hold of his arm. "Come, show me the way."

He would not even allow William Brown to help him in difficult places, so determined was he to accomplish this glorious and magnificent undertaking by his unaided efforts.

This last stage of his journey lasted three hours.

Almost at the start they passed three Englishmen, to whom Brown addressed a few words and who, while continuing on their road, uttered exclamations of surprise. Then came two more, who stopped for a moment while Brown explained the situation. These two turned back with Simon and the fisherman; and all four, on coming closer to the sea, were attracted by a voice appealing for help.

Simon ran forward and was the first to reach a woman lying on the sand. The waves were drenching her with their spray. She was bound by cords which fettered her legs, held her arms motionless against her body, pressed the wet silk of her blouse against her breast and bruised the bare flesh of her shoulders. Her black hair, cut rather short and fastened in front by a little gold chain, framed a dazzling face, with lips like the petals of a red flower and a warm, brown skin, burnt by the sun. The face, to an artist like Simon, was of a brilliant beauty and recalled to his mind certain feminine types which he had encountered in Spain or South America. Quickly he cut her bonds; and then, as his companions were approaching before he had time to question her, he slipped off his jacket and covered her beautiful shoulders with it.

She gave him a grateful glance, as though this delicate act was the most precious compliment which he could pay her:

"Thank you, thank you!" she murmured. "You are French, are you not?"

But groups of people came hurrying along, followed by a more numerous company. Brown told the story of Simon's adventure; and Simon found himself separated from the young woman without learning more about her. People crowded about him, asking him questions. At every moment fresh crowds mingled with the procession which bore him along in its midst.

All these people seemed to Simon unusually excited and strange in their behaviour. He soon learnt that the earthquake had devastated the English coast. Hastings, having been, like Dieppe, a centre of seismic shocks, was partly destroyed.

About eight o'clock they came to the edge of a deep depression quite two-thirds of a mile in width. Filled with water until the middle of the afternoon, this depression, by a stroke of luck for Simon, had delayed the progress of those who were flying from Hastings and who had ventured upon the new land.

A few minutes later, the fog being now less dense, Simon was able to distinguish the endless row of houses and hotels which lines the sea-fronts of Hastings and St. Leonards. By this time, his escort consisted of three or four hundred people; and many others, doubtless driven from their houses, were wandering in all directions with dazed expressions on their faces.

The throng about him became so thick that soon he was able to see nothing in the heavy gloom of the twilight but their crowded heads and shoulders. He replied as best he could to the thousand questions which were put to him; and his replies, repeated from mouth to mouth, aroused cries of astonishment and admiration.

Gradually, lights appeared in the Hastings windows. Simon, exhausted but indomitable, was walking briskly, sustained by a nervous energy which seemed to be renewed as and when he expended it. And suddenly he burst out laughing to think—and certainly no thought could have been more stimulating or better calculated to give a last fillip to his failing strength—to think that he, Simon Dubosc, a man of the good old Norman stock, was setting foot in England at the very spot where William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, had landed in the eleventh century! Hastings! King Harold and his mistress, Edith of the swan's neck! The great adventure of yore was being reënacted! For the second time the virgin isle was conquered . . . and conquered by a Norman!

"I believe destiny is favouring me, my Lord Bakefield," he said to himself.

The new land joined the mainland between Hastings and St. Leonards. It was intersected by valleys and fissures, bristling with rocks and fragments of the cliffs, in the midst of which lay, in an indescribable jumble, the wreckage of demolished piers, fallen lighthouses, stranded and shattered ships. But Simon saw nothing of all this. His eyes were too weary to distinguish things save through a mist.

They reached the shore. What happened next? He was vaguely conscious that some one was leading him, through streets with broken pavements and between heaps of ruins, to the hall of a casino, a strange, dilapidated building, with tottering walls and a gaping roof, but nevertheless radiant with electric light.

The municipal authorities had assembled here to receive him. Champagne was drunk. Hymns of rejoicing were sung with religious fervour. A stirring spectacle and, at the same time, a striking proof of the national self-control, this celebration improvised in the midst of a town in ruins. But every one present had the impression that something of a very great importance had occurred, something so great that it outweighed the horror of the catastrophe and the consequent mourning: France and England were united!

France and England were united; and the first man who had walked from the one country to the other by the path which had risen from the very depths of the ancient Channel that used to divide them was there, in their midst. What could they do but honour him? He represented in his magnificent effort the vitality and the inexhaustible ardour of France. He was the hero and the herald of the most mysterious future.

A tremendous burst of cheering rose to the platform on which he stood. The crowd thronged about him, the men shook him by the hand, the ladies kissed him. They pressed him to make a speech which all could hear and understand. And Simon, leaning over these people, whose enthusiasm blended with his own exaltation, stammered a few words in praise of the two nations.

The frenzy was so violent and unbridled that Simon was jostled, carried off his feet, swept into the crowd and lost among the very people who were looking for him. His only thought was to go into the first hotel that offered and throw himself down on a bed. A hand seized his; and a voice said:

"Come with me; I will show you the way."

He recognized the young woman whom he had released from her bonds. Her face likewise was transfigured with emotion.

"You have done a splendid thing," she said. "I don't believe any other man could have done it. . . . You are above all other men. . . ."

An eddy in the crowd tore them apart, although the stranger's hand clutched his. He fell to the floor among the overturned chairs, picked himself up again and was feeling at the end of his tether as he neared one of the exits, when suddenly he stood to attention. Strength returned to his limbs. Lord Bakefield and Isabel were standing before him.

Eagerly Isabel held out her hand:

"We were there, Simon. We saw you. I'm proud of you, Simon."

He was astonished and confused.

"Isabel! Is it really you?"

She smiled, happy to see him so much moved in her presence.

"It really is; and it's quite natural, since we live at Battle, a mile away. The catastrophe has spared the house but we came to Hastings to help the sufferers and in that way heard of your arrival . . . of your triumph, Simon."

Lord Bakefield did not budge. He pretended to be looking in another direction. Simon addressed him.

"May I take it, Lord Bakefield, that you will regard this day's work as a first step towards the goal for which I am making?"

The old nobleman, stiff with pride and resentment, vouchsafed no reply.

"Of course," Simon continued, "I haven't conquered England. But all the same there seem to be a series of circumstances in my favour which permit me at least to ask you whether you consider that the first of your conditions has been fulfilled."

This time Lord Bakefield seemed to be making up his mind. But, just as he was going to reply—and his features expressed no great amount of good-will—Isabel intervened:

"Don't ask my father any questions, Simon . . . He appreciates the wonderful thing that you have done at its true value. But you and I have offended him too seriously for him to be able to forgive you just yet. We must let time wipe out the unpleasant memory."

"Time!" echoed Simon, with a laugh. "Time! The trouble is that I have only twelve days left in which to triumph over all the labours put upon me. After conquering England, I have still to win the laurels of Hercules . . . or of Don Quixote."

"Well," she said, "in the meantime hurry off and go to bed. That's the best thing you can do for the moment."

And she drew Lord Bakefield away with her.

CHAPTER VII
LYNX-EYE

"What do you say to this, my boy? Did I prophesy it all, or did I not? Read my pamphlet on The Channel in the Year 2000 and you'll see. And then remember all I told you the other morning, at Newhaven station. Well, there you are: the two countries are joined together as they were once before, in the Eocene epoch."

Awakened with a start by Old Sandstone, Simon, with eyes still heavy with slumber, gazed vacantly at the hotel bed-room in which he had been sleeping, at his old professor, walking to and fro, and at another person, who was sitting in the dark and who seemed to be an acquaintance of Old Sandstone's.

"Ah!" yawned Simon. "But what's the time?"

"Seven o'clock in the evening, my son."

"What? Seven o'clock? Have I been sleeping since last night's meeting at the Casino?"

"Rather! I was strolling about this morning, when I heard of your adventure. 'Simon Dubosc! I know him.' said I. I ran like mad. I rapped on the door. I came in. Nothing would wake you. I went away, came back again and so on, until I decided to sit down by your bedside and wait."

Simon leapt out of bed. New clothes and clean linen had been laid out in the bathroom; and he saw, hanging on the wall, his jacket, the same with which he had covered the bare shoulders of the young woman whom he had released.

"Who brought that?" he asked.

"That? What?" asked Old Sandstone.

Simon turned to him.

"Tell me, professor, did any one come to this room while you were here?"

"Yes, lots of people. They came in as they liked: admirers, idle sightseers. . . ."

"Did a woman come in?"

"Upon my word, I didn't notice. . . . Why?"

"Why?" replied Simon, explaining. "Because last night, while I was asleep, I several times had the impression that a woman came up to me and bent over me. . . ."

Old Sandstone shrugged his shoulders:

"You've been dreaming, my boy. When one's badly overtired, one's likely to have those nightmares. . . ."

"But it wasn't in the very least a nightmare!" said Simon, laughing.

