George Bernard Shaw - "Der Mann des Schicksals"

Victor Appleton - "Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders"

George Eliot - "Daniel Deronda"

Jules Verne - "20000 Lieues sous les mers Parts 1&2"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Five Weeks in a Balloon

J >> Jules Verne >> Five Weeks in a Balloon




The doctor was able to gather something of his history
from his broken murmurs.

"Speak in your native language," he said to the sufferer;
"I understand it, and it will fatigue you less."

The missionary was a poor young man from the village
of Aradon, in Brittany, in the Morbihan country. His
earliest instincts had drawn him toward an ecclesiastical
career, but to this life of self-sacrifice he was also desirous
of joining a life of danger, by entering the mission of the
order of priesthood of which St. Vincent de Paul was the
founder, and, at twenty, he quitted his country for the
inhospitable shores of Africa. From the sea-coast, overcoming
obstacles, little by little, braving all privations,
pushing onward, afoot, and praying, he had advanced to
the very centre of those tribes that dwell among the tributary
streams of the Upper Nile. For two years his faith
was spurned, his zeal denied recognition, his charities
taken in ill part, and he remained a prisoner to one of the
cruelest tribes of the Nyambarra, the object of every
species of maltreatment. But still he went on teaching,
instructing, and praying. The tribe having been dispersed
and he left for dead, in one of those combats which
are so frequent between the tribes, instead of retracing his
steps, he persisted in his evangelical mission. His most
tranquil time was when he was taken for a madman.
Meanwhile, he had made himself familiar with the idioms
of the country, and he catechised in them. At length,
during two more long years, he traversed these barbarous
regions, impelled by that superhuman energy that comes
from God. For a year past he had been residing with
that tribe of the Nyam-Nyams known as the Barafri,
one of the wildest and most ferocious of them all. The
chief having died a few days before our travellers appeared,
his sudden death was attributed to the missionary, and
the tribe resolved to immolate him. His sufferings had
already continued for the space of forty hours, and, as the
doctor had supposed, he was to have perished in the blaze
of the noonday sun. When he heard the sound of fire-arms,
nature got the best of him, and he had cried out, "Help!
help!" He then thought that he must have been dreaming,
when a voice, that seemed to come from the sky, had
uttered words of consolation.

"I have no regrets," he said, "for the life that is passing
away from me; my life belongs to God!"

"Hope still!" said the doctor; "we are near you, and
we will save you now, as we saved you from the tortures
of the stake."

"I do not ask so much of Heaven," said the priest,
with resignation. "Blessed be God for having vouchsafed
to me the joy before I die of having pressed your friendly
hands, and having heard, once more, the language of my
country!"

The missionary here grew weak again, and the whole
day went by between hope and fear, Kennedy deeply
moved, and Joe drawing his hand over his eyes more
than once when he thought that no one saw him.

The balloon made little progress, and the wind seemed
as though unwilling to jostle its precious burden.

Toward evening, Joe discovered a great light in the
west. Under more elevated latitudes, it might have been
mistaken for an immense aurora borealis, for the sky
appeared on fire. The doctor very attentively examined
the phenomenon.

"It is, perhaps, only a volcano in full activity," said he.

"But the wind is carrying us directly over it," replied
Kennedy.

"Very well, we shall cross it then at a safe height!"
said the doctor.

Three hours later, the Victoria was right among the
mountains. Her exact position was twenty-four degrees
fifteen minutes east longitude, and four degrees forty-two
minutes north latitude, and four degrees forty-two
minutes north latitude. In front of her a volcanic crater
was pouring forth torrents of melted lava, and hurling
masses of rock to an enormous height. There were jets,
too, of liquid fire that fell back in dazzling cascades--a
superb but dangerous spectacle, for the wind with unswerving
certainty was carrying the balloon directly toward this
blazing atmosphere.

This obstacle, which could not be turned, had to be
crossed, so the cylinder was put to its utmost power, and
the balloon rose to the height of six thousand feet, leaving
between it and the volcano a space of more than three
hundred fathoms.

From his bed of suffering, the dying missionary could
contemplate that fiery crater from which a thousand jets
of dazzling flame were that moment escaping.

"How grand it is!" said he, "and how infinite is the
power of God even in its most terrible manifestations!"

This overflow of blazing lava wrapped the sides of the
mountain with a veritable drapery of flame; the lower
half of the balloon glowed redly in the upper night; a
torrid heat ascended to the car, and Dr. Ferguson made
all possible haste to escape from this perilous situation.

