And yet the night before, after leaving the village of Freschal in the American’s company, Zorn, Frascolin, Yvernès, Pinchinat had travelled for two miles on the land. They had then crossed the river in the ferry boat and again reached land. In fact, if they had left the Californian shore for any sea voyage they would certainly have noticed it.

Frascolin turned towards Calistus Munbar.

“We are on an island?” he asked.

“As you see!”  said the Yankee, with the most amiable of smiles.

“And what is this island?”

“Floating Island.”

“And this town?”

“Milliard City.”

CHAPTER V.

At this period the world was still waiting for the audacious statistical geographer who could give the exact number of the islands scattered over the face of the globe. The number, we may make bold to say, would amount to many thousands. Among all these islands was there not one that answered the requirements of the founders of Floating Island, and the wants of its future inhabitants? No, not one. Hence this peculiarly American notion of making an island which would be the latest and greatest thing in modern construction.

Floating Island was an island worked by screws. Milliard City was its capital. Why this name? Evidently because the capital was the town of the millionaires, a Gouldian, Vanderbiltian, Rothschildian City.

An artificial island; there was nothing extraordinary in the idea. With a sufficient mass of materials submerged in a river, a lake, a sea, it was not beyond the power of men to make it. But that was not sufficient. Having regard to its destination, to the requirements it had to satisfy, it was necessary that this island could be moved from place to place, and consequently that it should float. There was the difficulty, which was not too great for ironworkers and engineers to overcome.

Already, at the end of the nineteenth century, with their instinct for the “big,” their admiration for the “enormous,” the Americans had conceived the project of forming a large raft some miles out at sea, and their mooring it with anchors. If this was not a city, it was at least a station in the Atlantic with restaurants, hotels, clubs, theatres, &c., where tourists could find all the conveniences of the watering places then most in vogue. This project was realized and completed. And then, instead of a stationary raft, they made a movable island.

Six years before the opening of this story an American company, under the title of Floating Island Company, Limited, had been formed with a capital of five hundred million dollars, divided into five hundred shares, for the construction of an artificial island, affording the nabobs of the United States the various advantages of which the stationary regions of the globe are deprived. The shares were quickly taken up, for immense fortunes were then plentiful in America, gained either by manipulating railways, or banking operations, or oil transactions, or speculations in pickled pork.

Four years were occupied in the construction of this island, of which we may conveniently give the chief dimensions, the internal arrangements, the means of locomotion which enabled it to cruise amongst the most beautiful regions of the immense Pacific Ocean.

There are floating villages in China on the River Yang-tse-Kiang, in Brazil on the Amazon, in Europe on the Danube. But these are only ephemeral constructions, a few small houses built on the top of long rafts of wood. When it reaches its destination the raft is broken up, the houses taken off—the village has lived and died.

But it was quite another affair with regard to this island; it was to be launched on the sea, it was to last as long as any of the works issued from the hands of man.

And besides, who knows if the earth will not some day be too small for its inhabitants, whose numbers will almost reach six milliards in 2072—as the statisticians following Ravenstein affirm with astonishing precision. And will it not be necessary to build on the sea when the continents are overcrowded?

Floating Island was an island in steel, and the strength of its hull had been calculated for the weight it had to bear. It was composed of 270,000 caissons, each of them eighteen yards high, by ten long and ten wide. Their horizontal surface represented a square of ten yards on the side, that is to say, of a hundred square yards. When the caissons were all bolted and riveted together, they gave the island an area of about twenty-seven million square yards. In the oval form which the constructors had given it, it measured about four and a half miles long and three broad, and its circuit in round numbers was about eleven miles.

Floating Island drew thirty feet of water, and had a freeboard of twenty feet. In volume it was about 430,000,000 cubic yards, and its displacement, being three-fifths of its volume, amounted to 258,000,000 cubic yards.

The whole of the caissons below the water line had been covered with a preparation up to then undiscoverable —which had made a millionaire of its inventor—which prevented barnacles and other growths from attaching themselves to the parts in contact with the sea.

The subsoil of the new island was made safe from distortion and breakage by cross girders, riveting and bolting.

Special workshops had had to be erected for the construction of this huge example of naval construction. These were built by the Floating Island Company, who had acquired Madeleine Bay and its coast, at the extremity of the long peninsula of Old California, which is just on the Tropic of Cancer. It was in this bay that the work was executed under the direction of the engineers of the Floating Island Company, the chief being the celebrated William Tersen, who died a few months after the completion of the work, as Brunei did after the unfortunate launch of the Great Eastern. And Floating Island was but a Great Eastern modernized—only several thousand times larger.

It will be understood that there could be no question of launching the island as a ship is launched. It was built in sections, in compartments alongside one another on the waters of Madeleine Bay. This portion of the American coast became the station of the moving island, to which it could return when repairs were necessary.

The carcase of the island, its hull, if you will, was formed of two hundred and seventy thousand compartments, and filled in with vegetable soil, all except the site of the city, where the hull was of extraordinary strength. The depth of mould was ample for a vegetation restricted to lawns, flower beds, shrubberies, clumps of trees and fields of vegetables. It had seemed impracticable to require this artificial soil to produce cereals and feed for cattle, which could be regularly imported. But the necessary arrangements had been made, so as not to be dependent on importation for milk and poultry.

The three quarters of the soil of Floating Island devoted to vegetation amounted to about thirteen square miles, in which the park lawns afforded permanent verdure, and the carefully tilled fields abounded in vegetables and fruits, and the artificial prairies served as grazing ground for the flocks and herds. Electro-culture was largely employed, that is to say, the influence of continuous currents, the result being an extraordinary acceleration of growth and the production of vegetables of remarkable dimensions, such as radishes eighteen inches long and carrots weighing seven pounds apiece.