Five Weeks in a Balloon, Jules Verne [top reads txt] 📗

pursuit of something. I would like to know what they are about.”

“Patience, Dick! In a little while we shall overtake them, if they continue on the same route. We are going at the rate of twenty miles per hour, and no horse can keep up with that.”

Kennedy again raised his glass, and a few minutes later he exclaimed:

“They are Arabs, galloping at the top of their speed; I can make them out distinctly. They are about fifty in number. I can see their bournouses puffed out by the wind. It is some cavalry exercise that they are going through. Their chief is a hundred paces ahead of them and they are rushing after him at headlong speed.”

“Whoever they may be, Dick, they are not to be feared, and then, if necessary, we can go higher.”

“Wait, doctor—wait a little!”

“It’s curious,” said Kennedy again, after a brief pause, “but there’s something going on that I can’t exactly explain. By the efforts they make, and the irregularity of their line, I should fancy that those Arabs are pursuing some one, instead of following.”

“Are you certain of that, Dick?”

“Oh! yes, it’s clear enough now. I am right! It is a pursuit—a hunt—but a man-hunt! That is not their chief riding ahead of them, but a fugitive.”

“A fugitive!” exclaimed the doctor, growing more and more interested.

“Yes!”

“Don’t lose sight of him, and let us wait!”

Three or four miles more were quickly gained upon these horsemen, who nevertheless were dashing onward with incredible speed.

“Doctor! doctor!” shouted Kennedy in an agitated voice.

“What is the matter, Dick?”

“Is it an illusion? Can it be possible?”

“What do you mean?”

“Wait!” and so saying, the Scot wiped the sights of his spyglass carefully, and looked through it again intently.

“Well?” questioned the doctor.

“It is he, doctor!”

“He!” exclaimed Ferguson with emotion.

“It is he! no other!” and it was needless to pronounce the name.

“Yes! it is he! on horseback, and only a hundred paces in advance of his enemies! He is pursued!”

“It is Joe—Joe himself!” cried the doctor, turning pale.

“He cannot see us in his flight!”

“He will see us, though!” said the doctor, lowering the flame of his blow-pipe.

“But how?”

“In five minutes we shall be within fifty feet of the ground, and in fifteen we shall be right over him!”

“We must let him know it by firing a gun!”

“No! he can’t turn back to come this way. He’s headed off!”

“What shall we do, then?”

“We must wait.”

“Wait?—and these Arabs!”

“We shall overtake them. We’ll pass them. We are not more than two miles from them, and provided that Joe’s horse holds out!”

“Great God!” exclaimed Kennedy, suddenly.

“What is the matter?”

Kennedy had uttered a cry of despair as he saw Joe fling himself to the ground. His horse, evidently exhausted, had just fallen headlong.

“He sees us!” cried the doctor, “and he motions to us, as he gets upon his feet!”

“But the Arabs will overtake him! What is he waiting for? Ah! the brave lad! Huzza!” shouted the sportsman, who could no longer restrain his feelings.

Joe, who had immediately sprung up after his fall, just as one of the swiftest horsemen rushed upon him, bounded like a panther, avoided his assailant by leaping to one side, jumped up behind him on the crupper, seized the Arab by the throat, and, strangling him with his sinewy hands and fingers of steel, flung him on the sand, and continued his headlong flight.

A tremendous howl was heard from the Arabs, but, completely engrossed by the pursuit, they had not taken notice of the balloon, which was now but five hundred paces behind them, and only about thirty feet from the ground. On their part, they were not twenty lengths of their horses from the fugitive.

One of them was very perceptibly gaining on Joe, and was about to pierce him with his lance, when Kennedy, with fixed eye and steady hand, stopped him short with a ball, that hurled him to the earth.

Joe did not even turn his head at the report. Some of the horsemen reined in their barbs, and fell on their faces in the dust as they caught sight of the Victoria; the rest continued their pursuit.

“But what is Joe about?” said Kennedy; “he don’t stop!”

“He’s doing better than that, Dick! I understand him! He’s keeping on in the same direction as the balloon. He relies upon our intelligence. Ah! the noble fellow! We’ll carry him off in the very teeth of those Arab rascals! We are not more than two hundred paces from him!”

“What are we to do?” asked Kennedy.

“Lay aside your rifle,Dick.”

And the Scot obeyed the request at once.

“Do you think that you can hold one hundred and fifty pounds of ballast in your arms?”

“Ay, more than that!”

“No! That will be enough!”

And the doctor proceeded to pile up bags of sand in Kennedy’s arms.

“Hold yourself in readiness in the back part of the car, and be prepared to throw out that ballast at a single effort. But, for your life, don’t do so until I give the word!”

“Be easy on that point.”

“Otherwise, we should miss Joe, and he would be lost.”

“Count upon me!”

The Victoria at that moment almost commanded the troop of horsemen who were still desperately urging their steeds at Joe’s heels. The doctor, standing in the front of the car, held the ladder clear, ready to throw it at any moment. Meanwhile, Joe had still maintained the distance between himself and his pursuers—say about fifty feet. The Victoria was now ahead of the party.

“Attention!” exclaimed the doctor to Kennedy.

“I’m ready!”

“Joe, look out for yourself!” shouted the doctor in his sonorous, ringing voice, as he flung out the ladder, the lowest ratlines of which tossed up the dust of the road.