By ten o'clock the volcano could be seen only as a red
point on the horizon, and the balloon tranquilly pursued
her course in a less elevated zone of the atmosphere.



CHAPTER TWENTY-THIRD.

Joe in a Fit of Rage.--The Death of a Good Man.--The Night of watching
by the Body.--Barrenness and Drought.--The Burial.--The Quartz Rocks.
--Joe's Hallucinations.--A Precious Ballast.--A Survey of the Gold-bearing
Mountains.--The Beginning of Joe's Despair.

A magnificent night overspread the earth, and the
missionary lay quietly asleep in utter exhaustion.

"He'll not get over it!" sighed Joe. "Poor young
fellow--scarcely thirty years of age!"

"He'll die in our arms. His breathing, which was so
feeble before, is growing weaker still, and I can do nothing
to save him," said the doctor, despairingly.

"The infamous scoundrels!" exclaimed Joe, grinding
his teeth, in one of those fits of rage that came over him
at long intervals; "and to think that, in spite of all, this
good man could find words only to pity them, to excuse,
to pardon them!"

"Heaven has given him a lovely night, Joe--his last
on earth, perhaps! He will suffer but little more after
this, and his dying will be only a peaceful falling asleep."

The dying man uttered some broken words, and the
doctor at once went to him. His breathing became difficult,
and he asked for air. The curtains were drawn
entirely back, and he inhaled with rapture the light
breezes of that clear, beautiful night. The stars sent
him their trembling rays, and the moon wrapped him in
the white winding-sheet of its effulgence.

"My friends," said he, in an enfeebled voice, "I am
going. May God requite you, and bring you to your safe
harbor! May he pay for me the debt of gratitude that I
owe to you!"

"You must still hope," replied Kennedy. "This is
but a passing fit of weakness. You will not die. How
could any one die on this beautiful summer night?"

"Death is at hand," replied the missionary, "I know
it! Let me look it in the face! Death, the commencement
of things eternal, is but the end of earthly cares.
Place me upon my knees, my brethren, I beseech you!"

Kennedy lifted him up, and it was distressing to see
his weakened limbs bend under him.

"My God! my God!" exclaimed the dying apostle,
"have pity on me!"

His countenance shone. Far above that earth on
which he had known no joys; in the midst of that night
which sent to him its softest radiance; on the way to
that heaven toward which he uplifted his spirit, as though
in a miraculous assumption, he seemed already to live and
breathe in the new existence.

His last gesture was a supreme blessing on his new
friends of only one day. Then he fell back into the arms
of Kennedy, whose countenance was bathed in hot tears.

"Dead!" said the doctor, bending over him, "dead!"
And with one common accord, the three friends knelt
together in silent prayer.

"To-morrow," resumed the doctor, "we shall bury him in the
African soil which he has besprinkled with his blood."

During the rest of the night the body was watched,
turn by turn, by the three travellers, and not a word
disturbed the solemn silence. Each of them was weeping.

The next day the wind came from the south, and the
balloon moved slowly over a vast plateau of mountains:
there, were extinct craters; here, barren ravines; not a
drop of water on those parched crests; piles of broken
rocks; huge stony masses scattered hither and thither,
and, interspersed with whitish marl, all indicated the most
complete sterility.

Toward noon, the doctor, for the purpose of burying
the body, decided to descend into a ravine, in the midst
of some plutonic rocks of primitive formation. The surrounding
mountains would shelter him, and enable him to
bring his car to the ground, for there was no tree in sight
to which he could make it fast.

But, as he had explained to Kennedy, it was now impossible
for him to descend, except by releasing a quantity
of gas proportionate to his loss of ballast at the time when
he had rescued the missionary. He therefore opened the
valve of the outside balloon. The hydrogen escaped, and
the Victoria quietly descended into the ravine.

As soon as the car touched the ground, the doctor
shut the valve. Joe leaped out, holding on the while to
the rim of the car with one hand, and with the other
gathering up a quantity of stones equal to his own weight.
He could then use both hands, and had soon heaped into
the car more than five hundred pounds of stones, which
enabled both the doctor and Kennedy, in their turn, to
get out. Thus the Victoria found herself balanced, and
her ascensional force insufficient to raise her.

Moreover, it was not necessary to gather many of
these stones, for the blocks were extremely heavy, so much
so, indeed, that the doctor's attention was attracted by
the circumstance. The soil, in fact, was bestrewn with
quartz and porphyritic rocks.

"This is a singular discovery!" said the doctor, mentally.

In the mean while, Kennedy and Joe had strolled away
a few paces, looking up a proper spot for the grave. The
heat was extreme in this ravine, shut in as it was like a
sort of furnace. The noonday sun poured down its rays
perpendicularly into it.

