1870 2026
This is an AI modernization of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Jules Verne published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1870, after running it in instalments in the family magazine his publisher Hetzel produced. It belongs to the long series of adventure novels Hetzel marketed as the Voyages extraordinaires, and it is the one that did the most to invent science fiction as a form. The story opens in 1866 with ships all over the world reporting collisions with something enormous and fast in the open sea. A French marine biologist, Professor Pierre Aronnax, joins the American expedition sent to hunt it down, and is pulled overboard along with his servant Conseil and a Canadian harpooner named Ned Land. What picks them out of the water is the thing they were hunting: a submarine called the Nautilus, commanded by a man who calls himself Captain Nemo, which is Latin for nobody.
Submarines were not new in 1870 — hand-cranked boats had been built and had killed a warship in the American Civil War six years earlier — and that is exactly what Verne is writing against. The Nautilus runs on electricity, which its captain extracts from the sea itself, and the book's real subject is the claim that a man could cut himself off from every government on land and live entirely off the ocean. So the engineering matters. The long stretches where Aronnax counts the ship's fittings, reckons her displacement, or lists the fish going past the saloon window are not padding to be skipped; they are the argument that the thing would work, and they are kept here in full.
For a century English readers met this book only through Lewis Mercier's 1873 version, which cut close to a quarter of the text, mangled the science because the translator did not follow it, and toned down Nemo's rage at empire. Verne's standing in English as a writer of boys' books is largely the result of translations like that one. This edition is made from Verne's French, complete, as are the other Verne novels in this collection.
Three things are worth knowing going in. Conseil never addresses Aronnax as "you" — he speaks to his employer in the third person, and the flat courtesy of it is his whole comedy. Verne's measurements are metric and his leagues are distance travelled, not depth: the title counts the length of the voyage. And Nemo tells you almost nothing about himself for a very long time, which is deliberate. The scenes people remember are the underwater funeral in the coral, the pearl diver at Ceylon, and the hunting party that walks out across the sea floor in diving suits.
Four Thousand Leagues Under the Pacific
Part Two
A New Proposal from Captain Nemo
The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours
Latitude 47°24′, Longitude 17°28′
The year 1866 was marked by a bizarre event, an unexplained and altogether inexplicable phenomenon that no one, surely, has forgotten. To say nothing of the rumors that stirred up the populations of the ports and inflamed the public mind far inland across whole continents, it was the seafaring men above all who were shaken. Merchants and shipowners, sea captains, skippers and masters throughout Europe and America, naval officers of every country, and, in their wake, the governments of the various states on both continents — all of them took the matter with the utmost seriousness.
The fact was that, for some time now, several ships had met with "an enormous thing" out on the open sea: a long object, tapered like a spindle, sometimes glowing with a strange light, and vastly larger and faster than any whale.
The details concerning this apparition, entered in the various ships' logs, agreed rather closely on the structure of the object — or the creature — in question, on the unheard-of speed of its movements, on the astonishing power of its locomotion, and on the peculiar vitality with which it seemed endowed. If it was a member of the whale family, then it exceeded in bulk every specimen science had catalogued up to that time. Neither Cuvier, nor Lacépède, nor Monsieur Duméril, nor Monsieur de Quatrefages would have granted the existence of such a monster — not, at least, without having seen it, seen it with their own learned eyes.
Taking the average of the observations made on the various occasions — rejecting the timid estimates that gave the object a length of two hundred feet, and dismissing the wild exaggerations that made it a mile wide and three miles long — one could nonetheless assert that this phenomenal being far surpassed any dimensions admitted so far by the ichthyologists — assuming it existed at all.
And exist it did; the fact in itself could no longer be denied, and given the human brain's incurable fondness for the marvelous, one can well imagine the excitement this supernatural apparition stirred up all around the world. As for filing it away quietly among the fables, that idea had to be given up for good.
For on July 20, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson, of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had encountered this moving mass five miles off the eastern coast of Australia. Captain Baker at first believed he was looking at some uncharted reef; he was even preparing to fix its exact position when two columns of water, hurled up by the inexplicable object, shot hissing a hundred and fifty feet into the air. So unless this reef happened to be subject to the intermittent eruptions of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had well and truly come face to face with some aquatic mammal, unknown until then, which spouted from its blowholes columns of water mixed with air and steam.
The same phenomenon was observed on July 23 of that same year, in the waters of the Pacific, by the Cristobal Colon, of the West India and Pacific Steam Navigation Company. Clearly, then, this extraordinary whale could travel from one place to another with astonishing speed, since within an interval of just three days the Governor Higginson and the Cristobal Colon had observed it at two points on the map separated by a distance of more than seven hundred nautical leagues. Two weeks later, and two thousand leagues from there, the Helvetia, of the Compagnie Nationale, and the Shannon, of the Royal Mail line, steaming in opposite directions through that stretch of the Atlantic that lies between the United States and Europe, each in turn signaled the monster at 42°15′ north latitude and 60°35′ longitude west of the Greenwich meridian. From this simultaneous sighting, the creature's length was reckoned at a minimum of more than three hundred and fifty English feet, since both the Shannon and the Helvetia were smaller than it, even though they measured a hundred meters from stem to stern. Now, the largest whales — those that frequent the waters around the Aleutian Islands, the Kulammak and the Umgullick — have never exceeded a length of fifty-six meters, if indeed they ever reach it.
These reports arriving one on top of another, along with fresh observations made aboard the transatlantic liner Pereire, a collision between the Etna, of the Inman line, and the monster, an official report drawn up by the officers of the French frigate Normandie, and a very sober sighting recorded by the staff of Commodore Fitz-James aboard the Lord Clyde — all of this stirred public opinion to its depths. In the lighter-hearted countries, people made a joke of the whole thing, but the serious, practical countries — England, America, Germany — were gravely concerned.
Everywhere in the great cities the monster became the fashion of the hour; it was sung about in the cafés, jeered at in the newspapers, and acted out on the stage. The tabloids found in it a fine opportunity to lay eggs of every color. In the papers, short as ever on copy, one saw the reappearance of every imaginary and gigantic creature you could name, from the white whale — the terrible "Moby Dick" of the far northern regions — to the monstrous Kraken, whose tentacles can wrap themselves around a five-hundred-ton vessel and drag it down into the depths of the ocean. They even dusted off the official records of ancient times: the opinions of Aristotle and Pliny, who allowed the existence of such monsters; then the Norwegian tales of Bishop Pontoppidan; the accounts of Paul Heggede; and finally the reports of Mr. Harrington, whose good faith cannot be doubted when he swears that, aboard the Castilian in 1857, he saw that enormous sea serpent which until then had frequented no waters but those of the old Constitutionnel.
Then broke out the endless quarrel between the believers and the skeptics, waged in the learned societies and the scientific journals alike. The "monster question" set minds ablaze. Journalists who make a profession of science, locked in combat with those who make a profession of wit, spilled floods of ink during that memorable campaign — and a few of them even spilled two or three drops of blood, for from the sea serpent they passed straight on to the most offensive personal attacks.
For six months the war dragged on, with fortunes shifting on both sides. To the weighty articles of the Geographical Institute of Brazil, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; to the discussions in The Indian Archipelago, in Abbé Moigno's Cosmos, in Petermann's Mittheilungen; to the science columns of the great newspapers of France and abroad — the popular press fired back with an inexhaustible verve. Twisting a saying of Linnaeus that the monster's opponents had quoted, its witty writers maintained that "nature does not make fools," and they begged their contemporaries not to give nature the lie by admitting the existence of Krakens, sea serpents, "Moby Dicks," and other ravings of delirious sailors. Finally, in an article in a much-feared satirical paper, its most popular writer, mounting the attack over them all, went at the monster like Hippolytus, dealt it one last blow, and finished it off amid a burst of universal laughter. Wit had defeated science.
Through the first months of 1867, the question seemed to be buried, and it did not look likely to rise again — when new facts were brought to the public's attention. This time it was no longer a scientific puzzle to be solved, but a real and serious danger to be avoided. The question took on a wholly different aspect. The monster became once more an islet, a rock, a reef — but a runaway reef, one you could neither pin down nor lay hold of.
On March 5, 1867, the Moravian, of the Montreal Ocean Company, finding herself during the night at 27°30′ latitude and 72°15′ longitude, struck with her starboard quarter a rock that no chart marked in those waters. Under the combined thrust of the wind and her four hundred horsepower, she was making thirteen knots. There is no doubt that, but for the superior quality of her hull, the Moravian would have been split open by the blow and gone down with the two hundred and thirty-seven passengers she was bringing back from Canada.
The accident had happened around five in the morning, just as day was beginning to break. The watch officers rushed to the stern of the ship. They examined the ocean with the most scrupulous attention. They saw nothing — nothing but a strong eddy breaking about three cable-lengths off, as though the sheets of water had been violently churned. The position was noted down exactly, and the Moravian continued on her way with no apparent damage. Had she struck a submerged rock, or some enormous piece of wreckage? No one could say; but when her hull was examined in dry dock, it was found that part of the keel had been broken.
This incident, extremely serious in itself, might perhaps have been forgotten like so many others, had it not, three weeks later, repeated itself under conditions exactly the same. Only this time, thanks to the nationality of the ship that was the new victim, and thanks to the reputation of the company to which she belonged, the event caused an enormous stir all over the world.
No one is unaware of the name of the famous English shipowner Cunard. In 1840 this shrewd businessman founded a postal service between Liverpool and Halifax, with three wooden paddle-wheel ships of four hundred horsepower and eleven hundred and sixty-two tons' burden. Eight years later, the company's fleet grew by four ships of six hundred and fifty horsepower and eighteen hundred and twenty tons, and two years after that by two more vessels of still greater power and tonnage. In 1853, the Cunard company — its contract for carrying the mails having just been renewed — added one after another to its fleet the Arabia, the Persia, the China, the Scotia, the Java, and the Russia, all ships of the first rank, and the largest that, after the Great Eastern, had ever plowed the seas. And so, by 1867, the company owned twelve ships, eight of them paddle-wheelers and four screw-driven.
If I give these very brief details, it is so that everyone may grasp just how important this maritime transport company is, known the world over for its intelligent management. No transoceanic shipping enterprise has been run with more skill; no business has been crowned with more success. In twenty-six years, Cunard ships have crossed the Atlantic two thousand times, and never once has a voyage been missed, never a delay occurred, never a letter, a man, or a vessel been lost. That is why passengers, despite the powerful competition France offers, still choose the Cunard line over any other, as is plain from a survey of the official records of recent years. Having said this, no one will be surprised at the stir caused by the accident that befell one of its finest steamers.
On April 13, 1867, with the sea calm and the breeze manageable, the Scotia lay at 15°12′ longitude and 45°37′ latitude. She was making thirteen knots and forty-three hundredths under the push of her thousand horsepower. Her paddle wheels beat the sea with perfect regularity. Her draft at the time was six meters seventy centimeters, and her displacement six thousand six hundred and twenty-four cubic meters.
At seventeen minutes past four in the afternoon, while the passengers were gathered for lunch in the grand saloon, a shock — a slight one, all things considered — struck the Scotia's hull, on the quarter and a little abaft the port paddle wheel.
The Scotia had not struck; she had been struck, and by a cutting or piercing instrument rather than a blunt one. The impact had seemed so light that no one aboard would have worried about it, but for the cry of the men down in the hold, who came scrambling up onto the deck shouting:
"We're sinking! We're sinking!"
At first the passengers were badly frightened; but Captain Anderson hastened to reassure them. In fact, the danger could not be imminent. The Scotia, divided into seven compartments by watertight bulkheads, could shrug off any single leak with impunity.
Captain Anderson went down at once into the hold. He found that the sea had flooded the fifth compartment, and the speed of the flooding proved the leak was a large one. Very fortunately, that compartment did not house the boilers, or the fires would have gone out on the spot.
Captain Anderson had the ship stopped immediately, and one of the sailors dove down to inspect the damage. A few moments later they confirmed the existence of a hole two meters wide in the steamer's hull. Such a leak could not be plugged, and the Scotia, her paddle wheels half submerged, had to continue her voyage that way. She was then three hundred miles from Cape Clear, and after three days of delay that gave Liverpool a serious fright, she entered the company's docks.
The engineers then set about examining the Scotia, which was placed in dry dock. They could not believe their eyes. Two and a half meters below the waterline gaped a clean tear, in the shape of an isosceles triangle. The break in the metal plating was of perfect sharpness — it could not have been cut more cleanly with a punch press. So the piercing tool that had made it must have been tempered to an uncommon hardness — and, after being launched with prodigious force and thus driving through a plate four centimeters thick, it had had to withdraw itself by a backward motion that was truly inexplicable.
Such was this latest incident, and its result was to fire up public opinion all over again. From this moment on, in fact, every maritime disaster that had no clearly determined cause was laid at the monster's door. This fantastic animal was made to shoulder the blame for all these shipwrecks, whose number is unfortunately considerable; for out of the three thousand ships whose loss is recorded every year at the Bureau Veritas, the number of steamships and sailing vessels presumed lost with all hands for want of news comes to no fewer than two hundred!
And so it was the "monster" that, justly or unjustly, was accused of their disappearance; and, thanks to it, communication between the various continents growing more and more dangerous, the public spoke out and demanded, in no uncertain terms, that the seas be rid at last, and at any price, of this formidable creature.
At the time these events took place, I was on my way home from a scientific expedition into the Badlands of Nebraska, in the United States. In my capacity as assistant professor at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, I had been attached to the expedition by the French government. After six months in Nebraska, laden with precious collections, I reached New York toward the end of March. My departure for France was set for the first days of May. In the meantime, then, I was busy sorting and classifying my mineralogical, botanical, and zoological treasures, when the incident of the Scotia occurred.
I was thoroughly up to date on the question of the hour — and how could I not have been? I had read and reread every American and European newspaper without getting any closer to the truth. The mystery intrigued me. Unable to form an opinion, I drifted from one extreme to the other. That there was something out there could not be doubted, and the skeptics were cordially invited to lay a finger on the wound in the Scotia's side.
By the time I arrived in New York, the question was at fever pitch. The hypothesis of a floating island, an uncharted reef, championed by a few not especially competent minds, had been thoroughly abandoned. And indeed — unless this reef had an engine in its belly, how could it move about with such prodigious speed?
Dismissed for the same reason was the idea of a floating hull, an enormous piece of wreckage — again on account of the speed of its movements.
That left two possible solutions to the puzzle, and they created two very distinct camps of believers: on one side, those who held out for a monster of colossal strength; on the other, those who held out for a "submarine" boat of extraordinary driving power.
Now, this second hypothesis, admissible after all, could not survive the inquiries pursued in both the Old World and the New. That some private individual should have such a machine at his disposal was hardly likely. Where and when had he had it built, and how could he have kept its construction a secret?
Only a government could possibly own such an engine of destruction, and in these disastrous times, when men rack their brains to multiply the power of their weapons of war, it was conceivable that some state might be testing this formidable device without the others' knowledge. After the chassepot rifles, the torpedoes; after the torpedoes, the underwater rams; and then — the recoil. At least, so I hope.
But the theory of a war machine collapsed too, before the governments' formal denials. Since a matter of public interest was at stake — for transoceanic communications were suffering — the good faith of the governments could not be questioned. Besides, how could one accept that the construction of such a submarine boat had escaped the public eye? Keeping a secret under such circumstances is very difficult for a private individual, and certainly impossible for a state whose every act is doggedly watched by rival powers.
And so, after inquiries carried out in England, France, Russia, Prussia, Spain, Italy, America, and even Turkey, the hypothesis of an underwater Monitor was definitively rejected.
Upon my arrival in New York, several people had done me the honor of consulting me about the phenomenon in question. I had published in France a two-volume quarto work entitled The Mysteries of the Great Ocean Depths. This book, particularly well received in scholarly circles, had made me something of a specialist in that rather obscure branch of natural history. My opinion was sought. So long as I could deny the facts, I took refuge in flat denial. But soon, pinned against the wall, I had to explain myself in no uncertain terms. And indeed, "the honorable Pierre Aronnax, professor at the Paris Museum," was called upon by the New York Herald to formulate some opinion or other.
So I complied. I spoke because I could no longer keep silent. I discussed the question from every angle, politically and scientifically, and here I give an extract from a well-stuffed article I published in the issue of April 30.
"And so," I wrote, "having examined the various hypotheses one by one, and every other supposition being rejected, we are necessarily driven to admit the existence of a marine animal of tremendous power.
"The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us. The sounding line has never reached them. What goes on in those remote abysses? What creatures inhabit, and can inhabit, twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters? What is the makeup of these animals? We can scarcely even guess.
"Yet the solution to the problem put before me may take the form of a dilemma.
"Either we know every variety of creature that populates our planet, or we do not.
"If we do not know them all — if nature still keeps secrets from us in matters of ichthyology — then nothing is more reasonable than to admit the existence of fish, or cetaceans, of new species or even new genera, of an essentially 'bottom-dwelling' constitution, that inhabit the strata beyond the reach of the sounding line, and that some event or other — a whim, a caprice, if you like — brings up at long intervals toward the upper level of the ocean.
"If, on the contrary, we do know every living species, then we must necessarily look for the animal in question among the marine creatures already catalogued, and in that case I would be inclined to admit the existence of a giant narwhal.
"The common narwhal, or sea unicorn, often reaches a length of sixty feet. Multiply that dimension by five, even by ten; give this cetacean a strength proportional to its size; enlarge its offensive weapons — and you have the animal we are looking for. It will have the proportions determined by the officers of the Shannon, the instrument required by the puncturing of the Scotia, and the power needed to breach a steamer's hull.
"For the narwhal is armed with a sort of ivory sword — a halberd, as certain naturalists put it. It is a great tooth as hard as steel. Some of these teeth have been found buried in the bodies of whales, which the narwhal always attacks successfully. Others have been wrenched — not without difficulty — from the hulls of ships that they had pierced clean through, the way a drill bores through a barrel. The museum of the Paris Faculty of Medicine possesses one of these tusks, two meters and twenty-five centimeters long and forty-eight centimeters wide at its base!
"Well then! Suppose the weapon ten times stronger, and the animal ten times more powerful; launch it at a speed of twenty miles an hour; multiply its mass by its velocity, and you obtain an impact capable of producing the catastrophe in question.
"So, until further information comes to light, I would cast my vote for a sea unicorn of colossal dimensions, armed no longer with a mere halberd, but with a genuine ram like the ironclad frigates or the war 'rams,' whose bulk and driving power it would combine.
"That is how this inexplicable phenomenon could be explained — unless there is nothing there at all, in spite of everything that has been glimpsed, seen, felt, and sensed — which is also possible!"
Those last words were a piece of cowardice on my part; but up to a point I wanted to protect my professorial dignity, and not lay myself too open to the mockery of the Americans, who laugh heartily when they do laugh. I was leaving myself an escape hatch. Deep down, I admitted the existence of the "monster."
My article was hotly debated, which won it a wide echo. It rallied a fair number of supporters. The solution it proposed, moreover, left free rein to the imagination. The human mind delights in these grandiose conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle — the one element in which such giants (beside whom the land animals, elephants or rhinoceroses, are mere dwarves) can be produced and can grow. The liquid masses carry the largest known species of mammals, and perhaps they harbor mollusks of incomparable size, crustaceans frightful to behold — lobsters a hundred meters long, say, or crabs weighing two hundred tons! Why not, indeed? In former ages, the land animals, contemporaries of the geological epochs — the quadrupeds, the quadrumanes, the reptiles, the birds — were built on gigantic patterns. The Creator had cast them in a colossal mold, which time has gradually reduced. Why should the sea, in its unknown depths, not have preserved these vast specimens of the life of another age — the sea that never changes, while the earth's core is almost ceaselessly transformed? Why should it not hide in its bosom the last varieties of these titanic species, whose years are centuries and whose centuries are millennia?
But I let myself be carried away into daydreams that are no longer mine to entertain! Enough of these fancies, which time has turned, for me, into terrible realities. I repeat: opinion had by then made up its mind about the nature of the phenomenon, and the public accepted without dispute the existence of a prodigious being that had nothing in common with the fabled sea serpents.
But while some saw in it only a purely scientific problem to be solved, others — more practical, especially in America and England — were of a mind to purge the ocean of this fearsome monster, in order to make the sea lanes safe again. The industrial and commercial papers treated the question chiefly from this angle. The Shipping and Mercantile Gazette, the Lloyd, the Paquebot, the Revue maritime et coloniale — every sheet devoted to the insurance companies, which were threatening to raise their premium rates — were unanimous on this point.
Public opinion having declared itself, the states of the Union were the first to act. Preparations were made in New York for an expedition to hunt down the narwhal. A fast frigate, the Abraham Lincoln, made ready to put to sea as soon as possible. The arsenals were thrown open to Commander Farragut, who pressed briskly ahead with the arming of his frigate.
And, precisely as always happens, the very moment it was decided to give chase to the monster, the monster ceased to appear. For two months no one heard a word of it. Not a single ship crossed its path. It was as if this Unicorn had gotten wind of the plots being hatched against it. There had been so much talk of it — even over the transatlantic cable! And so the wits maintained that this sly creature had intercepted some passing telegram and was now turning it to its own advantage.
So there was the frigate, fitted out for a long cruise and equipped with formidable fishing gear, and no one knew where to point it. Impatience was mounting, when, on July 2, word came that a steamer of the San Francisco to Shanghai line had sighted the animal again three weeks earlier, in the northern seas of the Pacific.
The excitement this news caused was extreme. Commander Farragut was not granted twenty-four hours' respite. His provisions were aboard. His bunkers were bursting with coal. Not a man was missing from the crew rolls. He had only to light his furnaces, build up steam, and cast off! He would not have been forgiven half a day's delay. But then, Commander Farragut asked for nothing better than to be off.
Three hours before the Abraham Lincoln left the Brooklyn pier, I received a letter worded as follows:
Professor Aronnax, of the Paris Museum, Fifth Avenue Hotel.
New York.
"Sir,
If you would care to join the expedition of the Abraham Lincoln, the government of the Union will be pleased to see France represented by you in this undertaking. Commander Farragut has a cabin at your disposal.
Three seconds before J.-B. Hobson's letter arrived, I no more dreamed of chasing the Unicorn than of attempting the Northwest Passage. Three seconds after reading the letter from the honorable Secretary of the Navy, I understood at last that my true calling, the single purpose of my life, was to hunt down this troubling monster and rid the world of it.
And yet I had just come back from a grueling expedition, worn out and hungry for rest. I longed for nothing but to see my own country again, my friends, my little lodging at the Jardin des Plantes, my dear and precious collections! But nothing could hold me back. I forgot everything — the fatigue, the friends, the collections — and without another moment's thought I accepted the American government's offer.
"Besides," I told myself, "every road leads back to Europe, and the Unicorn will be kind enough to draw me toward the coasts of France! The worthy creature will let itself be caught in European waters — purely for my personal convenience — and I mean to bring back no less than half a meter of its ivory halberd for the Museum of Natural History."
But in the meantime, I would have to go looking for this narwhal in the northern Pacific — which, as a way of getting home to France, meant taking the road to the antipodes.
"Conseil!" I called, impatience in my voice.
Conseil was my manservant. A devoted young fellow who came with me on all my travels; a good-hearted Fleming I was fond of, and who returned the feeling in full — a man phlegmatic by nature, methodical on principle, dutiful out of habit, seldom rattled by whatever surprises life sprang on him, very clever with his hands, ready for any task, and, in spite of his name, one who never gave advice — not even when nobody asked him for any.
From rubbing shoulders with the scientists of our little world at the Jardin des Plantes, Conseil had ended up picking up a thing or two. In him I had a genuine specialist, thoroughly grounded in natural-history classification, who could scramble up and down the whole ladder of branches, groups, classes, subclasses, orders, families, genera, subgenera, species, and varieties with the agility of an acrobat. But his science stopped right there. Classifying was his life, and he knew nothing beyond it. Deeply versed in the theory of classification, and hardly at all in its practice, he could not, I believe, have told a sperm whale from a right whale! And yet, what a fine and worthy young fellow!
For ten years now, Conseil had followed me wherever science dragged me. Never once a word from him about the length of a journey or how tired it left him. Never an objection to buckling up his suitcase for whatever country you cared to name — China or the Congo, however far off it lay. Off he went, there as here, and asked for nothing more. On top of that, he enjoyed splendid health that defied every illness; solid muscles, but no nerves — not the least trace of nerves, morally speaking, that is.
The young man was thirty years old, and his age stood to his master's as fifteen to twenty. I hope I may be forgiven for admitting, in this roundabout way, that I was forty.
Conseil had just one flaw. A rabid stickler for form, he never spoke to me except in the third person — to the point of being downright irritating.
"Conseil!" I said again, my hands already flying feverishly through my preparations for departure.
I had no doubt whatever about this devoted young man. As a rule I never asked whether it suited him or not to come along on my travels; but this time we were talking about an expedition that might drag on indefinitely, a hazardous undertaking, in pursuit of an animal that could send a frigate to the bottom like a walnut shell! There was matter for reflection here, even for the most unflappable man alive. What would Conseil say?
"Conseil!" I cried a third time.
Conseil appeared.
"Master called?" he said as he came in.
"Yes, my boy. Get me ready, get yourself ready. We leave in two hours."
"Just as Master pleases," Conseil answered calmly.
"Not a moment to lose. Pack into my trunk all my traveling gear, clothes, shirts, socks — don't bother counting them, just as many as you can manage — and be quick about it!"
"And Master's collections?" Conseil observed.
"We'll deal with those later."
"What! The archaeotherium, the hyracotherium, the oreodons, the cheiropotamus, and Master's other carcasses?"
"They'll be kept at the hotel."
"And Master's live babirusa?"
"It'll be fed while we're away. In fact, I'll leave orders to have our whole menagerie shipped off to France."
"So we're not going back to Paris?" Conseil asked.
"Yes... certainly..." I answered evasively, "only by way of a small detour."
"Whatever detour Master pleases."
"Oh, it's a trifling one! A slightly less direct route, that's all. We're taking passage aboard the Abraham Lincoln."
"Just as it suits Master," Conseil answered placidly.
"You see, my friend, it's about the monster... the famous narwhal... We're going to rid the seas of it! The author of a two-volume quarto work on The Mysteries of the Great Ocean Depths can hardly excuse himself from sailing with Commander Farragut. A glorious mission, but — a dangerous one too! There's no knowing where we're bound! These creatures can be very unpredictable! But we'll go all the same! We have a commander who doesn't scare easily!"
"Whatever Master does, I'll do," Conseil answered.
"And think it over carefully! Because I don't want to hide a thing from you. This is one of those voyages a man doesn't always come back from!"
"Just as Master pleases."
A quarter of an hour later, our trunks were ready. Conseil had done it in a flash, and I was certain nothing was missing, for the young man classified shirts and coats every bit as well as birds or mammals.
The hotel elevator set us down in the great vestibule of the mezzanine. I went down the few steps that led to the ground floor. I settled my bill at that vast counter forever besieged by a considerable crowd. I left orders to ship my bales of stuffed animals and dried plants to Paris (France). I opened a line of credit sufficient to keep the babirusa fed, and, with Conseil at my heels, I jumped into a carriage.
The vehicle — twenty francs the trip — went down Broadway as far as Union Square, followed Fourth Avenue to its junction with Bowery Street, turned into Catherine Street, and stopped at Pier 34. There the Catherine ferryboat carried us — men, horses, and carriage — over to Brooklyn, that great annex of New York on the left bank of the East River, and in a few minutes we reached the wharf beside which the Abraham Lincoln was belching torrents of black smoke from its two funnels.
Our baggage was hauled aboard the frigate's deck at once. I hurried on board. I asked for Commander Farragut. One of the sailors led me up to the poop deck, where I found myself face to face with a fine-looking officer who held out his hand to me.
"Monsieur Pierre Aronnax?" he said.
"The very man," I answered. "Commander Farragut?"
"In person. Welcome aboard, Professor. Your cabin is waiting for you."
I bowed, and leaving the commander to the business of getting under way, I had myself shown to the cabin set aside for me.
The Abraham Lincoln had been perfectly chosen and fitted out for its new assignment. It was a fast frigate, equipped with superheating apparatus that let it drive its steam pressure up to seven atmospheres. Under that pressure the Abraham Lincoln reached an average speed of eighteen and three-tenths miles an hour — a considerable pace, yet still not enough to keep up with the gigantic cetacean.
The interior arrangements of the frigate matched its nautical qualities. I was very pleased with my cabin, set in the stern, opening onto the officers' wardroom.
"We'll be comfortable here," I said to Conseil.
"As comfortable, if Master doesn't mind my saying so," Conseil replied, "as a hermit crab in the shell of a whelk."
I left Conseil to stow our trunks properly and went back up on deck to watch the preparations for getting under way.
Just then Commander Farragut was ordering the last moorings cast off that still held the Abraham Lincoln to the Brooklyn pier. And so, a quarter of an hour's delay — even less — and the frigate would have sailed without me, and I would have missed this extraordinary, supernatural, altogether improbable expedition, whose truthful account may yet find a few skeptics.
But Commander Farragut had no intention of losing a single day, or a single hour, in reaching the waters where the animal had just been sighted. He sent for his engineer.
"Are we up to pressure?" he asked.
"Yes, sir," the engineer answered.
"Go ahead," cried Commander Farragut.
At this order, relayed to the engine room by compressed-air devices, the mechanics set the starting wheel in motion. Steam whistled as it rushed into the half-open valves. The long horizontal pistons groaned and shoved the connecting rods of the shaft. The blades of the propeller beat the waves with mounting speed, and the Abraham Lincoln moved off majestically amid a hundred or so ferryboats and tenders loaded with spectators, forming an escort in its honor.
The wharves of Brooklyn and all that part of New York bordering the East River were packed with the curious. Three cheers, torn from five hundred thousand throats, burst out one after another. Thousands of handkerchiefs waved above the dense mass and saluted the Abraham Lincoln until it reached the waters of the Hudson, at the tip of that long peninsula that forms the city of New York.
Then the frigate, following along the New Jersey side the admirable right bank of the river, all lined with villas, passed between the forts, which saluted it with their heaviest guns. The Abraham Lincoln answered by lowering and raising three times the American flag, its thirty-nine stars blazing at the mizzen peak; then, altering course to take the buoyed channel that curves around into the inner bay formed by the point of Sandy Hook, it skimmed that sandy spit where a few thousand spectators cheered it one more time.
The procession of boats and tenders kept following the frigate, and left it only when they came abreast of the lightship whose two beacons mark the entrance to the New York channels.
Three o'clock was striking just then. The pilot climbed down into his boat and rejoined the little schooner waiting for him to leeward. The fires were stoked; the propeller beat the waves faster; the frigate ran along the low yellow coast of Long Island, and at eight o'clock in the evening, having lost the lights of Fire Island to the northwest, it steamed at full speed out onto the dark waters of the Atlantic.