"It's stuff and nonsense, in any case!" cried Old Sandstone. "What does it matter? There's only one thing that matters: this sudden joining up of the two coasts . . . ! It's fairly tremendous, what? What do you think of it? It's more than a bridge thrown from shore to shore. It's more than a tunnel. It's a flesh-and-blood tie, a permanent junction, an isthmus, what? The Sussex Isthmus, the Isthmus of Normandy, they've already christened it."

Simon jested:

"Oh, an isthmus! . . . A mere causeway, at most!"

"You're drivelling!" cried Old Sandstone. "Don't you know what happened last night? Why, of course not, the fellow knows nothing! He was asleep! . . . Then you didn't realize that there was another earthquake? Quite a slight one, but still . . . an earthquake? No? You didn't wake up? In that case, my boy, listen to the incredible truth, which surpasses what any one could have foreseen. It's no longer a question of the strip of earth which you crossed from Dieppe to Hastings. That was the first attempt, just a little trial phenomenon. But since then . . . oh, since then, my boy . . . you're listening, aren't you? Well, there, from Fécamp to Cape Gris-nez in France and from the west of Brighton to Folkestone in England: all that part, my boy, is now one solid mass. Yes, it forms a permanent junction, seventy to ninety miles wide, a bit of exposed ground equivalent at least to two large French departments or two fair-sized English counties. Nature hasn't done badly . . . for a few hours' work! What say you?"

Simon listened in amazement:

"Is it possible? Are you sure? But then it will be the cause of unspeakable losses. Think: all the coast-towns ruined . . . and trade . . . navigation. . . ."

And Simon, thinking of his father and the vessels locked up in Dieppe harbour, repeated:

"Are you quite sure?"

"Why, of course I am!" said Old Sandstone, to whom all these considerations were utterly devoid of interest. "Of course I'm sure! A hundred telegrams, from all sides, vouch for the fact. What's more, read the evening papers. Oh, I give you my word, it's a blessed revolution! . . . The earthquake? The victims? We hardly mention them! . . . Your Franco-English raid? An old story! No, there's only one thing that matters to-day, on this side of the Channel: England is no longer an Island; she forms part of the European continent; she is riveted on to France!"

"This," said Simon, "is one of the greatest facts in history!"

"It's the greatest, my son. Since the world has been a world and since men have been gathered into nations, there has been no physical phenomenon of greater importance than this. And to think that I predicted the whole thing, the causes and the effects, the causes which I am the only one to know!"

"And what are they?" asked Simon. "How is it that I was able to pass? How is it. . . ."

Old Sandstone checked him with a gesture which reminded Simon of the way in which his former lecturer used to begin his explanations at college; and the old codger, taking a pen and a sheet of paper, proceeded:

"Do you know what a fault is? Of course not! Or a horst? Ditto! Oh, a geology-lesson at Dieppe college was so many hours wasted! Well, lend me your ears, young Dubosc! I will be brief and to the point. The terrestrial rind—that is, the crust which surrounds the internal fire-ball, of solidified elements and eruptive or sedimentary rocks—consists throughout of layers superposed like the pages of a book. Imagine forces of some kind, acting laterally, to compress those layers. There will be corrugations, sometimes actual fractures, the two sides of which, sliding one against the other, will be either raised or depressed. Faults is the name which we give to the fractures that penetrate the terrestrial shell and separate two masses of rock, one of which slides over the plane of fracture. The fault, therefore, reveals an edge, a lower lip produced by the subsidence of the soil, and an upper lip produced by an elevation. Now it happens that suddenly, after thousands and thousands of years, this upper lip, under the action of irresistible tangential forces, will rise, shoot upwards, and form considerable outthrows, to which we give the name of horsts. This is what has just taken place. . . . There exists in France, marked on the geological charts, a fault known as the Rouen fault, which is an important dislocation of the Paris basin. Parallel to the corrugations of the soil, which have wrinkled the cretaceous and tertiary deposits in this region from north-east to north-west, it runs from Versailles to seventy-five miles beyond Rouen. At Maromme, we lose it. But I, Simon, have found it again in the quarries above Longueville and also not far from Dieppe. And lastly I have found it . . . where do you think? In England, at Eastbourne, between Hastings and Newhaven! Same composition, same disposition. There was no question of a mistake. It ran from France to England! It ran under the Channel. . . . Ah, how I have studied it, my fault, Old Sandstone's fault, as I used to call it! How I have sounded it, deciphered its meanings, questioned it, analysed it! And then, suddenly in 1912, some seismic shocks affected the table-lands of the Seine-Inférieure and the Somme and acted in an abnormal manner as I was able to prove—on the tides! Shocks in Normandy! In the Somme! Right out at sea! Do you grasp the strangeness of such a phenomenon and how, on the other hand, it acquired a significant value from the very fact that it took place along a fault? Might we not suppose that there were stresses along this fault, that captive forces were seeking to escape through the earth's crust and attacking the points of least resistance, which happened to lie precisely along the lines of the faults? . . . You may call it an improbable theory. Perhaps so; but at any rate it seemed worth verifying. And I did verify it. I made diving-experiments within sight of the French coast. At my fourth descent, in the Ridin de Dieppe, where the depth is only thirty feet, I discovered traces of an eruption in the two blocks of a fault all of whose elements tallied with those of the Anglo-Norman fault . . . That was all I wanted to know. There was nothing more to do but wait . . . a century or two . . . or else a few hours. . . . Meanwhile it was patent to me that sooner or later the fragile obstacle opposed to the internal energies would break down and the great upheaval would come to pass. It has come to pass."

Simon listened with growing interest. Old Sandstone illustrated his lecture with diagrams drawn with broad strokes of the pen and smeared with blots which his sleeve or fingers generously spread all over the paper. Drops of sweat also played their part, falling from his forehead, for Old Sandstone was always given to perspiring copiously.

He repeated:

"It has come to pass, with a whole train of precursory or concomitant phenomena: submarine eruptions, whirlpools, boats and ships hurled into the air and drawn under by the most terrible suction; and then seismic tremors, more or less marked, cyclones, waterspouts and the devil's own mischief; and then a cataclysm of an earthquake. And immediately afterwards, indeed at the same moment, the shooting up of one lip of the fault, projecting from one coast to the other, over a width of seventy or eighty miles. And then, on the top of it, you, Simon Dubosc, crossing the Channel at a stride. And this perhaps was not the least remarkable fact, my boy, in the whole story."

Simon was silent for some time. Then he said:

"So far, so good. You have explained the emergence of the narrow belt of earth which I walked along and whose width I measured with my eyes, I might say, incessantly. But how do you explain the emergence of this immense region which now fills the Straits of Dover and part of the Channel?"

"Perhaps the Anglo-Norman fault had ramifications in the affected areas?"

"I repeat, I saw only a narrow belt of land."

"That is to say, you saw and crossed only the highest crests of the upheaved region, crests forming a ridge. But this region was thrown up altogether; and you must have noticed that the waves, instead of subsiding, were rolling over miles of beach."

"That is so. Nevertheless the sea was there and is there no longer."

"It is there no longer because it has receded. Phenomena of this extent produce reactions beyond their immediate field of activity and give rise to other phenomena, which in turn react upon the first. And, if this dislocation of the bottom of the Channel has raised one part, it may very well, in some other submarine part, have provoked subsidences and ruptures by which the sea has escaped through the crust. Observe that a reduction of level of six to nine feet was enough to turn those miles of barely covered beach into permanent dry land."

"A supposition, my dear professor."

"Nothing of the sort!" cried Old Sandstone, striking the table with his fists. "Nothing of the sort! I have positive evidence of this also; and I shall publish all my proofs at a suitable moment, which will not be long delayed."

He drew from his pocket the famous locked wallet, whose grease-stained morocco had caught Simon's eye at Newhaven, and declared:

"The truth will emerge from this, my lad, from this wallet in which my notes have been accumulating, four hundred and fifteen notes which must needs serve for reference. For, now that the phenomena has come to pass and all its mysterious causes have been wiped out by the upheaval, people will never know anything except what I have observed by personal experiments. They will put forward theories, draw inferences, form conclusions. But they will not see. Now I . . . have seen."

Simon, who was only half listening, interrupted:

"In the meantime, my dear professor, I am hungry. Will you have some dinner?"

"No, thanks. I must catch the train to Dover and cross to-night. It seems the Calais-Dover boats are running again; and I have no time to lose if I'm to publish an article and take up a definite position." He glanced at his watch. "Phew! It's jolly late! . . . If only I don't lose my train! . . . See you soon, my boy!" . . .

He departed.

The other person sitting in the dark had not stirred during this conversation and, to Simon's great astonishment, did not stir either after Old Sandstone had taken his leave. Simon, at switching on the light, was amazed to find himself face to face with an individual resembling in every respect the man whose body he had seen near the wreck on the previous evening. There was the same brick-red face, the same prominent cheek-bones, the same long hair, the same buff leather clothing. This man, however, was very much younger, with a noble bearing and a handsome face.

"A true Indian chief," thought Simon, "and it seems to me that I have seen him before. . . . Yes, I have certainly seen him somewhere. But where? And when?"

The stranger was silent. Simon asked him:

"What can I do for you, please?"

The other had risen to his feet. He went to the little table on which Simon had emptied his pockets, took up the coin with the head of Napoleon I. which Simon had found the day before and, speaking excellent French, but in a voice whose guttural tone harmonized with his appearance, said:

"You picked up this coin yesterday, on your way here, near a dead body, did you not?"

His guess was so correct and so unexpected that Simon could but confirm it:

"I did . . . near a man who had just been stabbed to death."

"Perhaps you were able to trace the murderer's footprints?"

"Yes."

"They were prints of bathing-shoes or tennis-shoes, with patterned rubber soles?"

"Yes, yes!" said Simon, more and more puzzled. "But how do you know that?"

"Well, sir," continued the man whom Simon silently called the Indian, without replying to the question, "Well, sir, yesterday one of my friends, Badiarinos by name, and his niece Dolores, wishing to explore the new land after the convulsions of the morning, discovered, in the harbour, amid the ruins, a narrow channel which communicated with the sea and was still free at that moment. A man who was getting into a boat offered to take my friend and his niece along with him. After rowing for some time, they saw several large wrecks and landed. Badiarinos left his niece in the boat and went off in one direction, while their companion took another. An hour later, the latter returned alone, carrying an old broken cash-box with gold escaping from it. Seeing blood on one of his sleeves, Dolores became alarmed and tried to get out of the boat. He flung himself upon her and, in spite of her desperate resistance, succeeded in tying her up. He took the oars again and turned back along the new coast-line. On the way, he decided to get rid of her and threw her overboard. She had the good luck to fall on a sandbank which became uncovered a few minutes later and which was soon joined to the mainland. For all that, she would have been dead if you had not released her."

"Yes," murmured Simon, "a Spaniard, isn't she? Very beautiful. . . . I saw her again at the casino."

"We spent the whole evening," continued the Indian, in the same impassive tones, "hunting for the murderer, at the meeting in the casino, in the bars of the hotels, in the public-houses, everywhere. This morning we began again . . . and I came here, wishing also to bring you the coat which you had lent to my friend's niece."

"It was you, then? . . ."

"Now, on entering the corridor upon which your room opens, I heard someone groaning and I saw, a little way ahead of me—the corridor is very dark—I saw a man dragging himself along the floor, wounded, half-dead. A servant and I carried him into one of the rooms which are being used for infirmary purposes; and I could see that he had been stabbed between the shoulders . . . as my friend was! Was I on the track of the murderer? It was difficult to make enquiries in this great hotel, crammed with the mixed crowd of people who have come here for shelter. At last I discovered that, a little before nine o'clock, a lady's maid, coming from outside, with a letter in her hand, had asked the porter for M. Simon Dubosc. The porter replied, 'Second floor, room 44.'"

"But I haven't had that letter!" Simon remarked.

"The porter, luckily for you, mistook the number. You're in room 43."

"And what became of it? Who sent it?"

"Here is a piece of the envelope which I picked up," replied the Indian. "You can still make out a seal with Lord Bakefield's arms. So I went to Battle House."

"And you saw . . . ?"

"Lord Bakefield, his wife and his daughter had left for London this morning, by motor. But I saw the maid, the one who had been to the hotel with a letter for you from her mistress. As she was going upstairs, she was overtaken by a gentleman who said, 'M. Simon Dubosc is asleep and said I was to let no one in. I'll give him the letter.' The maid therefore handed him the letter and accepted a tip of a louis. Here's the louis. It's one with the head of Napoleon I. and the date 1807 and is therefore precisely similar to the coin which you picked up near my friend's body."

"And then?" asked Simon, anxiously. "Then this man . . . ?"

"The man, having read the letter, went and knocked at room 44, which is the next room to yours. Your neighbour opened the door and was seized by the throat, while the murderer, with his free arm, drove a dagger into his neck, above the shoulders."

"Do you mean to say that he was stabbed instead of me? . . ."

"Yes, instead of you. But he is not dead. They will pull him through."

Simon was stunned.

"It's dreadful!" he muttered. "Again, that particular way of striking! . . ."

After a short pause, he asked:

"Do you know nothing of the contents of the letter?"

"From some words exchanged by Lord Bakefield and his daughter the maid gathered that they were discussing the wreck of the Queen Mary, the steamer on which Miss Bakefield had been shipwrecked the other day and which must be lying high and dry by now. Miss Bakefield appears to have lost a miniature."

"Yes," said Simon, thoughtfully, "yes, I dare say. But it is most distressing that this letter was not placed in my own hands. The maid ought never to have given it up."

"Why should she have been suspicious?"

"What! Of the first person she met?"

"But she knew him."

"She knew this man?"

"Certainly. She had often seen him at Lord Bakefield's; he is a frequent visitor to the house."

"Then she was able to give you his name?"

"She told me his name."

"Well?"

"His name's Rolleston."

Simon gave a start.

"Rolleston!" he exclaimed. "But that's impossible! . . . Rolleston! What madness! . . . What's the fellow like? Give me a description of him."

"The man whom the maid and I saw is very tall, which enables him to bend over his victims and stab them from above between the shoulders. He is thin . . . stoops a little . . . and he's very pale. . . ."

"Stop!" ordered Simon, impressed by this description, which was that of Edward. "Stop! . . . The man is a friend of mine and I'll answer for him as I would for myself. Rolleston a murderer! What nonsense!"

And Simon broke into a nervous laugh, while the Indian, still impassive, resumed:

"Among other matters, the maid told me of a public-house, frequented by rather doubtful people, where Rolleston, a great whiskey-drinker, was a familiar customer. This information was found to be correct. The barman, whom I tipped lavishly, told me that Rolleston had just been there, at about twelve o'clock, that he had enlisted half-a-dozen rascals who were game for anything and that the object of the expedition was the wreck of the Queen Mary. I was now fully informed. The whole complicated business was beginning to have a meaning; and I at once made the necessary preparations, though I made a point of coming back here constantly, so that I might be present when you awoke and tell you the news. Moreover, I took care that your friend, Mr. Sandstone, should watch over you; and I locked your pocketbook, which was lying there for anybody to help himself from, in this drawer. I took ten thousand francs out of it to finance our common business."

Simon was past being astonished by the doings of this strange individual. He could have taken all the notes with which the pocketbook was crammed; he had taken only ten. He was at least an honest man.

"Our business?" said Simon. "What do you mean by that?"

"It will not take long to explain, M. Dubosc," replied the Indian, speaking as a man who knows beforehand that he has won his cause. "It's this. Miss Bakefield lost, in the wreck of the Queen Mary, a miniature of the greatest value; and her letter was asking you to go and look for it. The letter was intercepted by Rolleston, who was thus informed of the existence of this precious object and at the same time, no doubt, became acquainted with Miss Bakefield's feelings towards you. If we admit that Rolleston, as the maid declares, is in love with Miss Bakefield, this in itself explains his pleasant intention of stabbing you. At any rate, after recruiting half-a-dozen blackguards of the worst kind, he set out for the wreck of the Queen Mary. Are you going to leave the road clear for him, M. Dubosc?"

Simon did not at once reply. He was thinking. How could he fail to be struck by the logic of the facts that had come to his notice? Nor could he forget Rolleston's habits, his way of living, his love of whisky and his general extravagance. Nevertheless, he once more asserted;

"Rolleston is incapable of such a thing."

"All right," said the Indian. "But certain men have set out to seize the Queen Mary. Are you going to leave the road clear for them? I'm not. I have the death of my friend Badiarinos to avenge. You have Miss Bakefield's letter to bear in mind. We will make a start then. Everything is arranged. Four of my comrades have been notified. I have bought arms, horses and enough provisions to last us. I repeat, everything is ready. What are you going to do?"

Simon threw off his dressing-gown and snatched at his clothes:

"I shall come with you."

"Oh, well," said the Indian smiling, "if you imagine that we can venture on the new land in the middle of the night! What about the water-courses? And the quicksands? And all the rest of it? To say nothing of the devil's own fog! No, no, we shall start to-morrow morning, at four o'clock. In the meantime, eat, M. Dubosc, and sleep."

Simon protested:

"Sleep! Why, I've done nothing else since yesterday!"

"That's not enough. You have undergone the most terrible exertions; and this will be a trying expedition, very trying and very dangerous. You can take Lynx-Eye's word for it."

"Lynx-Eye?"

"Antonio or Lynx-Eye: those are my names," explained the Indian. "Then to-morrow morning, M. Dubosc!"

Simon obeyed like a child. Since they had been living for the past few days in such a topsy-turvy world, could he do better than follow the advice of a man whom he had never seen, who was a Red Indian and who was called Lynx-Eye?

When he had had his meal, he glanced through an evening paper. There was an abundance of news, serious and contradictory. It was stated that Southampton and Le Havre were blocked. It was said that the British fleet was immobilized at Portsmouth. The rivers, choked at their mouths, were overflowing their banks. Everywhere all was disorder and confusion; communications were broken, harbours were filled with sand, ships were lying on their sides, trade was interrupted; everywhere devastation reigned and famine and despair; the local authorities were impotent and the governments distraught.

It was late when Simon at last fell into a troubled sleep.

It seemed to him that after an hour or two some one opened the door of his room; and he remembered that he had not bolted it. Light footsteps crossed the carpet. Then he had the impression that some one bent over him and that this some one was a woman. A cool breath caressed his face and in the darkness he divined a shadow moving quickly away.

He tried to switch on the light, but there was no current.

The shadow left the room. Was it the young woman whom he had released, who had come? But why should she have come?

CHAPTER VIII
ON THE WAR-PATH

At four o'clock in the morning, the streets were almost empty. A few fruit and vegetable-carts were making their way between the demolished houses and the shattered pavements. But from a neighbouring avenue there emerged a little cavalcade in which Simon immediately recognized, at the head of the party, astride a monstrous big horse, Old Sandstone, wearing his rusty top-hat, with the skirts of his black frock-coat overflowing either side of a saddle with bulging saddle-bags.

Next came Antonio, alias Lynx-Eye, likewise mounted; then a third horseman, perched like the others behind heavy saddle-bags; and lastly three persons on foot, one of whom held the bridle of a fourth horse. The three pedestrians had brick-red faces and long hair and were dressed in the same style as Lynx-Eye, in soft leggings with leather fringes, velveteen breeches, flannel girdles, wide-brimmed felt hats, with gaudy ribbons: in short, a heterogeneous, picturesque band, with many-coloured accoutrements, in which the adornments dear to circus cow-boys were displayed side by side with those of one of Fenimore Cooper's Redskins, or one of Gustave Aymard's scouts. They carried rifles slung across their shoulders and revolvers and daggers in their belts.

"What the deuce!" exclaimed Simon. "Why, this is a martial progress! Are we going among savages?"

"We are going into a country," replied Antonio, gravely, "Where there are no inhabitants, no inns, no victuals, but where there are already visitors as dangerous as beasts of prey, which is why we have to carry two days' provisions and two days' supply of oats and compressed fodder for our mounts. This, then, is our escort. These are the brothers Mazzani, the elder and the younger. This is Forsetta. Here is Mr. Sandstone. Here, on horseback, is one of my personal friends. And here, lastly, for you, is Orlando III. a half-breed by Gracious out of Chiquita."

And, at a sign from the Indian, a noble animal was led forward, lean, sinewy and nervous, standing very high on its long legs.

Simon mounted, much amused:

"And you, my dear professor?" he said to Old Sandstone: "Are you one of the party?"

"I lost my train," said the old fellow, "and on returning to the hotel I met Lynx-Eye, who recruited me. I represent science and am entrusted with the geological, geographical, crographical, stratigraphical, palaeontological and other observations. I shall have plenty to do."

"Forward, then!" commanded Simon. And, taking the lead with Antonio, he at once said, "Now tell me about your companions. And you, Lynx-Eye, where do you hail from? After all, if there are still a few specimens of Redskins left, they're not out for a good time on the highways of Europe. Confess that you are, all of you, made up and disguised."

"They are no more made up than I am," said Antonio. "We come from the other side. For my part, I am the grandson of one of the last remaining Indian chiefs, Long Carbine who ran away with the little daughter of a Canadian trapper. My mother was a Mexican. You see that, though there's a mixture, our origins are beyond dispute."

"But afterwards, Lynx-Eye? What has happened afterwards? I'm not aware that the British government provides for the descendants of the Sioux or Mohicans?"

"There are other concerns besides the British government," said the Indian.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean there are concerns which are interested in keeping us going."

"Really? What are they?"

"The cinema-firms."

Simon struck his hand against his forehead:

"What an idiot I am! Why didn't I think of that? Then you are. . . ."

"Simply film actors from the Far West, the Prairies and the Mexican frontier."

"That's it! That's it!" cried Simon. "I have seen you on the screen, haven't I? And I've seen . . . hold on. I remember now, I've seen the fair Dolores also, haven't I? But what are you doing in Europe?"

"An English company sent for me and I engaged a few friends over there, who, like myself, are the very mixed descendants of Red Indians, Mexicans and Spaniards. Now, M. Dubosc, one of these friends of mine—the best, for I can't say much for the others, and I advise you, if the occasion should arise, to be very careful with Forsetta and the Mazzani brothers—the best, M. Dubosc, was murdered the day before yesterday by Rolleston. I loved Badiarinos as a son loves his father. I have sworn to avenge him. There you have it."

"Lynx-Eye, grandson of Long Carbine," said Simon, "we will avenge your friend, but Rolleston is not guilty of his murder. . . ."

For a man like Simon, to whom practical navigation, in the air or on the sea, had given a keen sense of direction and who, moreover, kept on consulting his compass, it was child's play to reach a spot whose latitude and longitude he was able to determine more or less exactly. He galloped due south, after making the calculation that, if nothing forced them to turn aside, they would have to cover a distance of about thirty miles.

Almost immediately, the little troop, leaving on their left the line of ridges which Simon had followed a few days before, struck off across a series of rather lower sand-hills, which nevertheless were high enough to overlook immense beds of yellow mud, covered with a network of small, winding streams. This was the slime deposited by the rivers of the coast and carried out to sea by the tides and currents.

"Grand alluvial soil," said Old Sandstone. "The water will form channels for itself. The sandy parts will be absorbed."

"In five years," said Simon, "we shall see herds of cattle grazing on the very bed of the sea; and five years later there will be railway-lines across it and palatial hotels standing in the middle."

"Perhaps; but, for the moment the situation is not promising," observed the old professor. "Look here, look at this newspaper, published yesterday evening. In both France and England the disorder is complete. Social and economic life has been suddenly paralyzed. No more public services. Letters and telegrams may or may not be delivered. Nothing definite is known; and people are saying the most extraordinary things. The cases of insanity and suicide, it seems, are numberless. And the crimes! Isolated crimes, crimes committed by gangs of criminals, riots, shops and churches pillaged wholesale. It's an absolute chaos; we are back in the dark ages."

The stratum of mud, formerly swept by the ground-wash, was not very thick; and they were able, time after time, to venture upon it without the least danger. For that matter, it was already indented with footprints, which also marked the still moist sand of the hills. They passed the hulk of a steamboat round which some people had established a sort of camp. Some were poking about the hull. Others were entering by the battered funnel, or demolishing the woodwork with hammers, or breaking open cases of more or less intact provisions. Women of the people, women in rags and tatters, wearing the look of hunted animals, sat on pieces of timber, waiting. Children ran about, playing; and already, marking a first attempt at communal life, a pedlar was moving through the crowd with a keg of beer on his back, while two girls, installed behind a tottering bar, were selling tea and whisky.

Farther on, they saw a second camp and, in all directions, men prowling about, solitary individuals, who, like themselves, were reconnoitring.

"Capital!" cried Simon. "The prairie lies stretched before us, with all its mysteries and all its lurking dangers. Here we are on the war-path; and the man who leads us is a Red Indian chief."

After they had trotted for two hours at a brisk pace, the prairie was represented by undulating plains, in which sand and mud alternated in equal proportions and in which hesitating streams of no great depth were seeking a favourable bed. Over it hung a low, thick, stationary fog, apparently as solid as a ceiling.

"What a miracle, my dear Old Sandstone!" cried Simon, while they were following a long ribbon of fine gravel which stretched before them, like a sunken path winding through the greensward of a park. "What a miracle, an adventure of this sort! A horrible adventure, certainly; a disaster causing superhuman suffering, death and mourning; but extraordinary adventure, the finest that a man of my age could dream of. It's all so prodigious!"

"Prodigious, indeed!" said Old Sandstone, who, faithful to his mission, was pursuing his scientific investigations. "Prodigious! Thus, the presence of this gravel in this place constitutes one of the unprecedented events of which you are speaking. And then look at that bank of great golden fish lying over there, with their upturned bellies. . . ."

"Yes, yes, professor," replied Simon. "It's impossible that such an upheaval should not usher in a new age! If I look at the future as people sometimes look at a landscape, with my eyes half-closed, I can see . . . heavens, what don't I see! . . . What don't I imagine! . . . What a tragedy of folly, passion, hatred, love, violence, and noble efforts! We are entering upon one of those periods in which men are full to overflowing of energy, in which the will goes to the head like a generous wine!"

The young man's enthusiasm ended by annoying Old Sandstone, who moved away from his expansive companion, grumbling:

"Simon, the memory of Fenimore Cooper is making you lose your head. You're getting too talkative, my son."

Simon was not losing his head, but he was possessed by a burning fever and, after the hours which he had experienced two days before, was quivering with impatience to return, so to speak, to the world of abnormal actions.

In point of fact, Isabel's image was before him in all his thoughts and in all his dreams. He paid hardly any attention to the precise aim of his expedition or to the campaign which they were undertaking to recover a certain object. The precious miniature was hidden in the rug where he was sure to find it. Rolleston? His gang of ruffians? Men stabbed in the back? A pack of inventions and nightmares! The only reality was Isabel. The only aim before him was to distinguish himself as a knight fighting for the love of his lady.