The first thing to be done was to clear the surface of
the fragments of rock that encumbered it, and then a
quite deep grave had to be dug, so that the wild animals
should not be able to disinter the corpse.

The body of the martyred missionary was then
solemnly placed in it. The earth was thrown in over
his remains, and above it masses of rock were deposited,
in rude resemblance to a tomb.

The doctor, however, remained motionless, and lost in
his reflections. He did not even heed the call of his
companions, nor did he return with them to seek a shelter
from the heat of the day.

"What are you thinking about, doctor?" asked Kennedy.

"About a singular freak of Nature, a curious effect of
chance. Do you know, now, in what kind of soil that
man of self-denial, that poor one in spirit, has just been
buried?"

"No! what do you mean, doctor?"

"That priest, who took the oath of perpetual poverty,
now reposes in a gold-mine!"

"A gold-mine!" exclaimed Kennedy and Joe in one breath.

"Yes, a gold-mine," said the doctor, quietly. "Those
blocks which you are trampling under foot, like worthless
stones, contain gold-ore of great purity."

"Impossible! impossible!" repeated Joe.

"You would not have to look long among those
fissures of slaty schist without finding peptites
of considerable value."

Joe at once rushed like a crazy man among the scattered
fragments, and Kennedy was not long in following
his example.

"Keep cool, Joe," said his master.

"Why, doctor, you speak of the thing quite at your ease."

"What! a philosopher of your mettle--"

"Ah, master, no philosophy holds good in this case!"

"Come! come! Let us reflect a little. What good
would all this wealth do you? We cannot carry any of
it away with us."

"We can't take any of it with us, indeed?"

"It's rather too heavy for our car! I even hesitated
to tell you any thing about it, for fear of exciting your
regret!"

"What!" said Joe, again, "abandon these treasures
--a fortune for us!--really for us--our own--leave it
behind!"

"Take care, my friend! Would you yield to the thirst
for gold? Has not this dead man whom you have just
helped to bury, taught you the vanity of human affairs?"

"All that is true," replied Joe, "but gold! Mr. Kennedy,
won't you help to gather up a trifle of all these
millions?"

"What could we do with them, Joe?" said the hunter,
unable to repress a smile. "We did not come hither in
search of fortune, and we cannot take one home with us."

"The millions are rather heavy, you know," resumed
the doctor, "and cannot very easily be put into one's
pocket."

"But, at least," said Joe, driven to his last defences,
"couldn't we take some of that ore for ballast, instead of
sand?"

"Very good! I consent," said the doctor, "but you
must not make too many wry faces when we come to
throw some thousands of crowns' worth overboard."

"Thousands of crowns!" echoed Joe; "is it possible
that there is so much gold in them, and that all this is
the same?"

"Yes, my friend, this is a reservoir in which Nature
has been heaping up her wealth for centuries! There is
enough here to enrich whole nations! An Australia and
a California both together in the midst of the wilderness!"

"And the whole of it is to remain useless!"

"Perhaps! but at all events, here's what I'll do to
console you."

"That would be rather difficult to do!" said Joe, with
a contrite air.

"Listen! I will take the exact bearings of this spot,
and give them to you, so that, upon your return to England,
you can tell our countrymen about it, and let them have a
share, if you think that so much gold would make them
happy."

"Ah! master, I give up; I see that you are right, and
that there is nothing else to be done. Let us fill our car
with the precious mineral, and what remains at the end of
the trip will be so much made."

And Joe went to work. He did so, too, with all his
might, and soon had collected more than a thousand pieces
of quartz, which contained gold enclosed as though in an
extremely hard crystal casket.

The doctor watched him with a smile; and, while Joe
went on, he took the bearings, and found that the missionary's
grave lay in twenty-two degrees twenty-three minutes east
longitude, and four degrees fifty-five minutes
north latitude.

Then, casting one glance at the swelling of the soil,
beneath which the body of the poor Frenchman reposed,
he went back to his car.

He would have erected a plain, rude cross over the
tomb, left solitary thus in the midst of the African deserts,
but not a tree was to be seen in the environs.

"God will recognize it!" said Kennedy.

An anxiety of another sort now began to steal over
the doctor's mind. He would have given much of the
gold before him for a little water--for he had to replace
what had been thrown overboard when the negro was
carried up into the air. But it was impossible to find it
in these arid regions; and this reflection gave him great
uneasiness. He had to feed his cylinder continually; and
he even began to find that he had not enough to quench
the thirst of his party. Therefore he determined to lose
no opportunity of replenishing his supply.

