I did my best to induce the poor viscount to listen to reason. I made
him touch the mirrors and the iron tree and the branches and explained
to him, by optical laws, all the luminous imagery by which we were
surrounded and of which we need not allow ourselves to be the victims,
like ordinary, ignorant people.
"We are in a room, a little room; that is what you must keep saying to
yourself. And we shall leave the room as soon as we have found the
door."
And I promised him that, if he let me act, without disturbing me by
shouting and walking up and down, I would discover the trick of the
door in less than an hour's time.
Then he lay flat on the floor, as one does in a wood, and declared that
he would wait until I found the door of the forest, as there was
nothing better to do! And he added that, from where he was, "the view
was splendid!" The torture was working, in spite of all that I had
said.
Myself, forgetting the forest, I tackled a glass panel and began to
finger it in every direction, hunting for the weak point on which to
press in order to turn the door in accordance with Erik's system of
pivots. This weak point might be a mere speck on the glass, no larger
than a pea, under which the spring lay hidden. I hunted and hunted. I
felt as high as my hands could reach. Erik was about the same height
as myself and I thought that he would not have placed the spring higher
than suited his stature.
While groping over the successive panels with the greatest care, I
endeavored not to lose a minute, for I was feeling more and more
overcome with the heat and we were literally roasting in that blazing
forest.
I had been working like this for half an hour and had finished three
panels, when, as ill-luck would have it, I turned round on hearing a
muttered exclamation from the viscount.
"I am stifling," he said. "All those mirrors are sending out an
infernal heat! Do you think you will find that spring soon? If you
are much longer about it, we shall be roasted alive!"
I was not sorry to hear him talk like this. He had not said a word of
the forest and I hoped that my companion's reason would hold out some
time longer against the torture. But he added: "What consoles me is that the monster has given Christine until eleven
to-morrow evening. If we can't get out of here and go to her
assistance, at least we shall be dead before her! Then Erik's mass can
serve for all of us!"