Part 100 (1/2)
A burst of laughter replied to this volley; then the arh the air, like a falling star, the train of fire The barrel, hurled a distance of thirty feet, cleared the barricade of dead bodies, and fell a soldiers, who threw themselves on their faces The officer had followed the brilliant train in the air; he endeavored to precipitate himself upon the barrel and tear out the match before it reached the powder it contained Useless! The air had made the flame attached to the conductor ht have burnt five minutes, was consumed in thirty seconds, and the infernal work exploded
Furious vortices of sulphur and nitre, devouring shoals of fire which caught every object, the terrible thunder of the explosion, this is what the second which followed disclosed in that cavern of horrors The rocks split like planks of deal beneath the axe A jet of fire, srotto, enlarging as it e walls of silex tottered and fell upon the sand, and the sand itself, an instrument of pain when launched fro atoms Shrieks, iulfed in one terrific crash
The three first corietable, hter sand and ash ca over the dis touards with their blue coats laced with silver Seek the officers, brilliant in gold, seek for the arle s a chaos more confused, more shapeless, more terrible than the chaos which existed before the creation of the world There re by which God could have recognized His handiwork
As for Porthos, after having hurled the barrel of powder amidst his eneained the last coht, and sunshi+ne penetrated through the opening Scarcely had he turned the angle which separated the third compartment from the fourth when he perceived at a hundred paces fro on the waves There were his friends, there liberty, there life and victory Six more of his formidable strides, and he would be out of the vault; out of the vault! a dozen of his vigorous leaps and he would reach the canoe Suddenly he felt his knees give way; his knees sees to yield beneath hi ain! I can walk no further! What is this?”
Ara, and unable to conceive what could induce him to stop thus--”Come on, Porthos! coiant,an effort that contorted everythese words, he fell upon his knees, but with his ain
”Quick! quick!” repeated Ara forward towards the shore, as if to draw Porthos towards him with his ar all his strength to make one step more
”In the name of Heaven! Porthos, make haste! the barrel will blow up!”
”Make haste, neur!” shouted the Bretons to Porthos, as floundering as in a dream
But there was no tiaped, the sh the clefts obscured the sky; the sea flowed back as though driven by the blast of flaigantic fiery chimera; the reflux took the bark out twenty _toises_; the solid rocks cracked to their base, and separated like blocks beneath the operation of the wedge; a portion of the vault was carried up towards heaven, as if it had been built of cardboard; the green and blue and topaz conflagration and black lava of liquefactions clashed and combated an instant beneath a majestic dome of shty monoliths of rock which the violence of the explosion had not been able to uproot frorave and stiff oldthehtful shock seeth that he had lost; he arose, a giant a between the double hedge of granite phantoer supported by the corresponding links, began to roll and totter round our titan, who looked as if precipitated fro Porthos felt the very earth beneath his feet beco jelly-tre rocks A gigantic block was held back by each of his extended arranite mass sank between his shoulders For an instant the power of Porthos seemed about to fail him, but this new Hercules united all his force, and the talls of the prison in which he was buried fell back slowly and gave hiranite, like the angel of chaos, but in pushi+ng back the lateral rocks, he lost his point of support, for the hed upon his shoulders, and the boulder, pressing upon hiiant down upon his knees The lateral rocks, for an instant pushed back, drew together again, and added their weight to the ponderous mass which would have been sufficient to crush tenAraement and hope, for, thanks to the powerful arch of his hands, for an instant he believed that, like Enceladus, he would succeed in shaking off the triple load
But by degrees Ara for an instant, the arave way, the extended shoulders sank, wounded and torn, and the rocks continued to gradually collapse
”Porthos! Porthos!” cried Ara his hair ”Porthos! where are you? Speak!”
”Here, here,”evidently weaker, ”patience! patience!”
