Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/53

 CHAPTER I

A WINTER'S NIGHT HE city of Geneva is situated at the western extremity of the lake to which it gives—or owes —its name. The Rhone, which crosses the city on emerging from the lake, divides it into two distinct quarters, and is itself divided, in the center of the city, by an island rising between its two banks. This topographical situation is often to be observed in the great centers of commerce or industry. Doubtless the earliest inhabitants were seduced by the facilities of transportation afforded by the rapid arms of the rivers,—"those roads which advance of themselves," as Pascal says. In the case of the Rhone, they are roads which run. At the period when new and regular buildings had not as yet been erected on this island, anchored like a Dutch galiot in the midst of the river, the wonderful mass of houses huddled the one against the other offered to the eye a confusion full of charms. The small extent of the island had forced some of these buildings to perch upon piles, fastened pell-mell in the strong currents of the Rhone. These big timbers, blackened by time and worn by the waters, looked like the claws of an immense crab, and produced a fantastic effect. Some yellowed nets, real spiders' webs stretched amid these venerable substructures, shivered and trembled in the shade as if they had been the foliage of these old oaks, and the river, engulfing itself in the midst of this forest of piles, foamed with melancholy groans.

One of the habitations on the island struck the observer by its strange appearance of extreme age. It was the residence of the old clockmaker, Master Zacharius, his daughter Gerande, Aubert Thun, his apprentice, and his old servant, Scholastique.

What an original personage was this Zacharius! His age seemed incalculable. The oldest inhabitants of Geneva could not have told how long his lean head had wavered on his shoulders, nor the first day on which he had been seen 23