Commander Farragut was a fine sailor, worthy of the frigate he commanded. Ship and man were one; he was her very soul. On the question of the cetacean not a shadow of doubt crossed his mind, and he would not allow the animal's existence to be argued aboard his vessel. He believed in it the way certain devout old women believe in the Leviathan — by faith, not by reason. The monster existed; he would rid the seas of it; he had sworn as much. He was a kind of Knight of Rhodes, a Dieudonné de Gozon marching out to meet the serpent that plagued his island. Either Commander Farragut would kill the narwhal, or the narwhal would kill Commander Farragut. There was no middle ground.
The ship's officers shared their chief's opinion. You should have heard them talk, debate, argue, calculate the various odds of an encounter, and scan the vast reach of the ocean. More than one volunteered for a watch up in the topgallant crosstrees who, under any other circumstances, would have cursed the chore. As long as the sun traced its daily arc, the masts were crowded with sailors who couldn't hold still — the planks of the deck fairly scorched their feet. And yet the Abraham Lincoln had not yet cut through the suspect waters of the Pacific with her prow.
As for the crew, they asked nothing better than to meet the unicorn, harpoon it, haul it aboard, and carve it up. They watched the sea with scrupulous attention. Besides, Commander Farragut had mentioned a certain sum of two thousand dollars, set aside for whoever — cabin boy or sailor, mate or officer — should be the first to sight the animal. I leave you to imagine how hard the eyes worked aboard the Abraham Lincoln.
For my own part, I was not to be outdone by the others, and I yielded to no one my share of the daily watching. The frigate would have had a hundred reasons to call herself the Argus. Alone among us all, Conseil met the question that so consumed the rest of us with sheer indifference, striking a jarring note against the general enthusiasm on board.
I've said that Commander Farragut had carefully outfitted his ship with every device suited to fishing up the gigantic cetacean. A whaler could not have been better armed. We had every known engine of the trade, from the hand-thrown harpoon to the barbed arrows of blunderbusses and the explosive shells of duck guns. Up on the forecastle stretched a perfected cannon, breech-loading, very thick in the walls and very narrow in the bore, whose model is due to appear at the Universal Exposition of 1867. This precious instrument, of American make, could throw a four-kilogram conical shell an average distance of sixteen kilometers without the least strain.
So the Abraham Lincoln lacked no means of destruction. But she had something better still. She had Ned Land, the king of the harpooners.
Ned Land was a Canadian, with a rare gift in his hands and no equal in his perilous trade. Skill and cool nerve, daring and cunning — he possessed these qualities to a superior degree, and it took an unusually crafty whale, or a singularly sly sperm whale, to escape a thrust of his harpoon.
Ned Land was about forty. He was a tall man — over six English feet — powerfully built, grave in manner, not much of a talker, at times violent, and thoroughly furious when crossed. His person drew your attention, above all the force of his gaze, which gave a striking accent to his whole face.
I think Commander Farragut had done wisely in signing this man aboard. For eye and arm, he was worth the whole crew put together. I can't compare him to anything better than a powerful telescope that was at the same time a cannon always ready to fire.
To say Canadian is to say Frenchman, and, reserved as Ned Land was, I have to admit he took a certain liking to me. My nationality drew him, no doubt. It was a chance for him to speak, and for me to hear, that old language of Rabelais still in use in a few Canadian provinces. The harpooner's family came originally from Quebec, and had already produced a whole tribe of bold fishermen back when that city belonged to France.
Little by little, Ned developed a taste for talking, and I loved to hear the tales of his adventures in the polar seas. He told the story of his fishing and his battles with a great natural poetry. His account took on an epic shape, and I felt I was listening to some Canadian Homer, singing the Iliad of the far northern regions.
I'm sketching this bold companion for you now as I know him at present. For we have become old friends, bound by that unshakable friendship that is born and cemented in the most terrifying trials. Ah, brave Ned! I ask nothing more than to live another hundred years, so I can remember you all the longer!
And now — what was Ned Land's opinion on the question of the sea monster? I have to admit he scarcely believed in the unicorn, and that, alone on board, he did not share the general conviction. He even avoided the subject, which one day I felt I had to take up with him.
On a magnificent evening — the 30th of July, that is, three weeks after our departure — the frigate lay off Cape Blanco, thirty miles to leeward of the Patagonian coast. We had crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, and the Strait of Magellan opened less than seven hundred miles to the south. Within a week the Abraham Lincoln would be furrowing the waves of the Pacific.
Seated on the poop deck, Ned Land and I chatted about this and that, gazing at that mysterious sea whose depths have so far remained beyond the reach of human eyes. Quite naturally I steered the conversation around to the giant unicorn, and weighed the various chances of success or failure for our expedition. Then, seeing that Ned let me talk without saying much of anything, I pressed him more directly.
"Come now, Ned," I asked him, "how can you not be convinced of the existence of the cetacean we're chasing? Do you have some particular reason for being so skeptical?"
The harpooner looked at me for a few moments before answering, struck his broad forehead with his hand — a habitual gesture of his — closed his eyes as if to gather his thoughts, and said at last:
"Maybe I do, Professor Aronnax."
"And yet, Ned — you, a whaler by profession, you who are on familiar terms with the great marine mammals, you whose imagination ought to accept the notion of enormous cetaceans easily enough — you of all people should be the last to doubt in a case like this!"
"That's just where you're wrong, Professor," Ned answered. "Let the common crowd believe in extraordinary comets crossing space, or in antediluvian monsters peopling the inside of the globe — fine, let it pass. But neither the astronomer nor the geologist admits such fairy tales. Same with the whaler. I've chased plenty of cetaceans, I've harpooned a great many, I've killed several, but powerful and well-armed as they were, neither their tails nor their tusks could ever have dented the sheet-iron plates of a steamer."
"Even so, Ned, people cite ships that a narwhal's tooth has run clean through, from one side to the other."
"Wooden ships, maybe," the Canadian answered. "Though even that I've never seen. So, until I have proof to the contrary, I deny that whales, sperm whales, or unicorns can produce any such effect."
"Listen to me, Ned—"
"No, Professor, no. Anything you like except that. A giant octopus, perhaps?"
"Even less likely, Ned. The octopus is only a mollusk, and the very word tells you how little firmness there is in its flesh. Even at five hundred feet long, the octopus, which does not belong to the vertebrate branch at all, is completely harmless to ships like the Scotia or the Abraham Lincoln. So the exploits of Krakens and other monsters of that sort have to be filed away among the fables."
"Then, Professor," Ned Land went on, in a fairly mocking tone, "you persist in accepting the existence of a huge cetacean...?"
"Yes, Ned, I say it again, with a conviction that rests on the logic of the facts. I believe in the existence of a mammal, powerfully built, belonging to the vertebrate branch, like the whales, the sperm whales, or the dolphins, and equipped with a horny tusk of extreme penetrating force."
"Hmph!" said the harpooner, shaking his head with the air of a man who refuses to let himself be convinced.
"Consider, my worthy Canadian," I went on, "that if such an animal exists, if it inhabits the depths of the ocean, if it frequents the liquid layers some miles below the surface of the waters, then it must necessarily possess a body whose strength defies all comparison."
"And why such a powerful body?" Ned asked.
"Because it takes an incalculable force to hold oneself in the deep layers and resist their pressure."
"Really?" said Ned, watching me with a wink.
"Really, and a few figures will prove it to you easily enough."
"Oh, figures!" Ned shot back. "You can make figures say whatever you want!"
"In business, Ned, but not in mathematics. Listen to me. Let's say the pressure of one atmosphere is represented by the pressure of a column of water thirty-two feet high. In reality the column would be a bit shorter, since we're dealing with seawater, whose density is greater than that of fresh water. Well then, when you dive, Ned, for every thirty-two feet of water above you, your body bears a pressure equal to that of the atmosphere — that is, so many kilograms for every square centimeter of its surface. It follows that at three hundred and twenty feet this pressure is ten atmospheres, a hundred atmospheres at three thousand two hundred feet, and a thousand atmospheres at thirty-two thousand feet — roughly two and a half leagues down. Which amounts to saying that if you could reach that depth in the ocean, every square centimeter of your body's surface would undergo a pressure of a thousand kilograms. Now, my good Ned, do you know how many square centimeters of surface you have?"
"I haven't the faintest idea, Professor Aronnax."
"About seventeen thousand."
"As many as that?"
"And since in reality atmospheric pressure is a little more than the weight of one kilogram per square centimeter, your seventeen thousand square centimeters are, at this very moment, bearing a pressure of seventeen thousand five hundred and sixty-eight kilograms."
"Without my noticing it?"
"Without your noticing it. And if you're not crushed by such a pressure, it's because the air penetrates the inside of your body with an equal pressure. Hence a perfect balance between the inward push and the outward push, which cancel each other out, and that lets you bear it without any trouble. But in the water, it's another matter."
"Yes, I understand," Ned answered, grown more attentive, "because the water surrounds me and doesn't penetrate me."
"Exactly, Ned. So, at thirty-two feet below the surface of the sea, you'd undergo a pressure of seventeen thousand five hundred and sixty-eight kilograms; at three hundred and twenty feet, ten times that pressure, or a hundred and seventy-five thousand six hundred and eighty kilograms; at three thousand two hundred feet, a hundred times that pressure, or seventeen hundred and fifty-six thousand eight hundred kilograms; and at thirty-two thousand feet, finally, a thousand times that pressure, or seventeen million five hundred and sixty-eight thousand kilograms — that is to say, you'd be flattened as if they'd pulled you out from between the plates of a hydraulic press!"
"The devil!" said Ned.
"Well then, my worthy harpooner, if vertebrates several hundred meters long, and thick in proportion, hold themselves at such depths — creatures whose surface is measured in millions of square centimeters — then the push they undergo has to be reckoned in billions of kilograms. Calculate, then, what the resistance of their bony framework must be, and the power of their whole organism, to withstand such pressures!"
"They'd have to be built," Ned Land answered, "out of eight-inch iron plate, like the ironclad frigates."
"Just as you say, Ned. And think, then, of the havoc such a mass could wreak, launched with the speed of an express train against a ship's hull."
"Yes... true enough... maybe," the Canadian answered, shaken by these figures but unwilling to give in.
"Well, have I convinced you?"
"You've convinced me of one thing, Professor — that if such animals exist at the bottom of the sea, they'd necessarily have to be as strong as you say."
"But if they don't exist, you stubborn harpooner, how do you explain the accident that happened to the Scotia?"
"It's maybe...," said Ned, hesitating.
"Go on!"
"Because... it just isn't true!" the Canadian answered, unknowingly reproducing a famous reply of Arago's.
But that answer proved nothing but the harpooner's obstinacy. That day I pressed him no further. The Scotia's accident could not be denied. The hole existed so plainly that it had had to be plugged, and I don't think the existence of a hole can be demonstrated more categorically than that. Now, that hole had not made itself, and since it had not been produced by underwater rocks or underwater machines, it was necessarily due to the piercing tool of some animal.
Now, in my opinion — and for all the reasons deduced above — that animal belonged to the branch of vertebrates, to the class of mammals, to the group of the fish-shaped, and finally to the order of cetaceans. As for the family in which it ranked — whale, sperm whale, or dolphin — as for the genus it belonged to, as for the species in which it ought to be classed, that was a question to be cleared up later on. To settle it, one would have to dissect this unknown monster; to dissect it, catch it; to catch it, harpoon it — which was Ned Land's affair; to harpoon it, sight it — which was the crew's affair; and to sight it, meet it — which was the affair of chance.
For a while the Abraham Lincoln's voyage passed without incident. But one occasion arose that threw Ned Land's marvelous skill into sharp relief and showed just how much confidence we ought to place in him.
Off the Falklands, on June 30, the frigate spoke with some American whalers, and we learned that none of them had seen anything of the narwhal. But one of them, the captain of the Monroe, knowing that Ned Land was aboard the Abraham Lincoln, asked for his help in hunting a whale that had come into view. Commander Farragut, eager to see Ned Land at work, gave him leave to go across to the Monroe. And fortune served our Canadian so well that, instead of one whale, he harpooned two at a single double stroke — striking one clean through the heart and taking the other after a chase of only a few minutes!
There's no doubt about it: if the monster ever finds itself on the wrong end of Ned Land's harpoon, I wouldn't bet on the monster.
The frigate ran down the southeastern coast of America at a prodigious clip. By July 3 we lay off the mouth of the Strait of Magellan, level with Cape Vírgenes. But Commander Farragut had no wish to take that winding passage, and maneuvered instead to round Cape Horn.
The crew backed him unanimously. And indeed — was it likely we'd meet the narwhal in that cramped strait? A good many of the sailors swore the monster couldn't get through it, "that it was too big to fit!"
On July 6, around three in the afternoon, the Abraham Lincoln, fifteen miles to the south, rounded that solitary islet, that lost rock at the very tip of the American continent, to which Dutch sailors gave the name of their home town — Cape Horn. The course was set to the northwest, and the next day the frigate's propeller was at last churning the waters of the Pacific.
"Keep your eyes peeled! Keep your eyes peeled!" the sailors of the Abraham Lincoln kept telling one another.
And peel them they did, enormously. Eyes and spyglasses — a little dazzled, it's true, by the prospect of two thousand dollars — never rested for a moment. Day and night we watched the surface of the ocean, and the night-sighted ones, whose ability to see in the dark boosted their chances by fifty percent, were well placed to win the prize.
As for me, though the lure of money held little appeal, I was hardly the least attentive man aboard. Giving only a few minutes to meals, a few hours to sleep, indifferent to sun or rain, I no longer left the deck. Now leaning over the bulwarks of the forecastle, now propped against the after rail, I devoured with a greedy eye the cottony wake that whitened the sea as far as it could reach. And how many times I shared the thrill of the officers and crew when some capricious whale lifted its blackish back above the waves! In an instant the frigate's deck would fill. The hatchways would spew a torrent of sailors and officers. Each one, chest heaving, eyes clouded, watched the passage of the great mammal. I looked, I looked until I wore out my retina, until I nearly went blind, while Conseil, forever phlegmatic, would say to me in his calm way:
"If Master would be so good as to open his eyes a little less wide, Master would see a great deal more!"
But it was all wasted feeling! The Abraham Lincoln would change course, run down the sighted animal — an ordinary whale or a common sperm whale — which soon vanished amid a chorus of curses!
The weather, though, held fair. The voyage was going on under the best of conditions. It was then the bad season in the southern hemisphere, for July in that zone corresponds to our European January; but the sea stayed calm, and let itself be scanned easily over a wide sweep.
Ned Land still showed the most stubborn skepticism; he even made a point of not examining the surface of the waves outside of his watch — at least when no whale was in view. And yet his marvelous powers of vision would have done us great service. But eight hours out of twelve, that pigheaded Canadian read or slept in his cabin. A hundred times I reproached him for his indifference.
"Bah!" he'd answer. "There's nothing out there, Professor Aronnax, and even if there were some animal, what chance do we have of spotting it? Aren't we just running along at a venture? People say this creature nobody can find was sighted again in the high seas of the Pacific — fine, I'll grant that — but two months have already gone by since that encounter, and going by the temperament of your narwhal, it doesn't care to sit and molder for long in the same waters! It's gifted with a prodigious knack for getting around. Now, you know better than I do, Professor, that nature does nothing without a reason, and she wouldn't give an animal that's slow by nature the power to move fast if it had no need to use it. So, if the beast exists, it's already far away!"
To that I had no answer. Plainly we were groping in the dark. But what other way was there to go about it? And so our chances were quite limited. Still, no one yet doubted our success, and not a sailor aboard would have bet against the narwhal and its next appearance.
On July 20 we cut the Tropic of Capricorn at 105° longitude, and on the 27th of the same month we crossed the equator at the hundred-and-tenth meridian. That fix taken, the frigate held a more decided course to the west and struck into the central seas of the Pacific.
Commander Farragut reasoned, rightly, that it was better to keep to deep water and stay well clear of the continents and islands whose approach the animal had always seemed to avoid — "no doubt because there wasn't enough water there for it!" as the boatswain put it. So the frigate stood off from the Pomotou group, the Marquesas, and the Sandwich Islands, cut the Tropic of Cancer at 132° longitude, and steered for the seas of China.
We were at last on the stage of the monster's latest antics! And to tell the truth, life aboard had become unlivable. Hearts pounded dreadfully, laying up incurable aneurysms for the future. The whole crew labored under a nervous overexcitement I couldn't begin to describe. No one ate, no one slept. Twenty times a day a misjudgment, an optical illusion of some sailor perched on the crosstrees, caused unbearable anguish, and these emotions, repeated twenty times over, kept us in a state of agitation too violent not to bring on a reaction before long.
And indeed, the reaction was not slow in coming. For three months — three months in which every day lasted a century! — the Abraham Lincoln plowed all the northern seas of the Pacific, chasing after every whale that was sighted, veering off course abruptly, swinging suddenly from one tack to the other, stopping dead, forcing or reversing its steam again and again at the risk of throwing its engine off its bearings, and it left not a single point unexplored from the shores of Japan to the American coast. And nothing! Nothing but the immensity of the empty waves! Nothing that looked like a gigantic narwhal, or a submarine islet, or the wreck of a foundered ship, or a fleeing reef, or anything whatever of the supernatural!
So the reaction set in. Discouragement took hold of everyone's mind first, and opened a breach for disbelief. A new sentiment sprang up aboard, made of three-tenths shame against seven-tenths fury. We had been "utter fools" to let ourselves be taken in by a fantasy — but even more furious than foolish! The mountains of arguments piled up over a year came crashing down all at once, and each man thought of nothing now but making up, at meals or in sleep, for the time he'd so stupidly sacrificed.
With the natural fickleness of the human mind, we flung ourselves from one excess to the other. The warmest champions of the enterprise inevitably became its most ardent detractors. The reaction rose up from the depths of the ship, from the stokers' quarters clear to the officers' wardroom, and certainly, without a very particular stubbornness on Commander Farragut's part, the frigate would have finally turned her head back to the south.
Still, this fruitless search could not go on much longer. The Abraham Lincoln had nothing to reproach herself with, having done everything to succeed. Never did the crew of an American naval vessel show more patience and more zeal; the failure could not be laid at their door; there was nothing left but to turn back.
A representation to that effect was made to the commander. The commander held firm. The sailors made no secret of their discontent, and the service suffered for it. I don't mean to say there was mutiny aboard, but after a reasonable spell of obstinacy, Commander Farragut — like Columbus before him — asked for three days' patience. If within a delay of three days the monster had not appeared, the helmsman would give three turns of the wheel, and the Abraham Lincoln would make for European seas.
This promise was given on November 2. Its first effect was to revive the flagging spirits of the crew. The ocean was watched with fresh attention. Every man wanted to give it that last look in which all one's memory is summed up. The spyglasses went to work with a feverish energy. It was a supreme challenge flung at the giant narwhal, and the creature could not in reason excuse itself from answering that summons "to appear!"
Two days went by. The Abraham Lincoln kept under low steam. We tried a thousand tricks to rouse the attention or stir the apathy of the animal, in case it happened to be found in these waters. Enormous quarters of bacon were streamed astern — to the great satisfaction of the sharks, I must admit. The boats fanned out in every direction around the Abraham Lincoln while she lay to, and left not a point of sea unexplored. But the evening of November 4 arrived without this undersea mystery being unveiled.
The next day, November 5, at noon, the final deadline ran out. After the fix was taken, Commander Farragut, faithful to his promise, was to give the course to the southeast and abandon for good the northern regions of the Pacific.
The frigate then lay at 31°15′ north latitude and 136°42′ east longitude. The lands of Japan were less than two hundred miles off to leeward. Night was coming on. Eight bells had just struck. Great clouds veiled the disk of the moon, then in its first quarter. The sea heaved peacefully under the frigate's stem.
At that moment I was leaning at the bow, on the starboard bulwark. Conseil, posted beside me, gazed straight ahead. The crew, perched in the rigging, scanned the horizon as it narrowed and darkened little by little. The officers, armed with their night glasses, searched the growing gloom. Now and then the somber ocean glittered under a ray the moon shot between the fringe of two clouds. Then every trace of light died away in the darkness.
Watching Conseil, I noticed that the good fellow was feeling, ever so slightly, the general influence. At least I thought so. Perhaps, and for the first time, his nerves were quivering under the touch of a feeling of curiosity.
"Come now, Conseil," I said to him, "here's a last chance to pocket two thousand dollars."
"If Master will permit me to say so," Conseil replied, "I never counted on that prize, and the government of the Union could have promised a hundred thousand dollars — it wouldn't have been any the poorer for it."
"You're right, Conseil. It's a foolish business after all, and one we threw ourselves into too lightly. So much time lost, so much wasted feeling! Six months ago we'd already be back in France —"
"In Master's little apartment," Conseil answered, "in Master's Museum! And I'd already have classified Master's fossils! And Master's babirusa would be settled in its cage at the Jardin des Plantes, drawing every curious soul in the capital!"
"Just so, Conseil, and — not to mention, I imagine — that they'll all be laughing at us!"
"Quite so," Conseil answered tranquilly. "I do think they'll laugh at Master. And — must I say it...?"
"You must say it, Conseil."
"Well then, Master will have no more than he deserves!"
"Really!"
"When one has the honor of being a scholar like Master, one doesn't lay oneself open to —"
Conseil couldn't finish his compliment. In the midst of the general silence, a voice had just made itself heard. It was the voice of Ned Land, and Ned Land was shouting:
"Ahoy! The thing in question, to leeward, off our beam!"
At that shout the whole crew rushed toward the harpooner — commander, officers, mates, sailors, ship's boys, right down to the engineers who abandoned their engine and the stokers who left their furnaces. The order to stop had been given, and the frigate was now only coasting on her own momentum.
The darkness was deep just then, and good as the Canadian's eyes were, I wondered how he had seen anything, and what it was he could have seen. My heart was pounding fit to burst.
But Ned Land had not been mistaken, and all of us made out the object he was pointing to with his hand.
Two cable-lengths off the Abraham Lincoln's starboard quarter, the sea seemed to be lit from below. This was no mere trick of phosphorescence — there could be no mistaking it. The monster, submerged a few fathoms beneath the surface, was throwing off that intense but unexplained glow which several captains had described in their reports. This magnificent radiance had to be produced by some agent of tremendous illuminating power. The luminous patch traced across the sea an immense, elongated oval, at the center of which glowed a burning core whose unbearable brilliance faded off by successive degrees toward the edges.
"It's nothing but a cluster of phosphorescent molecules," cried one of the officers.
"No, sir," I replied with conviction. "Piddocks and salps never give off a light that powerful. This glow is electrical in nature... Besides — look, look! It's moving! It's coming forward, going back! It's charging straight at us!"
A general cry went up from the frigate.
"Silence!" ordered Commander Farragut. "Helm hard to windward! Engine astern!"
The sailors sprang to the wheel, the engineers to their engine. The steam was reversed at once, and the Abraham Lincoln, swinging to port, described a half-circle.
"Helm amidships! Engine ahead!" shouted Commander Farragut.
These orders were carried out, and the frigate pulled rapidly away from the glowing core.
Let me correct that. She meant to pull away, but the supernatural animal closed the distance at twice her speed.
We were breathless. Astonishment, far more than fear, held us silent and motionless. The animal ran us down as though it were a game. It circled the frigate, which was then making fourteen knots, and wrapped her in its electric sheets like a luminous dust. Then it drew off two or three miles, leaving behind a phosphorescent wake like the swirling clouds of steam an express locomotive flings out behind it. All at once, from the dark edge of the horizon, where it had gone to gather speed, the monster shot suddenly toward the Abraham Lincoln with terrifying swiftness, stopped short twenty feet from her wales, and went dark — not by sinking beneath the water, since its brilliance did not fade by degrees, but abruptly, as if the source of that dazzling outpouring had suddenly run dry. Then it reappeared on the other side of the ship, whether it had rounded her or slipped beneath her keel. At any instant a collision might occur that would be fatal to us.
Meanwhile, I was surprised at the frigate's maneuvers. She was fleeing, not attacking. She was being chased — she who ought to have been the hunter — and I said as much to Commander Farragut. His face, ordinarily so impassive, wore a look of indefinable bewilderment.
"Professor Aronnax," he answered me, "I don't know what formidable creature I'm dealing with, and I won't rashly risk my frigate in the middle of all this darkness. Besides, how do you attack something unknown, how do you defend against it? Let's wait for daylight, and then the roles will be reversed."
"You've no more doubt, Commander, as to the nature of the animal?"
"None, sir. It's obviously a gigantic narwhal — but an electric narwhal as well."
"Then perhaps," I added, "there's no more coming near it than there is coming near an electric eel or a torpedo ray."
"Just so," the commander replied. "And if it carries a thunderbolt's power inside it, then it's surely the most terrible animal that ever came from the hand of the Creator. That is why, sir, I intend to keep my guard up."
The whole crew stayed on their feet all through the night. No one dreamed of sleeping. The Abraham Lincoln, unable to match the creature for speed, had eased off and was holding under low steam. For its part the narwhal, imitating the frigate, let itself be rocked at the pleasure of the swell, and seemed determined not to abandon the field of battle.
Toward midnight, however, it disappeared — or, to put it more exactly, it "went out" like a big glowworm. Had it fled? That was to be feared, not hoped for. But at seven minutes to one in the morning came a deafening whistle, like the sound of a column of water driven up with extreme violence.
Commander Farragut, Ned Land, and I were on the poop deck just then, peering hungrily into the deep darkness.
"Ned Land," asked the commander, "you've often heard whales bellow?"
"Often, sir. But never a whale like this, one whose sight has earned me two thousand dollars."
"Quite right, you've a claim to the bounty. But tell me — isn't that the noise cetaceans make when they blow water out through their blowholes?"
"The same noise, sir, but this one is beyond all comparison louder. So there's no mistaking it. That's a cetacean out there in our waters, sure enough. With your permission, sir," the harpooner added, "we'll have a word or two with it tomorrow at daybreak."
"If it's in the mood to hear you out, Master Land," I said, in a tone of little conviction.
"Just let me get within four harpoon-lengths of it," the Canadian shot back, "and it'll have to hear me out!"
"But to get near it," the commander went on, "I'll have to put a whaleboat at your disposal?"
"No doubt, sir."
"That means gambling with my men's lives?"
"And with mine!" the harpooner answered simply.
Toward two in the morning the glowing core reappeared, no less intense, five miles to windward of the Abraham Lincoln. Despite the distance, despite the noise of wind and sea, we could distinctly hear the animal's formidable tail-strokes and even its panting breath. It seemed that when the enormous narwhal came up to breathe at the surface of the ocean, the air rushed into its lungs the way steam rushes into the vast cylinders of a two-thousand-horsepower engine.
"Hm!" I thought. "A whale with the strength of a cavalry regiment — that would be a fine whale indeed!"
We stayed on the alert until daybreak and made ready for battle. The fishing gear was laid out along the bulwarks. The first mate had them load those blunderbuss guns that can fire a harpoon a mile, and long duck-guns with explosive shells whose wound is mortal even to the mightiest animals. Ned Land had contented himself with sharpening his harpoon — a terrible weapon in his hand.
At six o'clock dawn began to break, and with the first gleams of daylight the narwhal's electric glow vanished. At seven the day had come up well enough, but a very thick morning mist shrank the horizon, and the best spyglasses could not pierce it. Hence disappointment and anger.
I hauled myself up to the mizzen crosstrees. A few officers had already perched themselves at the mastheads.
At eight the mist rolled heavily off the water, and its thick coils lifted little by little. The horizon widened and cleared all at once.
Suddenly, just as the evening before, Ned Land's voice rang out.
"The thing in question, off the port quarter!" cried the harpooner.
Every eye turned toward the point he indicated.
There, a mile and a half from the frigate, a long blackish body rose a meter above the waves. Its tail, lashing furiously, kicked up a considerable churn. Never did a caudal fin beat the sea with such power. An immense wake, dazzlingly white, marked the animal's passage and traced a long, sweeping curve.
The frigate drew near the cetacean. I studied it with a perfectly clear mind. The reports of the Shannon and the Helvetia had somewhat exaggerated its dimensions, and I put its length at only two hundred and fifty feet. As for its girth, I could gauge it only with difficulty; but on the whole the animal struck me as admirably proportioned in all three dimensions.
While I was observing this phenomenal creature, two jets of steam and water shot from its blowholes and rose to a height of forty meters, which settled the matter of how it breathed. From this I concluded definitively that it belonged to the branch of the vertebrates, the class of mammals, the subclass of monodelphians, the group of the fish-shaped, the order of cetaceans, family... Here I could not yet pronounce. The order of cetaceans comprises three families: the baleen whales, the sperm whales, and the dolphins — and it is among the last of these that the narwhals are classed. Each of these families divides into several genera, each genus into species, each species into varieties. Variety, species, genus, and family still eluded me, but I had no doubt of completing my classification with the help of heaven and Commander Farragut.
The crew was waiting impatiently for their chief's orders. He, after attentively studying the animal, sent for the engineer. The engineer came running.
"Sir," said the commander, "do you have your pressure up?"
"Yes, sir," the engineer answered.
"Good. Stoke your fires, and full steam ahead!"
Three cheers greeted this order. The hour of the fight had struck. A few moments later the frigate's two funnels were vomiting torrents of black smoke, and the deck shuddered under the trembling of the boilers.
Driven forward by her powerful propeller, the Abraham Lincoln headed straight at the animal. It let her come up to within half a cable-length, indifferently; then, disdaining to dive, it put on a little turn of flight and merely kept its distance.
This pursuit went on for about three quarters of an hour, without the frigate gaining a fathom on the cetacean. It was plain, then, that at this rate she would never overtake it.
Commander Farragut furiously twisted the thick tuft of hair that sprouted beneath his chin.
"Ned Land?" he called.
The Canadian came to the order.
"Well, Master Land," the commander asked, "do you still advise me to put my boats over the side?"
"No, sir," Ned Land answered, "because that beast won't be taken unless it chooses to be."
"Then what do we do?"
"Force the steam, if you can, sir. As for me — with your permission, that is — I'll go and post myself under the bobstays of the bowsprit, and if we come within harpoon-range, I harpoon."
"Go to it, Ned," Commander Farragut answered. "Engineer!" he shouted. "Get your pressure up."
Ned Land went off to his post. The fires were pushed harder; the propeller turned forty-three revolutions a minute, and the steam hissed out through the valves. The log was heaved, and it showed that the Abraham Lincoln was making eighteen and a half miles an hour.
But the cursed animal was also cruising along at eighteen and a half miles an hour.