Upon getting back to the car, he found it burdened
with the quartz-blocks that Joe's greed had heaped in it.
He got in, however, without saying any thing. Kennedy
took his customary place, and Joe followed, but not without
casting a covetous glance at the treasures in the ravine.

The doctor rekindled the light in the cylinder; the
spiral became heated; the current of hydrogen came in a
few minutes, and the gas dilated; but the balloon did not
stir an inch.

Joe looked on uneasily, but kept silent.

"Joe!" said the doctor.

Joe made no reply.

"Joe! Don't you hear me?"

Joe made a sign that he heard; but he would not understand.

"Do me the kindness to throw out some of that quartz!"

"But, doctor, you gave me leave--"

"I gave you leave to replace the ballast; that was all!"

"But--"

"Do you want to stay forever in this desert?"

Joe cast a despairing look at Kennedy; but the hunter
put on the air of a man who could do nothing in the
matter.

"Well, Joe?"

"Then your cylinder don't work," said the obstinate
fellow.

"My cylinder? It is lit, as you perceive. But the
balloon will not rise until you have thrown off a little
ballast."

Joe scratched his ear, picked up a piece of quartz, the
smallest in the lot, weighed and reweighed it, and tossed
it up and down in his hand. It was a fragment of about
three or four pounds. At last he threw it out.

But the balloon did not budge.

"Humph!" said he; "we're not going up yet."

"Not yet," said the doctor. "Keep on throwing."

Kennedy laughed. Joe now threw out some ten pounds,
but the balloon stood still.

Joe got very pale.

"Poor fellow!" said the doctor. "Mr. Kennedy, you
and I weigh, unless I am mistaken, about four hundred
pounds--so that you'll have to get rid of at least that
weight, since it was put in here to make up for us."

"Throw away four hundred pounds!" said Joe, piteously.

"And some more with it, or we can't rise. Come,
courage, Joe!"

The brave fellow, heaving deep sighs, began at last to
lighten the balloon; but, from time to time, he would stop,
and ask:

"Are you going up?"

"No, not yet," was the invariable response.

"It moves!" said he, at last.

"Keep on!" replied the doctor.

"It's going up; I'm sure."

"Keep on yet," said Kennedy.

And Joe, picking up one more block, desperately tossed it out
of the car. The balloon rose a hundred feet or so, and, aided
by the cylinder, soon passed above the surrounding summits.

"Now, Joe," resumed the doctor, "there still remains
a handsome fortune for you; and, if we can only keep the
rest of this with us until the end of our trip, there you
are--rich for the balance of your days!"

Joe made no answer, but stretched himself out luxuriously
on his heap of quartz.

"See, my dear Dick!" the doctor went on. "Just see
the power of this metal over the cleverest lad in the world!
What passions, what greed, what crimes, the knowledge
of such a mine as that would cause! It is sad to think
of it!"

By evening the balloon had made ninety miles to the
westward, and was, in a direct line, fourteen hundred miles
from Zanzibar.



CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURTH.

The Wind dies away.--The Vicinity of the Desert.--The Mistake in the
Water-Supply.--The Nights of the Equator.--Dr. Ferguson's Anxieties.
--The Situation flatly stated.--Energetic Replies of Kennedy and Joe.
--One Night more.

The balloon, having been made fast to a solitary tree,
almost completely dried up by the aridity of the region
in which it stood, passed the night in perfect quietness;
and the travellers were enabled to enjoy a little of the
repose which they so greatly needed. The emotions of
the day had left sad impressions on their minds.

Toward morning, the sky had resumed its brilliant
purity and its heat. The balloon ascended, and, after
several ineffectual attempts, fell into a current that,
although not rapid, bore them toward the northwest.

"We are not making progress," said the doctor. "If
I am not mistaken, we have accomplished nearly half of
our journey in ten days; but, at the rate at which we are
going, it would take months to end it; and that is all the
more vexatious, that we are threatened with a lack of
water."

"But we'll find some," said Joe. "It is not to be
thought of that we shouldn't discover some river, some
stream, or pond, in all this vast extent of country."

"I hope so."

"Now don't you think that it's Joe's cargo of stone
that is keeping us back?"

Kennedy asked this question only to tease Joe; and
he did so the more willingly because he had, for a moment,
shared the poor lad's hallucinations; but, not finding any
thing in them, he had fallen back into the attitude of a
strong-minded looker-on, and turned the affair off with a
laugh.

