Jules Verne (30 page)

"Have you not seen a trace?"

"Not one!"

"Shall I go down now?"

"No, Manoel," answered Benito; "I have begun; I know where to go. Let me
do it!"

Benito then explained to the pilot that his intention was to visit the
lower part of the bank up to the Bar of Frias, for there the slope had
perhaps stopped the corpse, if, floating between the two streams, it had
in the least degree been affected by the current. But first he wanted to
skirt the bank and carefully explore a sort of hole formed in the slope
of the bed, to the bottom of which the poles had evidently not been
able to penetrate. Araujo approved of this plan, and made the necessary
preparations.

Manoel gave Benito a little advice. "As you want to pursue your search
on that side," he said, "the raft will have to go over there obliquely;
but mind what you are doing, Benito. That is much deeper than where
you have been yet; it may be fifty or sixty feet, and you will have to
support a pressure of quite two atmospheres. Only venture with extreme
caution, or you may lose your presence of mind, or no longer know where
you are or what to do. If your head feels as if in a vice, and your ears
tingle, do not hesitate to give us the signal, and we will at once
haul you up. You can then begin again if you like, as you will have got
accustomed to move about in the deeper parts of the river."

Benito promised to attend to these hints, of which he recognized the
importance. He was particularly struck with the fact that his presence
of mind might abandon him at the very moment he wanted it most.

Benito shook hands with Manoel; the sphere of the diving-dress was again
screwed to his neck, the pump began to work, and the diver once more
disappeared beneath the stream.

The raft was then taken about forty feet along the left bank, but as it
moved toward the center of the river the current increased in strength,
the ubas were moored, and the rowers kept it from drifting, so as only
to allow it to advance with extreme slowness.

Benito descended very gently, and again found himself on the firm sand.
When his heels touched the ground it could be seen, by the length of the
haulage cord, that he was at a depth of some sixty-five or seventy
feet. He was therefore in a considerable hole, excavated far below the
ordinary level.

The liquid medium was more obscure, but the limpidity of these
transparent waters still allowed the light to penetrate sufficiently for
Benito to distinguish the objects scattered on the bed of the river,
and to approach them with some safety. Besides, the sand, sprinkled with
mica flakes, seemed to form a sort of reflector, and the very grains
could be counted glittering like luminous dust.

Benito moved on, examining and sounding the smallest cavities with his
spear. He continued to advance very slowly; the communication cord was
paid out, and as the pipes which served for the inlet and outlet of
the air were never tightened, the pump was worked under the proper
conditions.

Benito turned off so as to reach the middle of the bed of the Amazon,
where there was the greatest depression. Sometimes profound obscurity
thickened around him, and then he could see nothing, so feeble was the
light; but this was a purely passing phenomenon, and due to the raft,
which, floating above his head, intercepted the solar rays and made the
night replace the day. An instant afterward the huge shadow would be
dissipated, and the reflection of the sands appear again in full force.

All the time Benito was going deeper. He felt the increase of the
pressure with which his body was wrapped by the liquid mass. His
respiration became less easy; the retractibility of his organs no
longer worked with as much ease as in the midst of an atmosphere more
conveniently adapted for them. And so he found himself under the action
of physiological effects to which he was unaccustomed. The rumbling grew
louder in his ears, but as his thought was always lucid, as he felt
that the action of his brain was quite clear—even a little more so than
usual—he delayed giving the signal for return, and continued to go down
deeper still.

Suddenly, in the subdued light which surrounded him, his attention was
attracted by a confused mass. It seemed to take the form of a corpse,
entangled beneath a clump of aquatic plants. Intense excitement seized
him. He stepped toward the mass; with his spear he felt it. It was the
carcass of a huge cayman, already reduced to a skeleton, and which the
current of the Rio Negro had swept into the bed of the Amazon. Benito
recoiled, and, in spite of the assertions of the pilot, the thought
recurred to him that some living cayman might even then be met with in
the deeps near the Bar of Frias!