Meanwhile there were no longer any camps around wrecks, nor parties of people searching for valuables, but only individual prowlers and very few of these, as though most of the people were afraid to go too far from the coast. The surface was becoming more broken, consisting, no doubt, as Old Sandstone explained, of former sand banks which the seismic disturbances had shaken down and mixed with the underlying sedimentary strata. They had to go out of their way to avoid not shattered rocks indeed, nor compact cliffs, but raised tracts of ground that had not yet assumed those definite forms in which we perceive the action of time, of time which separates, classifies and discriminates, which organizes chaos and gives it a durable aspect.

They crossed a sheet of perfectly clear water, contained within a circle of low hills. The bottom was carpeted with little white pebbles. Then they descended, between two very high banks of mud, a narrow gully through which the water trickled in slender cascades. As they emerged from this gully, the Indian's horse shied. A man was kneeling on the ground, groaning and writhing in pain, his face covered with blood. Another man lay near him, his white face turned to the sky.

Antonio and Simon at once sprang from their horses. When the wounded man raised his head, Simon cried:

"Why, I know him . . . it's Williams, Lord Bakefield's secretary. And I know the other too: it's Charles, the valet. They have been attacked. What is it, Williams? You know me, Simon Dubosc."

The man could hardly speak. He spluttered:

"Bakefield . . . Lord Bakefield. . . ."

"Come, Williams, tell me what happened?"

"Yesterday . . . yesterday. . . ." replied the secretary.

"Yes, yesterday you were attacked. By whom?"

"Rolleston. . . ."

Simon started:

"Rolleston! Did he kill Charles?"

"Yes. . . . I. . . . I was wounded. . . . I have been calling out all night. And, just now, another man. . . ."

Antonio put a question:

"You were attacked again, were you not, by some thief who wanted to rob you. . . . And, when he heard us coming, he too stabbed you and took to his heels? Then he is not far away?"

"There . . . there," stammered Williams, trying to stretch out his arm.

The Indian pointed to footsteps which led to the left, up the slope of the hills:

"There's the trail," he said.

"I'll follow it up," said Simon, leaping into the saddle.

The Indian protested:

"What's the use?"

"Use? The scoundrel must be punished!"

Simon went off at a gallop, followed by one of the Indian's companions, the one who rode the fourth horse and whose name he did not know. Almost immediately, at five hundred yards ahead, on the ridge of the hills, a man rose from the cover of some blocks of stone and made away at the top of his speed.

Two minutes later, Simon reached these blocks and exclaimed:

"I see him! He's going around the lake which we crossed. Let's make straight for him."

He descended the farther slope and forced his horse into the water, which, at this point, covered a layer of mud so deep that the two riders had some difficulty in getting clear of it. When they reached the opposite shore, the fugitive, seeing that there were only two of them, turned round, threw up his rifle and covered them:

"Halt," he commanded, "or I fire!"

Simon was going too fast and could not pull up.

At the moment when the shot rang, he was at most twenty yards from the murderer. But another rider had leapt between them and was holding his horse, reared on its hind legs, like a rampart in front of Simon. The animal was hit in the belly and fell.

"Thanks, old chap, you've saved my life!" cried Simon, abandoning the pursuit and dismounting to succour the other, who was in an awkward position, jammed under his horse and in danger of being kicked by the dying brute.

Nevertheless, when Simon endeavoured to extricate him, the fallen rider did nothing to assist his efforts; and, after releasing him with some difficulty, he perceived that the man had fainted.

"That's odd!" thought Simon. "Those fellows don't usually faint over a fall from a horse!"

He knelt down beside the other and, seeing that his breathing was embarrassed, undid the first few buttons of his shirt and uncovered the upper part of his chest. He was stupefied and for the first time looked at his companion, who hitherto, in the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, had seemed to him like the other Indians of the escort. The hat had fallen off. Quickly, Simon lifted an orange silk kerchief bound round the head and neck of the supposed Red Indian, whose hair escaped from it in thick black curls.

"The girl!" he muttered. "Dolores!"

Once more he had before his eyes the vision of radiant beauty to which his mind had recurred several times during the past two days, though no emotion mingled with his admiration. He was so far from any thought of concealing this admiration that the young woman, on recovering consciousness, surprised it in his gaze. She smiled:

"I'm all right now!" she said. "I was only stunned."

"You're not in pain?"

"No. I am used to accidents. I've often had to fall from my horse for the films. . . . This one's dead, isn't he? Poor creature!"

"You've saved my life," said Simon.

"We're quits," she replied.

Her expression was grave and harmonized with her slightly austere features. Her's was one of those beautiful faces which are peculiarly disconcerting by reason of the contrasts which they present, being at once passionate and chaste, noble and sensuous, pensive and enticing.

Simon asked her, point blank:

"Was it you who came to my room yesterday, first in broad daylight and afterwards at night?"

She blushed, but admitted:

"Yes, it was I."

And, at a movement of Simon's, she added:

"I felt uneasy. People were being killed, in town and in the hotel. I had to watch over you, who had saved my life."

"I thank you," he said once more.

"Don't thank me. I have been doing things in spite of myself . . . these last two days. You seem to me so different from other men! . . . But I ought not to speak to you like this. Don't be vexed with me!"

Simon held out his hand to her, when suddenly she assumed a listening attitude and then, after a moment's attention, straightened her clothes, hid her hair beneath her kerchief and put on her hat.

"It's Antonio," she said, in a different tone. "He must have heard the firing. Don't let him know that you recognized me, will you?"

"Why?" asked Simon, in surprise.

She replied, in some embarrassment:

"It's better. . . . Antonio is very masterful. He forbade me to come. It was only when he was naming the three Indians of the escort that he recognized me; I had taken the fourth Indian's horse. . . . So, you see. . . ."

She did not complete her sentence. A horseman had made his appearance on the ridge. When he came up to them, Dolores had unfastened her saddle-bags and was strapping them to the saddle of Simon's horse. Antonio asked no questions. There was no exchange of explanations. With a glance he reconstructed the scene, examined the dead animal and, addressing the young woman by her name, perhaps to show that he was not taken in, said:

"Have my horse, Dolores."

Was it the mere familiarity of a comrade, or that of a man who wishes, in the presence of another man, to assert his rights or his pretentions to a woman? His tone was not imperious, but Simon surprised the glance that flashed anger on the one side and defiance on the other. However, he paid little attention, being much less anxious to discover the private motives which actuated Dolores and Antonio than to elucidate the problem arising from his meeting with Lord Bakefield's secretary.

"Did Williams say anything?" he asked Antonio, who was beside him.

"No, he died without speaking."

"Oh! He's dead! . . . And you discovered nothing?"

"Nothing."

"Then what do you think? Were Williams and Charles sent to the Queen Mary by Lord Bakefield and his daughter and were they to find me and help me in my search? Or did they go on their own account?"

They soon joined the three pedestrians of the escort, to whom Old Sandstone, with a cluster of shells in his hand, was giving a geological lesson. The three pedestrians were asleep.

"I'm going ahead," said Antonio to Simon. "Our horses need a rest. In an hour's time, set out along the track of the white pebbles which I shall drop as I go. You can ride at a trot. My three comrades are good runners."

He had already gone some paces, when he returned and, drawing Simon aside, looked him straight in the eyes and said:

"Be on your guard with Dolores, M. Dubosc. She is one of these women of whom it is wise to beware. I have seen many a man lose his head over her."

Simon smiled and could not refrain from saying:

"Perhaps Lynx-Eye is one of them?"

The Indian repeated:

"Be on your guard, M. Dubosc!"

And with these words he went his way. They seemed to sum up all that he thought of Dolores.

Simon ate, stretched himself out on the ground and smoked some cigarettes. Sitting on the sand, Dolores unpicked a few seams of the wide trousers which she was wearing and arranged them in such a fashion that they might have been taken for a skirt.

An hour later, as Simon was making ready to start, his attention was attracted by a sound of voices. At some little distance, Dolores and one of the three Indians were standing face to face and disputing in a language which Simon did not understand, while the brothers Mazzani were watching them and grinning.

Dolores' arms were folded across her breast; she stood motionless and scornful. The man, on the contrary, was gesticulating, with a snarling face and glittering eyes. Suddenly he took both Dolores' arms and, drawing her close to him, sought her lips.

Simon leapt to his feet. But there was no need of intervention; the Indian had at once recoiled, pricked at the throat by a dagger which Dolores held before her, the handle pressed against her bosom, the point threatening her adversary.

The incident was not followed by any sort of explanation. The Indian made off, grumbling. Old Sandstone, who had seen nothing, tackled Simon on the subject of his geological fault; and Simon merely said to himself, as Dolores tightened her saddle-girth:

"What the deuce are all these people up to?"

He did not waste time in seeking for an answer to the question.

The little band did not overtake Antonio until three hours later, when he was stooping over the ground, examining some footprints.

"There you are," he said to Simon, straightening his back. "I have made out thirteen distinct tracks, left by people who certainly were not travelling together. In addition to these thirteen highwaymen—for a man has to be a pretty tough lot to risk the journey—there are two parties ahead of us: first, a party of four horsemen and then, walking behind them—how many hours later I couldn't say—a party of seven on foot, forming Rolleston's gang. Look, here's the print of the patterned rubber soles."

"Yes, yes," said Simon, recognizing the footprint which he had seen two days before. "And what do you conclude?"

"I conclude that Rolleston, as we knew, is in it and that all these gentry, separate prowlers and parties, are making for the Queen Mary, the last large Channel boat sunk and the nearest to this part of the coast. Think, what a scoop for marauders!"

"Let's push on!" cried the young man, who was now uneasy at the thought that he might fail in the mission which Isabel had allotted to him.

One by one, five other tracks coming from the north—from Eastbourne, the Indian thought—joined the first. In the end they made such an intricate tangle that Antonio had to give up counting them. However, the footprints of the rubber soles and those of the four horses continued to appear in places.

They marched on for some time. The landscape showed little variety, revealing sandy plains and hills, stretches of mud, rivers and pools, of water left by the sea and filled with fish which had taken refuge there. It was all monotonous, without beauty or majesty, but strange, as anything that has never been seen before or anything that is shapeless must needs be strange.

"We are getting near," said Simon.

"Yes," said the Indian, "the tracks are coming in from all directions; and here even are marauders returning northwards, laden with their swag."

It was now four in the afternoon. Not a rift was visible in the ceiling of motionless clouds. Rain fell in great, heavy drops. For the first time they heard the overhead roar of an aeroplane flying above the insuperable obstacle. . . . They followed a depression in the ground, succeeded by hills. And suddenly a bulky object rose before them. It was the Queen Mary. She was bent in two, almost like a broken toy. And nothing was more lamentable, nothing gave a more dismal impression of ruin and destruction than those two lifeless halves of a once so powerful thing.

There was no one near the wreck.

Simon experienced an extreme emotion on standing before what was left of the big boat which he had seen wrecked so terribly. He could not approach it without that sort of pious horror which one would feel on entering a mighty tomb haunted by the shades of those whom we once knew. He thought of the three clergymen and the French family and the captain; and he shuddered at remembering the moment when, with all the strength of his will and all the imperious power of his love, he had dragged Isabel towards the abyss.

A halt was called. Simon left his horse with the Indians and went forward, accompanied by Antonio. He ran down the steep slope which the stern of the vessel had hollowed in the sand, gripped with both hands a rope which hung beside the rudder and in a few seconds, with the assistance of his feet and knees, reached the stern rail.

Although the deck had listed violently to starboard and a sticky mud was oozing through the planking, he ran to the spot where Isabel and he had sat. The bench had been torn away, but the iron supports were still standing and the rug which she had slung to one of them was there, shrunk, heavy with the water dripping from it and packed, as before the shipwreck, in its straps, which were untouched.

Simon thrust his hand between the wet folds of the rug, as he had seen Isabel do. Not feeling anything, he tried to unfasten the straps, but the leather had swollen and the ends were jammed in the buckles. Then he took his knife, cut the straps and unrolled the rug. The miniature in its pearl setting was gone.

In its place, fixed with a safety-pin, was a sheet of paper.

He unfolded it. On it were these hastily-written words, which Isabel evidently intended for him:

"I was hoping to see you. Haven't you received my letter? We have spent the night here—in an absolute hell on earth! and we are just leaving. I am uneasy. I feel that some one is prowling around us. Why are not you here?"

"Oh!" Simon stammered, "it's incredible!"

He showed the note to Antonio, who had joined him, and at once added:

"Miss Bakefield! . . . She spent the night here . . . with her father . . . and they have gone! But where? How are we to save them from so many lurking dangers?"

The Indian read the letter and said, slowly:

"They have not gone back north. I should have seen their tracks."

"Then. . . . ?"

"Then. . . . I don't know."

"But this is awful! See, Antonio, think of all that is threatening them . . . of Rolleston pursuing them! Think of this wild country, swarming with highwaymen and foot-pads! . . . It's horrible, horrible!"

PART THE SECOND

CHAPTER I
INSIDE THE WRECK

The expedition so gaily launched, in which Simon saw merely a picturesque adventure, such as one reads of in novels, had suddenly become the most formidable tragedy. It was no longer a matter of cinema Indians and circus cow-boys, nor of droll discoveries in fabled lands, but of real dangers, of ruthless brigands operating in regions where no organized force could thwart their enterprises. What could Isabel and her father do, beset by criminals of the worst type?

"Good God!" exclaimed Simon. "How could Lord Bakefield be so rash as to risk this journey? Look here, Antonio, the lady's-maid told you that Lord Bakefield had gone to London by train, with his wife and daughter. . . ."

"A misunderstanding," declared the Indian. "He must have seen the duchess to the station and arranged the expedition with Miss Bakefield."

"Then they're alone, those two?"

"No, they have two men-servants with them. It's the four riders whose tracks we picked up."

"What imprudence!"

"Imprudence, yes. Miss Bakefield told you of it in the intercepted letter, counting on you to take the necessary measures to protect her. Moreover, Lord Bakefield had given orders to his secretary, Williams, and his valet, Charles, to join them. That is why those two poor fellows were put out of action on the road by Rolleston and his six accomplices."

"Those are the men I'm afraid of," said Simon, hoarsely. "Have Lord Bakefield and his daughter escaped them? Did the departure of which Miss Bakefield speaks take place before their arrival? How can we find out? Where are we to look for them?"

"Here," said Antonio.

"On this deserted wreck?"

"There's a whole crowd inside the wreck," the Indian affirmed. "Here, we'll begin by questioning the boy who is watching us over there."

Leaning against the stump of a broken mast, stood a lean, pasty-faced gutter-snipe, with his hands in his pockets, smoking a huge cigar. Simon went up to him, muttering:

"Very like one of Lord Bakefield's favourite Havanas. . . . Where did you sneak that cigar?" he asked.

"I ain't sneaked nuffin, sure as my name's Jim. It was giv' me."

"Who gave it you?"

"My old man."

"Where is he, your old man?"

"Listen. . . ."

They listened. A noise echoed beneath their feet in the bowels of the wreck. It sounded like the regular blows of a hammer.

"That's my old man, smashin' 'er up," said the urchin, grinning.

"Tell me," said Simon, "have you seen an elderly gentleman and a young lady who came here on horseback?"

"Dunno," said the boy, carelessly. "Ask my old man."

Simon drew Antonio to where a companion-ladder led from the deck to the first-class cabins, as a still legible inscription informed them. They were going down the ladder when Simon, leading the way, struck his foot against something and nearly fell. By the light of a pocket-torch he saw the dead body of a woman. Though the face, which was swollen and bloated and half eaten away, was unrecognizable, certain signs, such as the colour and material of clothes, enabled Simon to identify the French lady whom he had seen with her husband and children. On stooping, he saw that the left hand had been severed at the wrist and that two fingers were lacking on the right hand.

"Poor woman!" he faltered. "Unable to remove her rings and bracelets, the blackguards mutilated her!" And he added. "To think that Isabel was here, that night, in this hell!"

The corridor which they entered as they followed the sound of hammering led them astern. At a sudden turning a man appeared, holding in his hand a lump of iron with which he was striking furiously at the partition-wall of a cabin. Through the ground-glass panes in the ceiling filtered a pale white light which fell full upon the most loathsome face imaginable, a scoundrelly, pallid, cruel face, with a pair of bloodshot eyes and an absolutely bald skull dripping with sweat.

"Keep your distance, mates! Everybody do the best he can in his own! There's plenty of stuff to go round!"

"The old man ain't much of a talker," said the urchin's shrill voice.

The boy had accompanied them and stood, with a bantering air, puffing great whiffs of smoke. The Indian handed him a fifty-franc note:

"Jim, you have something to tell us. Out with it."

"That's all right," said the boy. "I'm beginnin' to twig this business. Come along 'ere!"

Guided by the boy, Antonio and Simon passed along other corridors where they found the same fury of destruction. Everywhere fierce-looking ruffians were forcing locks, tearing, splitting, smashing, looting. Everywhere they were seen creeping into dark corners, crawling on their hands and knees, sniffing out booty and seeking, in default of gold or silver, bits of leather or scrap-metal that might prove marketable.

They were beasts of prey, carrion brutes, like those which prowl about a battlefield. Mutilated and stripped corpses bore witness to their ferocity. There were no rings left upon the bodies, no bracelets, watches, or pocket-books; no pins in the men's ties; no brooches at the women's throats.

From time to time, here and there, in this workyard of death and hideous theft, the sound of a quarrel arose; two bodies rolling on the ground; shouts, yells of pain, ending in the death-rattle. Two plunderers came to grips; and in a moment one of them was a murderer.

Jim halted in front of a roomy cabin, the lower part of whose sloping floor was under water; but on the upper part were several cane-deck chairs which were almost dry.