For another hour the frigate held to that pace without gaining a single fathom. It was humiliating for one of the fastest ships in the American navy. A dull rage ran through the crew. The sailors cursed the monster, which for its part disdained to answer them. Commander Farragut no longer contented himself with twisting his little beard; he was biting it.
The engineer was called once again.
"You've reached your maximum pressure?" the commander asked him.
"Yes, sir," the engineer answered.
"And your valves are loaded?"
"To six and a half atmospheres."
"Load them to ten atmospheres."
There was an American order if ever there was one. They'd have done no better on the Mississippi to outrun a "competitor"!
"Conseil," I said to my good servant, who was standing near me, "do you realize we're probably going to blow up?"
"Just as Master pleases!" answered Conseil.
Well — I'll admit it — this was a chance I was not sorry to run.
The valves were loaded. The coal was shoveled into the furnaces. The ventilators sent torrents of air over the blazing fires. The Abraham Lincoln's speed climbed. Her masts trembled down to their very steps, and the swirling smoke could barely find a way out through the too-narrow funnels.
The log was heaved a second time.
"Well, helmsman?" asked Commander Farragut.
"Nineteen and three-tenths miles, sir."
"Stoke the fires harder."
The engineer obeyed. The pressure gauge read ten atmospheres. But the cetacean "got its steam up" too, no doubt, for without the least strain it went right on making its nineteen and three-tenths miles.
What a chase! No, I cannot describe the emotion that set my whole being trembling. Ned Land held his post, harpoon in hand. Several times the animal let itself be approached.
"We're gaining on it! We're gaining on it!" cried the Canadian.
Then, just as he was getting ready to strike, the cetacean would slip away at a speed I cannot reckon at less than thirty miles an hour. And even at our top speed, didn't it take the liberty of mocking the frigate by circling clean around her! A howl of fury broke from every chest.
By noon we were no further along than we had been at eight in the morning.
Commander Farragut then resolved to try more direct means.
"Ah!" he said. "So this animal goes faster than the Abraham Lincoln! Well then — we'll see whether it can outrun her conical shells. Master-at-arms, men to the forward gun."
The forecastle gun was loaded and trained at once. The shot went off, but the shell passed a few feet over the cetacean, which was holding at half a mile.
"Someone with a better aim!" cried the commander. "And five hundred dollars to whoever pierces that infernal beast!"
An old gunner with a gray beard — I can see him still — calm-eyed, cold of face, stepped up to his gun, brought it into position, and took a long aim. A heavy detonation burst out, mingled with the cheers of the crew.
The shell found its mark; it struck the animal, but not squarely, and glancing off its rounded surface, went to lose itself two miles out to sea.
"Well now!" said the old gunner, seething. "That rogue's plated with six-inch armor!"
"Damnation!" cried Commander Farragut.
The chase began again, and Commander Farragut, leaning toward me, said:
"I'll hound that animal until my frigate blows apart!"
"Yes," I answered, "and you'll be right to!"
We could hope the animal would wear itself out, that it wouldn't be as indifferent to fatigue as a steam engine. But nothing of the kind. The hours went by without its giving any sign of exhaustion.
Still, it must be said to the Abraham Lincoln's credit that she battled on with tireless tenacity. I reckon at no less than five hundred kilometers the distance she covered during that ill-fated day of November 6! But night came and wrapped the heaving ocean in its shadows.
At that moment I believed our expedition was over, and that we would never see the fantastic animal again. I was mistaken.
At ten fifty in the evening, the electric glow reappeared, three miles to windward of the frigate, as pure and as intense as during the previous night.
The narwhal seemed motionless. Perhaps, worn out by its day, it was sleeping, giving itself up to the swaying of the waves? Here was a chance that Commander Farragut resolved to seize.
He gave his orders. The Abraham Lincoln was held under low steam and advanced cautiously so as not to wake its adversary. It is not unusual to come upon whales fast asleep in the open ocean, and attack them then with success, and Ned Land had harpooned more than one in its sleep. The Canadian went back to take up his post under the bobstays of the bowsprit.
The frigate crept up without a sound, stopped two cable-lengths from the animal, and coasted on her own way. No one aboard breathed anymore. A deep silence reigned over the deck. We were not a hundred feet from the burning core, whose glow grew and dazzled our eyes.
At that moment, leaning over the rail of the forecastle, I saw below me Ned Land, clinging with one hand to the martingale stay, brandishing his terrible harpoon with the other. Scarcely twenty feet separated him from the motionless animal.
All at once his arm shot out violently, and the harpoon was hurled. I heard the ringing clang of the weapon, which seemed to have struck some hard body.
The electric glow went out suddenly, and two enormous waterspouts crashed down onto the frigate's deck, running like a torrent from bow to stern, knocking men off their feet, snapping the lashings of the spare spars.
A frightful shock followed, and, flung over the rail before I had time to catch hold of anything, I was hurled into the sea.
Startled as I was by that sudden plunge, I nonetheless kept a very clear impression of my sensations.
At first I was dragged down to a depth of about twenty feet. I am a strong swimmer — without claiming to rival Byron and Edgar Poe, who are masters of the art — and the fall did not make me lose my head. Two vigorous kicks brought me back to the surface.
My first concern was to look for the frigate. Had the crew noticed my disappearance? Had the Abraham Lincoln come about? Was Commander Farragut lowering a boat? Could I dare hope to be saved?
The darkness was deep. I caught a glimpse of a black mass vanishing away to the east, its running lights dying out in the distance. It was the frigate. I felt that I was lost.
"Help! Help me!" I shouted, swimming toward the Abraham Lincoln with desperate strokes.
My clothes weighed me down. The water plastered them to my body; they paralyzed my movements. I was sinking! I was suffocating!
"Help!"
That was the last cry I flung out. My mouth filled with water. I struggled, dragged down into the abyss —
Suddenly my clothes were seized by a powerful hand, I felt myself hauled violently back to the surface, and I heard — yes, I heard — these words spoken close to my ear:
"If Master would be so very kind as to lean on my shoulder, Master would swim a great deal more comfortably."
I grabbed the arm of my faithful Conseil with one hand.
"You!" I said. "You!"
"Myself," Conseil answered, "and at Master's orders."
"That shock threw you overboard at the same time it threw me?"
"Not at all. But being in Master's service, I followed Master."
The good fellow found that the most natural thing in the world!
"And the frigate?" I asked.
"The frigate!" Conseil answered, rolling onto his back. "I think Master would do well not to count too much on her."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that just as I was throwing myself into the sea, I heard the men at the helm cry out, 'The propeller and the rudder are broken —'"
"Broken?"
"Yes! Broken by the monster's tooth. That's the only damage the Abraham Lincoln suffered, I believe. But it's an awkward circumstance for us — she can no longer steer."
"Then we're lost!"
"Perhaps," Conseil replied calmly. "Still, we have a few hours ahead of us, and a great deal can be done in a few hours."
Conseil's unshakable composure put fresh heart into me. I swam more vigorously; but hampered by my clothes, which gripped me like a cloak of lead, I found it extremely hard to keep myself up. Conseil noticed.
"Will Master permit me to make an incision?" he said.
And slipping an open knife under my clothes, he slit them from top to bottom with one quick stroke. Then he swiftly stripped them off me, while I swam for us both.
In my turn I did the same service for Conseil, and we went on "navigating" side by side.
Even so, our situation was no less terrible. Perhaps our disappearance had not been noticed; and even if it had, the frigate — stripped of her rudder — could not beat back upwind toward us. We could count on nothing but her boats.
Conseil reasoned this out coldly and made his plan accordingly. An astonishing nature! This phlegmatic fellow was as much at home here as in his own room.
So it was decided that, since our only chance of rescue lay in being picked up by the Abraham Lincoln's boats, we had to arrange things so as to wait for them as long as we possibly could. I resolved to divide our efforts, so as not to exhaust them both at once, and here is what we agreed on: while one of us lay stretched on his back, motionless, arms crossed and legs extended, the other would swim and push him forward. This towing job was not to last more than ten minutes, and by relieving each other in this way, we could stay afloat for several hours — perhaps until daybreak.
A slim chance! But hope is so deeply rooted in the human heart! Besides, there were two of us. And finally — I state this plainly, improbable as it may seem — even if I tried to crush every illusion in myself, even if I wanted to "give up hope," I could not do it!
The collision between the frigate and the whale had happened at around eleven o'clock at night. I therefore reckoned on eight hours of swimming until sunrise — an operation strictly feasible, so long as we relieved each other. The sea, fairly calm, tired us little. Now and then I tried to pierce those thick shadows, broken only by the phosphorescence stirred up by our own movements. I watched the luminous ripples that broke across my hand, their shimmering surface flecked with livid patches. It was as if we were plunged in a bath of quicksilver.
Toward one in the morning I was seized with extreme exhaustion. My limbs stiffened under the grip of violent cramps. Conseil had to hold me up, and the whole care of keeping us alive fell on him alone. Before long I heard the poor fellow panting; his breath came short and quick. I understood that he could not hold out much longer.
"Leave me! Leave me!" I told him.
"Abandon Master? Never!" he replied. "I fully intend to drown before he does!"
At that moment the moon broke through the fringes of a great cloud that the wind was driving eastward. The surface of the sea flashed under its light. That kindly gleam revived our strength. My head lifted. My eyes swept every point of the horizon. I spotted the frigate. She was five miles from us, no more than a dark blur, barely to be made out. But of boats — not one!
I wanted to cry out. What good would it do, at such a distance? My swollen lips let no sound pass. Conseil managed to get a few words out, and I heard him call again and again:
"Over here! Over here!"
Suspending our movements for an instant, we listened. And — perhaps it was one of those hummings with which the blood, pressed hard, fills the ear — but it seemed to me that a cry answered Conseil's.
"Did you hear that?" I whispered.
"Yes! Yes!"
And Conseil flung another desperate call into the dark.
This time there was no possible mistake! A human voice was answering ours! Was it the voice of some poor wretch abandoned in the middle of the ocean, some other victim of the blow the ship had taken? Or was one of the frigate's boats hailing us out of the shadows?
Conseil made a supreme effort, and, bracing himself on my shoulder while I resisted in one last convulsion, he raised himself half out of the water and dropped back exhausted.
"What did you see?"
"I saw —" he murmured, "I saw — but let's not talk — let's save all our strength!"
What had he seen? Then, I don't know why, the thought of the monster came into my mind for the first time! But that voice, though? The days are past when a Jonah takes refuge in the belly of a whale!
Still, Conseil went on towing me. Now and then he raised his head, looked ahead, and let out a hail of recognition, answered by a voice coming nearer and nearer. I could barely hear it. My strength was at its end; my fingers were spreading apart; my hand no longer gave me any hold; my mouth, convulsively open, was filling with salt water; the cold was creeping over me. I raised my head one last time, then I went under —
At that instant a hard body struck me. I clung to it. Then I felt myself being pulled up, brought back to the surface, my chest emptying of water — and I fainted.
I certainly came to quickly enough, thanks to the vigorous rubbing that worked up and down my body. I half opened my eyes.
"Conseil!" I murmured.
"Master rang?" answered Conseil.
At that moment, by the last light of the moon as it sank toward the horizon, I made out a face that was not Conseil's, and that I recognized at once.
"Ned!" I cried.
"In person, sir — and running after his bonus!" the Canadian replied.
"You were thrown overboard when the frigate was struck?"
"Yes, Professor, but with better luck than you: I managed to set foot almost at once on a floating island."
"An island?"
"Or, to put it more exactly, on our giant narwhal."
"Explain yourself, Ned."
"Only I soon understood why my harpoon couldn't bite into it and just glanced off, blunted, against its hide."
"Why, Ned? Why?"
"Because that beast, Professor, is made of sheet steel!"
Here I must gather my wits, refresh my memory, check my own assertions.
The Canadian's last words had produced a sudden upheaval in my brain. I hauled myself quickly up to the top of the creature — or object — half awash beneath us, which was serving as our refuge. I tested it with my foot. It was plainly a hard body, impenetrable, and not that soft substance that makes up the bulk of the great sea mammals.
But that hard body might be a bony shell, like those of the antediluvian animals, and I would be entitled to classify the monster among the amphibious reptiles, such as turtles or alligators.
Well — no! The blackish back that held me up was smooth, polished, not overlapping like scales. Struck, it rang with a metallic sound, and — incredible as it was — it seemed, I say, to be made of bolted plates.
There was no room for doubt! The animal, the monster, the natural phenomenon that had puzzled the entire scientific world, that had thrown into confusion and led astray the imaginations of sailors in both hemispheres — I had to admit it — was a still more astonishing phenomenon: a phenomenon made by human hands.
The discovery of the most fabulous, the most mythological creature in existence would not have staggered my reason to the same degree. That something prodigious should come from the Creator is simple enough. But to find, all at once, right before your eyes, the impossible mysteriously and humanly accomplished — that was enough to confound the mind!
Yet there was no hesitating. We were stretched out on the back of a kind of underwater boat, which, as far as I could judge, had the shape of an immense steel fish. Ned Land's opinion on that point was already settled. Conseil and I could only fall in with it.
"But then," I said, "this contraption must hold within it some mechanism of locomotion, and a crew to work it?"
"Obviously," the harpooner replied, "and yet, in the three hours I've lived on this floating island, it hasn't given a single sign of life."
"The boat hasn't moved at all?"
"No, Professor Aronnax. It lets itself be rocked by the swell, but it doesn't budge."
"And yet we know beyond any doubt that it's capable of great speed. Now, since it takes an engine to produce that speed, and an engineer to run the engine, I conclude — that we are saved."
"Hmph," said Ned Land in a guarded tone.
At that very moment, as if to prove my argument, a churning broke out at the stern of the strange machine — whose propeller was plainly a screw — and it began to move. We barely had time to grab hold of its upper part, which rose about eighty centimeters above the water. Very luckily its speed was not excessive.
"As long as it sails on the level," muttered Ned Land, "I have nothing to say. But if it takes a notion to dive, I wouldn't give two dollars for my hide!"
Less than that, the Canadian might have said. It was becoming urgent, then, to make contact with whatever beings were shut up inside this machine. I searched its surface for an opening, a hatch — "a manhole," to use the technical term; but the lines of bolts, firmly hammered down along the seams of the plating, were clean and uniform.
What was more, the moon then disappeared and left us in deep darkness. We had to wait for daylight to work out some way of getting inside this underwater boat.
So our safety depended entirely on the whim of the mysterious helmsmen who were steering this craft — and if they dove, we were lost! Barring that, I had no doubt we could open some communication with them. And indeed, unless they manufactured their own air, they necessarily had to come back to the surface of the ocean from time to time to renew their supply of breathable molecules. Hence there had to be some opening putting the inside of the boat in contact with the atmosphere.
As for any hope of being saved by Commander Farragut, that had to be given up completely. We were being carried westward, and I estimated that our speed, relatively moderate, reached twelve miles an hour. The screw beat the waves with a mathematical regularity, sometimes breaking the surface and sending the phosphorescent water spurting up to a great height.
Toward four in the morning the craft picked up speed. We could barely hold on against this dizzying rush whenever the waves struck us full force. Fortunately Ned's hand fell on a large mooring ring fixed to the top of the steel back, and we managed to hang on to it firmly.
At last the long night wore away. My incomplete recollection won't let me set down all its impressions. Only one detail comes back to me. During certain lulls in the sea and the wind, I thought I heard, several times, vague sounds — a kind of fleeting harmony produced by distant chords. What, then, was the mystery of this underwater navigation that the whole world was vainly trying to explain? What beings lived aboard this strange boat? What mechanical force let it travel at such a prodigious speed?
Day broke. The morning mists wrapped us round, but they were not slow to tear apart. I was about to begin a careful examination of the hull, which formed at its upper part a kind of horizontal platform, when I felt it start to sink, little by little.
"Hey! A thousand devils!" cried Ned Land, stamping his foot on the ringing steel. "Open up, you inhospitable sailors!"
But it was hard to make yourself heard over the deafening beat of the propeller. Fortunately, the sinking motion stopped.
Suddenly a noise of ironwork violently shoved came from inside the boat. A plate lifted, a man appeared, let out a strange cry, and instantly vanished.
A few moments later, eight burly fellows, their faces veiled, appeared in silence and dragged us down into their formidable machine.
The abduction had been so brutally carried out, and with such lightning speed, that neither my companions nor I had had time to collect ourselves. I don't know what they felt as they were shoved into this floating prison, but for my own part a quick shudder ran cold across my skin. Who were we dealing with? Some new breed of pirate, no doubt, plundering the sea in their own fashion.
The narrow hatch had scarcely closed above me when a deep darkness swallowed me whole. My eyes, still soaked with the light outside, could make out nothing. I felt my bare feet grip the rungs of an iron ladder. Ned Land and Conseil, seized just as roughly, came down after me. At the foot of the ladder a door swung open, then shut again immediately behind us with a resounding clang.
We were alone. Where? I couldn't have said, could scarcely even imagine. Everything was black — black so utter that, even after a few minutes, my eyes had not yet caught one of those vague glimmers that drift through the deepest of nights.
Meanwhile Ned Land, furious at being handled this way, gave free rein to his indignation.
"A thousand devils!" he burst out. "These people could give the Caledonians lessons in hospitality! All that's left is for them to turn out to be cannibals. I wouldn't be surprised if they did — but I'm telling you now, no one eats me without hearing me object!"
"Easy, Ned, easy," Conseil answered calmly. "Don't work yourself up before the hour. We're not in the roasting pan just yet."
"In the roasting pan, no," the Canadian shot back, "but in the oven for certain. It's dark enough. Lucky for me my bowie knife hasn't left my side, and I can still see well enough to use it. The first of these bandits who lays a hand on me—"
"Don't get riled, Ned," I said to the harpooner, "and don't compromise us with pointless violence. For all we know, they're listening. Let's try instead to find out where we are."
I felt my way forward. After five steps I came up against an iron wall of bolted plates. Turning back, I bumped into a wooden table, and set around it were several stools. The floor of this prison was hidden beneath a thick mat of phormium that muffled the sound of footsteps. The bare walls betrayed no trace of a door or a window. Conseil, making the same tour in the opposite direction, met up with me, and we came back to the middle of this cabin, which must have measured twenty feet long by ten feet wide. As for its height, Ned Land, tall as he was, couldn't reach it.
A full half hour had already crept by with no change in our situation when our eyes passed abruptly from utter darkness to the most violent light. Our prison lit up all at once — that is, it filled with a luminous substance so intense that at first I couldn't bear its brilliance. By its whiteness, by its intensity, I recognized that electric glow which produced around the submarine boat a kind of magnificent phosphorescence. After shutting my eyes involuntarily, I opened them again and saw that the light streamed from a frosted half-globe curving out of the ceiling of the cabin.
"At last! Now we can see!" cried Ned Land, who stood on the defensive, knife in hand.
"Yes," I answered, risking the play on words, "but our situation is as dark as ever."
"Let Master be patient," said the imperturbable Conseil.
The cabin's sudden lighting had let me examine it down to the smallest detail. It held nothing but the table and the five stools. The invisible door must have been hermetically sealed. Not a sound reached our ears. Everything seemed dead inside this boat. Was it moving? Holding at the surface of the ocean? Sinking into the depths? I couldn't guess.
Still, the luminous globe hadn't been lit for nothing, so I hoped the crew would not be long in showing themselves. When you mean to forget people, you don't light up their dungeon.
I was not mistaken. The rattle of a bolt was heard, the door opened, and two men appeared.
One was short, powerfully muscled, broad-shouldered, sturdy of limb, with a strong head, a thick mane of black hair, a heavy mustache, and a quick, penetrating gaze — his whole person stamped with that southern liveliness that in France marks the people of Provence. Diderot claimed, and rightly, that a man's gestures are metaphorical, and this little man was surely living proof of it. You sensed that in his ordinary speech he must lavish personifications, metonymies, and hypallages. Not that I was ever in a position to confirm it, for in my presence he always used a peculiar and utterly incomprehensible tongue.
The second stranger deserves a more detailed description. A disciple of Gratiolet or Engel could have read his face like an open book. I recognized his dominant qualities without hesitation. Self-confidence — for his head rose nobly on the arch formed by the line of his shoulders, and his black eyes looked out with cold assurance. Composure — for his skin, pale rather than ruddy, betokened calmness of blood. Energy — shown by the swift contraction of his brow muscles. And courage, in the end — for his deep breathing told of a great vital force.
I will add that this man was proud, that his firm, calm gaze seemed to reflect lofty thoughts, and that from the whole of him — from the harmony of expression in the movements of his body and face — there resulted, by the physiognomists' reckoning, an unquestionable frankness.
I felt myself "involuntarily" reassured in his presence, and I took it as a good omen for our interview.
Whether this man was thirty-five or fifty, I couldn't have said. He was tall, with a broad forehead, a straight nose, a clearly drawn mouth, magnificent teeth, and fine, elongated hands — eminently "psychic," to borrow a term from chirognomy, that is, worthy of serving a high and passionate soul. This man was certainly the most admirable specimen I had ever met. One particular detail: his eyes, set a little wide apart, could take in nearly a quarter of the horizon at once. This faculty — I verified it later — was matched by a power of vision even keener than Ned Land's. When this stranger fixed his gaze on an object, the line of his brows knit together, his broad eyelids drew close so as to hem in the pupils and narrow the field of sight, and he looked! What a look! How it magnified objects shrunk by distance! How it pierced you to the soul! How it saw through those sheets of water so opaque to our eyes, and read into the deepest reaches of the sea!
The two strangers wore berets made of sea-otter fur and sealskin sea boots, and their clothes, of a peculiar fabric, hung loose at the waist and left great freedom of movement.
The taller of the two — clearly the master of the ship — examined us with the closest attention, without saying a word. Then, turning to his companion, he conversed with him in a language I couldn't place. It was a sonorous, harmonious, supple tongue, whose vowels seemed to carry a widely varied accent.
The other replied with a nod of the head and added two or three perfectly incomprehensible words. Then his eyes seemed to question me directly.
I answered, in good French, that I did not understand his language. But he seemed not to understand mine either, and the situation grew rather awkward.
"Let Master tell our story anyway," said Conseil. "Perhaps these gentlemen will catch a word or two."
I began again the tale of our adventures, pronouncing each syllable clearly and leaving out no detail. I gave our names and stations; then I formally introduced Professor Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and Ned Land, master harpooner.
The man with the gentle, calm eyes listened to me quietly, politely even, with remarkable attention. But nothing in his face showed that he had understood my story. When I had finished, he did not speak a single word.
There remained the resource of speaking English. Perhaps we could make ourselves understood in that nearly universal tongue. I knew it, along with German, well enough to read fluently, though not to speak correctly. And here, above all, we needed to make ourselves understood.
"Come, your turn," I said to the harpooner. "It's up to you, Master Land — pull out of your bag the finest English an Anglo-Saxon ever spoke, and try for better luck than I had."
Ned did not need to be asked twice, and he began my story over in a version I could follow well enough. The substance was the same, but the form differed. Carried away by his temper, the Canadian threw a good deal of heat into it. He complained violently of being imprisoned in defiance of all human rights, demanded to know by what law they held him this way, invoked habeas corpus, threatened to prosecute those who were confining him unlawfully, thrashed about, gesticulated, shouted, and finally made clear by an expressive gesture that we were dying of hunger.
Which was perfectly true, though we had all but forgotten it.
To his great astonishment, the harpooner seemed to have been no more intelligible than I. Our visitors didn't so much as blink. It was plain they understood neither the language of Arago nor that of Faraday.
Thoroughly at a loss, having vainly exhausted our philological resources, I no longer knew what course to take, when Conseil said to me:
"If Master will permit, I'll tell the whole thing in German."
"What! You know German?" I exclaimed.
"Like a Fleming, if it won't displease Master."
"On the contrary, it pleases me very much. Go ahead, my boy."
And Conseil, in his tranquil voice, recounted for the third time the various turns of our story. But despite the narrator's elegant phrasing and fine accent, German met with no more success.
At last, driven to the wall, I gathered up everything left to me from my early studies and undertook to tell our adventures in Latin. Cicero would have stopped his ears and packed me off to the kitchen, but I managed to get through it all the same. Same negative result.
This last attempt having definitively failed, the two strangers exchanged a few words in their incomprehensible language and withdrew, without so much as offering us one of those reassuring gestures that pass current in every country on earth. The door closed again.
"It's an outrage!" cried Ned Land, exploding for the twentieth time. "What! We speak to these rascals in French, English, German, Latin, and not one of them has the courtesy to answer!"
"Easy, Ned," I said to the seething harpooner. "Anger won't get us anywhere."
"But do you realize, Professor," our irascible companion went on, "that a man could starve to death outright in this iron cage?"
"Bah," said Conseil philosophically, "we can hold out a good while yet."
"My friends," I said, "we mustn't despair. We've been in worse spots than this. Do me the favor of waiting before you form an opinion of this boat's commander and crew."
"My opinion's already made," Ned Land retorted. "They're rascals—"
"Fine. And from what country?"
"The country of rascals!"
"My good Ned, that country isn't yet marked clearly enough on the map, and I admit the nationality of these two strangers is hard to pin down. Not English, not French, not German — that's all one can say for certain. Still, I'd be tempted to grant that this commander and his second officer were born in low latitudes. There's something southern about them. But whether they're Spanish, Turkish, Arab, or Indian, their physical type won't let me decide. As for their language, it's absolutely incomprehensible."
"That's the trouble with not knowing every language," Conseil answered, "or the drawback of not having a single universal one!"
"Which would do no good at all!" Ned Land replied. "Don't you see these people have a language of their own, a language invented to drive to despair honest men who are asking for their dinner? But in every country on earth, opening your mouth, working your jaws, snapping your teeth and lips — isn't that plain enough on its own? Doesn't it mean the same in Quebec as in the Pomotous, in Paris as at the antipodes: I'm hungry! Give me something to eat!"
"Oh," said Conseil, "there are some natures so unintelligent!"
As he spoke those words, the door opened. A steward came in. He was bringing us clothes — jackets and sea trousers of a fabric whose nature I couldn't identify. I hurried to put them on, and my companions did the same.
Meanwhile the steward — mute, perhaps deaf — had set the table and laid three places.
"Now that's something serious," said Conseil, "and it looks promising."
"Bah," answered the resentful harpooner, "what the devil do you expect to eat here? Turtle liver, shark fillet, dogfish steak!"
"We'll soon see!" said Conseil.
The dishes, covered with their silver domes, were set out symmetrically on the cloth, and we took our places at the table. Decidedly, we were dealing with civilized people, and but for the electric light flooding over us, I could have believed myself in the dining room of the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, or the Grand Hotel in Paris. I must say, though, that bread and wine were entirely absent. The water was fresh and clear, but it was water — which was not to Ned Land's taste. Among the dishes served to us I recognized various fish delicately prepared; but of certain others, excellent though they were, I couldn't venture an opinion, and I couldn't even have said to which kingdom, vegetable or animal, their contents belonged. As for the table service, it was elegant and in perfect taste. Each utensil — spoon, fork, knife, plate — bore a letter encircled by a motto in exergue, and here is the exact facsimile:
Mobilis in Mobili — moving within the moving element! The motto applied precisely to this underwater vessel, provided you translated the preposition in as "within" and not "upon." The letter N was doubtless the initial of the name of that enigmatic figure who reigned in command at the bottom of the seas!
Ned and Conseil weren't given to so much reflection. They were devouring their meal, and I was not slow to follow their example. I was reassured, moreover, about our fate, and it seemed clear to me that our hosts did not mean to let us die of starvation.
But everything comes to an end here below, everything passes — even the hunger of men who haven't eaten in fifteen hours. Our appetites satisfied, the need for sleep made itself imperiously felt. A natural enough reaction after the endless night through which we had struggled against death.
"My word, I could sleep well," said Conseil.
"And I'm asleep already!" answered Ned Land.
My two companions stretched out on the cabin's mat and were soon plunged into a deep sleep.
For my part, I gave in less easily to that violent need for sleep. Too many thoughts crowded my mind, too many unanswerable questions pressed upon me, too many images held my eyelids half open. Where were we? What strange power was carrying us off? I felt — or rather thought I felt — the vessel sinking toward the sea's most remote layers. Violent nightmares beset me. In those mysterious refuges I glimpsed a whole world of unknown animals, and this submarine boat seemed one of their own kind — alive, moving, formidable like them! Then my brain quieted, my imagination melted into a vague drowsiness, and I soon fell into a heavy, dismal sleep.
How long that sleep lasted, I have no idea; but it must have been a long one, for it left us fully rested from our exhaustion. I was the first to wake. My companions hadn't stirred yet, and lay stretched out in their corner like two inert masses.
I had barely risen from that passably hard bunk when I felt my head clear and my mind sharpen. I set about examining our cell all over again.
Nothing about its interior arrangements had changed. The prison was still a prison, and the prisoners were still prisoners. Only, the steward had taken advantage of our sleep to clear the table. So nothing pointed to any imminent change in our situation, and I began to wonder in all seriousness whether we were fated to spend the rest of our days in this cage.
That prospect struck me as all the more unpleasant because, although my brain was free of the previous night's obsessions, I now felt a curious tightness in my chest. My breathing was coming with difficulty. The heavy air was no longer enough for my lungs to work with. Roomy as the cell was, it was plain that we had used up most of the oxygen it held. In fact, each man consumes in one hour the oxygen contained in a hundred liters of air, and that air, by then loaded with a nearly equal quantity of carbon dioxide, becomes unbreathable.
It was therefore urgent to renew the atmosphere of our prison — and no doubt the atmosphere of the underwater boat as well.
That raised a question in my mind. How did the commander of this floating dwelling manage it? Did he obtain air by chemical means, driving off with heat the oxygen locked in potassium chlorate and absorbing the carbon dioxide with caustic potash? In that case he would have had to keep up some contact with the continents in order to procure the materials for the process. Did he simply store air under high pressure in tanks and then release it as his crew required? Perhaps. Or — a more convenient method, more economical, and therefore more likely — did he content himself with rising to the surface of the sea to breathe, like a cetacean, renewing his supply of atmosphere every twenty-four hours? However he did it, whatever the method, it seemed to me only prudent that he employ it without delay.
Indeed, I was already reduced to quickening my breaths to draw out what little oxygen the cell still held when, all at once, I was refreshed by a current of pure air, fragrant with a salty tang. It was the sea breeze itself, bracing and heavy with iodine! I opened my mouth wide, and my lungs drank in the fresh molecules. At the same moment I felt a swaying, a gentle roll of no great amplitude but perfectly unmistakable. The boat — the monster of sheet iron — had evidently just come up to the surface of the ocean to breathe, whale-fashion. So the ship's ventilation method was now perfectly understood.
Once I had filled my chest with that pure air, I looked for the duct — the "airway," if you like — that let this reviving flow reach us, and I soon found it. Above the door opened a ventilation hole that let through a cool column of air, renewing the cell's depleted atmosphere.
