Tired of reading? Add this page to your Bookmarks or Favorites and finish it later.
|
|
The preparations for the expedition were brief and simple.
Ben Zoof saddled the horses and filled his pouch with biscuits
and game; water, he felt certain, could be obtained in abundance
from the numerous affluents of the Shelif, which, although they
had now become tributaries of the Mediterranean, still meandered
through the plain. Captain Servadac mounted his horse Zephyr,
and Ben Zoof simultaneously got astride his mare Galette,
named after the mill of Montmartre. They galloped off in
the direction of the Shelif, and were not long in discovering
that the diminution in the pressure of the atmosphere had precisely
the same effect upon their horses as it had had upon themselves.
Their muscular strength seemed five times as great as hitherto;
their hoofs scarcely touched the ground, and they seemed
transformed from ordinary quadrupeds into veritable hippogriffs.
Happily, Servadac and his orderly were fearless riders;
they made no attempt to curb their steeds, but even urged them
to still greater exertions. Twenty minutes sufficed to carry them
over the four or five miles that intervened between the gourbi
and the mouth of the Shelif; then, slackening their speed,
they proceeded at a more leisurely pace to the southeast, along what
had once been the right bank of the river, but which, although it
still retained its former characteristics, was now the boundary
of a sea, which extending farther than the limits of the horizon,
must have swallowed up at least a large portion of the province
of Oran. Captain Servadac knew the country well; he had at one
time been engaged upon a trigo-nometrical survey of the district,
and consequently had an accurate knowledge of its topography.
His idea now was to draw up a report of his investigations:
to whom that report should be delivered was a problem he had
yet to solve.
During the four hours of daylight that still remained,
the travelers rode about twenty-one miles from the river mouth.
To their vast surprise, they did not meet a single human being.
At nightfall they again encamped in a slight bend of the shore,
at a point which on the previous evening had faced the mouth
of the Mina, one of the left-hand affluents of the Shelif,
but now absorbed into the newly revealed ocean. Ben Zoof made
the sleeping accommodation as comfortable as the circumstances
would allow; the horses were clogged and turned out to feed
upon the rich pasture that clothed the shore, and the night
passed without special incident.
At sunrise on the following morning, the 2nd of January, or what,
according to the ordinary calendar, would have been the night of the 1st,
the captain and his orderly remounted their horses, and during
the six-hours' day accomplished a distance of forty-two miles.
The right bank of the river still continued to be the margin
of the land, and only in one spot had its integrity been impaired.
This was about twelve miles from the Mina, and on the site of the annex
or suburb of Surkelmittoo. Here a large portion of the bank had been
swept away, and the hamlet, with its eight hundred inhabitants,
had no doubt been swallowed up by the encroaching waters.
It seemed, therefore, more than probable that a similar fate had
overtaken the larger towns beyond the Shelif.
|