Chapter 9 - Page 2

enough to starve the gang out of Back Cup, by preventing the tug
from supplying them with provisions. On the other hand, the schooner
could never break through the investing lines, and if she did her
description would be known in every port. In this event, of what
possible use would Thomas Roch's invention be to the Count d'Artigas
Decidedly, I cannot understand it!

About seven o'clock in the morning I jump out of bed. If I am a
prisoner in the cavern I am at least not imprisoned in my grotto cell.
The door yields when I turn the handle and push against it, and I walk
out.

Thirty yards in front of me is a rocky plane, forming a sort of quay
that extends to right and left. Several sailors of the _Ebba_ are
engaged in landing bales and stores from the interior of the tug,
which lays alongside a little stone jetty.

A dim light to which my eyes soon grow accustomed envelops the cavern
and comes from a hole in the centre of the roof, through which the
blue sky can be seen.

"It is from that hole that the smoke which can be seen for such a
distance issues," I say to myself, and this discovery suggests a whole
series of reflections.

Back Cup, then, is not a volcano, as was supposed--as I supposed
myself. The flames that were seen a few years ago, and the columns
of smoke that still rise were and are produced artificially. The
detonations and rumblings that so alarmed the Bermudan fishers were
not caused by the internal workings of nature. These various phenomena
were fictitious. They manifested themselves at the mere will of the
owner of the island, who wanted to scare away the inhabitants who
resided on the coast. He succeeded, this Count d'Artigas, and remains
the sole and undisputed monarch of the mountain. By exploding
gunpowder, and burning seaweed swept up in inexhaustible quantities by
the ocean, he has been able to simulate a volcano upon the point of
eruption and effectually scare would-be settlers away!

The light becomes stronger as the sun rises higher, the daylight
streams through the fictitious crater, and I shall soon be able to
estimate the cavern's dimensions. This is how I calculate:

Exteriorly the island of Back Cup, which is as nearly as possible
circular, measures two hundred and fifty yards in circumference, and
presents an interior superficies of about six acres. The sides of the
mountain at its base vary in thickness from thirty to a hundred yards.

It therefore follows that this excavation practically occupies the
whole of that part of Back Cup island which appears above water. As to
the length of the submarine tunnel by which communication is obtained
with the outside, and through which the tug passed, I estimate that it
is fifty