I had gotten that far in my observations when Ned and Conseil woke almost at the same instant, roused by that revitalizing draft. They rubbed their eyes, stretched their arms, and were on their feet in a moment.
"Did Master sleep well?" Conseil asked me, with his everyday courtesy.
"Very well, my good fellow," I answered. "And you, Ned Land?"
"Like a log, Professor. But unless I'm mistaken, I could swear I'm breathing a sea breeze?"
A sailor couldn't be wrong about that, and I told the Canadian what had happened while he slept.
"Well now!" he said. "That explains those bellowing noises we heard whenever the so-called narwhal came in sight of the Abraham Lincoln."
"Exactly, Ned. It was the thing breathing!"
"Only, Professor Aronnax, I've no idea what time it is — unless it happens to be dinnertime?"
"Dinnertime, my worthy harpooner? Say breakfast time, at the very least, for we've certainly reached the day after yesterday."
"Which proves," Conseil put in, "that we've had twenty-four hours' sleep."
"That's my reckoning," I answered.
"I won't argue the point," Ned Land replied. "But dinner or breakfast, the steward will be welcome whichever one he brings."
"Both," said Conseil.
"Just so," said the Canadian. "We've a right to two meals, and for my part I'll do justice to the pair of them."
"All right, Ned, let's wait," I answered. "It's clear these strangers don't mean to let us starve — otherwise last night's supper would make no sense."
"Unless they're fattening us up!" Ned shot back.
"I object," I answered. "We haven't fallen into the hands of cannibals!"
"Once is no habit," the Canadian replied gravely. "Who's to say these people haven't gone a long time without fresh meat? And in that case, three sound, well-built specimens like the Professor here, his servant, and me—"
"Get those ideas out of your head, Ned," I told the harpooner, "and above all, don't let them set you off against our hosts. That would only make matters worse."
"In any case," said the harpooner, "I've got the devil's own hunger, and dinner or breakfast, the meal's slow in coming!"
"Ned," I replied, "we have to conform to the ship's schedule, and I suspect our stomachs are running fast against the cook's dinner bell."
"Well then, we'll set them right," Conseil said calmly.
"There you are, friend Conseil, that's you all over," the impatient Canadian retorted. "You never waste your temper or your nerves! Always calm! You'd be capable of saying your thanks before you'd said grace, and starving to death rather than complaining!"
"What good would it do?" asked Conseil.
"It would do the good of complaining! That's already something. And if these pirates — I say pirates out of respect, and so as not to cross the Professor, who forbids me to call them cannibals — if these pirates imagine they're going to keep me shut up in this cage where I'm suffocating, without hearing the kind of oaths I season my rages with, they're mistaken! Come now, Professor Aronnax, speak frankly. Do you really think they'll hold us long in this iron box?"
"To tell the truth, I know no more about it than you do, Ned."
"But come, what's your guess?"
"My guess is that chance has made us masters of an important secret. Now, the crew of this underwater boat has an interest in keeping that secret, and if that interest outweighs the lives of three men, then I believe our existence is very much in danger. If not, then at the first opportunity the monster that swallowed us will hand us back to the world our own kind lives in."
"Unless it enrolls us among its crew," said Conseil, "and keeps us that way—"
"Right up until," Ned Land replied, "some frigate faster or cleverer than the Abraham Lincoln captures this nest of cutthroats and sends its crew — and us along with it — to breathe our last from the end of its mainyard."
"Well reasoned, Ned," I replied. "But so far, as far as I know, no one has made us any such offer. No use, then, debating what course to take should the occasion arise. I say again: let's wait, let's take our cue from circumstances, and let's do nothing, since there's nothing to be done."
"On the contrary, Professor!" answered the harpooner, who wouldn't let it go. "We've got to do something."
"Do what, Ned?"
"Escape."
"Escaping from a prison on land is often difficult enough, but from an underwater prison strikes me as flat-out impossible."
"Come on, friend Ned," Conseil asked, "what's your answer to Master's objection? I can't believe an American is ever at the end of his resources!"
The harpooner, plainly embarrassed, said nothing. Flight, given the circumstances chance had thrown us into, was absolutely impossible. But a Canadian is half a Frenchman, and Ned Land made that plain enough by his reply.
"So, Professor Aronnax," he went on after a few moments' thought, "you can't guess what people ought to do when they can't break out of their prison?"
"No, my friend."
"Simple enough. They fix things so as to stay in it."
"Good grief!" said Conseil. "Better to be inside than above or below!"
"But only after throwing out the jailers, the turnkeys, and the guards," Ned Land added.
"What, Ned? You'd seriously think of seizing this vessel?"
"Very seriously," answered the Canadian.
"It's impossible."
"Why so, Professor? Some lucky chance might turn up, and I don't see what could stop us from taking advantage of it. If there aren't more than a score of men aboard this machine, they won't make two Frenchmen and a Canadian back down, I should think!"
Better to accept the harpooner's proposition than to argue it. So I contented myself with answering:
"Let's wait and see how things develop, Ned, and we'll see. But until then, I beg you, hold your impatience in check. We can only act by cunning, and you won't bring lucky chances into being by flying off the handle. Promise me, then, that you'll accept the situation without too much anger."
"I promise you, Professor," Ned Land answered, in a tone that was anything but reassuring. "Not a violent word will pass my lips, not a brutal gesture will give me away — not even if the meals aren't served with all the regularity a man could wish."
"I have your word, Ned," I said to the Canadian.
Then the conversation lapsed, and each of us fell to thinking on his own. For my part, I'll admit that, despite the harpooner's assurances, I kept no illusions. I put no stock in those lucky chances Ned Land had spoken of. To be handled so surely, the underwater boat required a large crew, and consequently, in the event of a fight, we would be up against too strong a force. Besides, before anything else we would have to be free, and we weren't. I couldn't see any way at all of escaping this cell of sheet iron, sealed so tightly shut. And if this strange commander had a secret to keep — which seemed at the very least probable — he wouldn't let us move about freely aboard his ship. Now, would he rid himself of us by violence, or would he set us down some day on some corner of dry land? That was the unknown. All these hypotheses struck me as extremely plausible, and one had to be a harpooner to hope for the return of one's freedom.
I understood, moreover, that Ned Land's mood was souring as the thoughts crowded in on his brain. Little by little I could hear the curses rumbling in the back of his throat, and I saw his gestures turn menacing again. He would get up, pace like a wild beast in a cage, kick and punch at the walls. Meanwhile time was passing, hunger was making itself cruelly felt, and this time the steward did not appear. And it was leaving us castaways forgotten too long, if anyone really did have good intentions toward us.
Ned Land, tormented by the pangs of his sturdy stomach, was working himself up more and more, and, for all his promise, I genuinely feared an explosion the moment he came face to face with one of the men aboard.
For two more hours, Ned Land's fury mounted. The Canadian called out, he shouted, but in vain. The iron walls were deaf. I couldn't hear so much as a sound inside this boat, which seemed to lie dead. It wasn't moving, for I would surely have felt the hull shudder under the drive of the propeller. Plunged, no doubt, into the depths of the waters, it no longer belonged to the earth. That whole gloomy silence was terrifying.
As for how long we might be left abandoned, isolated at the bottom of this cell, I didn't dare guess. The hopes I had conceived after our meeting with the ship's commander were fading little by little. The gentleness of that man's gaze, the generous cast of his features, the nobility of his bearing — all of it was vanishing from my memory. I saw this enigmatic figure again as he must necessarily be: pitiless, cruel. I felt him to be outside humanity, closed to any feeling of mercy, an implacable enemy of his own kind, toward whom he must have sworn an undying hatred.
But this man — was he really going to let us die of starvation, shut up in this narrow prison, given over to those horrible temptations that savage hunger drives one to? That frightful thought took on a terrible intensity in my mind, and with my imagination feeding it, I felt myself seized by a senseless dread. Conseil stayed calm. Ned Land roared.
At that moment, a sound was heard outside.
Footsteps rang on the metal floor. The locks were worked, the door swung open, and the steward appeared.
Before I could make a move to stop him, the Canadian had hurled himself on the poor man; he had knocked him down; he had him by the throat. The steward was choking under that powerful grip.
Conseil was already trying to pry the harpooner's half-suffocated victim out of his hands, and I was about to join my efforts to his, when I was suddenly nailed to the spot by these words, spoken in French:
"Calm yourself, Ned Land, and you, Professor, be so good as to hear me out!"
It was the commander of the vessel who had spoken.
At those words, Ned Land sprang to his feet. The steward, nearly throttled, staggered out at a sign from his master; and such was the commander's authority aboard his own ship that not a single gesture betrayed the resentment this man must surely have felt toward the Canadian. Conseil, curious in spite of himself, and I, dumbfounded, waited in silence for the scene to reach its end.
The commander, leaning against the corner of the table, arms folded, studied us with deep attention. Was he hesitating to speak? Did he regret those words he had just let slip in French? One might well have thought so.
After a few moments of a silence none of us dreamed of breaking, he said, in a calm and penetrating voice:
"Gentlemen, I speak French, English, German, and Latin equally well. I could therefore have answered you at our very first meeting; but I wanted to know you first, and to reflect afterward. Your four accounts, absolutely alike at bottom, confirmed for me the identity of your persons. I now know that chance has brought before me Monsieur Pierre Aronnax, professor of natural history at the Museum of Paris, charged with a scientific mission abroad; Conseil, his servant; and Ned Land, a Canadian by birth, harpooner aboard the frigate Abraham Lincoln of the United States Navy."
I bowed in a gesture of assent. The commander had not put a question to me. So there was no reply to make. The man expressed himself with perfect ease, without the slightest accent. His phrasing was clear, his words exact, his fluency remarkable. And yet I did not "feel" in him a fellow countryman.
He went on in these terms:
"You have doubtless found, sir, that I was slow in paying you this second visit. It is because, once your identity was established, I wanted to weigh carefully what course to take with you. I hesitated a great deal. The most unfortunate of circumstances has brought you into the presence of a man who has broken with humankind. You came to trouble my existence—"
"Not by intention," I said.
"Not by intention?" the stranger answered, raising his voice a little. "Is it by no intention that the Abraham Lincoln hunts me across every sea? Is it by no intention that you took passage aboard that frigate? Is it by no intention that your cannonballs bounced off the hull of my ship? Is it by no intention that Master Ned Land struck me with his harpoon?"
I caught a contained irritation in these words. But to these recriminations I had a perfectly natural answer to make, and I made it.
"Sir," I said, "you are surely unaware of the debates that have taken place about you in America and in Europe. You do not know that various accidents, caused by collisions with your underwater craft, have stirred public opinion on both continents. I will spare you the countless hypotheses by which people tried to explain the inexplicable phenomenon whose secret you alone possessed. But you must understand that, in pursuing you across the high seas of the Pacific, the Abraham Lincoln believed it was chasing some powerful sea monster, one the ocean had to be rid of at any cost."
A half smile relaxed the commander's lips; then, in a calmer tone:
"Professor Aronnax," he replied, "would you dare to claim that your frigate would not have pursued and cannonaded an underwater boat just as readily as a monster?"
The question left me at a loss, for Commander Farragut would certainly not have hesitated. He would have believed it his duty to destroy a craft of this kind exactly as he would a gigantic narwhal.
"You understand, then, sir," the stranger went on, "that I have the right to treat you as enemies."
I made no answer, and with good reason. What was the use of arguing a proposition like that, when force can shatter the best of arguments?
"I hesitated for a long time," the commander resumed. "Nothing obliged me to offer you my hospitality. If I were to part with you, I had no interest in ever seeing you again. I would set you back down on the platform of this ship that had served you as a refuge. I would sink beneath the seas, and forget that you had ever existed. Was that not my right?"
"It might have been the right of a savage," I answered, "but not that of a civilized man."
"Professor," the commander shot back sharply, "I am not what you call a civilized man! I have broken with the whole of society for reasons that I alone have the right to judge. I therefore obey none of its rules, and I urge you never to invoke them in my presence again!"
This was said flatly. A flash of anger and scorn had lit the stranger's eyes, and in this man's life I glimpsed a formidable past. Not only had he placed himself outside human laws, he had made himself independent, free in the strictest sense of the word, beyond all reach! For who would dare pursue him to the bottom of the seas, when at their surface he foiled every effort mounted against him? What ship could withstand a collision with his underwater ram? What armor plating, however thick, could bear the blows of his spur? No man on earth could call him to account for his deeds. God—if he believed in one; his conscience—if he had one; these were the only judges he could depend on.
These reflections flashed swiftly through my mind while the strange personage fell silent, absorbed and as though withdrawn into himself. I regarded him with a dread mingled with fascination, much, no doubt, as Oedipus regarded the Sphinx.
After a rather long silence, the commander spoke again.
"I hesitated, then," he said, "but I concluded that my own interest could be reconciled with that natural pity to which every human being has a claim. You will remain aboard my ship, since fate has cast you here. You will be free aboard her, and in exchange for that freedom—a wholly relative freedom, I admit—I will impose only a single condition on you. Your word that you will submit to it will be enough for me."
"Speak, sir," I answered. "I take it this condition is one an honest man can accept?"
"Yes, sir, and here it is. It is possible that certain unforeseen events may oblige me to confine you to your cabins for some hours or some days, as the case may be. Wishing never to resort to violence, I expect from you in that case—more even than in any other—a passive obedience. In acting so, I shield you from all responsibility, I clear you entirely, for it falls to me to make it impossible for you to see what must not be seen. Do you accept this condition?"
So things went on aboard that were at the very least peculiar—things not to be seen by people who had not placed themselves outside the laws of society! Among the surprises the future held in store for me, this would not prove the least.
"We accept," I answered. "Only, I will ask your permission, sir, to put one question to you—just one."
"Speak, sir."
"You said that we would be free aboard your ship?"
"Entirely."
"Then I will ask what you understand by that freedom."
"Why, the freedom to come and go, to see, even to observe everything that happens here—save in a few grave circumstances—the freedom, in short, that my companions and I enjoy ourselves."
It was clear that we did not understand each other.
"Forgive me, sir," I resumed, "but such freedom is only the freedom every prisoner has to pace his cell! It cannot be enough for us."
"And yet it will have to be enough!"
"What! We must give up ever again seeing our homeland, our friends, our families?"
"Yes, sir. But giving up that unbearable yoke of the land, which men take to be freedom—perhaps that is not so painful as you suppose!"
"For one thing," cried Ned Land, "I will never give my word not to try to escape!"
"I am not asking you for your word, Master Land," the commander answered coldly.
"Sir," I said, carried away in spite of myself, "you are abusing your position over us! This is cruelty!"
"No, sir, it is mercy! You are my prisoners of war! I keep you, when with a single word I could plunge you back into the depths of the ocean! You attacked me! You came to surprise a secret that no man in the world must uncover—the secret of my whole existence! And you think I am going to send you back to that dry land that must know me no longer? Never! In holding you, it is not you I am keeping—it is myself!"
These words showed a resolve on the commander's part against which no argument would prevail.
"So, sir," I resumed, "you are simply giving us the choice between life and death?"
"Simply that."
"My friends," I said, "to a question put in such terms there is nothing to answer. But no word binds us to the master of this ship."
"No word, sir," the stranger replied.
Then, in a gentler voice, he went on:
"Now, allow me to finish what I have to say to you. I know you, Professor Aronnax. You, if not your companions, will perhaps have less cause to complain of the chance that has bound you to my fate. Among the books that serve my favorite studies you will find that work you published on the great ocean depths. I have often read it. You have carried your work as far as land-bound science allowed. But you do not know everything, you have not seen everything. Let me tell you, then, Professor, that you will not regret the time spent aboard my ship. You are about to travel through the land of wonders. Astonishment, amazement, will very likely be the habitual condition of your mind. You will not easily grow jaded with the spectacle offered ceaselessly to your eyes. In a new tour of the underwater world—the last, perhaps, who knows?—I mean to see again all that I have been able to study at the bottom of these seas I have crossed so many times, and you shall be my companion in study. From this day forward, you enter a new element; you will see what no man has yet seen—for my crew and I no longer count ourselves among the living—and our planet, thanks to me, is going to yield up to you its last secrets."
I cannot deny it: these words of the commander made a great impression on me. He had caught me by my weakness, and I forgot, for a moment, that the contemplation of these sublime things could not be worth the freedom I had lost. Besides, I was counting on the future to settle that grave question. So I contented myself with answering:
"Sir, though you have broken with humanity, I want to believe that you have not renounced all human feeling. We are castaways charitably taken in aboard your ship; we will not forget it. As for me, I do not deny that if the interest of science could absorb even the need for freedom, what our meeting promises would offer me great compensations."
I thought the commander was going to hold out his hand to seal our pact. He did nothing of the sort. I regretted it for his sake.
"One last question," I said, just as this inexplicable being seemed about to withdraw.
"Speak, Professor."
"By what name am I to call you?"
"Sir," the commander replied, "to you I am nothing but Captain Nemo, and you and your companions are nothing to me but the passengers of the Nautilus."
Captain Nemo called out. A steward appeared. The captain gave him his orders in that strange language I could not identify. Then, turning to the Canadian and Conseil:
"A meal is waiting for you in your cabin," he told them. "Kindly follow this man."
"I won't say no to that!" replied the harpooner.
At last he and Conseil left the cell where they had been shut up for more than thirty hours.
"And now, Professor Aronnax, our lunch is ready. Allow me to lead the way."
"At your service, Captain."
I followed Captain Nemo, and the moment I stepped through the door I entered a sort of corridor lit by electricity, like the gangways of a ship. After a walk of some ten meters, a second door opened before me.
I then entered a dining room, decorated and furnished in severe good taste. Tall oak sideboards, inlaid with ebony ornaments, rose at either end of the room, and on their shelves, cut in undulating lines, gleamed earthenware, porcelain, and glassware of inestimable value. The flat silver plate shone under rays poured down from a luminous ceiling, whose fine paintings softened and filtered the glare.
At the center of the room stood a table richly laid. Captain Nemo pointed out the place I was to occupy.
"Sit down," he said, "and eat like a man who must be starving."
The lunch consisted of a number of dishes whose contents the sea alone had supplied, and of a few whose nature and origin I could not guess. I will admit that it was good, though with a peculiar flavor that I grew used to easily. These various foods struck me as rich in phosphorus, and I concluded they must be of marine origin.
Captain Nemo watched me. I asked him nothing, but he read my thoughts and answered, of his own accord, the questions I was burning to put to him.
"Most of these dishes are unknown to you," he said. "Yet you may partake of them without fear. They are wholesome and nourishing. Long ago I gave up the foods of the land, and I am none the worse for it. My crew, who are a hardy lot, eat no differently than I do."
"So," I said, "all these foods are products of the sea?"
"Yes, Professor, the sea provides for all my needs. Sometimes I set my nets adrift and haul them back in, ready to burst. Sometimes I go hunting in the very midst of this element that seems beyond man's reach, and run down the game that lodges in my underwater forests. My flocks, like those of old Neptune's shepherd, graze the vast prairies of the ocean without fear. I have there a great estate that I work myself, and that is forever sown anew by the hand of the Creator of all things."
I looked at Captain Nemo with a certain astonishment, and answered him:
"I understand perfectly, sir, that your nets furnish excellent fish for your table; I understand less well that you should hunt aquatic game in your underwater forests; but I no longer understand at all how a scrap of meat, however small, could figure in your menu."
"And indeed, sir," Captain Nemo answered me, "I never make use of the flesh of land animals."
"This, however," I said, pointing to a dish where a few slices of fillet still remained.
"What you take to be meat, Professor, is nothing but fillet of sea turtle. Here, too, are some dolphin livers you would mistake for a pork stew. My cook is a skillful hand, who excels at preserving these varied products of the ocean. Taste all these dishes. Here is a preserve of sea cucumbers that a Malay would declare without rival in the world; here is a cream whose milk was furnished by the udders of whales, and its sugar by the great kelp of the North Sea; and finally, allow me to offer you some preserves of sea anemones, as good as those made from the most delicious fruits."
And I tasted, more out of curiosity than appetite, while Captain Nemo enchanted me with his improbable tales.
"But this sea, Professor Aronnax," he said to me, "this prodigious, inexhaustible nurse, does not merely feed me; it clothes me as well. The fabrics that cover you are woven from the byssus of certain shellfish; they are dyed with the purple of the ancients, shaded with violet tints that I extract from the sea hares of the Mediterranean. The perfumes you will find on the washstand of your cabin are the product of distilling marine plants. Your bed is made of the softest eelgrass of the ocean. Your pen will be a whale's baleen, your ink the liquor secreted by the cuttlefish or the squid. Everything now comes to me from the sea, as everything will one day return to it!"
"You love the sea, Captain."
"Yes! I love it! The sea is everything! It covers seven tenths of the globe. Its breath is pure and healthful. It is the vast desert where man is never alone, for he feels life quivering at his side. The sea is only the vehicle of a supernatural and prodigious existence; it is nothing but movement and love; it is the Living Infinite, as one of your poets put it. And indeed, Professor, nature reveals herself there through her three kingdoms—mineral, vegetable, animal. The last of these is broadly represented in it by the four groups of zoophytes, by three classes of articulates, by five classes of mollusks, by three classes of vertebrates—the mammals, the reptiles, and those countless legions of fish, an endless order of animals numbering more than thirteen thousand species, of which only a tenth belong to fresh water. The sea is the vast reservoir of nature. It was by the sea that the globe began, so to speak, and who knows but that it will end by it too! There lies supreme tranquility. The sea does not belong to despots. On its surface they may still exercise their iniquitous rights, do battle, devour one another, carry across it every terrestrial horror. But thirty feet below its surface, their power ceases, their influence dies out, their might disappears! Ah, sir—live, live in the bosom of the seas! There alone is independence! There I acknowledge no masters! There I am free!"
Captain Nemo fell silent all at once, in the midst of this enthusiasm that had come pouring out of him. Had he let himself be carried beyond his usual reserve? Had he said too much? For a few moments he paced back and forth, greatly agitated. Then his nerves grew calm, his face resumed its accustomed coldness, and, turning toward me:
"Now, Professor," he said, "if you wish to visit the Nautilus, I am at your service."
Captain Nemo rose. I followed him. A double door at the far end of the room swung open, and I stepped into a chamber the same size as the one I had just left.
It was a library. Tall bookcases of black rosewood, inlaid with copper, held on their broad shelves a great many volumes bound alike. They ran the whole curve of the room and ended along the bottom in wide divans, upholstered in brown leather, that offered the most comfortable of curves. Light reading-stands on rollers, which could be pushed away or drawn near at will, let you rest your open book on them. At the center stood a large table strewn with pamphlets, among which a few already old newspapers showed. Electric light flooded this whole harmonious ensemble, falling from four frosted globes half sunk in the scrollwork of the ceiling. I gazed with real wonder at this room so ingeniously fitted out, and I could scarcely believe my eyes.
"Captain Nemo," I said to my host, who had just stretched out on a divan, "here is a library that would do honor to more than one palace on the continents, and I'm truly amazed to think that it can follow you down into the deepest seas."
"Where would one find more solitude, more silence, Professor?" Captain Nemo answered. "Does your study at the Museum offer you as complete a peace?"
"No, Captain, and I must add that mine is a poor thing beside yours. You must have six or seven thousand volumes here—"
"Twelve thousand, Professor Aronnax. They are the only ties that still bind me to the land. But the world ended for me the day my Nautilus first dove beneath the waves. That day I bought my last books, my last pamphlets, my last newspapers, and ever since I have chosen to believe that humanity has neither thought nor written another word. These books, Professor, are at your disposal in any case, and you may use them freely."
I thanked Captain Nemo and went over to the library shelves. Books of science, of philosophy, of literature, written in every language, were there in abundance; but I did not see a single work of political economy—those, it seemed, were strictly banned from the ship. One curious detail: all these books were shelved together without distinction, whatever language they happened to be written in, and this mingling proved that the captain of the Nautilus must read fluently any volume his hand happened to pull down.
Among these works I noticed the masterpieces of the old masters and the new—that is, everything most beautiful that humanity has produced in history, poetry, fiction, and science, from Homer to Victor Hugo, from Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame Sand. But science, above all, was what this library had been built to hold. Books of mechanics, ballistics, hydrography, meteorology, geography, geology, and the rest took up a place no less important than the works of natural history, and I understood that they formed the captain's chief study. There I saw all of Humboldt, all of Arago, the work of Foucault, of Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, of Chasles, of Milne-Edwards, of Quatrefages, of Tyndall, of Faraday, of Berthelot, of Father Secchi, of Petermann, of Commander Maury, of Agassiz, and more. The memoirs of the Academy of Sciences, the bulletins of the various geographical societies, and—in a place of honor—the two volumes that had perhaps earned me this relatively charitable welcome from Captain Nemo. Among the works of Joseph Bertrand, his book titled The Founders of Astronomy even gave me a firm date: since I knew it had appeared in the course of 1865, I could conclude that the Nautilus had been fitted out no earlier than that. So Captain Nemo had begun his underwater existence three years ago at the most. I hoped, moreover, that still more recent works might let me pin down the date exactly; but I had time to make that search, and I did not want to hold up our stroll through the wonders of the Nautilus any longer.
"Captain," I said, "I thank you for putting this library at my disposal. There are treasures of science here, and I'll make good use of them."
"This room is not only a library," said Captain Nemo. "It's also a smoking room."
"A smoking room?" I exclaimed. "So one smokes on board?"
"Certainly."
"Then, Captain, I'm forced to conclude that you've kept up your dealings with Havana."
"None at all," the captain replied. "Take this cigar, Professor Aronnax, and though it doesn't come from Havana, you'll be pleased with it if you know your tobacco."
I took the cigar he offered me. Its shape recalled that of a Havana londres, but it seemed to be made of leaves of gold. I lit it at a little brazier resting on an elegant bronze stand, and drew my first puffs with all the pleasure of a connoisseur who hasn't smoked in two days.
"It's excellent," I said, "but it isn't tobacco."
"No," the captain answered. "This tobacco comes neither from Havana nor from the East. It's a kind of seaweed, rich in nicotine, that the sea supplies me—not without some stinginess. Do you still miss your londres cigars, Professor?"
"Captain, from this day on I scorn them."
"Then smoke as you please, and don't fret over where these cigars come from. No tax office has passed judgment on them, but they're none the worse for that, I imagine."
"On the contrary."
At that moment Captain Nemo opened a door facing the one by which I had entered the library, and I passed into an immense salon, splendidly lit.
It was a vast rectangle with cut corners, ten meters long, six wide, five high. A luminous ceiling, decorated with light arabesques, spread a clear, soft daylight over all the wonders heaped up in this museum. For it truly was a museum, in which an intelligent and lavish hand had gathered every treasure of nature and of art, with that artist's jumble that marks a painter's studio.
Some thirty masterworks, framed alike and separated by dazzling displays of arms, adorned the walls, which were hung with tapestries of a severe design. There I saw canvases of the highest value, most of which I had admired in the private collections of Europe and at the painting exhibitions. The various schools of the old masters were represented by a madonna of Raphael, a virgin of Leonardo da Vinci, a nymph of Correggio, a woman of Titian, an adoration of Veronese, an assumption of Murillo, a portrait by Holbein, a monk by Velázquez, a martyr by Ribera, a village festival by Rubens, two Flemish landscapes by Teniers, three little genre pieces by Gerard Dou, Metsu, and Paul Potter, two canvases by Géricault and Prud'hon, and a few seascapes by Backhuysen and Vernet. Among the works of modern painting were pictures signed Delacroix, Ingres, Decamps, Troyon, Meissonier, Daubigny, and others; and a few admirable scale copies of marble or bronze statues, modeled after the finest works of antiquity, stood on their pedestals in the corners of this magnificent museum. The stunned amazement the commander of the Nautilus had predicted was already beginning to take hold of my mind.
"Professor," said this strange man just then, "you'll forgive the informality with which I receive you, and the disorder that reigns in this salon."
"Captain," I answered, "without trying to learn who you are, may I be allowed to recognize in you an artist?"
"An amateur, at most, Professor. I once loved to collect these beautiful works created by the hand of man. I was an avid seeker, a tireless hunter, and I managed to gather a few pieces of great value. They are my last mementos of that land which is dead to me. In my eyes, your modern artists are already ancients; they have two or three thousand years of existence behind them, and I blur them together in my mind. The masters have no age."
"And these musicians?" I said, pointing to scores by Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hérold, Wagner, Auber, Gounod, and many others, scattered over a large-model piano-organ that filled one of the salon's panels.
"These musicians," Captain Nemo replied, "are contemporaries of Orpheus, for the differences of chronology fade away in the memory of the dead—and I am dead, Professor, as thoroughly dead as those friends of yours who rest six feet underground!"
Captain Nemo fell silent and seemed lost in a deep reverie. I studied him with keen emotion, silently reading the strangeness of his features. Leaning on the corner of a precious mosaic table, he no longer saw me; he had forgotten my presence.
I respected his meditation and went on reviewing the curiosities that enriched this salon.
Alongside the works of art, the natural rarities held a very important place. They consisted mainly of plants, shells, and other products of the Ocean, which must have been Captain Nemo's own personal finds. In the middle of the salon, a jet of water, lit by electricity, fell back into a basin made from a single giant clam. This shell, furnished by the largest of the headless mollusks, measured around six meters in circumference along its delicately scalloped rim; so it surpassed in size even those splendid giant clams the Republic of Venice gave to Francis I, and from which the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris made two gigantic holy-water fonts.
Around this basin, under elegant glass cases fixed with copper frames, were classified and labeled the most precious products of the sea that had ever been offered to a naturalist's gaze. You can imagine my professor's delight.
The branch of the zoophytes offered very curious specimens of its two groups, the polyps and the echinoderms. In the first group there were organ-pipe corals, sea fans spread out like fans, soft sponges of Syria, sea shrubs of the Moluccas, sea pens, an admirable sea rod from the waters of Norway, various sea plumes, soft corals, a whole series of those madrepores that my teacher Milne-Edwards has so shrewdly sorted into sections, and among which I noticed lovely flabellinas, oculina corals from Réunion Island, the "chariot of Neptune" of the Antilles, superb varieties of coral—in short, every species of those curious coral-builders whose colonies form entire islands that will one day become continents. Among the echinoderms, remarkable for their spiny casing, the sea stars, the starfish, the sea lilies, the feather stars, the brittle stars, the sea urchins, the sea cucumbers, and the rest represented a complete collection of that group.