"That's where they spent the night," he said.

"Who?" asked Simon.

"The three what come on horseback. I was the first on the wreck with my old man. I saw 'em come."

"But there were four of them."

"There was one what lay down outside to guard the horses. The other three went to get something out of the rug where you didn't find nuffin; and they 'ad their grub and slept in 'ere. This mornin', after they left, my old man come to go through the cabin and found the old gent's cigar-case here.

"So they went away again?"

The boy was silent.

"Answer my question, can't you, boy? They left on horseback, didn't they, before the others got here? And they're out of danger?"

The boy held out his hand:

"Two notes," he demanded.

Simon was on the point of flying at him. But he restrained himself, gave the boy the notes and pulled out his revolver:

"Now then!"

The boy shrugged his shoulders:

"It's the notes is making me talk, not that thing! . . . Well, it's like this: when the old gent wanted to start this mornin', he couldn't find the old chap what was guarding the four horses near the stern of the vessel, what you got up by."

"But the horses?"

"Gone!"

"You mean, stolen?"

"'Arf a mo! The old gent, his daughter and the other gent went off to look for him, following the track of the 'osses alongside the wreck. That took them to the other part of the Queen Mary, just to the place where the starboard lifeboat was stove in. And then—I was on deck, like I was just now, and I see the whole business as if it was the movies—there was five or six devils got up from behind the lifeboat and rushed at 'em; and a great tall bloke a-leadin' of 'em with a revolver in each fist. I wouldn't say everythink passed off quiet, not on neither side. The old gent, 'e defended himself. There was some shootin'; and I see two of 'em fall in the scrimmage."

"And then? And then?" Simon rapped out, breathlessly.

"I don't know nuffin about then. A change of pickshers, like at the movies. The old man wanted me for somefink; he took me by the scruff o' the neck and I lost the end o' the film like."

It was now Simon's turn to seize the young hooligan by the scruff of the neck. He dragged him up the companion-ladder and, having reached a part of the deck where the whole wreck was visible, he said:

"It was over there, the lifeboat?"

"Yuss, over there."

Simon rushed to the stern of the vessel, slid down the rope and, followed by the Indian and the boy, ran alongside the steamer to the lifeboat which had been torn from the Queen Mary's deck and cast on the sands some twenty yards from the wreck. It was here that the attack had taken place. Traces of it remained. The body of one of those whom the boy had described as "devils" was half-hidden in a hollow.

But a cry of pain rose from behind the boat. Simon and the Indian ran round it and saw a man cowering there, with his forehead bound up in a bloodstained handkerchief.

"Rolleston!" cried Simon, stopping short in bewilderment. "Edward Rolleston!"

Rolleston! The man whom all accused! The man who had planned the whole affair and recruited the Hastings blackguards in order to make a dash for the wreck and steal the miniature! Rolleston, the murderer of Dolores' uncle, the murderer of William and Charles! Rolleston, Isabel's persecutor!

Nevertheless Simon hesitated, profoundly troubled by the sight of his friend. Fearing an outburst of anger on the Indian's part, he seized him by the arm:

"Wait a moment, Antonio! . . . First, are you really certain?"

For some seconds, neither stirred. Simon was thinking that Rolleston's presence on the battle-field was the most convincing proof of his guilt. But Antonio declared:

"This is not the man I met in the corridor of the hotel."

"Ah!" cried Simon. "I was sure of it! In spite of all appearances, I could not admit. . . ."

And he rushed up to his friend, saying:

"Wounded, Ted? It's not serious, is it, old man?"

The Englishman murmured:

"Is that you, Simon? I didn't recognize you. My eyes are all misty."

"You're not in pain?"

"I should think I was in pain! The bullet must have struck against the skull and then glanced off; and here I've been since this morning, half dead. But I shall get over it."

Simon questioned him anxiously:

"Isabel? What has become of her?"

"I don't know. . . . I don't know," the Englishman said, with an effort. "No . . . no . . . I don't know. . . ."

"But where do you come from? How do you come to be here?"

"I was with Lord Bakefield and Isabel."

"Ah!" said Simon. "Then you were of their party?"

"Yes. We spent the night on the Queen Mary . . . and this morning we were set upon here, by the gang. We were retreating, when I dropped. Lord Bakefield and Isabel fell back on the Queen Mary, where it would have been easier for them to defend themselves. Rolleston and his men were not firing at them, however."

"Rolleston?" echoed Simon.

"A cousin of mine . . . Wilfred Rolleston, a damned brute, capable of anything . . . a scoundrel . . . a crook . . . oh, a madman! A real madman . . . a dipsomaniac. . . ."

"And he's like you in appearance isn't he?" asked Simon, understanding the mistake that had been made.

"I suppose so."

"And it was to steal the miniature and the pearls that he attacked you?"

"That . . . and something else that he's even more keen on."

"What?"

"He's in love with Isabel. He asked her to marry him at a time when he hadn't fallen so low. Then Bakefield kicked him out."

"Oh, it would be too awful," stammered Simon, "if that man had succeeded in kidnapping Isabel!"

He stood up. Rolleston, exhausted, said:

"Save her, Simon."

"But you, Ted? We can't leave you. . . ."

"She comes first. He has sworn to have his revenge; he has sworn that Isabel shall be his wife."

"But what are we to do? Where are we to look for her?" cried Simon, in despair.

At that moment Jim came up, all out of breath. He was followed by a man whom Simon at once recognized as a groom in Lord Bakefield's service.

"The bloke!" cried Jim. "The one what looked after the horses. . . . I found him among the rocks . . . d'you see? Over there? They'd tied him up and the horses were tied up in a sort of cave like. . . ."

Simon lost no time:

"Miss Bakefield?"

"Carried off," replied the man. "Carried off . . . and his lordship as well."

"Ah!" cried Simon, overwhelmed.

The man continued:

"Rolleston is their leader, Wilfred Rolleston. He came up to me this morning at sunrise, as I was seeing to the horses, and asked me if Lord Bakefield was still there. Then, without waiting for an answer, he knocked me flat, with the help of his men, and had me carried here, where they laid an ambush for his lordship. They didn't mind what they said before me; and I learnt that Mr. Williams, the secretary, and Charles, my fellow-servant, who were to have joined us and increased the escort, had been attacked by them and, most likely, killed. I learnt too that Rolleston's idea was to keep Miss Bakefield as a hostage and to send his lordship to his Paris banker's to get the ransom. Later on, they left me alone. Then I heard two shots and, a little after, they returned with his lordship and Miss Bakefield. Both of them had their hands and feet tied."

"At what time did all this happen?" asked Simon, quivering with impatience.

"Nine o'clock, sir, or thereabouts."

"Then they have a day's start of us?"

"Oh, no! There were provisions in the saddle-bags. They sat eating and drinking and then went to sleep. It was at least two o'clock in the afternoon when they strapped his lordship and Miss Bakefield to a couple of horses and started."

"In what direction?"

"That way," said the man-servant, pointing.

"Antonio," cried Simon, "we must catch them before night! The ruffian's escort is on foot. Three hours' gallop will be enough. . . ."

"Our horses are badly done up," objected the Indian.

"They've got to get there, if it kills them."

Simon Dubosc gave the servant his instructions:

"Get Mr. Rolleston under shelter in the wreck, look after him and don't leave him for a second. Jim, can I count on you?"

"Yes."

"And on your father?"

"All depends."

"Fifty pounds for him if the wounded man is in Brighton, safe and sound, in two days' time."

"Make it a hundred," said Jim. "Not a penny less."

"Very well, a hundred."

At six o'clock in the evening, Simon and Antonio returned to the Indians' camp. They quickly bridled and saddled their horses, while Old Sandstone, who was strolling around, ran up to them shouting:

"My fault, Simon! I swear we are over my fault, the fault in the Paris basin, which I traced to Maromme and near the Ridin de Dieppe . . . the one whose fracture caused the whole upheaval. Get on your horse, so that I may give you my proofs. There's a regular Eocene and Pliocene mixture over there which is really typical. . . . Heavens, man, listen to me, can't you?"

Simon stepped up to him and, with drawn features, shouted:

"This is no time to listen to your nonsense!"

"What do you mean?" stammered the old fellow, utterly bewildered.

"Mean? Why, shut up!"

And the young man leapt into the saddle:

"Are you coming, Antonio?"

"Yes. My mates will follow our trail. I shall leave a mark from spot to spot; and I hope we shall all be united again to-morrow."

As they were starting, Dolores, on horseback, brought up her mount alongside theirs.

"No!" said Antonio. "You come on with the others. The professor can't walk all the time."

She made no reply.

"I insist on your keeping with the others," repeated the half-breed, more severely.

But she set her horse at a trot and caught up with Simon.

For more than an hour they followed a direction which Simon took to be south by south-east, that is to say, the direction of France. The half-breed thought the same:

"The main thing," he said, "is to get near the coast, as our beasts have only enough food to last them till to-morrow evening. The water question also might become troublesome."

"I don't care what happens to-morrow," Simon rejoined.