As the doctor shouted, Joe had turned his head, but without checking his horse. The ladder dropped close to him, and at the instant he grasped it the doctor again shouted to Kennedy:

“Throw ballast!”

“It’s done!”

And the Victoria, lightened by a weight greater than Joe’s, shot up one hundred and fifty feet into the air.

Joe clung with all his strength to the ladder during the wide oscillations that it had to describe, and then making an indescribable gesture to the Arabs, and climbing with the agility of a monkey, he sprang up to his companions, who received him with open arms.

The Arabs uttered a scream of astonishment and rage. The fugitive had been snatched from them on the wing, and the Victoria was rapidly speeding far beyond their reach.

“Master! Kennedy!” ejaculated Joe, and overwhelmed, at last, with fatigue and emotion, the poor fellow fainted away, while Kennedy, almost beside himself, kept exclaiming:

“Saved—saved!”

“Saved indeed!” murmured the doctor, who had recovered all his phlegmatic coolness.

Joe was almost naked. His bleeding arms, his body covered with cuts and bruises, told what his sufferings had been. The doctor quietly dressed his wounds, and laid him comfortably under the awning.

Joe soon returned to consciousness, and asked for a glass of brandy, which the doctor did not see fit to refuse, as the faithful fellow had to be indulged.

After he had swallowed the stimulant, Joe grasped the hands of his two friends and announced that he was ready to relate what had happened to him.

But they would not allow him to talk at that time, and he sank back into a profound sleep, of which he seemed to have the greatest possible need.

The Victoria was then taking an oblique line to the westward. Driven by a tempestuous wind, it again approached the borders of the thorny desert, which the travellers descried over the tops of palm-trees, bent and broken by the storm; and, after having made a run of two hundred miles since rescuing Joe, it passed the tenth degree of east longitude about nightfall.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENTH.

The Western Route.—Joe wakes up.—His Obstinacy.—End of Joe’s Narrative.—Tagelei.—Kennedy’s Anxieties.—The Route to the North.—A Night near Aghades.

During the night the wind lulled as though reposing after the boisterousness of the day, and the Victoria remained quietly at the top of the tall sycamore. The doctor and Kennedy kept watch by turns, and Joe availed himself of the chance to sleep most sturdily for twenty-four hours at a stretch.

“That’s the remedy he needs,” said Dr. Ferguson. “Nature will take charge of his care.”

With the dawn the wind sprang up again in quite strong, and moreover capricious gusts. It shifted abruptly from south to north, but finally the Victoria was carried away by it toward the west.

The doctor, map in hand, recognized the kingdom of Damerghou, an undulating region of great fertility, in which the huts that compose the villages are constructed of long reeds interwoven with branches of the asclepia. The grain-mills were seen raised in the cultivated fields, upon small scaffoldings or platforms, to keep them out of the reach of the mice and the huge ants of that country.

They soon passed the town of Zinder, recognized by its spacious place of execution, in the centre of which stands the “tree of death.” At its foot the executioner stands waiting, and whoever passes beneath its shadow is immediately hung!

Upon consulting his compass, Kennedy could not refrain from saying:

“Look! we are again moving northward.”

“No matter; if it only takes us to Timbuctoo, we shall not complain. Never was a finer voyage accomplished under better circumstances!”

“Nor in better health,” said Joe, at that instant thrusting his jolly countenance from between the curtains of the awning.

“There he is! there’s our gallant friend—our preserver!” exclaimed Kennedy, cordially.—“How goes it, Joe?”

“Oh! why, naturally enough, Mr. Kennedy, very naturally! I never felt better in my life! Nothing sets a man up like a little pleasure-trip with a bath in Lake Tchad to start on—eh, doctor?”

“Brave fellow!” said Ferguson, pressing Joe’s hand, “what terrible anxiety you caused us!”

“Humph! and you, sir? Do you think that I felt easy in my mind about you, gentlemen? You gave me a fine fright, let me tell you!”

“We shall never agree in the world, Joe, if you take things in that style.”

“I see that his tumble hasn’t changed him a bit,” added Kennedy.

“Your devotion and self-forgetfulness were sublime, my brave lad, and they saved us, for the Victoria was falling into the lake, and, once there, nobody could have extricated her.”

“But, if my devotion, as you are pleased to call my summerset, saved you, did it not save me too, for here we are, all three of us, in first-rate health? Consequently we have nothing to squabble about in the whole affair.”

“Oh! we can never come to a settlement with that youth,” said the sportsman.

“The best way to settle it,” replied Joe, “is to say nothing more about the matter. What’s done is done. Good or bad, we can’t take it back.”

“You obstinate fellow!” said the doctor, laughing; “you can’t refuse, though, to tell us your adventures, at all events.”

“Not if you think it worth while. But, in the first place, I’m going to cook this fat goose to a turn, for I see that Mr. Kennedy has not wasted his time.”

“All right, Joe!”

“Well, let us see then how this African game will sit on a European stomach!”

The goose was soon roasted by the flame of the blow-pipe, and not long afterward was comfortably stowed away. Joe took his own good share, like a man who had eaten nothing for several days. After the tea and the punch, he acquainted his friends with his recent adventures. He spoke with some emotion, even while looking at things with his usual philosophy. The doctor