But he repelled the idea, and continued his progress, so as to reach the
bottom of the depression.

And now he had arrived at a depth of from eighty to a hundred feet, and
consequently was experiencing a pressure of three atmospheres. If,
then, this cavity was also drawn blank, he would have to suspend his
researches.

Experience has shown that the extreme limit for such submarine
explorations lies between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and thirty
feet, and that below this there is great danger, the human organism not
only being hindered from performing his functions under such a pressure,
but the apparatus failing to keep up a sufficient supply of air with the
desirable regularity.

But Benito was resolved to go as far as his mental powers and physical
energies would let him. By some strange presentiment he was drawn toward
this abyss; it seemed to him as though the corpse was very likely to
have rolled to the bottom of the hole, and that Torres, if he had any
heavy things about him, such as a belt containing either money or arms,
would have sunk to the very lowest point. Of a sudden, in a deep hollow,
he saw a body through the gloom! Yes! A corpse, still clothed, stretched
out like a man asleep, with his arms folded under his head!

Was that Torres? In the obscurity, then very dense, he found it
difficult to see; but it was a human body that lay there, less than ten
paces off, and perfectly motionless!

A sharp pang shot through Benito. His heart, for an instant, ceased to
beat. He thought he was going to lose consciousness. By a supreme effort
he recovered himself. He stepped toward the corpse.

Suddenly a shock as violent as unexpected made his whole frame vibrate!
A long whip seemed to twine round his body, and in spite of the thick
diving-dress he felt himself lashed again and again.

"A gymnotus!" he said.

It was the only word that passed his lips.

In fact, it was a
"puraque,"
the name given by the Brazilians to the
gymnotus, or electric snake, which had just attacked him.

It is well known that the gymnotus is a kind of eel, with a blackish,
slimy skin, furnished along the back and tail with an apparatus
composed of plates joined by vertical lamellæ, and acted on by nerves of
considerable power. This apparatus is endowed with singular electrical
properties, and is apt to produce very formidable results. Some of these
gymnotuses are about the length of a common snake, others are about ten
feet long, while others, which, however, are rare, even reach fifteen or
twenty feet, and are from eight to ten inches in diameter.

Gymnotuses are plentiful enough both in the Amazon and its tributaries;
and it was one of these living coils, about ten feet long, which, after
uncurving itself like a bow, again attacked the diver.

Benito knew what he had to fear from this formidable animal. His clothes
were powerless to protect him. The discharges of the gymnotus, at first
somewhat weak, become more and more violent, and there would come a time
when, exhausted by the shocks, he would be rendered powerless.

Benito, unable to resist the blows, half-dropped upon the sand. His
limbs were becoming paralyzed little by little under the electric
influences of the gymnotus, which lightly touched his body as it wrapped
him in its folds. His arms even he could not lift, and soon his spear
escaped him, and his hand had not strength enough left to pull the cord
and give the signal.

Benito felt that he was lost. Neither Manoel nor his companions could
suspect the horrible combat which was going on beneath them between the
formidable puraque and the unhappy diver, who only fought to suffer,
without any power of defending himself.

And that at the moment when a body—the body of Torres without a
doubt!—had just met his view.

By a supreme instinct of self-preservation Benito uttered a cry. His
voice was lost in the metallic sphere from which not a sound could
escape!

And now the puraque redoubled its attacks; it gave forth shock after
shock, which made Benito writhe on the sand like the sections of a
divided worm, and his muscles were wrenched again and again beneath the
living lash.

Benito thought that all was over; his eyes grew dim, his limbs began to
stiffen.

But before he quite lost his power of sight and reason he became the
witness of a phenomenon, unexpected, inexplicable, and marvelous in the
extreme.

A deadened roar resounded through the liquid depths. It was like a
thunder-clap, the reverberations of which rolled along the river bed,
then violently agitated by the electrical discharges of the gymnotus.
Benito felt himself bathed as it were in the dreadful booming which
found an echo in the very deepest of the river depths.