They made much slower progress than they had hoped to do. Their mounts were poor, spiritless stuff. Moreover, they had to stop at intervals to decipher the tracks which crossed one another in the wet sand or to pick them up on rocky ground. Simon became incensed at each of these halts.

All around them the scene was like that which they had observed early in the afternoon; the land rose and fell in scarcely perceptible undulations; it was a dismal, monotonous world, with its graveyards of ships and skeleton steamers. Prowling figures crossed it in all directions. Antonio shouted questions to them as he passed. One of them said that he had met two horsemen and four pedestrians leading a couple of horses on which were bound a man and a woman whose fair hair swept the ground.

"How long ago was this?" asked Simon, in a hoarse voice.

"Forty minutes, or fifty at the most."

He dug his heels into his horse's flanks and set off at a gallop, stooping over the animal's neck in order not to lose the scoundrel's track. Antonio found it difficult to follow him, while Dolores erect in her saddle, with a serious face and eyes fixed on the distant horizon, kept up with him without an effort.

Meanwhile the light was failing, and the riders felt as though the darkness were about to swoop down on them from the heavy clouds in which it was gathering.

"We shall get there . . . we must," repeated Simon. "I feel certain we shall see them in ten minutes. . . ."

He told Dolores in a few words what he had heard of Isabel's abduction. The thought that she was in pain caused unendurable torture. His overwrought mind pictured her a captive among savages torturing her for their amusement, while her blood-bedabbled head was gashed by the stones along the track. He followed in imagination all the stages of her last agony; and he had such a keen impression of speed contending with death, he searched the horizon with so eager a gaze, that he scarcely heeded a strident call from the half-breed, a hundred yards in the rear.

Dolores turned and calmly observed:

"Antonio's horse has fallen."

"Antonio can follow us," said Simon.

For a few moments, they had been riding through a rather more uneven tract of land, covered with a sort of downs with precipitous sides, like cliffs. A fairly steep incline led to a long valley, filled with water, on the brink of which the bandits' trail was plainly visible. They entered the water, making for a place on the opposite edge which seemed to them, at a distance, to be trampled in the same way.

The water, which barely reached the horses' hocks, flowed in a gentle current from left to right. But, when they had covered a third of the distance, Dolores struck Simon's horse with her long reins:

"Hurry!" she commanded. "Look . . . on the left. . . ."

On the left the whole width of the valley was blocked by a lofty wave which was gathering at either end into a long, foaming breaker. It was merely a natural phenomenon; as a result of the great upheaval, the waters were seeking their level and invading the lower tracts. Moreover, the flow was so gradual that there was no reason to fear its effects. The horses, however, seemed to be gradually sinking. Dragged by the current, they were forced to sheer off to the right; and at the same time the opposite bank was moving away from them, changing its aspect, shifting back as the new stream rose. And, when they had reached it, they were still obliged, in order to escape the water, which pursued them incessantly, to quicken their pace and trot along the narrow lane enclosed between two little cliffs of dried mud, in which thousands upon thousands of shells were encrusted like the cubes of a mosaic.

Only after half an hour's riding were they able to clamber to a table-land where they were out of reach. It was as well, for their horses refused to go any farther.

The darkness was increasing. How were they to recover the tracks of Isabel and her kidnappers? And how could their own tracks, buried beneath this enormous sheet of water, be recovered by Antonio and his men?

"We are separated from the others," said Simon, "and I don't see how our party can be got together again."

"Not before to-morrow, at all events," said Dolores.

"Not before. . . ."

And so these two were alone in the night, in the depths of this mysterious land.

Simon strode to and fro on the plateau, like a man who does not know on what course to decide and who knows, moreover, that there is no course on which he can decide. But Dolores unsaddled the horses, unbuckled the saddle-bags and said:

"Our food will hold out, but we have nothing to drink. The spare water-bottles were strapped to Antonio's saddle."

And she added, after spreading out the two horse-rugs:

"We will sleep here, Simon."

CHAPTER II
ALONG THE CABLE

He fell asleep beside her, after a long spell of waking during which his uneasiness was gradually assuaged by the soft and regular rhythm which marked the young girl's breathing.

When he woke, fairly late in the morning, Dolores was stooping and bathing her beautiful arms and her face in the stream that flowed down the hillside. She moved slowly; and all her attitude, as she dried her arms and put back her hair, knotting it low on her neck, were full of a grave harmony.

As Simon stood up, she filled a glass and brought it to him:

"Drink that," she said. "Contrary to what I thought, it's fresh water. I heard our horses drinking it in the night."

"That's easily explained," said Simon. "During the first few days, the rivers of the old coasts filtered in more or less anywhere, until forced, by their increasing flow, to wear themselves a new course. Judging by the direction which this one seems to follow and by its size, it should be a French river, doubtless the Somme, which will join the sea henceforth between Le Havre and Southampton. Unless. . . ."

He was not certain of his argument. In reality, under the implacable veil of the clouds, which were still motionless and hanging very low, and without his compass, which he had heedlessly handed to Antonio, he did not know how to take his bearings. He had followed in Isabel's track last evening; and he hesitated to venture in either direction now that this track was lost and that there was no clue to justify his seeking her in one direction rather than in another.

A discovery of Dolores put an end to his hesitation. In exploring the immediate surroundings, the girl had noticed a submarine cable which crossed the river.

"Capital!" he said. "The cable evidently comes from England, like ourselves. If we follow it, we shall be going towards France. We shall be sure of going the same way as our enemies and we shall very likely pick up some information on the road."

"France is a long way off," Dolores remarked, "and our horses perhaps won't last for more than another half day."

"That's their lookout," cried Simon. "We shall finish the journey on foot. The great thing is to reach the French coast. Let us make a start."

At two hundred yards' distance, in a depression of the soil, the cable rose from the river and ran straight to a sand-bank, after which it appeared once more, like one of those roads which show in sections on uneven plains.

"It will lead you to Dieppe," said a wandering Frenchman, whom Simon had stopped. "I've just come from there. You've only to follow it."

They followed it in silence. A mute companion, speaking none save indispensable words, Dolores seemed to be always self-absorbed, or to heed only the horses and the details of the expedition. As for Simon, he gave no thought to her. It was a curious fact that he had not yet felt, even casually, that there was something strange and disturbing in the adventure that brought him, a young man, and her, a young woman, together. She remained the unknown; yet this mystery had no particular attraction for him, nor did Antonio's enigmatic words recur to his memory. Though he was perfectly well aware that she was very beautiful, though it gave him pleasure to look at her from time to time and though he often felt her eyes resting on him, she was never the subject of his thoughts and did not for a moment enter into the unbroken reflections aroused by his love for Isabel Bakefield and the dangers which she was incurring.

These dangers he now judged to be less terrible than he had supposed. Since Rolleston's plan consisted in sending Lord Bakefield to a Paris banker to obtain money, it might be assumed that Isabel, held as a hostage, would be treated with a certain consideration, at least until Rolleston, after receiving a ransom, made further demands. But, when this happened, would not he, Simon, be there?

They were now entering a region of a wholly different character, where there was no longer either sand or mud, but a floor of grey rock streaked with thin sheets of hard, sharp-edged stone, which refused to take the imprint of a trail and which even the iron of the horses' shoes failed to mark. Their only chance of information was from the prowlers whom they might encounter.

These were becoming more and more numerous. Two full days had elapsed since the emergence of the new land. It was now the third day; and from all parts, from every point of the sea-side counties or departments, came hastening all who did not fear the risk of the undertaking: vagabonds, tramps, poachers, reckless spirits, daredevils of all kinds. The ruined towns poured forth their contingent of poverty-striken, starving outcasts and escaped prisoners. Armed with rifles and swords, with clubs or scythes, all these brigands wore an air that was both defiant and threatening. They watched one another warily, each of them gauging at a glance his neighbour's strength, ready to spring upon him or ready to act in self-defence.

Simon's questions hardly evoked as much as a grumbling reply:

"A woman tied up? A party? Horses? Not come my way."

And they went on. But, two hours later, Simon was greatly surprised to see the motley dress of three men walking some distance ahead, their shoulders laden with bundles which each of them carried slung on the end of a stick. Weren't those Antonio's Indians?

"Yes," murmured Dolores. "It's Forsetta and the Mazzani brothers." But, when Simon proposed to go after them, "No!" she said, without concealing her repugnance. "They're a bad lot. There's nothing to be gained by joining them."

But he was not listening; and, as soon as they were within hearing, he shouted:

"Is Antonio anywhere about?"

The three men set down their bundles, while Simon and Dolores dismounted and Forsetta, who had a revolver in his hand, thrust it into his pocket. He was a great giant of a fellow.

"Ah, so it's you, Dolores?" he said, after saluting Simon. "Faith, no, Antonio's nowhere hereabouts. We've not seen him."

He smiled with a wry mouth and treacherous eyes.

"That means," retorted Simon, pointing to their burdens, "that you and Mazzani thought it simpler to go hunting in this direction?"

"May be," he said, with a leer.

"But the old professor? Antonio left him in your charge."