A conchologist of nervous temperament would surely have swooned before other, more numerous cases in which the specimens of the mollusk branch were arranged. There I saw a collection of inestimable value that I would not have time to describe in full. Among these treasures I'll cite, just for the record: the elegant royal hammer shell of the Indian Ocean, whose regular white spots stood out vividly against a red and brown ground; an imperial spondylus of vivid colors, bristling all over with spines, a rare specimen in the museums of Europe, whose value I put at twenty thousand francs; a common hammer shell from the seas of New Holland, hard to come by; exotic cockles from Senegal, fragile white shells with double valves that a breath would have scattered like a soap bubble; several varieties of the watering-pot shells of Java, sorts of chalky tubes fringed with leafy folds and much fought over by collectors; a whole series of top shells, some greenish-yellow, fished from American seas, others reddish-brown, partial to the waters of New Holland, some of these from the Gulf of Mexico and remarkable for their overlapping scale-like shell, others sun shells found in the southern seas, and last, the rarest of all, the magnificent New Zealand spur shell; then some admirable sulfur-yellow tellins, precious species of Cytherea and Venus clams, the trellised sundial shell from the coasts of Tranquebar, the marbled turban with its resplendent mother-of-pearl, the green parrot shells of the China seas, the almost unknown cone of the genus Coenodullus, every variety of cowrie that serves as money in India and Africa, the "Glory of the Sea," the most precious shell of the East Indies; and finally periwinkles, dolphin shells, turret shells, violet snails, egg cowries, volutes, olives, miters, helmet shells, murexes, whelks, harp shells, rock shells, tritons, cerith shells, spindle shells, conchs, wing shells, limpets, sea butterflies, sea angels—delicate, fragile shells that science has christened with its most charming names.
Set apart, in special compartments, were unrolled strings of pearls of the greatest beauty, which the electric light pricked with points of fire: pink pearls torn from the pinna shells of the Red Sea; green pearls from the iris abalone; yellow, blue, and black pearls, curious products of the various mollusks of every ocean and of certain mussels from the rivers of the North; and finally several specimens of inestimable price, distilled by the rarest of pearl oysters. Some of these pearls were bigger than a pigeon's egg; they were worth as much as, and more than, the one the traveler Tavernier sold for three million to the Shah of Persia, and they outshone that other pearl of the Imam of Muscat, which I had believed had no rival in the world.
So putting a figure on the value of this collection was, so to speak, impossible. Captain Nemo must have spent millions to acquire these various specimens, and I was wondering what source he could be drawing on to satisfy his collector's whims like this, when I was interrupted by these words:
"You're examining my shells, Professor. Indeed, they may interest a naturalist; but for me they hold one further charm, for I gathered every one of them with my own hand, and there is not a sea on the globe that has escaped my searches."
"I understand, Captain—I understand that joy of walking among such riches. You are one of those who have built their own treasure with their own hands. No museum in Europe possesses such a collection of the Ocean's products. But if I exhaust my admiration on it, what will I have left for the vessel that carries it! I have no wish to pry into secrets that are yours. Still, I confess that this Nautilus, the motive power it holds within itself, the machinery that lets it be handled, the mighty agent that drives it—all of that excites my curiosity in the highest degree. I see instruments hanging on the walls of this salon whose purpose is unknown to me. May I ask—?"
"Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo answered, "I told you that you would be free aboard my ship, and so no part of the Nautilus is off-limits to you. You may visit it in detail, and I'll be glad to be your guide."
"I don't know how to thank you, Captain, but I won't abuse your kindness. I'll only ask what these instruments of physics are meant for—"
"Professor, these same instruments are in my own room, and it's there that I'll have the pleasure of explaining their use to you. But first, come see the cabin that has been set aside for you. You need to know how you'll be housed aboard the Nautilus."
I followed Captain Nemo, who led me through one of the doors cut into each canted corner of the salon and back into the ship's passageways. He took me forward, and there I found, not a cabin, but an elegant room, with a bed, a washstand, and various other furnishings.
I could only thank my host.
"Your room adjoins mine," he said, opening a door, "and mine opens onto the salon we have just left."
I entered the captain's room. It had a severe, almost monastic look. An iron cot, a work table, a few washing furnishings. The whole lit by a dim half-light. Nothing comfortable. The strict necessities, and no more.
Captain Nemo pointed me to a seat.
"Please sit down," he said.
I sat, and he began to speak in these terms:
"Professor," said Captain Nemo, pointing to the instruments hanging on the walls of his cabin, "here are the devices the navigation of the Nautilus requires. In here, as in the salon, I have them always before my eyes, and they tell me my position and my exact heading in the middle of the Ocean. Some of them you'll recognize: the thermometer, which gives the temperature inside the Nautilus; the barometer, which weighs the pressure of the air and predicts changes in the weather; the hygrometer, which marks the degree of dryness in the atmosphere; the storm-glass, whose mixture, as it breaks down, announces the coming of a storm; the compass, which steers my course; the sextant, which by the height of the sun tells me my latitude; the chronometers, which allow me to calculate my longitude; and finally the day and night glasses, which serve me to scan every point of the horizon when the Nautilus has risen back to the surface of the waves."
"These are the ordinary instruments of any navigator," I answered, "and I know how they're used. But here are others that no doubt answer to the particular demands of the Nautilus. This dial I see, with a needle traveling across it — isn't that a pressure gauge?"
"A pressure gauge, exactly. Put in contact with the water, whose external pressure it registers, it tells me thereby the depth at which my craft is holding."
"And these soundings of a new kind?"
"They're thermometric soundings that report back the temperature of the various layers of water."
"And these other instruments, whose use I can't guess?"
"Here, Professor, I must give you a few explanations," said Captain Nemo. "Kindly hear me out."
He kept silent for a few moments, then he said:
"There is a powerful agent, obedient, quick, easy, one that bends to every use and reigns as master aboard my ship. Everything is done by it. It lights me, it warms me, it is the soul of my mechanical apparatus. This agent is electricity."
"Electricity!" I exclaimed, rather taken aback.
"Yes, Professor."
"And yet, Captain, you command an extreme swiftness of movement that sits poorly with the power of electricity. So far, its dynamic force has remained very limited, capable of producing only small amounts of power!"
"Professor," replied Captain Nemo, "my electricity is not everybody's electricity, and that is all I'll permit myself to tell you about it."
"I won't press you, Captain, and I'll content myself with being thoroughly astonished at such a result. One question only, however — which you needn't answer if it's indiscreet. The elements you use to produce this marvelous agent must wear out quickly. The zinc, for instance — how do you replace it, since you no longer have any communication with the land?"
"Your question will have its answer," replied Captain Nemo. "Let me tell you, first of all, that there exist at the bottom of the seas mines of zinc, iron, silver, and gold whose working would very certainly be practicable. But I've borrowed nothing from these metals of the earth; I wanted to ask the sea itself, and nothing else, for the means to produce my electricity."
"The sea?"
"Yes, Professor, and the means were not lacking. I could, in fact, by setting up a circuit between wires sunk to different depths, have obtained electricity from the difference in the temperatures they were exposed to; but I preferred to use a more practical system."
"And that is?"
"You know the composition of seawater. In every thousand grams you find ninety-six and a half hundredths water, and about two and two-thirds hundredths sodium chloride; then, in small quantities, chlorides of magnesium and potassium, bromide of magnesium, sulfate of magnesia, and the sulfate and carbonate of lime. You see, then, that sodium chloride is present in a considerable proportion. Now, it is this sodium that I extract from seawater, and out of which I compose my elements."
"The sodium?"
"Yes, Professor. Mixed with mercury, it forms an amalgam that takes the place of zinc in the Bunsen cells. The mercury never wears out. Only the sodium is consumed, and the sea itself supplies it to me. I'll tell you, besides, that sodium batteries must be regarded as the most powerful of all, and that their electromotive force is double that of zinc batteries."
"I quite understand, Captain, the excellence of sodium in the conditions you find yourself in. The sea contains it. Good. But you still have to manufacture it — to extract it, in a word. And how do you do that? Your batteries could obviously serve for the extraction; but, if I'm not mistaken, the sodium the electrical apparatus would consume would exceed the quantity extracted. It would turn out, then, that you'd use up more producing it than you'd ever produce!"
"And so, Professor, I don't extract it with the battery; I simply use the heat of coal from the earth."
"From the earth?" I said, pressing him.
"Say sea coal, if you like," replied Captain Nemo.
"And you can work undersea coal mines?"
"Professor Aronnax, you'll see me at work. I ask you only for a little patience, since you have time to be patient. Remember just this: I owe everything to the Ocean; it produces the electricity, and the electricity gives the Nautilus heat, light, motion — life, in a word."
"But not the air you breathe?"
"Oh, I could manufacture the air I need, but there's no point, since I go back up to the surface of the sea whenever I please. Still, if electricity doesn't supply me with breathable air, it does at least work powerful pumps that store it away in special tanks, and that lets me prolong my stay in the deep layers as long as I want, whenever the need arises."
"Captain," I answered, "I can only admire you. You've evidently found what men will no doubt find one day — the true dynamic power of electricity."
"I don't know whether they'll find it," replied Captain Nemo coldly. "Be that as it may, you already know the first application I've made of this precious agent. It's electricity that lights us, with an evenness, a steadiness, that the light of the sun doesn't have. Now, look at this clock; it's electric, and it runs with a regularity that defies the best chronometers. I've divided it into twenty-four hours, like the Italian clocks, for to me there is neither night nor day, neither sun nor moon, but only this artificial light that I carry with me to the bottom of the seas! Look — right now, it's ten in the morning."
"Exactly."
"Another application of electricity. This dial, hung here before our eyes, serves to indicate the speed of the Nautilus. An electric wire connects it to the log's propeller, and its needle shows me the craft's actual pace. And there, at this moment, we're running at a moderate speed of fifteen miles an hour."
"It's marvelous," I answered, "and I see very well, Captain, that you were right to make use of this agent, which is destined to replace wind, water, and steam."
"We're not finished, Professor Aronnax," said Captain Nemo, rising. "If you'll follow me, we'll visit the stern of the Nautilus."
In fact, I already knew the whole forward part of this underwater boat, whose exact layout, going from the center toward the ram, was as follows: the dining room, five meters long, separated from the library by a watertight bulkhead — that is, one that water couldn't get through; the library, five meters; the grand salon, ten meters, separated from the captain's cabin by a second watertight bulkhead; the said captain's cabin, five meters; mine, two and a half meters; and finally an air reservoir, seven and a half meters, that extended all the way to the bow. Total, thirty-five meters in length. The watertight bulkheads were pierced with doors that shut hermetically by means of rubber gaskets, and they guaranteed complete safety aboard the Nautilus in the event that a leak sprang somewhere.
I followed Captain Nemo through the gangways running along the sides, and came to the center of the ship. There I found a sort of well that opened between two watertight bulkheads. An iron ladder, bolted to the wall, led up to its upper end. I asked the captain what this ladder was for.
"It leads to the dinghy," he answered.
"What! You have a dinghy?" I replied, rather astonished.
"Of course. An excellent little boat, light and unsinkable, that serves for excursions and fishing."
"But then, when you want to embark, you're forced to come back to the surface of the sea?"
"Not at all. This dinghy sits against the upper part of the Nautilus's hull and occupies a cavity built to receive it. It's completely decked over, absolutely watertight, and held in place by strong bolts. This ladder leads to a manhole cut through the hull of the Nautilus, which matches a similar hole cut in the side of the dinghy. It's through this double opening that I let myself into the boat. They close one — the Nautilus's; I close the other — the dinghy's — by means of pressure screws; I release the bolts, and the boat shoots up to the surface of the sea with prodigious speed. Then I open the deck hatch, kept carefully shut until then, I step the mast, I hoist my sail or take up my oars, and off I go."
"But how do you get back aboard?"
"I don't come back, Professor Aronnax — it's the Nautilus that comes back."
"At your command!"
"At my command. An electric wire connects me to it. I send a telegram, and that's enough."
"Indeed," I said, intoxicated by these marvels, "nothing could be simpler!"
After passing the stairwell that led up to the platform, I saw a cabin two meters long, in which Conseil and Ned Land, delighted with their meal, were busy devouring it with a hearty appetite. Then a door opened onto the galley, three meters long, set between the ship's spacious storerooms.
There, electricity — more energetic and more obedient than gas itself — did all the work of cooking. The wires, running in under the stoves, delivered to spongy plates of platinum a heat that was distributed and held steady and even. It also heated distilling apparatus that, through evaporation, furnished excellent drinking water. Next to this galley opened a bathroom, comfortably fitted out, whose taps supplied cold or hot water at will.
After the galley came the crew's quarters, five meters long. But the door was shut, and I couldn't see how it was arranged — which might have told me how many men it took to run the Nautilus.
At the far end rose a fourth watertight bulkhead that separated these quarters from the engine room. A door opened, and I found myself in the compartment where Captain Nemo — a first-rate engineer, beyond any doubt — had installed his machinery for locomotion.
This engine room, brightly lit, measured no less than twenty meters in length. It was naturally divided into two parts: the first held the elements that produced the electricity, the second the mechanism that transmitted the motion to the propeller.
I was struck at first by the sui generis odor that filled the compartment. Captain Nemo noticed my reaction.
"These," he told me, "are a few emissions of gas produced by the use of sodium; but it's only a slight inconvenience. Besides, every morning we purify the ship by ventilating it in the open air."
Meanwhile, I was examining the machinery of the Nautilus with an interest easy to imagine.
"You see," Captain Nemo told me, "I use Bunsen cells, not Ruhmkorff cells. Those would have been powerless. The Bunsen cells are few in number, but strong and large, which works better, as experience has shown. The electricity produced travels to the stern, where it acts through large electromagnets on a special system of levers and gearing that transmits the motion to the propeller shaft. The propeller, six meters in diameter with a pitch of seven and a half meters, can turn as fast as a hundred and twenty revolutions per second."
"And you get, then?"
"A speed of fifty miles an hour."
There was a mystery here, but I didn't press to learn it. How could electricity act with such power? Where did this almost unlimited force take its origin? Was it in its excessive tension, obtained by coils of some new kind? Was it in its transmission, which an unknown system of levers could amplify to infinity? That was what I couldn't grasp.
"Captain Nemo," I said, "I take note of the results and I don't try to explain them. I saw the Nautilus maneuvering in front of the Abraham Lincoln, and I know what to make of its speed. But moving isn't enough. You have to see where you're going! You have to be able to steer right, left, up, down! How do you reach the great depths, where you meet a growing resistance measured in hundreds of atmospheres? How do you rise back to the surface of the Ocean? And how, finally, do you hold yourself at whatever level suits you? Am I being indiscreet in asking you?"
"Not at all, Professor," the captain answered me, after a slight hesitation, "since you must never leave this underwater boat. Come into the salon. It's our real study, and there you'll learn everything you need to know about the Nautilus!"
A moment later we were seated on a divan in the lounge, cigars between our lips. The captain laid before me a set of drawings that gave the plan, section, and elevation of the Nautilus. Then he began his description in these words:
"Here, Professor Aronnax, are the various dimensions of the vessel that carries you. It's a very elongated cylinder with conical ends. It closely resembles the shape of a cigar — a shape already adopted in London for several craft of the same kind. The length of this cylinder, from tip to tip, is exactly seventy meters, and its beam, at its widest point, is eight meters. So it isn't built quite to the ratio of one to ten, like your fast steamers, but its lines are long enough and its run prolonged enough that the displaced water slips away easily and puts up no resistance to its passage.
"These two dimensions let you work out, by a simple calculation, the surface area and the volume of the Nautilus. Its surface comes to 1,011.45 square meters; its volume, 1,500.2 cubic meters — which is to say that, fully submerged, it displaces or weighs 1,500.2 cubic meters, or tons.
"When I drew up the plans for a vessel meant to travel underwater, I wanted it, when floating in equilibrium, to sit nine-tenths submerged and to show only one-tenth above the surface. Under those conditions, then, it had to displace only nine-tenths of its volume — that is, 1,356.48 cubic meters, weighing that same number of tons. So in building it to the dimensions I just gave you, I couldn't exceed that weight.
"The Nautilus is made of two hulls, one inside the other, joined by T-shaped iron beams that give it tremendous rigidity. Thanks to this cellular arrangement, it stands up to pressure like a solid block, as though it were cast in one piece. Its plating can't give way; it holds together by its own cohesion and not by the grip of rivets, and the uniformity of its construction — the result of a perfect fit between materials — lets it defy the most violent seas.
"Both hulls are built of sheet steel, whose density relative to water is 7.8. The inner hull is no less than five centimeters thick and weighs 394.96 tons. The outer shell, together with the keel — fifty centimeters high and twenty-five wide, weighing 62 tons on its own — plus the engine, the ballast, the various fittings and furnishings, the interior bulkheads and bracing, all come to 961.62 tons; add that to the 394.96 tons, and you get the required total of 1,356.48 tons. Is that clear?"
"It's clear," I answered.
"So," the captain went on, "when the Nautilus is afloat under these conditions, one-tenth of it rides above the water. Now, I've fitted it with tanks whose capacity equals that one-tenth — a volume of 150.72 tons — and if I fill them with water, the vessel then displaces, or weighs, 1,507 tons, and is completely submerged. That's exactly what happens, Professor. These tanks are set in the lower parts of the Nautilus. I open the valves, they fill, the vessel sinks, and comes to rest just level with the surface of the water."
"Fine, Captain, but here we come to the real difficulty. That you can bring the ship level with the surface of the ocean, I understand. But lower down, diving beneath that surface, won't your underwater machine meet a pressure — and therefore suffer an upward thrust — that has to be reckoned at one atmosphere for every thirty feet of water, or about one kilogram per square centimeter?"
"Precisely, Professor."
"Then unless you fill the Nautilus entirely, I don't see how you can drive it down into the heart of the waters."
"Professor," Captain Nemo replied, "you mustn't confuse statics with dynamics, or you lay yourself open to serious errors. It takes very little effort to reach the ocean's lower regions, because bodies have a tendency to become 'sinkers.' Follow my reasoning."
"I'm listening, Captain."
"When I set out to determine the added weight the Nautilus would need in order to submerge, all I had to concern myself with was the reduction in volume that seawater undergoes as its layers grow deeper and deeper."
"That's obvious," I answered.
"Now, if water isn't absolutely incompressible, it is at least very slightly compressible. In fact, according to the most recent calculations, this reduction amounts to only 436 ten-millionths per atmosphere, or per thirty feet of depth. If I mean to go down a thousand meters, I then allow for the reduction in volume under a pressure equal to that of a column of water a thousand meters high — that is, under a pressure of a hundred atmospheres. This reduction would then be 436 hundred-thousandths. So I'd have to increase the weight until the vessel weighs 1,513.77 tons instead of 1,507.2 tons. The increase, consequently, would come to only 6.57 tons."
"Only that?"
"Only that, Professor Aronnax, and the calculation is easy to check. Now, I have supplementary tanks capable of taking on a hundred tons of water. So I can descend to considerable depths. When I want to rise again and come level with the surface, I need only expel that water, emptying all the tanks completely if I want the Nautilus to ride one-tenth of its total capacity above the waves."
Against reasoning backed by figures like these, I had nothing to object.
"I accept your calculations, Captain," I answered, "and I'd be churlish to dispute them, since experience proves them right every day. But now I sense a genuine difficulty ahead of us."
"Which is, Professor?"
"When you're at a depth of a thousand meters, the walls of the Nautilus bear a pressure of a hundred atmospheres. If, at that moment, you want to empty the supplementary tanks in order to lighten your vessel and rise to the surface, your pumps have to overcome that pressure of a hundred atmospheres — which comes to a hundred kilograms per square centimeter. That calls for a power —"
"That electricity alone could give me," Captain Nemo cut in. "I repeat, Professor: the dynamic power of my machines is very nearly infinite. The pumps of the Nautilus have prodigious force — as you must have seen when their columns of water came pouring like a torrent over the Abraham Lincoln. Besides, I only use the supplementary tanks to reach middling depths of fifteen hundred to two thousand meters, and even then only to spare my equipment. So when the whim takes me to visit the depths of the ocean, two or three leagues below its surface, I use maneuvers that take longer but are no less reliable."
"Which are, Captain?" I asked.
"That brings me naturally to telling you how the Nautilus is handled."
"I can't wait to hear it."
"To steer this vessel to starboard or to port — to maneuver it, in short, along a horizontal plane — I use an ordinary broad-bladed rudder, mounted on the stern-post and worked by a wheel and tackle. But I can also drive the Nautilus up and down, in a vertical plane, by means of two inclined planes attached to its sides at the waterline — movable planes, able to take any position, worked from inside by powerful levers. Kept parallel to the vessel, these planes hold it moving horizontally. Tilted, the Nautilus — depending on the angle set and driven by the thrust of its propeller — either dives along a diagonal as long as I please, or climbs along that same diagonal. And if I want to return to the surface faster still, I throw in the propeller, and the pressure of the water sends the Nautilus rising straight up like a balloon that, swollen with hydrogen, shoots quickly into the air."
"Bravo, Captain!" I cried. "But how can the helmsman follow the course you set for him in the middle of the waters?"
"The helmsman is stationed in a glass-walled cage that projects from the upper part of the Nautilus's hull, fitted with lens-shaped panes."
"Panes able to withstand such pressures?"
"Perfectly. Crystal, fragile under a sharp blow, nonetheless offers considerable resistance. In experiments with fishing by electric light, carried out in 1864 in the northern seas, plates of this material, only seven millimeters thick, were seen to withstand a pressure of sixteen atmospheres, all the while letting through powerful heat rays that spread the warmth unevenly across them. Now, the panes I use are no less than twenty-one centimeters thick at their center — thirty times that thickness."
"Granted, Captain Nemo — but after all, to see, you need light to drive back the darkness, and I wonder how, in the blackness of the waters —"
"Behind the helmsman's cage is mounted a powerful electric reflector, whose beams light up the sea for half a mile around."
"Ah, bravo — three times bravo, Captain! Now I understand that phosphorescence of the so-called narwhal that so puzzled the scientists! And on that subject, let me ask you: was the collision of the Nautilus with the Scotia, which caused such a stir, the result of a chance encounter?"
"Purely by chance, Professor. I was cruising two meters below the surface when the shock occurred. I saw, moreover, that it had done no serious harm."
"None, sir. But as for your encounter with the Abraham Lincoln?"
"Professor, I'm sorry for one of the finest ships of that gallant American navy — but I was under attack, and I had to defend myself! I contented myself, though, with putting the frigate out of any condition to harm me; she'll have no trouble repairing her damage at the nearest port."
"Ah, Captain," I exclaimed with conviction, "your Nautilus really is a marvelous vessel!"
"Yes, Professor," Captain Nemo answered with genuine emotion, "and I love it as the flesh of my flesh! If aboard one of your ships, exposed to all the hazards of the ocean, everything is danger — if on that sea the first impression is the sense of the abyss, as the Dutchman Jansen so aptly put it — then aboard the Nautilus, and beneath its waters, a man's heart has nothing left to fear. No warping to dread, for the double hull of this vessel has the rigidity of iron; no rigging to be worn out by pitch and roll; no sails for the wind to carry off; no boilers for the steam to burst; no fire to fear, since this craft is made of sheet metal and not of wood; no coal to run out of, since electricity is its driving power; no collision to fear, since it sails alone in the deep waters; no storm to brave, since a few meters below the surface it finds absolute calm! There, Professor. There is the ship of ships! And if it's true that the engineer has more confidence in a vessel than the builder, and the builder more than the captain himself, then you can understand with what abandon I trust myself to my Nautilus — since I am at once its captain, its builder, and its engineer!"
Captain Nemo spoke with a compelling eloquence. The fire in his eyes, the passion in his gestures, transfigured him. Yes! He loved his ship the way a father loves his child.
But a question — an indiscreet one, perhaps — arose naturally, and I couldn't keep myself from putting it to him.
"You're an engineer, then, Captain Nemo?"
"Yes, Professor," he answered. "I studied in London, in Paris, in New York, back when I was a dweller on the continents of the earth."
"But how were you able to build this admirable Nautilus in secret?"
"Each of its pieces, Professor Aronnax, reached me from a different point on the globe, under a disguised destination. Its keel was forged at Le Creusot, its propeller shaft at Pen & Co. of London, the sheet-iron plates of its hull at Leard's of Liverpool, its propeller at Scott's of Glasgow. Its tanks were made by Cail & Co. of Paris, its engine by Krupp in Prussia, its ram in the workshops of Motala in Sweden, its precision instruments at Hart Brothers of New York, and so on — and each of these suppliers received my plans under a different name."
"But," I went on, "once these pieces were made, they had to be assembled, fitted together?"
"Professor, I'd set up my workshops on a deserted islet, in the open ocean. There, my workmen — that is, my brave companions, whom I've trained and formed — and I finished our Nautilus. Then, once the work was done, fire destroyed every trace of our passage on that islet, which I'd have blown up if I could have."
"Then I may assume the cost of building this craft was enormous?"
"Professor Aronnax, an iron ship costs eleven hundred and twenty-five francs per ton. Now, the Nautilus gauges fifteen hundred. So it came to 1,687,000 francs — two million counting its fittings, or four or five million with the works of art and the collections it holds."
"One last question, Captain Nemo."
"Go ahead, Professor."
"You're rich, then?"
"Infinitely rich, sir — I could pay off France's ten billion of debt without the slightest inconvenience!"
I stared hard at the strange man who spoke to me this way. Was he trading on my credulity? The future would tell.
The portion of the globe covered by water has been reckoned at three million eight hundred thirty-two thousand five hundred fifty-eight square myriameters — more than thirty-eight million hectares. This liquid mass comprises two billion two hundred fifty million cubic miles, and would form a sphere sixty leagues in diameter weighing three quintillion tons. To grasp that number, you have to tell yourself that a quintillion is to a billion what a billion is to one — that is, there are as many billions in a quintillion as there are single units in a billion. And this mass of water is roughly the quantity that all the rivers of the earth would pour out over the span of forty thousand years.
During the geological ages, the age of fire was followed by the age of water. In the beginning the ocean was universal. Then, little by little, in the Silurian period, mountain peaks appeared, islands emerged and vanished again under partial floods, showed themselves once more, fused together, formed continents, and at last the land settled geographically into the shape we see today. The solid had wrested from the liquid thirty-seven million six hundred fifty-seven thousand square miles — twelve thousand nine hundred sixteen million hectares.
The configuration of the continents lets us divide the waters into five great parts: the Arctic Ocean, the Antarctic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean.
The Pacific runs from north to south between the two polar circles, and from west to east between Asia and America across a stretch of a hundred and forty-five degrees of longitude. It is the most peaceful of the seas: its currents broad and slow, its tides moderate, its rainfall abundant. Such was the ocean that fate had first summoned me to travel — and under the strangest conditions imaginable.
"Professor," Captain Nemo said to me, "if you don't mind, we're going to fix our exact position and set the point of departure for this voyage. It's a quarter to noon. I'll bring us back up to the surface."
The captain pressed an electric bell three times. The pumps began driving the water out of the ballast tanks; on the pressure gauge the needle marked, through its shifting readings, the Nautilus's rise, then came to a stop.
"We've arrived," said the captain.
I made my way to the central stairway that led up to the platform. I climbed the metal steps and, through the open hatches, came out onto the upper part of the Nautilus.
The platform stood barely eighty centimeters above the water. The bow and stern of the Nautilus tapered into that spindle shape which had, quite rightly, earned it the comparison to a long cigar. I noticed that its sheet-metal plates, slightly overlapping, resembled the scales that clothe the bodies of the great land reptiles. So I understood perfectly well why, even through the best telescopes, this vessel had always been taken for a marine animal.
Toward the middle of the platform, the dinghy, half sunk into the hull of the ship, formed a slight swelling. Fore and aft rose two cages of modest height, with sloping walls, partly closed by thick lens-shaped panes of glass: one meant for the helmsman who steered the Nautilus, the other for the powerful electric beacon that lit its way.
The sea was magnificent, the sky clear. The long craft scarcely felt the wide swells of the ocean. A light breeze out of the east ruffled the surface of the water. The horizon, swept clear of mist, was perfect for observation.
There was nothing in sight. Not a reef, not an islet. No more Abraham Lincoln. Nothing but the empty vastness.
Sextant in hand, Captain Nemo took the altitude of the sun, which would give him his latitude. He waited a few minutes for the star to come and just graze the rim of the horizon. While he sighted, not one of his muscles so much as twitched, and the instrument could not have held stiller in a hand of marble.
"Noon," he said. "Professor, whenever you're ready."
I cast one last look at that faintly yellowish sea off the Japanese coast, and went back down to the grand salon.
There the captain worked out his position, calculated his longitude by chronometer, and checked it against earlier observations of hour angles. Then he said to me:
"Professor Aronnax, we are at a hundred thirty-seven degrees and fifteen minutes of longitude west —"
"West of which meridian?" I asked eagerly, hoping the captain's answer might give me a clue to his nationality.
"Sir," he replied, "I have several chronometers set to the meridians of Paris, Greenwich, and Washington. But in your honor I'll use the one for Paris."
The answer told me nothing. I bowed, and the commander went on:
"Thirty-seven degrees and fifteen minutes of longitude west of the Paris meridian, and thirty degrees and seven minutes of north latitude — that is, some three hundred miles off the coast of Japan. Today, the eighth of November, at noon, our voyage of exploration beneath the waters begins."
"God keep us," I answered.
"And now, Professor," the captain added, "I'll leave you to your studies. I've set our course east-northeast at a depth of fifty meters. Here are some large-scale charts where you can follow it. The salon is at your disposal, and I ask your leave to withdraw."
Captain Nemo bowed to me. I was left alone, lost in my thoughts. Every one of them turned on this commander of the Nautilus. Would I ever learn what nation this strange man belonged to — this man who boasted of belonging to none? What had provoked the hatred he had sworn against all humanity, this hatred that perhaps was hunting for some terrible revenge? Was he one of those unrecognized scholars, one of those geniuses "who had been dealt some great sorrow," as Conseil put it — a modern Galileo — or one of those men of science, like the American Maury, whose career had been broken by political upheavals? I still couldn't say. Chance had just flung me aboard his ship; he held my life in his hands; and he received me coldly, but with courtesy. Only, he had never once taken the hand I held out to him. He had never once offered me his own.
For a full hour I sat sunk in these reflections, trying to pierce a mystery that fascinated me. Then my gaze fixed on the vast planisphere spread across the table, and I laid my finger on the very spot where the observed longitude and latitude crossed.
The sea has its rivers just as the continents do. They are particular currents, recognizable by their temperature and their color, and the most remarkable of them is known as the Gulf Stream. Science has charted the courses of five principal currents around the globe: one in the North Atlantic, a second in the South Atlantic, a third in the North Pacific, a fourth in the South Pacific, and a fifth in the southern Indian Ocean. It is even probable that a sixth current once existed in the northern Indian Ocean, back when the Caspian and Aral Seas, joined to the great lakes of Asia, formed a single unbroken sheet of water.