Joe cast a mournful glance at him; but the doctor
made no reply. He was thinking, not without secret terror,
probably, of the vast solitudes of Sahara--for there
whole weeks sometimes pass without the caravans meeting
with a single spring of water. Occupied with these
thoughts, he scrutinized every depression of the soil with
the closest attention.

These anxieties, and the incidents recently occurring,
had not been without their effect upon the spirits of our
three travellers. They conversed less, and were more
wrapt in their own thoughts.

Joe, clever lad as he was, seemed no longer the same
person since his gaze had plunged into that ocean of gold.
He kept entirely silent, and gazed incessantly upon the
stony fragments heaped up in the car--worthless to-day,
but of inestimable value to-morrow.

The appearance of this part of Africa was, moreover,
quite calculated to inspire alarm: the desert was gradually
expanding around them; not another village was
to be seen--not even a collection of a few huts; and
vegetation also was disappearing. Barely a few dwarf
plants could now be noticed, like those on the wild heaths
of Scotland; then came the first tract of grayish sand and
flint, with here and there a lentisk tree and brambles.
In the midst of this sterility, the rudimental carcass of the
Globe appeared in ridges of sharply-jutting rock. These
symptoms of a totally dry and barren region greatly
disquieted Dr. Ferguson.

It seemed as though no caravan had ever braved this
desert expanse, or it would have left visible traces of its
encampments, or the whitened bones of men and animals.
But nothing of the kind was to be seen, and the aeronauts
felt that, ere long, an immensity of sand would cover the
whole of this desolate region.

However, there was no going back; they must go forward;
and, indeed, the doctor asked for nothing better;
he would even have welcomed a tempest to carry him beyond
this country. But, there was not a cloud in the sky.
At the close of the day, the balloon had not made thirty
miles.

If there had been no lack of water! But, there remained
only three gallons in all! The doctor put aside
one gallon, destined to quench the burning thirst that a
heat of ninety degrees rendered intolerable. Two gallons
only then remained to supply the cylinder. Hence, they
could produce no more than four hundred and eighty cubic
feet of gas; yet the cylinder consumed about nine cubic
feet per hour. Consequently, they could not keep on
longer than fifty-four hours--and all this was a
mathematical calculation!

"Fifty-four hours!" said the doctor to his companions.
"Therefore, as I am determined not to travel by night, for
fear of passing some stream or pool, we have but three
days and a half of journeying during which we must find
water, at all hazards. I have thought it my duty to make
you aware of the real state of the case, as I have retained
only one gallon for drinking, and we shall have to put
ourselves on the shortest allowance."

"Put us on short allowance, then, doctor," responded
Kennedy, "but we must not despair. We have three days
left, you say?"

"Yes, my dear Dick!"

"Well, as grieving over the matter won't help us, in
three days there will be time enough to decide upon what
is to be done; in the meanwhile, let us redouble our
vigilance!"

At their evening meal, the water was strictly measured
out, and the brandy was increased in quantity in the punch
they drank. But they had to be careful with the spirits,
the latter being more likely to produce than to quench
thirst.

The car rested, during the night, upon an immense
plateau, in which there was a deep hollow; its height was
scarcely eight hundred feet above the level of the sea.
This circumstance gave the doctor some hope, since it recalled
to his mind the conjectures of geographers concerning
the existence of a vast stretch of water in the centre
of Africa. But, if such a lake really existed, the point was
to reach it, and not a sign of change was visible in the
motionless sky.

To the tranquil night and its starry magnificence succeeded
the unchanging daylight and the blazing rays of
the sun; and, from the earliest dawn, the temperature became
scorching. At five o'clock in the morning, the doctor
gave the signal for departure, and, for a considerable
time, the balloon remained immovable in the leaden
atmosphere.

The doctor might have escaped this intense heat by
rising into a higher range, but, in order to do so, he would
have had to consume a large quantity of water, a thing
that had now become impossible. He contented himself,
therefore, with keeping the balloon at one hundred feet
from the ground, and, at that elevation, a feeble current
drove it toward the western horizon.

The breakfast consisted of a little dried meat and pemmican.
By noon, the Victoria had advanced only a few miles.

"We cannot go any faster," said the doctor; "we no
longer command--we have to obey."

"Ah! doctor, here is one of those occasions when a
propeller would not be a thing to be despised."

"Undoubtedly so, Dick, provided it would not require
an expenditure of water to put it in motion, for, in that
case, the situation would be precisely the same; moreover,
up to this time, nothing practical of the sort has been
invented. Balloons are still at that point where ships were
before the invention of steam. It took six thousand years
to invent propellers and screws; so we have time enough yet."

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