Scarcely had he pronounced these words, when the iht; the enormous rock sank down, pressed by those others which sank in from the sides, and, as it were, sed up Porthos in a sepulcher of badly jointed stones On hearing the dying voice of his friend, Ara to land Two of the Bretons followed hi sufficient to take care of the bark The dying rattle of the valiant gladiator guided the as at twenty, sprang towards the triple mass, and with his hands, delicate as those of a woth the corner-stone of this great granite grave Then he caught a glih the darkness of that charnel-house, of the still brilliant eye of his friend, to who of the mass restored a rasped their iron levers, united their triple strength, not ave ith cries of grief, and the rough voice of Porthos, seeing thele, murmured in an almost cheerful tone those supreme words which came to his lips with the last respiration, ”Too heavy!”
After which his eyes darkened and closed, his face grew ashy pale, the hands whitened, and the colossus sank quite down, breathing his last sigh With hiony he had still held up The three men dropped the levers, which rolled upon the tumulary stone Then, breathless, pale, his brow covered with sweat, Aramis listened, his breast oppressed, his heart ready to break
Nothing iant slept the eternal sleep, in the sepulcher which God had built about him to his measure
Chapter LI Porthos's Epitaph
Ara like a ti froh capable of standing, he was not capable of walking Itof dead Porthos had just died within him His Bretons surrounded him; Aramis yielded to their kind exertions, and the three sailors, lifting hi laid him down upon the bench near the rudder, they took to their oars, preferring this to hoisting sail, which ht betray therotto of Locle hillock attracted their eyes Aramis never removed his from it; and, at a distance out in the sea, in proportion as the shore receded, thatproud mass of rock seemed to draw itself up, as for, yet invincible head towards heaven, like that of his dear old honest valiant friend, the strongest of the four, yet the first dead Strange destiny of these men of brass! The th of body guided by subtlety of or alone could save ht, triu upon the body, drove out the mind
Worthy Porthos! born to help other men, always ready to sacrifice hiiven hiht he was carrying out the conditions of his compact with Aramis, a compact, however, which Aramis alone had drawn up, and which Porthos had only known to suffer by its terrible solidarity noble Porthos! of what good now are thy chateaux overfloith sua ealth! Of what service to thee now thy lackeys in brilliant liveries, and in the ated by thee! Oh, noble Porthos! careful heaper-up of treasure, was it worth while to labor to sweeten and gild life, to coulls, and lay thyself, with broken bones, beneath a torpid stone? Was it worth while, in short, noble Porthos, to heap so raven upon thy monument? Valiant Porthos! he still, without doubt, sleeps, lost, forgotten, beneath the rock the shepherds of the heath take for the gigantic abode of a _dol branches, so many mosses, bent by the bitter wind of ocean, so many lichens solder thy sepulcher to earth, that no passers-by will iranite could ever have been supported by the shoulders of one man
Aramis, still pale, still icy-cold, his heart upon his lips, looked, even till, with the last ray of daylight, the shore faded on the horizon Not a word escaped hih rose from his deep breast
The superstitious Bretons looked upon hi Such silence was not that of a man, it was the silence of a statue In the hted up the heavens, the canoe hoisted its little sail, which, swelling with the kisses of the breeze, and carrying them rapidly from the coast, made bravest way towards Spain, across the dreaded Gulf of Gascony, so rife with storms But scarcely half an hour after the sail had been hoisted, the rowers beca an eye-shade with their hands, pointed out to each other a white spot which appeared on the horizon as ull rocked by the viewless respiration of the waves But that whichat a quick rate to the experienced eye of the sailor; that which appeared stationary upon the ocean was cutting a rapid way through it For so the profound torpor in which their ed, they did not dare to rouse hi their conjectures in whispers Arailant, so active--Ara, and saw better by night than by day--Aramis seemed to sleep in this despair of soul An hour passed thus, during which daylight gradually disappeared, but during which also the sail in view gained so swiftly on the bark, that Goenne, one of the three sailors, ventured to say aloud: