CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE CADAVER ON THE SHIP

In accordance with the indications furnished by the document written by the castaways of the Jenny, Trinitus searched for the ship at the northern end of the cliff, through the enormous icebergs that the wind had had driven toward the coast. The search was extremely difficult. To reach the sea, which was continually masked by blocks of ice of prodigious height, it was necessary to climb over all the accessible peaks, and as they were generally the lower ones, one could only discover a very limited horizon from their summits.

It was continually necessary to follow veritable alleyways hollowed out in the ice, the sheer walls of which, taller than six-story houses, limited the view in all directions. A host of insurmountable objects also stopped the explorers repeatedly. Sometimes it was a broad and deep crevasse that opened before them, sometimes a snowdrift into which they sank waist-deep and forced them to retreat.

From time to time, in order to attract the castaways’ attention, if, by chance any still remained on the Jenny, the three men uttered formidable hurrahs, followed by a simultaneous discharge of their firearms. The echoes of the glaciers, in prolonged and peculiarly sonorous resonances, multiplied the shots and magnified the sound of the detonations, but no other sound replied to those frequent appeals.

Trinitus was beginning to believe that not only had the entire crew of the Jenny died of cold and deprivation, but that the ship itself, probably crushed between two ice-sheets, had disappeared under the waves.

After thirty-six hours of stubborn research, however, Marcel, having scaled a cliff that Nicaise and Trinitus had identified as an excellent observatory, a black dot framed by an ice-field suddenly struck his gaze. The distance that separated him from that dot was so considerable, though, that he needed to have recourse to Trinitus’ binoculars to determine exactly what he was looking at.

Scarcely had he raised the optical instrument to his eyes than a cry of victory escaped his lips. “I can see the ship! I can see the Jenny!”

The cheers and enthusiastic shouts of Trinitus and Nicaise welcomed that good news; the two mariners assured themselves of the Jenny’s position, wedged in the ice as if in a vice, and the little troop, alert and joyful, headed toward the wrecked ship at top speed.

Soon, the three companions came into the icy plain that extended as far as the eye could see around the Jenny, and from then on they were able to study the unfortunate vessel at their ease.

She was a brig of the most wretched appearance. Her masts had been sawn off at deck level and her hull had been badly dented by the violent impacts of the icebergs and floes in the midst of which she had been sailing. Here and there, her split sides gaped open, seemingly covered with hideous wounds. On the ice, at the foot of the ship, fragments of planks, scraps of sails, fishing equipment and a few tools had been abandoned, half-hidden in the snow. Ends of rope hung down everywhere; a narrow ladder had been set up beneath an open hatchway.

Before climbing up, Trinitus and Nicaise hailed the crew several times. With Marcel they made a circuit of the ship, but, no one having responded to their reiterated appeals, they decided to climb up on to the deck.

Suddenly, Trinitus, having looked curiously through a porthole, uttered a cry of amazement and fright. His two friends wanted to see too, and they perceived a man sitting in a cabin at a small table laden with ledgers and papers.

In spite of the secret terror that took possession of them at that sight, they did not hesitate to continue the exploration that they had commenced, and as soon as they had reached the deck they hastened to clear away the snow accumulated at the head of the stairway. They descended into the cabins with an urgency mingled with keen anxiety, and immediately headed for the room occupied by the mysterious individual they had see through the porthole.

Trinitus opened the door. The man was sitting in the same place, still immobile. The scientist approached him and took his hand; it was stiff and icy. A greenish moisture covered his pale lips and veiled his eyes; his right hand, leaning on the table, was holding a pen, and a voluminous journal was open before him.

While Trinitus recognized, trembling, that the unfortunate man had been killed by the cold, Marcel cast his eyes over the last lines that the hand had written, and read in a high voice:

Seventeenth January. It’s now thirty-three days that our ship has been trapped in the ice. Our fire went out yesterday evening and the captain tried in vain to relight it. His wife died this morning of cold and hunger, along with five crewmen. No more hope!

On hearing those words, Trinitus cast his eyes over the journal, but suddenly, recoiling fearfully, he fell into Nicaise’s arms, uttering a terrible cry. He had just perceived a casket on the table that he had seen before, in the hands of his daughter—and, indeed, on which the name Alice was inscribed in golden letters.

His amazement was, it is true, of short duration.

The scientist launched himself toward the box like a miser hurling himself on a treasure. He took it in his hands and sprinkled it with his tears, kissing it rapturously.

Nicaise and Marcel, as astonished as he was, shared his emotion and felt a new courage reborn within them.

On opening the casket, however, Trinitus suddenly went pale. A shiver made his entire body tremble. Seized by fear, he wondered whether the letter that his fingers felt inside the box might suddenly strike him a mortal blow by revealing the most fatal news to him.

It was a terrible moment of anguish for the poor scientist, when, with a tremulous hand, he opened the mysterious note over which he dared not cast his eyes. Suddenly, however, a glint of joy made his face radiant, and his heart beat faster. In the blink of an eye he passed from the most atrocious doubt to the most ardent hope. He was completely transfigured.

The note contained in the casket was written in Alice’s handwriting. A few lines were traced in pencil.

The English steamer Richmond has been broken by a tempest in the Coral Sea. Ten passengers saved in a lifeboat have jut disembarked on the coast of an island that is unknown to them, but must belong to the archipelago of the New Hebrides. May God protect them, while waiting for their brethren to come to their rescue.

“Finally!” cried Trinitus. “The tempest has spared my dear child! She’s alive! And her mother is doubtless alive too! Oh, Nicaise…Marcel…what joy for us! Be brave, and we’ll find them. By virtue of strength and energy, we’ll triumph over all obstacles! We’ll be stronger than all the elements conspiring against us!”

Nicaise and Marcel shook their friend’s hand effusively.

“Dear child,” Trinitus went on, emotionally. “How far she must have been from suspecting, when she wrote this note, that it would be read by her father! Do you understand exactly how it has fallen into our hands? It’s the currents that flow from the Coral Sea to here that have carried it this far. The Jenny was already trapped in the ice when her passengers picked up the casket! Perhaps there’s even mention of it in the log—isn’t there, Marcel?”

The young man, who had just picked up the journal from the table, turned two or three pages and suddenly exclaimed: “Eighth January. This morning a sailor brought back a box thrown into the sea by castaways. May they be more fortunate than us, and escape the frightful death that awaits us.”

“Poor fellows,” said Trinitus, gazing once again at the pale face, hardened by cold, of the unfortunate man that death had nailed to the chair beside the table. “What frightful tortures they must have endured!”

Thinking, however, that he would probably find all the tools necessary to repair the Éclair in the carpenter’s locker, the scientist soon hastened to get out of that funereal cabin, to the great relief of Nicaise and Marcel.

Following the corridors of the ship, the three men discovered four more cadavers stiffened by the cold but retaining all the appearances of life.

The Jenny seemed to be a vast sepulcher, and the ice-field in which she was imprisoned rendered it a hundred times more sinister than the darkest tomb.

Nicaise marched in terror over the sonorous planks, Marcel dared not proffer a word, and Trinitus, having occasionally had the audacity to open a door, hardly ever closed them again without a secret surge of fear.

The cadavers of the Jenny were, in fact, veritably fearful. The majority of the passengers, having expired in atrocious suffering, had retained on their faces the horrible expression of pain, and one might have thought that death, by virtue of a refinement of cruelty, had taken pleasure in conserving the features of his victims, in order to see engraved there the marks of the most frightful agony.

Finally, after some groping, Trinitus and his two companions arrived at the master carpenter’s cabin. There was no cadaver there, and all the tools were in their usual places. A little forge devoid of fuel appeared in a neighboring cabin, the partition wall of which had been broken, probably in order to be burned. At that sight, the scientist uttered a cry of joy, and while Nicaise broke up an old table in order to make a fire, he set about searching the drawers and chests for a metal rod that could replace the Éclair’s broken axle.

After a few minutes he was fortunate enough to discover a steel bar that seemed to possess all the desirable qualities, and Marcel presented him with a box of files that he welcomed with the greatest pleasure.

Soon, thanks to Nicaise’s perseverance, flame sprang up in the forge, the steel bar was reddened in the fire, and Trinitus fashioned it as he wished on the anvil, striking it with a hundred mighty hammer-blows, as if he wanted to wake the dead men that the Jenny retained in her flanks.