Atlantida

"In an hour the waters will reach that height. Those are the marks of

the last inundation. Let us get started. There is not an instant to

lose."

"All right," Morhange replied tranquilly.

We had the greatest difficulty to make the camels kneel. When we had

thrown ourselves into the saddle they started off at a pace which

their terror rendered more and more disorderly.

Of a sudden the wind began, a formidable wind, and, almost at the same

time the light was eclipsed in the ravine. Above our heads the sky had

become, in the flash of an eye, darker than the walls of the canyon

which we were descending at a breathless pace.

"A path, a stairway in the wall," I screamed against the wind to my

companions. "If we don't find one in a minute we are lost."

They did not hear me, but, turning in my saddle, I saw that they had

lost no distance, Morhange following me, and Bou-Djema in the rear

driving the two baggage camels masterfully before him.

A blinding streak of lightning rent the obscurity. A peal of thunder,

re-echoed to infinity by the rocky wall, rang out, and immediately

great tepid drops began to fall. In an instant, our burnouses, which

had been blown out behind by the speed with which we were traveling,

were stuck tight to our streaming bodies.

"Saved!" I exclaimed suddenly.

Abruptly on our right a crevice opened in the midst of the wall. It

was the almost perpendicular bed of a stream, an affluent of the one

we had had the unfortunate idea of following that morning. Already a

veritable torrent was gushing over it with a fine uproar.

I have never better appreciated the incomparable sure-footedness of

camels in the most precipitate places. Bracing themselves, stretching

out their great legs, balancing themselves among the rocks that were

beginning to be swept loose, our camels accomplished at that moment

what the mules of the Pyrannees might have failed in.

After several moments of superhuman effort we found ourselves at last

out of danger, on a kind of basaltic terrace, elevated some fifty

meters above the channel of the stream we had just left. Luck was with

us; a little grotto opened out behind. Bou-Djema succeeded in

sheltering the camels there. From its threshold we had leisure to

contemplate in silence the prodigious spectacle spread out before us.

You have, I believe, been at the Camp of Chalons for artillery drills.

You have seen when the shell bursts how the chalky soil of the Marne

effervesces like the inkwells at school, when we used to throw a piece

of calcium carbonate into them. Well, it was almost like that, but in

the midst of the desert, in the midst of obscurity. The white waters

rushed into the depths of the black hole, and rose and rose towards

the pedestal on which we stood. And there was the uninterrupted noise

of thunder, and still louder, the sound of whole walls of rock,

undermined by the flood, collapsing in a heap and dissolving in a few

seconds of time in the midst of the rising water.