Карен Хабер: This Way to the End Times

Our situation is quite simple and can be summed up in a few words. We are on an island. We are hemmed round by the sea. Only yesterday we would have been looking at a sea of mountain tops, several of them dominating the one on which we are standing those mountaintop have all disappeared, while, for reasons that will remain forever unknown, ours, though more humble, has been arrested in its descent; everywhere else spreads that boundless sheet of water. In every direction, nothing but the sea. We are occupying the only solid land within the immense circle of the horizon.

A glance is sufficient to acquaint us with the whole extent of the islet that, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, has given us refuge. For it is certainly small: a thousand meters long, at the most, and five hundred wide. On the north, west, and south sides, fairly easy slopes mount to its summit, about a hundred meters above the waves. But on the east, the islet ends in a cliff that falls vertically into the ocean.

We keep turning our eyes in that direction. There we should have the mountains, tier upon tier, and beyond them should extend all Mexico. What a transformation in one brief spring night! The mountains have vanished, and Mexico has been engulfed! In their place is an infinite desert, the barren desert of the sea!

We look at each other in cold terror. Marooned without food or water on this narrow, naked rock, we are left with no hope at all. Bitter but resigned, we might as well lie on the ground and await the coming of death.

WHAT HAPPENED DURING THE NEXT few days? I have retained no memory of them. It is to be supposed that I finally lost consciousness, and I came to only on board the ship that picked us up. Only then did I learn that we had remained ten whole days on the islet, and that two of our party, Williamson and Rowling, had died there of hunger and thirst. Of the fourteen people that my villa was sheltering at the moment of the cataclysm, only nine are left: my son Jean and ward Helene, my chauffeur Simonat, inconsolable over the loss of his machine, Anna Raleigh and her two daughters, Doctors Bathurst and Moreno, and finally myself.

The Virginia, the ship that has rescued us, is a hybrid vessel, a sailer with auxiliary motors, or, if you will, a motor ship with auxiliary sails engaged in the transport of merchandise. She is a fairly old ship, of about two thousand tons, seaworthy but slow. Captain Morris has twenty men under his command. He and the crew are English.

The Virginia left Melbourne under ballast a little over a month ago, bound for Rosario. No incident marked her crossing, except that on the eve of May 25 she encountered ground swells of a prodigious height but of a proportionate length that rendered them harmless. Singular though they were, they could give the Captain no warning of the cataclysm that was occurring at the same time. Therefore he had been highly astonished to find only the sea where he had expected to find Rosario and the Mexican coast. Of that coast, only one islet remained. A boat from the Virginia had accosted the islet, on which eleven inanimate bodies were discovered. Two were corpses; the nine others were taken aboard. And that is how we were saved.

AN INTERVAL OF EIGHT MONTHS separates the last lines of the preceding section from the present writing. I date this January or February, finding it impossible to be more precise, for I no longer have an exact notion of time.

These eight months cover the cruelest period of our ordeal, during which suffering ever-increasing hardship, we came to know the full extent of our misfortune.

After picking us up, the Virginia continued on her way east at full speed. When I came to myself, the islet on which we had nearly died was long since under the horizon. According to bearings taken in a cloudless sky, we were then sailing exactly where Mexico City should have been. But of Mexico City there remained no trace; nor, during my unconsciousness, had any of the central mountains been sighted; nor could we now discern any land whatever, as far as our view extended: in every direction there was only the infinity of the sea.

We could not help wondering if not the world, but we, had gone mad. Think of it! Mexico entirely swallowed up! We exchanged frightened glances and asked ourselves how far the ravages of the terrible cataclysm had been felt. . . .

The Captain was determined to know the answer. Changing his course, he headed north: even if Mexico no longer existed, it was unthinkable that the same could be true of the entire North American continent.

But it was the same! For twelve days we went north without meeting land. And we met none after putting about and sailing south for nearly a month. However fantastic the fact appeared, we were compelled to surrender to the evidence: both American continents had sunk under the waves!

Had we been rescued, then, only to know for a second time the agony of death? We truly had every right to think so. Not to mention provisions, which sooner or later must be exhausted, a pressing danger was threatening us: what should become of us when exhaustion of our fuel shut down our engines? That is why, on July 14, when we found ourselves close to the former site of Buenos Aires, Captain Morris stopped the engines and hoisted sail. That done, he assembled everyone on board the Virginia, crewmen and passengers, and, having explained our situation in a few words, requested each of us to reflect upon it and to offer any solutions that occurred to us at a council to be held on the following day.

I do not know whether any of my companions in misfortune hit upon any more-or-less intelligent expedients. For my part, I was hesitating, I confess, being very uncertain of the best course to take, when a tempest arose in the night and decided the question: we had to run toward the west before a violent wind, at every instant on the point of foundering in the raging sea.

The hurricane lasted thirty-five days without a minute’s interruption, not even any slackening of its force. We were beginning to give up hope of its ever ending, when, on August 19, fine weather returned as abruptly as it had deserted us more than a month previously. The only good the storm had done was to provide us with a quantity of fresh water. The Captain profited by the return of the sun to take an observation; his calculations gave him forty degrees north latitude and a hundred and fourteen degrees east longitude. These were the coordinates of Peking!

So, then, we had passed over Polynesia, and perhaps Australia, quite unawares, and were now sailing over what had been the capital of an empire of four hundred million souls!

Had Asia, too, suffered the fate of the Americas?

We were soon convinced that it had. The Virginia, following a southwest course, reached the latitude of Tibet and the Himalayas. Here should have soared the highest peaks on the globe, but nowhere was anything emerging from the surface of the ocean.

It began to look as if no solid land, except the islet that had saved our lives, existed on earth and that we were the only survivors of the cataclysm, the last inhabitants of a world buried in the shifting shroud of the sea!

If this were true, we should not be slow to perish in our turn. In spite of strict rationing, the provisions on board were by now running low, and in our predicament we must abandon all hope of renewing them. These seas were yielding us no fish whatever.

I WILL ABRIDGE MY ACCOUNT of that frightening voyage. If I were to report it in detail, attempting to relive it day by day, the memory would drive me mad. For, however strange and terrible the events both before and since, and however dismal the prospects of the future (a future that I shall not witness), during that infernal voyage we knew the limit of human terror. That endless cruise on a sea without end! To expect every day to accost some coast, yet to find the term of our voyage ceaselessly deferred! To live crouching over maps upon which men had engraved sinuous shore lines, and to realize that nothing, absolutely nothing, was left of regions they had thought eternal! To tell ourselves that the earth had throbbed with innumerable living beings, that billions and billions of men and animals had pervaded its lands and flashed through the air, and that all at once everything was dead, that all lives had been extinguished together like a little flame in a gust of wind! To seek everywhere for our fellows, and to seek in vain! To acquire little by little the certitude that beyond our little company there existed no living thing, and to become gradually conscious of loneliness in the middle of an unmerciful universe!