Now, at the point marked on the planisphere, there unrolled one of these currents — the Kuro-Shivo of the Japanese, the Black River — which, issuing from the Bay of Bengal where the perpendicular rays of the tropical sun warm it, crosses the Strait of Malacca, runs along the coast of Asia, and curves through the North Pacific as far as the Aleutian Islands, carrying with it drifting trunks of camphor trees and other native products, and slicing through the ocean's waves with the pure indigo of its warm waters. This was the current the Nautilus was about to travel. I followed it with my eye, watched it lose itself in the immensity of the Pacific, and felt myself being carried along with it — when Ned Land and Conseil appeared in the salon doorway.
My two good companions stood petrified at the sight of the wonders heaped up before their eyes.
"Where are we? Where are we?" cried the Canadian. "In the museum at Quebec?"
"If Master will allow," Conseil put in, "it looks more like the Hôtel du Sommerard!"
"My friends," I answered, motioning them in, "you're neither in Canada nor in France, but very much aboard the Nautilus, fifty meters below the surface of the sea."
"We'll have to take Master's word for it, since Master says so," Conseil replied. "But frankly, this salon is enough to astonish even a Fleming like me."
"Be astonished, my friend, and look — for a classifier of your caliber, there's plenty of work here."
I hardly needed to encourage Conseil. Bent over the display cases, the good fellow was already murmuring words in the language of the naturalists: class of Gastropods, family of Buccinoids, genus of Cowries, species Cypraea madagascariensis, and so on.
Meanwhile Ned Land, no great conchologist, was questioning me about my meeting with Captain Nemo. Had I found out who he was, where he came from, where he was going, into what depths he was dragging us? In short, a thousand questions I hadn't the time to answer.
I told him everything I knew, or rather everything I didn't know, and asked him what he'd heard or seen on his side.
"Seen nothing, heard nothing!" the Canadian replied. "I haven't even caught sight of this ship's crew. You don't suppose they're electric too, do you?"
"Electric!"
"Upon my word, you'd almost be tempted to believe it. But you, Professor Aronnax," asked Ned Land, who still had his fixed idea, "can't you tell me how many men are aboard? Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred?"
"I couldn't tell you, Master Land. And besides, take my word for it — drop this notion of seizing the Nautilus or escaping from it, at least for now. This ship is one of the masterpieces of modern industry, and I'd have hated never to see it! Plenty of people would accept the situation we're in, if only for the chance to walk through these marvels. So keep calm, and let's try to see what's going on around us."
"See!" cried the harpooner. "But there's nothing to see, there'll never be anything to see out of this iron prison! We're sailing, we're navigating, blind..."
Ned Land was just uttering these last words when darkness fell all at once — utter, absolute darkness. The luminous ceiling went out, and so abruptly that my eyes felt a stab of pain, the same you get when you pass the other way, from deep gloom into the most dazzling light.
We stood mute, not stirring, not knowing what surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, awaited us. But a sliding sound made itself heard. It was as if panels were being worked along the flanks of the Nautilus.
"This is the end of the end!" said Ned Land.
"Order of the Hydromedusae!" murmured Conseil.
Suddenly light returned on either side of the salon, through two oblong openings. The liquid masses appeared, brilliantly lit by the electric glow. Two panes of crystal separated us from the sea. At first I shuddered at the thought that this fragile wall might shatter; but strong copper frames held it in place and gave it an all but infinite resistance.
The sea was distinctly visible for a mile in every direction around the Nautilus. What a sight! What pen could describe it? Who could paint the play of light through those transparent sheets, the softness of its gradations fading down to the ocean's lower and upper reaches?
Everyone knows how transparent the sea is. Its clarity is known to surpass that of spring water. The mineral and organic substances it holds in suspension actually increase its transparency. In certain parts of the ocean, in the Antilles, a hundred forty-five meters of water let you make out the sandy bottom with astonishing sharpness, and the penetrating power of the sun's rays seems to stop only at a depth of three hundred meters. But in this fluid medium the Nautilus was crossing, the electric brilliance was being produced within the very heart of the waves. It was no longer luminous water — it was liquid light.
If one accepts the hypothesis of Ehrenberg, who believes in a phosphorescent illumination of the ocean depths, then nature has certainly reserved for the creatures of the sea one of its most prodigious spectacles — and I could judge it here by the thousand plays of this light. On either side I had a window opening onto those unexplored abysses. The darkness of the salon set off the brightness outside, and we gazed as though this pure crystal were the glass of some immense aquarium.
The Nautilus seemed not to be moving. That was because we had no landmarks. Now and then, though, the lines of water, split by its ram, streamed past our eyes at tremendous speed.
Marveling, we leaned on our elbows before those windows, and none of us had yet broken this silence of amazement when Conseil said:
"You wanted to see, friend Ned — well, now you see!"
"Amazing! Amazing!" the Canadian kept saying — for, forgetting his rage and his plans of escape, he had fallen under an irresistible spell. "A man would come from the far ends of the earth to admire a sight like this!"
"Ah!" I exclaimed. "Now I understand this man's life! He's made himself a world apart that holds its most astonishing marvels in reserve for him!"
"But the fish?" the Canadian objected. "I don't see any fish!"
"What does it matter to you, friend Ned," Conseil answered, "since you don't know them anyway?"
"Me! A fisherman!" cried Ned Land.
And on that subject an argument broke out between the two friends, for they both knew fish — but each in a very different way.
Everyone knows that fish form the fourth and last class of the vertebrate branch. They have been very properly defined as "vertebrates with double circulation and cold blood, breathing through gills and destined to live in water." They fall into two distinct series: the series of bony fish — those whose spine is made of bony vertebrae — and the cartilaginous fish, those whose spine is made of cartilaginous vertebrae.
The Canadian may perhaps have known this distinction, but Conseil knew a great deal more, and now, bound to Ned in friendship, he couldn't allow himself to seem less learned than his friend. So he said to him:
"Friend Ned, you're a slayer of fish, a very skillful fisherman. You've caught a great number of these interesting animals. But I'd wager you don't know how they're classified."
"I do," the harpooner replied gravely. "They're classified into fish you eat and fish you don't!"
"That's a glutton's distinction," Conseil answered. "But tell me — do you know the difference between bony fish and cartilaginous fish?"
"I might, Conseil."
"And the subdivisions of those two great classes?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," the Canadian admitted.
"Well then, friend Ned, listen and remember! The bony fish are subdivided into six orders. First: the acanthopterygians, whose upper jaw is complete and mobile, and whose gills take the shape of a comb. This order includes fifteen families — that is, three-quarters of all known fish. Type: the common perch."
"Fairly good eating," said Ned Land.
"Second," Conseil went on, "the abdominals, which have their ventral fins slung under the abdomen and behind the pectorals, without being attached to the shoulder bones — an order that divides into five families and takes in the greater part of the freshwater fish. Type: the carp, the pike."
"Bah!" said the Canadian with a certain scorn. "Freshwater fish!"
"Third," said Conseil, "the subbrachians, whose ventral fins are attached beneath the pectorals and hung directly from the shoulder bones. This order contains four families. Type: plaice, dab, turbot, brill, sole, and so on."
"Excellent! Excellent!" cried the harpooner, who would consider fish only from the standpoint of the dinner table.
"Fourth," Conseil resumed, unruffled, "the apodes, with an elongated body, without ventral fins, clothed in a thick and often slimy skin — an order comprising just one family. Type: the eel, the electric eel."
"Mediocre! Mediocre!" answered Ned Land.
"Fifth," said Conseil, "the lophobranchs, which have complete and free jaws, but whose gills are formed of little tufts arranged in pairs along the branchial arches. This order counts only one family. Type: the seahorses, the sea dragons."
"Poor! Poor!" the harpooner shot back.
"Sixth and last," said Conseil, "the plectognaths, whose maxillary bone is fixed to the side of the intermaxillary that forms the jaw, and whose palatine arch is locked by suture to the skull, which makes it immovable — an order that lacks true ventral fins and is made up of two families. Types: the pufferfish, the sunfish."
"Fish fit to dishonor a stewpot!" cried the Canadian.
"Have you followed all that, friend Ned?" asked the learned Conseil.
"Not in the least, friend Conseil," the harpooner replied. "But go right on, because you're very interesting."
"As for the cartilaginous fish," Conseil continued imperturbably, "they comprise only three orders."
"So much the better," said Ned.
"First, the cyclostomes, whose jaws are fused into a single mobile ring and whose gills open through numerous holes — an order comprising only one family. Type: the lamprey."
"An acquired taste," Ned Land replied.
"Second, the selacians, with gills like those of the cyclostomes, but with a mobile lower jaw. This order, the most important of the class, includes two families. Types: the ray and the sharks."
"What!" cried Ned. "Rays and sharks in the same order! Well, friend Conseil, for the rays' sake I wouldn't advise putting them together in the same tank!"
"Third," Conseil answered, "the sturgeons, whose gills open, as usual, through a single slit fitted with a gill cover — an order that includes four genera. Type: the sturgeon."
"Ah, friend Conseil, you saved the best for last — in my opinion, anyway. And is that all?"
"Yes, my good Ned," Conseil replied, "and mind you, once you know all that, you still know nothing, for the families subdivide into genera, subgenera, species, varieties..."
"Well, friend Conseil," said the harpooner, leaning over the pane of the panel, "here come some varieties now!"
"Yes! Fish!" cried Conseil. "You'd think we were standing in front of an aquarium!"
"No," I said, "because an aquarium is only a cage, and those fish are as free as birds in the air."
"Well then, friend Conseil, name them, go on, name them!" said Ned Land.
"Me?" Conseil replied. "I'm not able to! That's Master's business!"
And indeed, the worthy fellow — a rabid classifier — was no naturalist, and I doubt he could have told a tuna from a bonito. In a word, the opposite of the Canadian, who named all these fish without a moment's hesitation.
"A triggerfish," I said.
"And a Chinese triggerfish!" answered Ned Land.
"Genus Balistes, family of the Sclerodermi, order of the Plectognaths," murmured Conseil.
Decidedly, between the two of them, Ned and Conseil would have made one distinguished naturalist.
The Canadian hadn't been mistaken. A troop of triggerfish, with compressed bodies and grainy skin, armed with a spine on the dorsal fin, were frolicking around the Nautilus, flicking the four rows of prickles that bristle along each side of their tails. Nothing could be more admirable than their covering — gray above, white below — its spots of gold glittering in the dark swirl of the waves. Among them undulated rays, like a sheet let loose to the winds, and among these I spotted, to my great joy, that Chinese ray, yellowish on its upper part, soft pink beneath the belly, and fitted with three spines behind its eye — a rare species, and one whose very existence was doubtful in the time of Lacépède, who had never seen it except in a collection of Japanese drawings.
For two hours a whole aquatic army escorted the Nautilus. Amid their games and their leaps, as they vied with one another in beauty, brilliance, and speed, I made out the green wrasse; the surmullet, marked with a double black stripe; the eleotris goby, with rounded tail, white in color and flecked with violet on the back; the Japanese mackerel, that admirable scomber of these seas, its body blue and its head silver; brilliant azurors whose name alone dispenses with any description; striped sea breams, their fins variegated in blue and yellow; banded sea breams, set off by a black band on the tail; girdled sea breams, elegantly corseted in their six sashes; snipefish, true flute-mouthed trumpetfish, some specimens of which reached a meter in length; Japanese salamanders; snake-eels of the moray kind, long six-foot serpents with small, lively eyes and a wide mouth bristling with teeth — and so on.
Our admiration held always at its highest pitch. Our exclamations never ran dry. Ned named the fish, Conseil classified them, and I stood enraptured before the liveliness of their movements and the beauty of their forms. Never before had I been given the chance to catch these animals alive and free in their natural element.
I will not list all the varieties that passed thus before our dazzled eyes, this whole collection of the seas of Japan and China. The fish came running, more numerous than birds in the air, drawn no doubt by the dazzling focus of the electric light.
Suddenly the salon filled with light again. The metal panels closed. The enchanting vision vanished. But for a long while I went on dreaming, until the moment my gaze fixed on the instruments hung along the walls. The compass still showed our heading as north-northeast, the pressure gauge indicated a pressure of five atmospheres, corresponding to a depth of fifty meters, and the electric log gave a speed of fifteen miles an hour.
I waited for Captain Nemo. But he didn't appear. The clock read five.
Ned Land and Conseil went back to their cabin. I returned to my own room. My dinner was waiting there, ready. It consisted of a turtle soup made from the most delicate hawksbills, a red mullet with white, slightly flaky flesh — its liver, prepared separately, made a delicious dish — and fillets of that meat of the emperor holocanthus, whose flavor struck me as superior to salmon's.
I spent the evening reading, writing, thinking. Then, as sleep crept over me, I stretched out on my bed of eelgrass and fell into a deep sleep, while the Nautilus slid along through the swift current of the Black River.
The next day, November 9, I woke only after a long twelve-hour sleep. Conseil came, as was his habit, to ask "how Master had passed the night" and to offer his services. He had left his friend the Canadian sleeping like a man who had never done anything else his whole life.
I let the good fellow chatter away to his heart's content without answering him much. My mind was on Captain Nemo's absence during our session the day before, and I hoped to see him again today.
I was soon back in my clothes of byssus. Their material had prompted more than one comment from Conseil. I explained to him that they were woven from the glossy, silky filaments that anchor the "fan mussels" to the rocks — a kind of shell very common along the shores of the Mediterranean. In the old days these threads were made into fine fabrics, stockings, gloves, for they were at once very soft and very warm. So the Nautilus's crew could clothe itself cheaply, without asking a thing of the cotton fields, the sheep, or the silkworms of the land.
Once dressed, I made my way to the grand salon. It was deserted.
I plunged into the study of those treasures of conchology heaped beneath the glass cases. I also went digging through the great herbariums, filled with the rarest marine plants, which, though dried, still kept their wonderful colors. Among these precious hydrophytes I noticed whorled cladostephus, peacock's-tail padinas, grape-leaved caulerpas, grain-bearing callithamnions, delicate scarlet-tinted ceramiums, agars spread out like fans, acetabularias resembling the caps of very flattened mushrooms, and long classed among the zoophytes — in short, a whole series of wracks and kelps.
The entire day went by without my being honored by a visit from Captain Nemo. The panels of the salon did not open. Perhaps they didn't want to let us grow jaded on these beautiful things.
The Nautilus held its course east-northeast, its speed at twelve miles, its depth between fifty and sixty meters.
The next day, November 10, the same neglect, the same solitude. I saw no one from the crew. Ned and Conseil spent the greater part of the day with me. They were astonished by the captain's inexplicable absence. Was this strange man ill? Did he mean to change his plans concerning us?
After all, as Conseil pointed out, we enjoyed complete liberty; we were fed delicately and abundantly. Our host was keeping to the terms of his agreement. We had nothing to complain of, and besides, the very strangeness of our fate held such splendid compensations in store that we had no right, as yet, to accuse him of anything.
That day I began the journal of these adventures — which is what has allowed me to recount them with the most scrupulous accuracy — and, a curious detail, I wrote it on paper made from marine eelgrass.
On November 11, early in the morning, the fresh air spreading through the interior of the Nautilus told me we had returned to the surface of the ocean to renew our supply of oxygen. I headed for the central stairway and climbed up onto the platform.
It was six o'clock. I found the weather overcast, the sea gray but calm. Scarcely a swell. Captain Nemo, whom I hoped to meet up there — would he come? I saw no one but the helmsman, penned in his glass cage. Seated on the ridge formed by the hull of the dinghy, I breathed in the salt air with delight.
Little by little the mist burned off under the sun's rays. The radiant star came flooding up over the eastern horizon. The sea caught fire beneath its gaze like a trail of gunpowder. The clouds, scattered high overhead, took on vivid, exquisitely shaded tones, and countless "cat's tongues" of cloud warned of wind for the whole day.
But what did the wind matter to a Nautilus that not even storms could frighten?
So I was admiring that joyous sunrise — so cheerful, so invigorating — when I heard someone climbing up toward the platform.
I was getting ready to greet Captain Nemo, but it was his second-in-command — whom I had already seen during the captain's first visit — who appeared. He advanced onto the platform and did not seem to notice my presence. His powerful telescope at his eyes, he scanned every point of the horizon with the closest attention. Then, this examination done, he came up to the panel and pronounced a sentence whose exact words are these. I've remembered it, because every morning it was repeated under identical conditions. It ran as follows:
"Nautron respoc lorni virch."
What it meant, I couldn't say.
These words spoken, the second-in-command went back down. I supposed the Nautilus was about to resume its underwater voyage. So I went back to the panel, and through the passageways I returned to my cabin.
Five days passed like this, with no change in the situation. Every morning I climbed up onto the platform. The same sentence was pronounced by the same man. Captain Nemo did not appear.
I had made up my mind that I would not see him again, when, on November 16, coming back into my cabin with Ned and Conseil, I found on the table a note addressed to me.
I opened it with an impatient hand. It was written in a frank, clear hand, though a little Gothic, calling to mind the German styles of lettering.
The note was worded as follows:
Professor Aronnax, aboard the Nautilus.
November 16, 1867.
Captain Nemo invites Professor Aronnax to a hunting party that will take place tomorrow morning in his forests on Crespo Island. He hopes that nothing will prevent the Professor from attending, and he will be glad to see the Professor's companions join him.
The commander of the Nautilus, Captain NEMO.
"A hunt!" cried Ned.
"And in his forests on Crespo Island!" added Conseil.
"So he does go ashore, then, this odd character of ours?" Ned Land went on.
"That seems clearly stated," I said, rereading the letter.
"Well then! We have to accept," the Canadian replied. "Once we're on solid ground, we'll figure out what to do. Besides, I won't be sorry to sink my teeth into a few slabs of fresh venison."
Without trying to reconcile the plain contradiction between Captain Nemo's evident loathing for continents and islands and his invitation to go hunting in a forest, I simply answered:
"Let's first see what this Crespo Island is."
I consulted the planisphere, and at 32°40′ north latitude and 167°50′ west longitude I found a small island, sighted in 1801 by Captain Crespo, which the old Spanish charts called Rocca de la Plata — that is, "Silver Rock." So we were about eighteen hundred miles from our starting point, and the Nautilus's slightly altered course was bringing it back toward the southeast.
I showed my companions that little rock lost in the middle of the North Pacific.
"If Captain Nemo does go ashore now and then," I told them, "he at least chooses islands that are absolutely deserted!"
Ned Land shook his head without answering; then he and Conseil left me. After a supper served to me by the mute, impassive steward, I fell asleep, though not without some uneasiness.
The next day, November 17, when I awoke, I felt that the Nautilus was completely motionless. I dressed quickly and went into the grand salon.
Captain Nemo was there. He was waiting for me; he rose, bowed, and asked whether it suited me to come along with him.
Since he made no allusion whatever to his absence over these eight days, I refrained from mentioning it, and simply replied that my companions and I were ready to follow him.
"Only, sir," I added, "I'll take the liberty of putting a question to you."
"Put it, Professor Aronnax, and if I can answer it, I will."
"Well then, Captain, how does it happen that you, who have broken off all connection with the land, own forests on Crespo Island?"
"Professor," the captain answered me, "the forests I own ask the sun for neither light nor warmth. No lions, no tigers, no panthers, no quadruped of any kind sets foot in them. They are known to me alone. They grow for me alone. They are not land forests at all, but undersea forests."
"Undersea forests!" I exclaimed.
"Yes, Professor."
"And you're offering to take me there?"
"Precisely."
"On foot?"
"On foot, and dry-shod at that."
"Hunting?"
"Hunting."
"Rifle in hand?"
"Rifle in hand."
I looked at the commander of the Nautilus in a way that was hardly flattering to him.
"Decidedly, his mind is diseased," I thought. "He's had a fit that's lasted eight days, and that's lasting still. What a shame! I liked him better strange than mad!"
This thought could be read plainly on my face, but Captain Nemo merely invited me to follow him, and I followed like a man resigned to anything.
We came to the dining room, where breakfast was already served.
"Professor Aronnax," the captain said to me, "I'll ask you to share my breakfast without ceremony. We'll talk while we eat. But though I've promised you a walk in the forest, I've made no pledge to have you come across a restaurant there. So eat like a man who probably won't dine until very late."
I did justice to the meal. It was made up of various fish and slices of holothurians — those excellent zoophytes — dressed with very appetizing seaweeds, such as Porphyria laciniata and Laurentia primafetida. The drink was clear water, to which, following the captain's example, I added a few drops of a fermented liquor, extracted, in the Kamchatkan fashion, from the alga known as "palmate Rhodymenia."
Captain Nemo ate, at first, without saying a single word. Then he said to me:
"Professor, when I proposed that you come hunt in my forests of Crespo, you thought me at odds with myself. When I told you it was a matter of undersea forests, you thought me mad. Professor, one must never judge men lightly."
"But, Captain, believe me that—"
"Kindly hear me out, and you'll see whether you have any grounds to accuse me of madness or of contradiction."
"I'm listening."
"Professor, you know as well as I do that a man can live underwater provided he carries his own supply of breathable air with him. In underwater work, the laborer, dressed in a waterproof suit with his head sealed inside a metal capsule, receives air from the outside by means of force pumps and flow regulators."
"That's the diving-suit apparatus," I said.
"Just so, but under those conditions the man isn't free. He's tethered to the pump that sends him air through a rubber hose — a veritable chain riveting him to the land — and if we had to be held to the Nautilus like that, we couldn't go far."
"And the means of being free?" I asked.
"It's to use the Rouquayrol-Denayrouze apparatus, devised by two of your countrymen, but which I've perfected for my own use, and which will let you venture into these new physiological conditions without your organs suffering the least harm. It consists of a tank of thick sheet metal, in which I store air under a pressure of fifty atmospheres. This tank is fastened to the back by straps, like a soldier's pack. Its upper part forms a box out of which the air, held in by a bellows mechanism, can escape only at its normal pressure. In the Rouquayrol apparatus as it is ordinarily used, two rubber tubes run from this box to a kind of mask that seals the operator's nose and mouth; one serves to bring in the air breathed in, the other to let out the air breathed out, and the tongue closes off one or the other according to the needs of respiration. But I, who face considerable pressures at the bottom of the seas, have had to enclose my head, like the head of a diver, in a copper sphere, and it is to this sphere that the two intake and exhaust tubes lead."
"Perfect, Captain Nemo, but the air you carry must run out fast, and once it holds no more than fifteen percent oxygen, it becomes unbreathable."
"No doubt, but as I told you, Professor Aronnax, the pumps of the Nautilus let me store it under considerable pressure, and under those conditions the tank of the apparatus can supply breathable air for nine or ten hours."
"I have no further objection to make," I replied. "I'll only ask you, Captain, how you can light your way at the bottom of the ocean."
"With the Ruhmkorff apparatus, Professor Aronnax. If the first is carried on the back, the second is fastened to the belt. It consists of a Bunsen battery that I activate not with potassium bichromate, but with sodium. An induction coil gathers the electricity produced and directs it toward a specially designed lantern. In this lantern there is a glass coil containing only a residue of carbon dioxide gas. When the apparatus is working, this gas becomes luminous, giving off a whitish, continuous light. Thus equipped, I breathe and I see."
"Captain Nemo, to every one of my objections you give such crushing answers that I no longer dare doubt. Still, though I'm quite forced to accept the Rouquayrol and Ruhmkorff apparatus, I ask leave to hold some reservations about the rifle you mean to arm me with."
"But it isn't a powder rifle," the captain replied.
"An air rifle, then?"
"No doubt. How would you have me manufacture powder aboard my ship, having neither saltpeter, nor sulfur, nor charcoal?"
"Besides," I said, "to fire underwater, in a medium eight hundred fifty-five times denser than air, you'd have to overcome a considerable resistance."
"That would be no reason not to. There exist certain guns, perfected after Fulton by the Englishmen Philip Coles and Burley, by the Frenchman Furcy, by the Italian Landi, which are fitted with a special sealing system and can fire under these conditions. But I repeat, having no powder, I've replaced it with high-pressure air, which the pumps of the Nautilus supply me in abundance."
"But this air must run out quickly."
"Well, don't I have my Rouquayrol tank, which can furnish it at need? All it takes is a suitable tap. Besides, Professor Aronnax, you'll see for yourself that during these undersea hunts one uses up no great quantity of air or of bullets."
"Still, it seems to me that in this half-darkness, in the midst of a liquid so dense compared to the atmosphere, the shots can't carry far and are hardly likely to be deadly."
"Sir, with this rifle, on the contrary, every shot is deadly, and the instant an animal is hit, however lightly, it falls as if struck by lightning."
"Why?"
"Because what this rifle fires are not ordinary bullets, but little glass capsules — invented by the Austrian chemist Leniebroek — of which I have a considerable stock. These glass capsules, sheathed in a steel casing and weighted with a lead base, are true little Leyden jars, in which electricity is forced to a very high tension. At the slightest impact they discharge, and the animal, however powerful it may be, drops dead. I'll add that these capsules are no bigger than number-four shot, and that the charge of an ordinary rifle could hold ten of them."
"I'll argue no more," I replied, rising from the table, "and I have nothing left to do but take up my rifle. Wherever you go, I'll go."
Captain Nemo led me toward the stern of the Nautilus, and, passing by the cabin of Ned and Conseil, I called my two companions, who followed us at once.
Then we came to a cell located alongside, near the engine room, in which we were to put on our walking gear.
This cell was, strictly speaking, the arsenal and the changing room of the Nautilus. A dozen diving suits hung along the wall, waiting for anyone who cared to go walking.
When Ned Land laid eyes on them, he made no secret of how little he wanted to climb into one.
"But my good Ned," I said to him, "the forests of Crespo Island are nothing more than underwater forests!"
"Terrific," grumbled the harpooner, watching his dreams of fresh meat evaporate. "And you, Professor Aronnax, you're going to squeeze yourself into one of those getups?"
"I'm afraid I must, Master Ned."
"Suit yourself, Professor," he answered with a shrug. "But as for me, unless somebody forces me into it, I'll never set foot inside one of those things."
"No one is going to force you, Master Ned," said Captain Nemo.
"And Conseil means to risk it?" Ned asked.
"I go wherever Master goes," Conseil replied.
At a word from the captain, two of the crew came to help us into these heavy waterproof garments, made of seamless rubber and built to withstand tremendous pressures. They were like a suit of armor at once supple and unyielding. Each formed a pair of trousers and a jacket. The trousers ended in thick boots weighted with heavy lead soles. The fabric of the jacket was reinforced by strips of copper that plated the chest like a cuirass, shielding it against the crush of the water while leaving the lungs free to work; the sleeves ended in soft, flexible gloves that in no way hampered the movements of the hand.
There was, as you can see, a world of difference between these perfected diving suits and the shapeless contraptions — the cork breastplates, the leather overjackets, the sea-coats, the airtight chests, and the rest — that had been invented and touted in the eighteenth century.
Captain Nemo, one of his companions — a sort of Hercules who must have possessed prodigious strength — Conseil, and I were soon dressed in our diving suits. All that remained was to seat our heads inside their metal spheres. But before we came to that, I asked the captain's permission to examine the guns that had been set aside for us.
One of the Nautilus's men handed me an ordinary-looking gun whose butt, made of sheet steel and hollow inside, was of fairly large size. It served as a reservoir for compressed air, which a valve, worked by a trigger, released into the metal barrel. A magazine hollowed out within the thickness of the butt held some twenty electric bullets that, by means of a spring, loaded themselves automatically into the barrel. The moment one shot was fired, the next was ready to go.
"Captain Nemo," I said, "this weapon is perfect, and easy to handle. I ask nothing better than to try it out. But how are we to reach the bottom of the sea?"
"At this moment, Professor, the Nautilus is grounded in ten meters of water, and we have only to set out."
"But how will we get out?"
"You are about to see."
Captain Nemo thrust his head into the spherical helmet. Conseil and I did the same — though not before hearing the Canadian fling us an ironic "Happy hunting!" The top of our suits ended in a threaded copper collar onto which the metal helmet screwed. Three portholes, protected by thick glass, let us see in every direction simply by turning our heads inside the sphere. As soon as the helmet was in place, the Rouquayrol apparatus strapped to our backs began to work, and for my part I breathed easily.
With the Ruhmkorff lamp hanging at my belt and the gun in my hand, I was ready to set out. But to be honest, imprisoned in these heavy garments and nailed to the deck by my lead soles, I would have found it impossible to take a single step.
But this had been anticipated, for I felt myself being pushed into a small chamber next to the changing room. My companions, towed along in the same way, followed after me. I heard a door fitted with valves close behind us, and a deep darkness enveloped us.
After a few minutes, a sharp hissing reached my ear. I felt a distinct sensation of cold rise from my feet to my chest. Clearly, from inside the vessel someone had opened a tap and let in the water from outside, which flooded over us and soon filled the chamber. A second door, cut in the side of the Nautilus, then swung open. A dim light shone on us. An instant later, our feet were treading the floor of the sea.
And now, how could I ever retrace the impressions this walk beneath the waters left with me? Words are powerless to tell of such marvels! When the painter's own brush cannot capture the effects peculiar to the liquid element, how could the pen ever hope to reproduce them?
Captain Nemo walked ahead, and his companion followed us a few paces behind. Conseil and I kept close together, as though an exchange of words had been possible through our metal shells. Already I no longer felt the weight of my clothing, my boots, my air reservoir, or the heavy sphere in the middle of which my head rattled like an almond in its shell. Plunged in the water, all these objects lost a portion of their weight equal to that of the liquid they displaced, and I found myself the happy beneficiary of that law of physics discovered by Archimedes. I was no longer an inert mass; I had a relatively great freedom of movement.
The light, which lit up the ground to thirty feet below the surface of the ocean, astonished me by its power. The sun's rays passed easily through this watery mass and dissolved its color. I could make out objects clearly at a distance of a hundred meters. Beyond that, the depths shaded off into the fine gradations of ultramarine, then turned blue in the far distance, and faded away into a vague darkness. Truly, this water surrounding me was only a kind of air, denser than the earth's atmosphere but nearly as transparent. Above me I could see the calm surface of the sea.
We walked on fine, smooth sand, not rippled like that of the beaches, which keep the imprint of the swell. This dazzling carpet, a true mirror, hurled back the sun's rays with a startling intensity. Hence the immense glare that penetrated every molecule of the water. Will I be believed if I claim that at this depth of thirty feet I could see as if in broad daylight?
For a quarter of an hour I trod that blazing sand, strewn with an impalpable dust of seashells. The hull of the Nautilus, stretched out like a long reef, was gradually disappearing, but its beacon, once night fell in the midst of the waters, would help guide us back on board by casting its rays with perfect clearness. This is an effect hard to grasp for anyone who has only seen such whitish sheets of light on land. There, the dust with which the air is saturated gives them the look of a luminous fog; but on the sea, as beneath it, these electric beams travel with an incomparable purity.
Meanwhile we kept walking on, and the vast plain of sand seemed to stretch on without end. With my hand I parted the liquid curtains that closed again behind me, and the track of my footsteps vanished at once under the pressure of the water.
Before long, the shapes of a few objects, barely sketched in the distance, took form before my eyes. I recognized magnificent foregrounds of rocks carpeted with zoophytes of the finest kind, and I was struck at once by an effect peculiar to this element.
It was then ten in the morning. The sun's rays struck the surface of the waves at a rather oblique angle, and at the touch of their light — broken up by refraction as though through a prism — flowers, rocks, seedlings, shells, and polyps were tinged along their edges with the seven colors of the solar spectrum. It was a marvel, a feast for the eyes, this tangle of colored tones, a veritable kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue — in a word, the whole palette of a mad colorist! How I longed to share with Conseil the vivid sensations flooding into my brain, and to vie with him in cries of admiration! How I wished I knew, like Captain Nemo and his companion, how to trade my thoughts by means of agreed-upon signs! And so, for want of anything better, I talked to myself, I shouted inside the copper box that capped my head, spending on empty words perhaps more air than I ought.
Faced with this splendid spectacle, Conseil had stopped short, as I had. Plainly the worthy fellow, in the presence of these specimens of zoophytes and mollusks, was classifying, forever classifying. Polyps and echinoderms abounded on the ground. The various isis corals, the cornularians that live in isolation, tufts of virgin oculina — known long ago as "white coral" — the fungia bristling in the shape of mushrooms, the anemones clinging by their muscular disks, all made up a bed of flowers, enameled with porpitae decked in their collar of azure tentacles, with starfish that studded the sand, and with warty astrophyton — fine lace embroidered by the hands of the water-nymphs, whose festoons swayed to the faint ripples stirred up by our walking. It was a real sorrow to me to crush beneath my steps the brilliant specimens of mollusks that littered the ground by the thousand — the concentric scallops, the hammer shells, the donax clams (true leaping shells), the top shells, the red helmet shells, the angel-wing stromb shells, the sea hares, and so many other products of this inexhaustible ocean. But we had to keep walking, and on we went, while overhead there sailed troops of Portuguese men-of-war trailing their ultramarine tentacles behind them, jellyfish whose opaline or soft-pink umbrellas, fringed with a band of azure, sheltered us from the sun's rays, and pelagia panopyra that, in the dark, would have sown our path with phosphorescent gleams!
All these marvels I glimpsed within the space of a quarter of a mile, scarcely pausing, and following Captain Nemo, who beckoned me on with a gesture. Before long the nature of the ground changed. To the plain of sand there succeeded a layer of viscous mud that the Americans call "ooze," composed solely of siliceous or calcareous shells. Then we crossed a meadow of seaweed, open-sea plants that the waters had not yet torn away, and whose growth was rampant. These close-woven lawns, soft to the foot, could have rivaled the most luxurious carpets ever woven by human hands. But even as the greenery spread out beneath our steps, it did not desert our heads. A light arbor of marine plants, ranked in that exuberant family of the algae — of which more than two thousand species are known — interwove at the surface of the waters. I saw floating there long ribbons of fucus, some globular, others tubular; laurencia and cladostephus with their delicate fronds; palmate rhodymenia resembling the fans of a cactus. I noticed that the green plants kept nearer the surface of the sea, while the red ones held to a middle depth, leaving to the black or brown hydrophytes the task of forming the gardens and flower beds of the ocean's deepest layers.
These algae are truly a wonder of creation, one of the marvels of the world's flora. This one family produces at once the smallest and the largest plants on the globe. For just as forty thousand of these all-but-invisible seedlings have been counted in a space of five square millimeters, so too specimens of fucus have been gathered whose length exceeded five hundred meters.
We had left the Nautilus about an hour and a half earlier. It was nearly noon. I could tell by the perpendicular fall of the sun's rays, which no longer refracted. The magic of the colors faded away little by little, and the shades of emerald and sapphire were wiped from our firmament. We walked with a steady tread that rang out against the ground with an astonishing intensity. The faintest sounds carried with a speed the ear is not used to on land. Water, in fact, is a better conductor of sound than air, and it travels through water four times faster.
Just then the ground fell away in a marked slope. The light took on a uniform tint. We reached a depth of a hundred meters, where we came under a pressure of ten atmospheres. But my diving suit was built in such a way that I suffered nothing at all from this pressure. I felt only a certain stiffness in the joints of my fingers, and even that discomfort was not long in disappearing. As for the fatigue that ought to have come with this two-hour walk in a harness I was so little used to, there was none. My movements, helped along by the water, came with a surprising ease.
Arrived at this depth of three hundred feet, I could still perceive the sun's rays, but faintly. Their intense brilliance had given way to a reddish twilight, a halfway state between day and night. Still, we could see well enough to make our way, and there was no need yet to switch on the Ruhmkorff apparatus.
At that moment Captain Nemo stopped. He waited until I had rejoined him, and with a finger he pointed out to me some dark masses that stood out in the shadows a short distance off.
"That is the forest of Crespo Island," I thought — and I was not mistaken.
We had reached at last the edge of this forest — surely one of the finest in all Captain Nemo's vast domain. He regarded it as his own, claiming over it the very rights the first men held in the first days of the world. And who, after all, would have disputed his ownership of this underwater estate? What bolder pioneer would ever have come, axe in hand, to clear its shadowy thickets?
This forest was made up of great tree-like plants, and the moment we passed beneath its towering arches, my eyes were struck at once by a singular arrangement of their branches — an arrangement I had never observed until then.
Not one of the grasses carpeting the ground, not one of the boughs bristling on the shrubs, crept along the bottom, or curved over, or spread out in a horizontal plane. Every one of them climbed toward the surface of the ocean. There was no filament, no ribbon, however slender, that did not hold itself straight as an iron rod. The wracks and the sea-vines developed along a rigid, perpendicular line, obeying the density of the element that had produced them. Motionless too: when I pushed them aside with my hand, these plants sprang back at once to their original position. This was the realm of the vertical.
Soon I grew used to this strange arrangement, and to the relative gloom that wrapped around us. The forest floor was strewn with sharp blocks of stone, hard to avoid. The undersea flora struck me as remarkably complete here, richer even than it would have been in the arctic or tropical zones, where its species are fewer. But for a few minutes I kept mixing up the kingdoms in spite of myself, mistaking zoophytes for water plants, animals for vegetables. And who would not have made the same mistake? Fauna and flora touch so closely in this underwater world!
I noticed that all these products of the plant kingdom held to the ground only by the shallowest of grips. Without roots, indifferent to the solid body — sand, shell, shard, or pebble — that supported them, they asked of it only a foothold, not the source of their life. These plants proceed from nothing but themselves, and the principle of their existence lies in the water that holds them up and feeds them. Most of them, instead of leaves, put out little blades of the most fanciful shapes, confined to a narrow range of colors that ran only to pink, carmine, green, olive, tawny, and brown. Here I saw again — not dried out this time, as in the Nautilus's specimens — peacock's-tail algae spread into fans that seemed to beg for a breeze, scarlet ceramium weeds, tangleweeds stretching out their young, edible shoots, thread-like sea-otters' cabbage rippling and unfurling to a height of fifteen meters, clusters of acetabularia whose stalks grow upward from the crown, and any number of other open-sea plants, all of them flowerless. "A curious anomaly," as one witty naturalist put it, "a strange element indeed, where the animal kingdom flowers and the plant kingdom does not!"
Among these various shrubs, as tall as the trees of the temperate zones, and under their damp shade, gathered real bushes of living flowers, hedges of zoophytes on which bloomed brain corals zebra-striped with twisting furrows, yellowish cup-corals with translucent tentacles, and turf-like tufts of zoanthids. And to complete the illusion, the flying gurnards darted from branch to branch like a swarm of hummingbirds, while yellow lepisacanths with bristling jaws and sharp scales, along with sea-robins and boarfish, rose up under our feet like a flock of flushed snipe.
Toward one o'clock, Captain Nemo gave the signal to halt. For my own part I was glad enough of it, and we stretched out beneath a bower of winged kelp, whose long tapering strands stood up like arrows.
That moment of rest struck me as delicious. All we lacked was the charm of conversation. But it was impossible to speak, impossible to answer. I only brought my big copper head close to Conseil's. I saw the good fellow's eyes shining with contentment, and, as a sign of his satisfaction, he wriggled inside his shell with the most comical air in the world.
After four hours of this walk, I was astonished to feel no violent hunger. What accounted for this state of my stomach, I couldn't say. But in exchange, I felt an overwhelming urge to sleep, as happens to every diver. And so my eyes soon closed behind their thick glass, and I sank into an irresistible drowsiness that the movement of walking alone had been holding off until then. Captain Nemo and his sturdy companion, stretched out in that limpid crystal, set us the example of sleep.
How long I stayed sunk in that slumber I couldn't judge; but when I woke, it seemed to me the sun was sinking toward the horizon. Captain Nemo was already on his feet, and I was beginning to stretch my limbs, when an unexpected apparition brought me abruptly upright.
A few steps off, a monstrous sea-spider, a full meter high, was watching me with its squinting eyes, poised to spring. Thick as my diving suit was — thick enough to protect me from the creature's bite — I couldn't hold back a shudder of horror. Conseil and the sailor from the Nautilus woke at that moment. Captain Nemo pointed the hideous crustacean out to his companion, who felled it at once with a blow from the butt of his rifle, and I saw the monster's horrible legs writhe in terrible convulsions.
This encounter set me thinking that other, more fearsome animals must haunt these dark depths, and that my diving suit would be no protection against their attacks. I hadn't given it a thought until then, and I resolved to stay on my guard. I supposed, moreover, that this halt marked the end of our walk; but I was wrong, and instead of turning back to the Nautilus, Captain Nemo pressed on with his daring excursion.
The ground kept dropping away, and its slope, growing steeper, led us to greater depths. It must have been around three o'clock when we reached a narrow valley, cut between high sheer walls, lying at a depth of a hundred and fifty meters. Thanks to the perfection of our equipment, we thus went ninety meters beyond the limit that nature had seemed until now to impose on the undersea excursions of man.
I say a hundred and fifty meters, though no instrument allowed me to gauge the distance. But I knew that even in the clearest seas the sun's rays could penetrate no deeper. And, sure enough, the darkness now became profound. Not an object was visible ten steps off. So I was groping my way forward when I suddenly saw a fairly vivid white light shine out. Captain Nemo had just switched on his electric apparatus. His companion did the same. Conseil and I followed their lead. By turning a screw, I established the connection between the coil and the glass spiral, and the sea, lit by our four lanterns, glowed within a radius of twenty-five meters.
Captain Nemo went on plunging deeper into the dark depths of the forest, whose shrubs were thinning out more and more. I noticed that plant life was disappearing faster than animal life. The open-sea plants had already forsaken the ground, which had turned barren, while a prodigious number of animals — zoophytes, articulates, mollusks, and fish — still swarmed over it.
As I walked, it occurred to me that the light of our Ruhmkorff apparatus was bound to draw in some of the inhabitants of these dark strata. But if any did approach us, they at least kept a distance regrettable for hunters. Several times I saw Captain Nemo stop and bring his gun to his shoulder; then, after a few moments' observation, he would straighten up and resume his march.
At last, toward four o'clock or so, this marvelous excursion came to an end. A wall of superb rock reared up before us, an imposing mass — a heaping of gigantic blocks, an enormous granite cliff hollowed with dark grottoes, but offering no practicable slope to climb. These were the coastal cliffs of Crespo Island. This was dry land.
Captain Nemo stopped short. A gesture from him brought us all to a halt, and however much I longed to scale that rampart, I had to stop. Here the domains of Captain Nemo ended. He would not go beyond them. Past this point lay that portion of the globe he was never to set foot on again.
The return began. Captain Nemo had taken the lead of his little troop once more, moving forward without a moment's hesitation. I thought I could tell that we weren't taking the same path back to the Nautilus. This new route, very steep and therefore very trying, brought us quickly nearer the surface of the sea. Still, this return to the upper layers wasn't so sudden that the decompression came too fast — which might have brought on grave disorders in our systems and caused those internal injuries so fatal to divers. Very quickly the light reappeared and grew, and, since the sun was already low on the horizon, refraction once again fringed every object with a spectral ring.
At a depth of ten meters, we walked in the midst of a swarm of little fish of every kind, more numerous than the birds of the air, and more nimble too; but no aquatic game worth a shot had yet offered itself to our eyes.
At that moment I saw the captain's weapon snap to his shoulder and track some moving object through the bushes. The shot went off, I heard a faint whistle, and an animal dropped, struck down, a few steps away.
It was a magnificent sea otter, an enhydra, the only quadruped that lives exclusively in the sea. This otter, a meter and a half long, must have been of very great value. Its coat, chestnut-brown above and silvered below, made one of those admirable furs so sought after in the Russian and Chinese markets; the fineness and sheen of its fur guaranteed it a value of at least two thousand francs. I greatly admired this curious mammal, with its rounded head trimmed with short ears, its round eyes, its white whiskers like a cat's, its webbed and clawed feet, and its bushy tail. Hunted and harried by the fishermen, this precious carnivore is becoming extremely rare, and it has taken refuge mainly in the northern reaches of the Pacific, where its species will most likely soon die out altogether.
Captain Nemo's companion came to pick up the animal, hoisted it onto his shoulder, and we set off again.
For an hour, a plain of sand unrolled before our steps. Often it rose to within less than two meters of the surface of the water. I could then see our own image, sharply reflected, sketched upside down, and above us there appeared an identical troop, reproducing our movements and our gestures, in every point exactly like us, except that it walked head-down and feet-up.
Another effect worth noting: the passing of thick clouds that formed and vanished swiftly. But on reflection I understood that these so-called clouds were due only to the varying thickness of the long ground-swells, and I could even make out the foamy "whitecaps" that their breaking crests multiplied across the water. There was nothing, right down to the shadows of the great birds passing over our heads, whose quick grazing of the sea's surface I did not catch.
On this occasion I witnessed one of the finest shots that ever set a hunter's nerves tingling. A great bird of wide wingspan, plainly visible, came gliding closer. Captain Nemo's companion took aim and fired the instant it was only a few meters above the waves. The creature dropped, struck down, and its fall carried it within reach of the deft hunter, who seized it. It was an albatross of the finest kind, an admirable specimen of the open-sea birds.
Our march had not been interrupted by this incident. For two hours we followed sometimes sandy plains, sometimes meadows of seaweed that were very hard going. Frankly, I could go no further when I caught sight of a dim glow that broke the darkness of the waters half a mile off. It was the beacon of the Nautilus. Within twenty minutes we would be aboard, and there I would breathe easy again, for it seemed to me that my tank was now supplying only air very poor in oxygen. But I had reckoned without an encounter that delayed our arrival somewhat.
I had fallen some twenty steps behind when I saw Captain Nemo come hurrying back toward me. With his powerful hand, he pressed me down to the ground, while his companion did the same to Conseil. At first I didn't know what to make of this abrupt assault, but I was reassured to see the captain lie down beside me and stay motionless.
So there I was, stretched out on the bottom, sheltered exactly beneath a bush of seaweed, when, raising my head, I saw enormous masses go noisily past, casting off phosphorescent gleams.
My blood froze in my veins! I had recognized the formidable sharks that threatened us. It was a pair of tintorea sharks, terrible creatures with enormous tails and dull, glassy stares, that distill a phosphorescent matter through holes pierced around their snouts. Monstrous fireflies, that grind a whole man to pulp in their iron jaws! I don't know whether Conseil was busy classifying them, but for my own part I studied their silvered bellies, their fearsome maws bristling with teeth, from a rather unscientific point of view — more as a victim than as a naturalist.
Very luckily, these voracious animals see poorly. They passed without noticing us, grazing us with their brownish fins, and we escaped, as if by a miracle, a danger surely greater than meeting a tiger in the depths of a forest.
Half an hour later, guided by the electric trail, we reached the Nautilus. The outer door had been left open, and Captain Nemo closed it again the moment we were back in the first cell. Then he pressed a button. I heard the pumps working inside the vessel, I felt the water sinking around me, and in a few moments the cell was completely emptied. The inner door then opened, and we passed into the changing room.
There, our diving suits were stripped off, not without some trouble, and, thoroughly worn out, faint with hunger and sleep, I made my way back to my cabin, filled with wonder at this astonishing excursion to the bottom of the seas.
The next morning, November 18, I had fully recovered from the exhaustion of the day before, and I climbed up onto the platform just as the Nautilus's first officer was pronouncing his daily phrase. It occurred to me then that it must have to do with the state of the sea — or rather that it meant: "We have nothing in sight."
And indeed, the ocean was deserted. Not a sail on the horizon. The heights of Crespo Island had vanished during the night. The sea drank in all the colors of the spectrum except the blue, reflecting that in every direction and taking on a magnificent shade of indigo. A watered-silk pattern of broad bands rippled regularly across the swelling waves.
I was admiring this splendid face of the ocean when Captain Nemo appeared. He seemed not to notice my presence, and began a series of astronomical observations. Then, his work finished, he went and leaned his elbows on the housing of the beacon-lamp, and his gaze lost itself over the surface of the sea.
Meanwhile some twenty of the Nautilus's sailors — all of them vigorous, well-built men — had come up onto the platform. They had come to haul in the nets that had been trailing behind us through the night. These sailors clearly belonged to different nations, though the European type was marked in every one of them. I recognized, beyond any doubt, Irishmen, Frenchmen, a few Slavs, a Greek or a Cretan. Still, these men were sparing with their words, and among themselves they used only that strange tongue whose origin I could not so much as guess at. So I had to give up questioning them.
The nets were hauled aboard. They were a kind of trawl, like those used off the coast of Normandy — vast pouches held half-open by a floating spar and by a chain threaded through the lower meshes. These pouches, dragged along on their iron footropes, swept the ocean floor and gathered up everything in their path. That day they brought up some curious samples from these fish-rich waters: anglerfish, whose comical movements have earned them the nickname of clowns; black commersons, fitted with their antennae; wavy triggerfish ringed with red bands; crescent puffers, whose venom is extremely subtle; a few olive-colored lampreys; long-snouted grenadiers covered in silvery scales; cutlassfish, whose electric power equals that of the electric eel and the torpedo ray; scaly featherbacks with brown transverse stripes; greenish cod; several varieties of gobies; and so on — and finally a few fish of larger proportions: a jack with a prominent head, a meter long; several fine bonito mackerel splashed with blue and silver; and three magnificent tuna whose swiftness had not been enough to save them from the trawl.
I reckoned that this cast of the net brought up more than a thousand pounds of fish. It was a fine haul, but no surprise. These nets stay in tow for hours, and they cage up an entire aquatic world in their prison of twine. So we would have no shortage of provisions, and excellent ones at that — supplies the speed of the Nautilus and the lure of its electric light could renew endlessly.
These various products of the sea were at once lowered through the hatch toward the storerooms, some destined to be eaten fresh, others to be preserved.
With the fishing done and the air supply renewed, I supposed the Nautilus was about to resume its underwater excursion, and I was getting ready to go back to my cabin, when Captain Nemo turned to me and said, without any preamble:
"Look at this ocean, Professor — isn't it endowed with a life of its own? Doesn't it have its rages and its tendernesses? Yesterday it fell asleep as we did, and now here it is, waking after a peaceful night!"
Not a good morning, not a good evening! You would have thought this strange man was simply carrying on a conversation with me that had already begun.
"Look," he went on, "it wakes beneath the sun's caresses! It's about to live its daytime life all over again. It makes for a fascinating study, to follow the workings of its organism. It has a pulse, it has arteries, it has its spasms — and I say that clever man Maury was right when he discovered in it a circulation as real as the circulation of the blood in animals."
It was clear that Captain Nemo expected no answer from me, and it seemed pointless to lavish on him the "Of courses," the "Certainlys," and the "You're quite rights." He was speaking rather to himself, taking long pauses between his sentences. It was a meditation aloud.
"Yes," he said, "the ocean has a true circulation, and to bring it about, the Creator of all things had only to multiply within it heat, salt, and microscopic animals. Heat, in fact, creates different densities, which give rise to currents and countercurrents. Evaporation — nil in the hyperborean regions, very active in the equatorial zones — sets up a permanent exchange between the tropical waters and the polar waters. What's more, I have caught these currents flowing top to bottom and bottom to top, and they make up the true respiration of the ocean. I have seen the molecule of seawater, warmed at the surface, sink back down toward the depths, reach its maximum density at two degrees below zero, then, cooling further, grow lighter and rise again. At the poles you'll see the consequences of this phenomenon, and you'll understand why, by this law of provident nature, freezing can never occur anywhere but at the surface of the water!"
While Captain Nemo was finishing his sentence, I was saying to myself: "The pole! Does this bold character mean to take us all the way there?"
But the captain had fallen silent, contemplating this element he had studied so completely and so ceaselessly. Then, resuming:
"Salts," he said, "are present in the sea in considerable quantity, Professor, and if you removed all of those it holds in solution, you would make a mass of four and a half million cubic leagues, which, spread out over the globe, would form a layer more than ten meters high. And don't imagine that the presence of these salts is due to some caprice of nature. No. They make the marine waters less liable to evaporation, and keep the winds from carrying off too great a quantity of vapor — which, condensing again, would flood the temperate zones. An immense role, the role of a stabilizer in the general economy of the globe!"
Captain Nemo stopped, even stood up, took a few steps along the platform, and came back to me:
"As for the infusoria," he resumed, "as for those billions of microscopic animals, which exist by the million in a single droplet, and of which it takes eight hundred thousand to weigh a milligram — their role is no less important. They absorb the marine salts, they assimilate the solid elements of the water, and, true makers of limestone continents, they manufacture corals and madrepores! And so the drop of water, stripped of its mineral nourishment, grows lighter, rises again to the surface, absorbs there the salts left behind by evaporation, grows heavier, sinks back down, and brings the microscopic animals fresh elements to absorb. Hence a double current, ascending and descending — and always motion, always life! Life, more intense than on the continents, more exuberant, more infinite, blossoming in every part of this ocean — an element of death for man, so they have said, but an element of life for myriads of animals, and for me!"
When Captain Nemo spoke like this, he was transfigured, and he stirred in me an extraordinary emotion.
"And so," he added, "there is where true existence lies! And I could well conceive of the founding of nautical cities, of clusters of underwater houses that, like the Nautilus, would come up to breathe each morning at the surface of the seas — free cities, if ever there were any, independent towns! And yet — who knows whether some despot..."
Captain Nemo finished his sentence with a violent gesture. Then, addressing me directly, as if to drive off a grim thought:
"Professor Aronnax," he asked, "do you know the depth of the ocean?"
"I know, at least, Captain, what the principal soundings have taught us."
"Could you cite them for me, so that I might check them if need be?"
"Here are a few," I answered, "that come back to me. If I'm not mistaken, an average depth of eight thousand two hundred meters has been found in the north Atlantic, and of two thousand five hundred meters in the Mediterranean. The most remarkable soundings were taken in the south Atlantic, near the thirty-fifth parallel, and they gave twelve thousand meters, fourteen thousand and ninety-one meters, and fifteen thousand one hundred and forty-nine meters. All in all, it's estimated that if the sea bottom were leveled off, its average depth would be about seven kilometers."
"Good, Professor," Captain Nemo replied. "We'll show you better than that, I hope. As for the average depth of this part of the Pacific, I'll tell you that it is only four thousand meters."
That said, Captain Nemo made for the hatch and disappeared down the ladder. I followed him, and went back into the grand salon. The propeller began to turn at once, and the log registered a speed of twenty miles an hour.
Over the days and weeks that followed, Captain Nemo was very sparing with his visits. I saw him only at rare intervals. His first officer regularly took the ship's position, which I would find marked on the chart, so that I could trace the Nautilus's course exactly.
Conseil and Land spent long hours with me. Conseil had told his friend all the wonders of our undersea walk, and the Canadian was sorry not to have come along. But I hoped the chance to visit the oceanic forests would present itself again.
Almost every day, for a few hours, the panels of the salon would open, and our eyes never tired of probing the mysteries of the underwater world.
The Nautilus's general heading was southeast, and it kept between a hundred and a hundred and fifty meters deep. One day, though, on some whim or other, drawn down at an angle by its inclined planes, it reached the layers of water lying at two thousand meters. The thermometer read a temperature of 4.25 degrees centigrade — a temperature that, at this depth, seems common to all latitudes.
On November 26, at three in the morning, the Nautilus crossed the Tropic of Cancer at 172° longitude. On the 27th, it passed in sight of the Sandwich Islands, where the illustrious Cook met his death on February 14, 1779. By then we had covered four thousand eight hundred and sixty leagues since our starting point. That morning, when I came up onto the platform, I made out, two miles to leeward, Hawaii, the largest of the seven islands that make up this archipelago. I distinguished clearly its cultivated fringe, the various mountain chains that run parallel to the coast, and its volcanoes, dominated by Mauna Kea, which rises five thousand meters above sea level. Among other samples from these waters, the nets brought up peacock sea-fans — flattened polyps of a graceful shape, peculiar to this part of the ocean.
The Nautilus held to its southeast heading. It crossed the Equator on December 1, at 142° longitude, and on the 4th of the same month, after a swift passage marked by no incident, we came within sight of the Marquesas group. I sighted, three miles off, at 8°57′ south latitude and 139°32′ west longitude, Martin Point on Nuku Hiva, the chief island of this group, which belongs to France. I saw only the wooded mountains outlined against the horizon, for Captain Nemo did not care to close with land. There the nets brought up fine specimens of fish: dolphinfish with azure fins and gold tails, whose flesh has no rival in the world; hologymnosus, all but scaleless yet of an exquisite taste; bony-jawed cardinalfish; and yellowish frigate mackerel worthy of the bonito — all fish deserving to be entered in the ship's larder.
After leaving these charming islands under the protection of the French flag, from December 4 to 11 the Nautilus covered about two thousand miles. This stretch of sailing was marked by an encounter with an immense host of squid, curious mollusks very close kin to the cuttlefish. French fishermen call them encornets; they belong to the class of cephalopods and to the family of the dibranchiates, which also takes in the cuttlefish and the argonauts. These animals were studied with particular care by the naturalists of antiquity, and they furnished many a metaphor to the orators of the Agora, as well as an excellent dish at the tables of wealthy citizens — if we are to believe Athenaeus, a Greek physician who lived before Galen.
It was during the night of December 9 to 10 that the Nautilus met this army of mollusks, which are especially nocturnal. You could count them by the million. They were migrating from the temperate zones toward the warmer ones, following the same route as the herrings and sardines. We watched them through the thick crystal panes, swimming backward with extreme speed, propelling themselves by means of their locomotor tube, chasing fish and mollusks, eating the small ones, eaten by the big ones, and thrashing in indescribable confusion the ten arms that nature has planted on their heads like a mane of pneumatic serpents. For all its speed, the Nautilus sailed for several hours in the midst of this troop of animals, and its nets brought up an uncountable number of them, among which I recognized the nine species that d'Orbigny has classified for the Pacific Ocean.
As you can see, throughout this crossing the sea lavished its most marvelous spectacles on us without pause. It varied them endlessly. It changed its scenery and its staging for the pleasure of our eyes, and we were called not only to contemplate the works of the Creator in the midst of the liquid element, but also to penetrate the most formidable mysteries of the ocean.
During the day of December 11, I was busy reading in the grand salon. Ned Land and Conseil were watching the luminous waters through the half-open panels. The Nautilus lay motionless. Its tanks filled, it held at a depth of a thousand meters — a scarcely inhabited region of the oceans, where only the large fish made rare appearances.
Just then I was reading a charming book by Jean Macé, The Servants of the Stomach, and savoring its ingenious lessons, when Conseil broke off my reading.
"Would Master care to come here a moment?" he said in a peculiar voice.
"What is it, Conseil?"
"Let Master have a look."
I got up, went and leaned my elbows before the pane, and looked.
There, in the full glare of the electric light, an enormous blackish mass hung motionless in the midst of the waters. I studied it carefully, trying to make out the nature of this gigantic cetacean. But a thought suddenly crossed my mind.
"A ship!" I cried.
"Yes," answered the Canadian, "a disabled vessel that's gone straight to the bottom!"
Ned Land was not mistaken. We were in the presence of a ship whose cut shrouds still hung from their chainplates. Its hull seemed to be in good condition, and its wreck was at most a few hours old. Three stumps of masts, sheared off two feet above the deck, showed that the vessel, in trouble, had been forced to sacrifice its rigging. But, lying over on its side, it had filled with water, and it still listed to port. A sorry sight, this hulk lost beneath the waves — yet sorrier still the view of its deck, where a few corpses, lashed by ropes, still lay! I counted four of them — four men, one of whom stood upright at the helm — and then a woman, half emerged through the skylight of the poop deck, holding a child in her arms. This woman was young. In the vivid glare of the Nautilus's lights, I could make out her features, which the water had not yet begun to disfigure. In one last effort, she had lifted her child above her head — poor little creature, whose arms were locked around its mother's neck! The attitude of the four sailors struck me as terrifying, twisted as they were in convulsive movements, making one final effort to tear free of the ropes that bound them to the ship. Alone, calmer, his face clear and grave, his graying hair plastered to his forehead, his hand clenched on the wheel, the helmsman seemed still to be steering his shipwrecked three-master through the depths of the ocean!
What a scene! We stood mute, our hearts pounding, before this shipwreck caught in the act and, so to speak, photographed in its final minute! And already I could see, their eyes ablaze, enormous sharks advancing, drawn by this bait of human flesh!
Meanwhile the Nautilus, maneuvering, turned around the sunken ship, and for an instant I was able to read on its stern board:
Florida, Sunderland.
That terrible spectacle was only the first in a whole series of maritime disasters that the Nautilus was to encounter along its course. Ever since it had begun following more frequented waters, we often caught sight of wrecked hulls rotting away between the surface and the deep, and, lower down, cannons, cannonballs, anchors, chains, and a thousand other iron objects being devoured by rust.
Meanwhile, still carried along by the Nautilus — where we lived as though cut off from the world — on December 11 we came within sight of the Pomotou archipelago, Bougainville's old "dangerous group," which stretches across a span of five hundred leagues from east-southeast to west-northwest, between 13°30′ and 23°50′ south latitude, and 125°30′ and 151°30′ west longitude, from Ducie Island to Lazareff Island. The archipelago covers an area of three hundred and seventy square leagues and is made up of some sixty clusters of islands, among which one notes the Gambier group, over which France has imposed its protectorate. These islands are coral formations. A slow but ceaseless upheaval, driven by the labor of the polyps, will one day link them all together. Then this new island will later fuse with the neighboring archipelagos, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia all the way to the Marquesas.
The day I laid out this theory before Captain Nemo, he answered me coldly:
"It isn't new continents the earth needs, but new men!"
