“Already the trees were growing farther apart, forming a few isolated groups, and the rays of light penetrated more easily through the lofty branches. The ground, too, began to show a certain incline, which soon became a fairly steep slope.
Although he was considerably tired, Godfrey had enough determination not to slacken his pace. He would undoubtedly have run, had it not been for the steepness of the first slopes.
Soon he had climbed high enough to overlook the general mass of that verdant dome stretching out behind him, above which a few treetops emerged here and there.
But Godfrey had no thought of looking back. His eyes never left that bare ridge-line outlined four or five hundred feet ahead of him and above. It was the barrier that still concealed the eastern horizon from him.
A small cone, obliquely truncated, rose above this uneven line and joined, by gentle slopes, the winding crest formed by the hills as a whole.
‘There!… There!…’ Godfrey said to himself. ‘That is the point I must reach!… The summit of that cone!… And from there, what shall I see?… A town?… a village?… the desert?’
Highly excited, Godfrey continued to climb, pressing his elbows against his chest as though to contain the beating of his heart. His somewhat breathless respiration was exhausting him, but he would not have had the patience to stop and catch his breath. Even if he were to collapse, half-fainting, at the summit of the cone, which now rose only a hundred feet or so above his head, he would not waste a single minute lingering on the way.
At last, only a few moments more and he would reach his goal. The slope seemed quite steep on this side, at an angle of thirty to thirty-five degrees. He used both hands and feet; he clung to the sparse tufts of grass on the incline, to the few meagre shrubs of mastic or myrtle that grew in stages up to the crest.
One final effort! At last his head rose above the platform of the cone, while, lying flat on his stomach, his eyes eagerly swept the entire eastern horizon…
It was the sea that formed it, merging some twenty miles beyond with the line of the sky!”
Jules Verne, Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery (L’École des Robinsons)
Where Sang Chaud guides Don Carotte, somewhat lost, perhaps somewhat delirious, and having lost part of his memory… but also, against all expectations, having discovered the great tree… Perhaps he too had his doubts… Was that tree really there… or was it the product of their imagination…
Excerpt from Sang Chaud’s Journal
—I was no longer certain that I had a body… nor that I had walked for so long… nor even that I had ever left the clearing. And on the enormous trunk of the tree which, I know not how, we had climbed, I thought I saw, or perhaps merely discerned, the shape of a face. Was it his… or simply my own reflection, projected by something that had known me longer than I had been alive?
What was there, within the tree… and what Don Carotte was observing… he alone knew. He had been staring at the tree for a long while, in a silence so intense that it seemed to absorb the slightest movement like the beating of a heart. He no longer moved. His entire being had contracted into vision, straining towards that gigantic form, towards that trunk as vast as an ancient tower, constellated with marks, swellings, crevices into which the shadows sank.
It was a flawless concentration, almost painful. He studied the bark as a sailor watches the distant horizon of an ocean… not in order to see something there, but to detect what might happen.
And then there was a tremor.
Slight. Almost imperceptible. But it was enough to make something quiver in his gaze. A furrowing of the brow. A tightening of the jaws. Tiny shivers running along his arms…
Something had moved… but it was not the whole tree. No. It was upon it… at the very edge of visibility, in one of the recesses of the trunk, where the patterns dissolved into organic forms, between the lines and hollows, there had been a shift. Like a slight alteration in texture… or as though a fragment of bark had drawn breath and moved of its own accord.
—Sang Chaud… he said to me in a whisper, without taking his eyes from it.
—I know, I had simply replied, instead of I saw.
For at that moment, it was I who knew. I who, from the beginning, had opened the way and remained lucid whenever the would-be knight without a mount lost himself in his visions. But there, even I… it seemed to me that I had been reduced to the essential: a breath mingling with the heavy air…
We had not yet seen the silent figure standing only a few paces away from us.
I raised one arm. Slowly. With a studied slowness, intended not to disturb the fragile balance of the moment. I extended my index finger, not towards the tree as a whole, but towards one precise point on its immense surface.
And, without a word, I pointed to one particular place.
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