And then a last cry escaped him, for fearful was the vision which
appeared before his eyes!

The corpse of the drowned man which had been stretched on the sand
arose! The undulations of the water lifted up the arms, and they swayed
about as if with some peculiar animation. Convulsive throbs made the
movement of the corpse still more alarming.

It was indeed the body of Torres. One of the suns rays shot down to
it through the liquid mass, and Benito recognized the bloated, ashy
features of the scoundrel who fell by his own hand, and whose last
breath had left him beneath the waters.

And while Benito could not make a single movement with his paralyzed
limbs, while his heavy shoes kept him down as if he had been nailed to
the sand, the corpse straightened itself up, the head swayed to and fro,
and disentangling itself from the hole in which it had been kept by a
mass of aquatic weeds, it slowly ascended to the surface of the Amazon.

WHAT WAS it that had happened? A purely physical phenomenon, of which
the following is the explanation.

The gunboat Santa Ana, bound for Manaos, had come up the river and
passed the bar at Frias. Just before she reached the
embouchure
of the
Rio Negro she hoisted her colors and saluted the Brazilian flag. At the
report vibrations were produced along the surface of the stream, and
these vibrations making their way down to the bottom of the river, had
been sufficient to raise the corpse of Torres, already lightened by the
commencement of its decomposition and the distension of its cellular
system. The body of the drowned man had in the ordinary course risen to
the surface of the water.

This well-known phenomenon explains the reappearance of the corpse, but
it must be admitted that the arrival of the Santa Ana was a fortunate
coincidence.

By a shout from Manoel, repeated by all his companions, one of the
pirogues was immediately steered for the body, while the diver was at
the same time hauled up to the raft.

Great was Manoel's emotion when Benito, drawn on to the platform,
was laid there in a state of complete inertia, not a single exterior
movement betraying that he still lived.

Was not this a second corpse which the waters of the Amazon had given
up?

As quickly as possible the diving-dress was taken off him.

Benito had entirely lost consciousness beneath the violent shocks of the
gymnotus.

Manoel, distracted, called to him, breathed into him, and endeavored to
recover the heart's pulsation.

"It beats! It beats!" he exclaimed.

Yes! Benito's heart did still beat, and in a few minutes Manoel's
efforts restored him to life.

"The body! the Body!"

Such were the first words, the only ones which escaped from Benito's
lips.

"There it is!" answered Fragoso, pointing to a pirogue then coming up to
the raft with the corpse.

"But what has been the matter, Benito?" asked Manoel. "Has it been the
want of air?"

"No!" said Benito; "a puraque attacked me! But the noise? the
detonation?"

"A cannon shot!" replied Manoel. "It was the cannon shot which brought
the corpse to the surface."

At this moment the pirogue came up to the raft with the body of Torres,
which had been taken on board by the Indians. His sojourn in the water
had not disfigured him very much. He was easily recognizable, and there
was no doubt as to his identity.

Fragoso, kneeling down in the pirogue, had already begun to undo the
clothes of the drowned man, which came away in fragments.

At the moment Torres' right arm, which was now left bare, attracted
his attention. On it there appeared the distinct scar of an old wound
produced by a blow from a knife.

"That scar!" exclaimed Fragoso. "But—that is good! I remember now—"

"What?" demanded Manoel.

"A quarrel! Yes! a quarrel I witnessed in the province of Madeira three
years ago. How could I have forgotten it! This Torres was then a captain
of the woods. Ah! I know now where I had seen him, the scoundrel!"

"That does not matter to us now!" cried Benito. "The case! the case! Has
he still got that?" and Benito was about to tear away the last coverings
of the corpse to get at it.

Manoel stopped him.

"One moment, Benito," he said; and then, turning to the men on the
raft who did not belong to the jangada, and whose evidence could not be
suspected at any future time: