Like Verne also, he was French by birth, a native of Nantes. Did Michel Verne understand this allusion? In any case, he changed Laurier to Ledun and deleted the expression "a hearse drawn by a dog team."

The Poetry of the Far North

In this adventure novel, Verne conjured up-as lack London and James Oliver Curwood would do later-the poetry of the Canadian Far North, the rough, wild country through which the two cousins from Montreal traveled in search of a supposedly gold-bearing claim. Here we have a true western genre: the caravan goes through mountain passes, sails over lakes and rivers, hunts for its food, and is attacked by bears and a gang of bandits. A strange hunting expedition for moose, those mythical and elusive creatures, adds to the novel's ecological and poetic character.

In this rugged universe, with its fearsome cold, women do not face the same dangers-except for two nuns who, true to their vocation, also undertake the long journey to Dawson City to bring comfort and a feminine presence to the wretched victims of the auri sacra fames.'

Michel Verne's Revisions

Michel Verne rewrote the novel and took it upon himself (possibly out of anticlericalism) to replace the Sisters of Charity by two charming cousins who become prospectors and whose light-hearted banter with the two heroes leads to a double wedding at the end! From being a straightforward and virile adventure novel about a symbolic quest, it sinks to the level of sentimental vaudeville. To add to its picturesque and comical character, Michel Verne has cousin Jane accompanied by a grotesque individual, Patrick Richardson, a market porter, who always addresses his patroness as "Monsieur Jean" since he cannot recognize a woman wearing a miner's trousers! To top it all off, Neluto, the worthy Indian who accompanies the caravan to Golden Mount, the mysterious golden volcano, is ridiculed and made to speak like the caricature of a Norman peasant:

"There! ... there! ... Smoke!" he cried.

But he immediately regretted having had the audacity to express himself so positively.

"Or a cloud," he said.

He thought for a second, and added:

"Or a bird!"

The pilot thought some more. Smoke, a cloud, a bird.... Had he really exhausted all the possible hypotheses?

"Or nothing at all!" he concluded.10

This stream of interpretations, unworthy of an eagle-eyed Indian, replaces Jules Verne's concise account:

The fog lifted and Neluto could be heard shouting:

"Look! Look! Smoke!"

At that instant the mountain appeared, the Golden Volcano,

with its crater spewing out sooty vapors."

All these additions, all these changes, far from improving the novel, make it insipid and mindless." What is even more serious is that Michel Verne's conclusion, following four supplementary chapters, transforms defeat into victory. This complete about-face is baffling when one stops to think that Verne's only reason for describing the search for gold was to point out the curse attached to the yellow metal: a disastrous quest from which one returns-if indeed one does return-even poorer than before.

In his work of transformation, it may be noted that Michel Verne displays an uncommon talent in changing the novel's final sentences and succeeds in giving a totally different meaning to his father's words; an explosion of rancor becomes a superabundance of vitality. For Jules Verne, Ben Raddle does not admit defeat:

He seemed ready at any moment to burst out in recriminations against his bad luck.

Then Summy Skim would say cheerfully:

"Yes, poor Ben is always ready to erupt. After all, when you've had a volcano in your life, part of it always stays with you."

In Michel Verne's version, Ben Raddle:

that happy man, is never there,. . . he comes and goes like lightning.... Summy Skim ... does not hesitate to heap the most severe reproaches on Ben Raddle....

But Summy, when his cousin has left for another trip, is the first to make excuses for him.

"You mustn't hold a grudge against my poor Ben," he usually says to Edith, "if he's always about to erupt. After all, when you've had a volcano in your life, part of it always stays with you.

Toward the Final Explosion

Today Jules Verne can finally express himself, cleansed of the slag that disfigured his work, as the cursed gold is doubly purified by water. Reading The Golden Volcano in its original version, as the author conceived it, restores the novel's power and beauty, and all its purity.

Verne had always been obsessed by the symbolic aspect of volcanoes-a liberating explosion, an organic outpouring. Often referred to as "fire-spitting" in the Extraordinary Voyages, they vomit fire. Was not an emetic prescribed for Golden Mount in The Golden Volcano, to help it disgorge the nuggets from its overburdened stomach? Already, in Topsy Turvy, "the volcanoes took advantage of the opportunity ... to vomit up, like a seasick passenger, the extraneous matter in their stomachs."13

From earth to sky, the volcano illuminates all of Verne's writings in a fantastic display of fireworks. In Five Weeks in a Balloon, the first novel published by Hetzel, a missionary dies while watching that marvel of nature, a

fiery crater noisily shooting out a thousand dazzling showers of sparks.

"How beautiful it is," he said, "and how infinite is God's power even in its most terrible manifestations."14

In the conquest of air, earth, water, and fire, Verne makes full use of his imagination. Volcanoes, as symbols of power, passion, and vitality, give free rein to impulses and express a rejection of constraints. Sometimes the volcano sleeps; let us beware of its reawakening.

Edward Baxter

THERE I S EVERY REASON to believe that if Jules Verne had lived another year he would have made substantial corrections to the manuscript of The Golden Volcano. If he had reread the book carefully, he would surely have spotted the blanks, the spelling errors (some perhaps caused by a misreading of his handwriting), and the mistakes in chronology and geography that are to be found throughout the manuscript.

In this translation, blanks have been filled in and errors in geography and spelling corrected as far as possible, some by the editor of this edition and some by the translator.

The most useful source for verifying the spelling of names and identifying individuals has been Klondike: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush by the late Pierre Berton (McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 1963). "Wallace's Map of the Klondike and Indian River Gold Fields," dated February 12, 1898, and reprinted in 1962, was also a valuable source of information. Other useful works included The Canadian Encyclopedia and The Oxford Companion to Canadian History, edited by Gerald Halowell.

Verne used various units of measurement and currency in this novel: kilometers, leagues, miles, hectares, francs, sous, piaster, and dollars. These have all been converted to English units. A kilometer is equal to about five-eighths of a mile.