The chances of its navigation had led the Nautilus straight toward Clermont-Tonnerre Island, one of the most curious of the group, discovered in 1822 by Captain Bell of the Minerve. I was able, then, to study the madrepore system to which the islands of this ocean owe their existence.
Madrepores — which one must be careful not to confuse with corals — have a tissue coated in a calcareous crust, and the variations in its structure led Monsieur Milne-Edwards, my illustrious teacher, to classify them into five sections. The tiny animalcules that secrete this coral stone live by the billions at the bottom of their cells. It is their calcareous deposits that become rocks, reefs, islets, islands. In one place they form a circular ring surrounding a lagoon or small inner lake, which openings connect with the sea. In another they take the shape of barrier reefs like those along the coasts of New Caledonia and various islands of the Pomotou. Elsewhere, as at Réunion and Mauritius, they raise up fringing reefs — high, sheer walls, alongside which the ocean plunges to considerable depths.
Skirting the sheer flanks of Clermont-Tonnerre Island by only a few cable-lengths, I marveled at the gigantic work accomplished by these microscopic laborers. These walls were specifically the work of the madrepores known as millepores, porites, astraea, and meandrina. These polyps develop above all in the churning surface layers of the sea, and so it is by their upper part that they begin these substructures, which sink little by little along with the debris of secretions that support them. Such, at least, is the theory of Monsieur Darwin, who explains the formation of atolls this way — a theory superior, in my view, to the one that gives the madrepore works a foundation of mountaintops or volcanoes submerged a few feet below sea level.
I could observe these curious walls at very close range, for the sounding line marked more than three hundred meters of depth right at their base, and our electric sheets set the brilliant limestone glittering.
Answering a question Conseil put to me about how long it took these colossal barriers to grow, I astonished him considerably by telling him that scientists reckoned that growth at one-eighth of an inch per century.
"So then," he said to me, "to raise these walls, it took...?"
"A hundred and ninety-two thousand years, my good Conseil, which stretches the biblical days out rather a lot. Besides, the formation of coal — that is, the mineralization of forests swallowed up by floods — required a far greater span of time still. But I would add that the days of the Bible are only epochs, and not the interval that passes between two sunrises, because, according to the Bible itself, the sun does not date from the first day of creation."
When the Nautilus rose back to the surface of the ocean, I could take in the whole spread of this island of Clermont-Tonnerre, low and wooded. Its madrepore rocks had plainly been made fertile by waterspouts and storms. One day some seed, torn from the neighboring lands by a hurricane, fell onto the calcareous layers, mixed with the decomposed remains of fish and sea plants that formed the vegetable soil. A coconut, driven by the waves, arrived on this new coast. The germ took root. The tree, growing tall, held back the water vapor. A stream was born. Vegetation gained ground little by little. A few animalcules, worms, insects, landed on trunks wrenched from the windward islands. Turtles came to lay their eggs. Birds nested in the young trees. In this way animal life developed, and, drawn by the greenery and the fertility, man appeared. And so were formed these islands, the immense works of microscopic animals.
Toward evening, Clermont-Tonnerre melted into the distance, and the Nautilus's course shifted noticeably. After touching the Tropic of Capricorn at the one hundred and thirty-fifth degree of longitude, it headed west-northwest, working its way back up the whole intertropical zone. Though the summer sun was lavish with its rays, we suffered no discomfort from the heat, for thirty or forty meters below the surface the temperature never rose above ten or twelve degrees.
On December 15 we left to the east the alluring Society archipelago and graceful Tahiti, the queen of the Pacific. That morning I glimpsed, a few miles to leeward, the lofty peaks of that island. Its waters supplied the tables aboard with excellent fish — mackerel, bonito, albacore, and varieties of a sea serpent called munerophis.
The Nautilus had covered eight thousand one hundred miles. Nine thousand seven hundred and twenty miles were logged when it passed between the Tonga-Tabou archipelago, where the crews of the Argo, the Port-au-Prince, and the Duke-of-Portland met their end, and the Navigators' archipelago, where Captain de Langle, La Pérouse's friend, was killed. Then it came within sight of the Viti archipelago, where the savages massacred the sailors of the Union and Captain Bureau, of Nantes, commander of the Aimable-Joséphine.
This archipelago, which extends over a span of a hundred leagues from north to south and ninety leagues from east to west, lies between 6° and 2° south latitude and 174° and 179° west longitude. It is made up of a number of islands, islets, and shoals, among which one notes the islands of Viti-Levou, Vanoua-Levou, and Kandubon.
It was Tasman who discovered this group in 1643 — the very year Torricelli invented the barometer and Louis XIV ascended the throne. I leave you to decide which of these events was of greater use to humanity. Then came Cook in 1714, d'Entrecasteaux in 1793, and finally Dumont d'Urville, in 1827, who untangled the whole geographical chaos of this archipelago. The Nautilus drew near the bay of Wailea, the scene of the terrible adventures of that Captain Dillon who was the first to shed light on the mystery of La Pérouse's shipwreck.
This bay, dredged several times over, yielded excellent oysters in abundance. We ate them immoderately, having opened them at our very table, following the precept of Seneca. These mollusks belonged to the species known as ostrea lamellosa, which is very common in Corsica. This Wailea bank must have been enormous, and certainly, were it not for the many causes of destruction, these accumulations would end up filling in the bays, since as many as two million eggs are counted in a single individual.
And if Master Ned Land had no cause to regret his gluttony on this occasion, it is because the oyster is the one dish that never brings on indigestion. Indeed, it takes no fewer than sixteen dozen of these headless mollusks to furnish the three hundred and fifteen grams of nitrogenous matter needed for one man's daily nourishment.
On December 25 the Nautilus was sailing through the middle of the New Hebrides archipelago, which Quiros discovered in 1606, Bougainville explored in 1768, and Cook gave its present name in 1773. This group is made up chiefly of nine large islands and forms a band a hundred and twenty leagues long from north-northwest to south-southeast, lying between 15° and 2° south latitude and between 164° and 168° longitude. We passed fairly close to the island of Aurou, which, at the moment of the midday observations, appeared to me as a mass of green woods crowned by a peak of great height.
That day was Christmas, and Ned Land seemed to me to miss keenly the celebration of "Christmas," the true family festival that Protestants keep with a fervor bordering on fanaticism.
I hadn't seen Captain Nemo for a week or so when, on the morning of the 27th, he came into the grand salon with the air, as always, of a man who had left you five minutes before. I was busy tracing the Nautilus's route on the planisphere. The captain came over, laid a finger on a point on the chart, and spoke this single word:
"Vanikoro."
The name was magic. It was the name of the islets on which La Pérouse's ships had been lost. I sprang to my feet.
"The Nautilus is taking us to Vanikoro?" I asked.
"Yes, Professor," the captain replied.
"And I'll be able to visit those famous islands where the Boussole and the Astrolabe were wrecked?"
"If it would please you, Professor."
"When will we reach Vanikoro?"
"We are there now, Professor."
Followed by Captain Nemo, I climbed up onto the platform, and from there my eyes swept eagerly across the horizon.
To the northeast rose two volcanic islands of unequal size, ringed by a coral reef that measured forty miles around. We were facing the island of Vanikoro proper, to which Dumont d'Urville gave the name Île de la Recherche — Search Island — and we lay directly before the little harbor of Vanou, situated at 16°4′ south latitude and 164°32′ east longitude. The land seemed carpeted in green from the beach up to the interior summits, over which towered Mount Kapogo, four hundred and seventy-six fathoms high.
The Nautilus, after clearing the outer belt of rocks through a narrow pass, found itself inside the breakers, where the sea ran thirty to forty fathoms deep. Under the verdant shade of the mangroves I made out a few natives, who showed extreme surprise at our approach. In this long, blackish body advancing at water level, did they not see some formidable sea creature they had every reason to distrust?
Just then Captain Nemo asked me what I knew of La Pérouse's shipwreck.
"What everyone knows, Captain," I answered him.
"And could you tell me what everyone knows?" he asked, in a slightly ironic tone.
"Very easily."
I recounted for him what the latest work of Dumont d'Urville had brought to light — work of which here is a very brief summary.
La Pérouse and his second-in-command, Captain de Langle, were sent by Louis XVI in 1785 to carry out a voyage of circumnavigation. They sailed aboard the corvettes the Boussole and the Astrolabe, which were never seen again.
In 1791, the French government, rightly troubled by the fate of the two corvettes, fitted out two large storeships, the Recherche and the Espérance, which left Brest on September 28 under the command of Bruni d'Entrecasteaux. Two months later, word came through the deposition of a certain Bowen, commander of the Albermale, that the wreckage of shipwrecked vessels had been seen off the coasts of New Georgia. But d'Entrecasteaux, unaware of this communication — which was uncertain enough, at any rate — steered for the Admiralty Islands, named in a report by Captain Hunter as the site of La Pérouse's shipwreck.
His searches came to nothing. The Espérance and the Recherche even passed straight in front of Vanikoro without stopping, and, all in all, the voyage was a most unhappy one, for it cost the lives of d'Entrecasteaux, two of his officers, and several sailors of his crew.
It was an old hand of the Pacific, Captain Dillon, who was the first to find indisputable traces of the shipwrecked men. On May 15, 1824, his ship, the Saint-Patrick, passed near the island of Tikopia, one of the New Hebrides. There, a lascar who came alongside in a canoe sold him a silver sword hilt bearing the imprint of characters engraved with a graver. This lascar claimed, moreover, that six years earlier, during a stay at Vanikoro, he had seen two Europeans who belonged to ships that had run aground years before on the island's reefs.
Dillon guessed that these must be La Pérouse's ships, whose disappearance had stirred the whole world. He tried to reach Vanikoro, where, according to the lascar, a great deal of wreckage from the disaster was to be found; but the winds and currents kept him from it.
Dillon returned to Calcutta. There he managed to interest the Asiatic Society and the East India Company in his discovery. A ship, which was given the name Recherche, was placed at his disposal, and he set out on January 23, 1827, accompanied by a French agent.
The Recherche, after putting in at several points in the Pacific, anchored off Vanikoro on July 7, 1827, in that same harbor of Vanou where the Nautilus was floating at this very moment.
There, it gathered up numerous remains of the wreck — iron implements, anchors, pulley straps, swivel guns, an eighteen-pound cannonball, fragments of astronomical instruments, a piece of taffrail, and a bronze bell bearing the inscription "Bazin made me," the mark of the foundry at the Brest Arsenal around 1785. Doubt was no longer possible.
Dillon, rounding out his information, stayed at the site of the disaster until the month of October. Then he left Vanikoro, headed for New Zealand, anchored at Calcutta on April 7, 1828, and returned to France, where he was very warmly received by Charles X.
But at that same time, Dumont d'Urville, without any knowledge of Dillon's work, had already set out to search elsewhere for the scene of the shipwreck. And in fact, word had come through the reports of a whaler that medals and a cross of Saint-Louis were in the hands of the natives of the Louisiade and New Caledonia.
Dumont d'Urville, commanding the Astrolabe, had therefore put to sea, and, two months after Dillon had just left Vanikoro, he was anchoring off Hobart Town. There he learned of the results Dillon had obtained, and, on top of that, he heard that a certain James Hobbs, second officer of the Union, of Calcutta, having gone ashore on an island situated at 8°18′ south latitude and 156°30′ east longitude, had noticed iron bars and red cloth in use among the natives of those parts.
Dumont d'Urville, rather perplexed, and unsure whether he ought to put any faith in these accounts carried by newspapers of little credibility, nevertheless resolved to launch himself onto Dillon's trail.
On February 10, 1828, the Astrolabe presented itself off Tikopia, took on as guide and interpreter a deserter settled on the island, made for Vanikoro, came within sight of it on February 12, skirted its reefs until the 14th, and only on the 20th anchored inside the barrier, in the harbor of Vanou.
On the 23rd, several of the officers made a circuit of the island and brought back a few unimportant pieces of debris. The natives, adopting a policy of denials and evasions, refused to lead them to the site of the disaster. This very shady conduct suggested that they had mistreated the shipwrecked men, and, indeed, they seemed to fear that Dumont d'Urville had come to avenge La Pérouse and his ill-fated companions.
Nevertheless, on the 26th, won over by gifts and understanding that they had no reprisals to fear, they led the second officer, Monsieur Jacquinot, to the scene of the wreck.
There, under three or four fathoms of water, between the Pacou and Vanou reefs, lay anchors, cannons, and pigs of iron and lead, encrusted in calcareous concretions. The Astrolabe's launch and whaleboat were directed to this spot, and, not without long and exhausting labor, their crews managed to haul up an anchor weighing eighteen hundred pounds, a cast-iron eight-pounder, a pig of lead, and two copper swivel guns.
Questioning the natives, Dumont d'Urville also learned that La Pérouse, after losing his two ships on the island's reefs, had built a smaller vessel in which he went off to wreck a second time... Where? No one knew.
The commander of the Astrolabe then had a cenotaph raised, under a clump of mangroves, to the memory of the famous navigator and his companions. It was a simple four-sided pyramid, set on a base of coral, into which went no ironwork that might tempt the greed of the natives.
Then Dumont d'Urville wished to leave; but his crews were sapped by the fevers of that unhealthy coast, and, very ill himself, he was unable to set sail until March 17.
Meanwhile the French government, fearing that Dumont d'Urville might not be aware of Dillon's work, had sent to Vanikoro the corvette the Bayonnaise, commanded by Legoarant de Tromelin, who was on station off the west coast of America. The Bayonnaise anchored off Vanikoro a few months after the Astrolabe's departure, found no new document, but established that the savages had respected La Pérouse's memorial.
Such is the substance of the account I gave Captain Nemo.
"So then," he said to me, "it's still not known where this third vessel — the one the shipwrecked men built on the island of Vanikoro — went to perish?"
"It is not known."
Captain Nemo said nothing in reply, and signaled me to follow him to the grand salon. The Nautilus sank a few meters beneath the waves, and the panels slid open.
I rushed to the window, and there, beneath the coral incrustations, sheathed in fungia, siphonules, alcyons, and caryophyllia, through myriads of charming fish — rainbow wrasse, glyphisodons, pompherids, snappers, and squirrelfish — I recognized certain remains the dredges had not been able to tear loose: iron stirrups, anchors, cannons, cannonballs, the fittings of a capstan, a stem-post — all objects come from the wrecked ships and now upholstered in living flowers.
And while I gazed at these forlorn wrecks, Captain Nemo said to me in a grave voice:
"Commander La Pérouse set out on December 7, 1785, with his ships the Boussole and the Astrolabe. He first anchored at Botany Bay, visited the Friendly archipelago and New Caledonia, made for Santa Cruz, and put in at Namouka, one of the islands of the Hapaï group. Then his ships arrived at the uncharted reefs of Vanikoro. The Boussole, which was in the lead, ran onto the southern coast. The Astrolabe came to her aid and grounded in the same way. The first ship was destroyed almost at once. The second, wedged fast to leeward, held out a few days. The natives gave the castaways a fairly good welcome. They settled on the island and built a smaller vessel out of the debris of the two large ones. A few sailors stayed at Vanikoro of their own free will.
"The rest, weakened and ill, set off with La Pérouse. They steered for the Solomon Islands, and they perished, ship and all, on the western coast of the group's main island, between Capes Deception and Satisfaction!"
"And how do you know this?" I cried.
"Here is what I found on the very site of that last wreck!"
Captain Nemo showed me a tin box, stamped with the arms of France and entirely corroded by the salt water. He opened it, and I saw a bundle of yellowed papers, still legible.
They were the very instructions of the Minister of the Navy to Commander La Pérouse, annotated in the margins in the hand of Louis XVI!
"Ah! It's a fine death for a sailor!" said Captain Nemo then. "A coral tomb is a peaceful grave, and may heaven grant that my companions and I never have any other!"
During the night of December 27th to 28th, the Nautilus left the waters of Vanikoro behind at a headlong speed. Her course was southwest, and in three days she covered the seven hundred and fifty leagues that separate the La Pérouse group from the southeastern point of Papua.
Early on the morning of January 1, 1863, Conseil joined me on the platform.
"Master," said the good fellow, "will Master permit me to wish him a happy New Year?"
"Of course, Conseil — exactly as if I were back in Paris, in my study at the Botanical Gardens. I accept your good wishes and I thank you for them. Only, I'd like to ask what you mean by 'a happy New Year,' given the circumstances we find ourselves in. Do you mean the year that will bring an end to our imprisonment, or the year that will see this strange voyage go on?"
"Well now," Conseil answered, "I hardly know what to tell Master. It's certain we're seeing curious things, and that for two months now we haven't had a moment to be bored. The latest wonder is always the most astonishing, and if this keeps up, I honestly don't know how it will all end. It's my opinion we'll never come across an opportunity like this again."
"Never, Conseil."
"Besides, Captain Nemo, who certainly lives up to his Latin name, is no more of a bother than if he didn't exist at all."
"Just as you say, Conseil."
"So I think, if Master doesn't mind my saying so, that a happy year would be one that let us see everything —"
"See everything, Conseil? That might take a while. But what does Ned Land think?"
"Ned Land thinks exactly the opposite of me," Conseil replied. "He's a practical mind and a demanding stomach. Watching fish, and forever eating them, isn't enough for him. The lack of wine, of bread, of meat hardly suits a worthy Saxon who's used to his beefsteaks, and whom a bit of brandy or gin, taken in moderation, doesn't frighten in the least!"
"For my part, Conseil, that isn't what troubles me, and I get along very well on the ship's fare."
"So do I," Conseil answered. "Which is why I think as much about staying as Master Land does about running off. So if the year that's beginning isn't a good one for me, it will be for him, and the other way around. That way there'll always be somebody satisfied. And so, to conclude, I wish Master whatever will please Master."
"Thank you, Conseil. Only I'll ask you to put off the question of New Year's gifts to a later date, and for now to accept a good firm handshake in their place. It's all I have on me."
"Master has never been so generous," Conseil replied.
And with that the good fellow went off.
By January 2 we had logged eleven thousand three hundred and forty miles — that is, five thousand two hundred and fifty leagues — since our starting point in the seas of Japan. Ahead of the Nautilus's ram stretched the dangerous waters of the Coral Sea, off the northeastern coast of Australia. Our boat ran along, a few miles off, that formidable barrier on which Cook's ships nearly came to grief on June 10, 1770. The vessel Cook was aboard struck a rock, and if she didn't sink it was thanks to this piece of luck: the chunk of coral, torn loose by the impact, stayed lodged in the gaping hull.
I would dearly have loved to visit that reef, three hundred and sixty leagues long, against which the always-heavy sea broke with a stupendous violence, like rolling thunder. But just then the Nautilus's diving planes were carrying us down to a great depth, and I could see nothing of those high coral walls. I had to content myself with the various specimens of fish our nets brought up. Among others I noticed albacore, a kind of mackerel as big as tuna, with bluish flanks striped by transverse bands that vanish when the animal dies. These fish traveled with us in shoals and furnished our table with extremely delicate flesh. We also caught a great number of green sea breams, half a decimeter long, tasting like gilthead, and flying pyrapedes, true submarine swallows that on dark nights streak the air and the water by turns with their phosphorescent gleams. Among the mollusks and zoophytes, I found in the meshes of the trawl various kinds of alcyonarians, sea urchins, hammer shells, spur shells, sundial shells, cerith shells, and sea butterflies. The flora was represented by beautiful floating seaweeds, tangleweed and giant kelp, steeped in the mucilage that oozed through their pores, and among them I gathered a magnificent Nemastoma Geliniaroide, which was filed away among the natural curiosities of the ship's museum.
Two days after crossing the Coral Sea, on January 4, we sighted the coast of Papua. On this occasion Captain Nemo informed me that he intended to reach the Indian Ocean by way of the Torres Strait. That was all he said. Ned was glad to see that this route brought him closer to European seas.
The Torres Strait is reckoned no less dangerous for the reefs that bristle across it than for the savage inhabitants who frequent its shores. It separates the great island of Papua — also called New Guinea — from New Holland.
Papua is four hundred leagues long by a hundred and thirty leagues wide, with an area of forty thousand geographical leagues. It lies in latitude between 0°19′ and 10°2′ south, and in longitude between 128°23′ and 146°15′. At noon, while the first officer was taking the sun's altitude, I caught sight of the summits of the Arfak Mountains, rising in terraces and crowned with sharp peaks.
This land, discovered in 1511 by the Portuguese Francisco Serrano, was visited in turn by Don José de Menesès in 1526, by Grijalva in 1527, by the Spanish general Alvar de Saavedra in 1528, by Juigo Ortez in 1545, by the Dutchman Shouten in 1616, by Nicolas Sruick in 1753, by Tasman, Dampier, Fumel, Carteret, Edwards, Bougainville, Cook, Forrest, and Mac Cluer, by d'Entrecasteaux in 1792, by Duperrey in 1823, and by Dumont d'Urville in 1827. "It is the heartland of the black peoples who occupy all of Malaysia," Monsieur de Rienzi has said — and I little suspected that the hazards of this passage were about to bring me face to face with the formidable Andamenese.
So the Nautilus presented herself at the mouth of the most dangerous strait on the globe — the one the boldest navigators scarcely dare to run — the strait that Luis Vaez de Torres braved coming back from the southern seas into Melanesia, and in which, in 1840, the stranded corvettes of Dumont d'Urville came within a hair of being lost with all hands. The Nautilus herself, superior to every peril of the sea, was nonetheless about to make the acquaintance of its coral reefs.
The Torres Strait is about thirty-four leagues wide, but it is choked with a countless swarm of islands, islets, breakers, and rocks that make navigating it all but impossible. Accordingly, Captain Nemo took every precaution the crossing required. The Nautilus, floating just at the surface, advanced at a moderate pace. Her propeller, like the tail of some great sea creature, beat the waves slowly.
Taking advantage of this, my two companions and I settled ourselves on the platform, which was as deserted as ever. In front of us rose the pilothouse, and unless I was much mistaken, Captain Nemo himself must be in there, steering his own Nautilus.
Before me I had the excellent charts of the Torres Strait, surveyed and drawn up by the hydrographic engineer Vincendon Dumoulin and the ensign Coupvent-Desbois — now an admiral — who were both on Dumont d'Urville's staff during his last voyage of circumnavigation. These, along with Captain King's, are the best charts for untangling the snarl of this narrow passage, and I studied them with the most scrupulous attention.
All around the Nautilus the sea boiled furiously. The current, running from southeast to northwest at a speed of two and a half miles an hour, broke over the coral heads that jutted up here and there.
"That's an ugly sea!" Ned Land said to me.
"Detestable, indeed," I answered, "and not at all the thing for a vessel like the Nautilus."
"That damned captain," the Canadian went on, "had better be very sure of his course, because I can see clumps of coral out there that would smash his hull into a thousand pieces if it so much as grazed them!"
The situation was perilous, no question — yet the Nautilus seemed to glide as if by magic through those raging reefs. She didn't follow exactly the track of the Astrolabe and the Zélée that had proved fatal to Dumont d'Urville. She bore farther north, skirted Murray Island, and came back to the southwest, toward the Cumberland passage. I thought she was going to head straight into it when, standing off again to the northwest, she made her way through a great many little-known islands and islets, toward Tound Island and the Bad Channel.
I was already wondering whether Captain Nemo, reckless to the point of madness, meant to drive his ship into that passage where Dumont d'Urville's two corvettes had run aground — when, altering course a second time and cutting straight west, he steered for Gueboroar Island.
It was then three in the afternoon. The swell broke high, the tide being nearly full. The Nautilus drew near this island, which I can still picture with its remarkable fringe of pandanus. We ranged along it at less than two miles.
Suddenly a shock threw me off my feet. The Nautilus had just struck a reef, and she lay motionless, listing slightly to port.
When I got up, I saw Captain Nemo and his first officer on the platform. They were examining the ship's position, exchanging a few words in their incomprehensible tongue.
Here is how things stood. Two miles off to starboard lay Gueboroar Island, its coastline curving from north to west like an enormous arm. To the south and east a few coral heads were already showing, laid bare by the ebb. We had run hard aground at full tide, and in one of those seas where the tides are feeble — an awkward circumstance for refloating the Nautilus. Still, the ship had suffered no damage at all, so solidly was her hull put together. But though she could neither sink nor split open, she ran a very real risk of being pinned forever on those reefs — and if so, that would be the end of Captain Nemo's underwater vessel.
I was turning all this over in my mind when the captain, cool and calm, master of himself as always, showing neither agitation nor annoyance, came up to me.
"An accident?" I asked.
"No — an incident," he answered.
"An incident," I shot back, "that may well force you to become once more a dweller on the very lands you flee!"
Captain Nemo looked at me strangely and made a negative gesture. It told me clearly enough that nothing would ever compel him to set foot on a continent again. Then he said:
"Besides, Professor Aronnax, the Nautilus is not lost. She will carry you yet through the wonders of the ocean. Our voyage is only just beginning, and I have no wish to deprive myself so soon of the honor of your company."
"All the same, Captain Nemo," I resumed, letting the ironic turn of the phrase pass, "the Nautilus has run aground at high water. Now, the tides aren't strong in the Pacific, and if you can't lighten the Nautilus — which strikes me as impossible — I don't see how she can be refloated."
"The tides aren't strong in the Pacific — you're right there, Professor," Captain Nemo replied. "But in the Torres Strait you still get a difference of a meter and a half between high and low water. Today is January 4, and in five days the moon will be full. Now, I'll be very much surprised if that obliging satellite doesn't raise these masses of water high enough, and do me a service I care to owe to no one but it alone."
With that, Captain Nemo, followed by his first officer, went back down inside the Nautilus. As for the ship, she no longer stirred, lying as motionless as if the coral polyps had already walled her in with their indestructible cement.
"Well, Professor?" said Ned Land, coming over to me after the captain had gone.
"Well, friend Ned, we'll wait quietly for the tide of the 9th, since it seems the moon will be kind enough to set us afloat again."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that."
"And this captain isn't going to drop anchors off the shoals, put the engine on the chains, and do everything he can to haul her off?"
"Since the tide will be enough!" Conseil put in simply.
The Canadian looked at Conseil, then shrugged his shoulders. It was the sailor in him talking.
"Professor," he said, "you can take my word for it when I tell you this hunk of iron will never sail again, on or under the sea. It's fit for nothing but selling by the pound. So I think the time has come to give Captain Nemo the slip."
"Friend Ned," I answered, "I don't despair of this gallant Nautilus the way you do, and in four days we'll know just where we stand on the Pacific tides. Besides, the advice to make a run for it might be timely if we were within sight of the coasts of England or Provence — but off Papua it's another matter, and there'll always be time enough to come to that extremity if the Nautilus fails to right herself, which I would regard as a grave turn of events."
"But couldn't we at least get a taste of that ground over there?" Ned Land went on. "There's an island. On the island, there are trees. Under the trees, land animals — the kind that carry cutlets and roast beef around on them, and that I'd gladly sink a few teeth into."
"Here friend Ned is right," said Conseil, "and I side with him. Couldn't Master persuade his friend Captain Nemo to set us ashore, if only so that we don't lose the habit of treading the solid parts of our planet underfoot?"
"I can ask him," I answered, "but he'll refuse."
"Let Master take the chance," said Conseil, "and we'll find out just how obliging the captain is."
To my great surprise, Captain Nemo granted the permission I asked of him, and he did it very graciously and readily, without even requiring me to promise to come back aboard. But a flight across the wilds of New Guinea would have been extremely dangerous, and I would not have advised Ned Land to attempt it. Better to be a prisoner aboard the Nautilus than to fall into the hands of the natives of Papua.
The dinghy was placed at our disposal for the next morning. I didn't try to find out whether Captain Nemo would come with us. I even supposed that no member of the crew would be assigned to us, and that Ned Land alone would be charged with handling the boat. In any case, the shore was two miles off at most, and it was mere child's play for the Canadian to steer that light craft between the lines of reefs so fatal to great ships.
The next day, January 5, the dinghy was lifted out of its housing, its decking removed, and launched into the sea from the top of the platform. Two men were enough for the operation. The oars were already in the boat, and we had only to take our places.
At eight o'clock, armed with rifles and axes, we pushed off from the Nautilus. The sea was fairly calm. A light breeze blew off the land. Conseil and I took the oars and pulled vigorously, while Ned steered through the narrow gaps the breakers left between them. The boat handled well and skimmed along swiftly.
Ned Land couldn't contain his joy. He was a prisoner escaped from his prison, and he gave hardly a thought to the fact that he would have to go back into it.
"Meat!" he kept saying. "So we're going to eat meat — and what meat! Real game! No bread, though, more's the pity! I'm not saying fish isn't a fine thing, but you mustn't overdo it, and a chunk of fresh venison, grilled over glowing coals, will be a pleasant change from our usual fare."
"Glutton!" Conseil retorted. "He's making my mouth water."
"It remains to be seen," I said, "whether these forests are full of game, and whether the game isn't of such a size that it might hunt the hunter instead."
"Fine, Professor Aronnax!" answered the Canadian, whose teeth seemed as sharp as the edge of an axe. "But I'll eat tiger — sirloin of tiger — if there's no other four-footed animal on this island."
"Friend Ned is a worry," said Conseil.
"Whatever it is," Ned Land went on, "any animal on four legs without feathers, or on two legs with them, will get a salute from my first shot."
"Good!" I said. "There go Master Land's rash ways, starting up again!"
"Don't be afraid, Professor Aronnax," the Canadian replied, "and pull hard! I don't ask twenty-five minutes to serve you up a dish of my own making."
At half past eight, the Nautilus's dinghy ran gently aground on a beach of sand, having safely cleared the coral ring that encircled the island of Gueboroar.
Setting foot on land made a strong impression on me. Ned Land tested the ground with his foot, as though to take possession of it. Yet it had been only two months since we had become, in Captain Nemo's phrase, the "passengers of the Nautilus" — which is to say, in plain fact, the prisoners of her commander.
In a few minutes we were within gunshot of the shore. The soil was almost entirely made of coral, but certain beds of dried-up torrents, strewn with fragments of granite, showed that the island dated from some primordial formation. The whole horizon lay hidden behind a curtain of magnificent forest. Enormous trees, some of them reaching two hundred feet, were linked one to another by garlands of vines — real natural hammocks, rocked by a light breeze. There were mimosas, ficus, casuarinas, teaks, hibiscus, pandanus, palms, all mingled in profusion, and beneath the shelter of their green vault, at the foot of their giant trunks, grew orchids, legumes, and ferns.
But without so much as a glance at these fine specimens of Papuan flora, the Canadian abandoned the pleasant for the useful. He spotted a coconut palm, knocked down a few of its fruit, split them open, and we drank their milk and ate their meat with a satisfaction that was a standing protest against the ordinary fare of the Nautilus.
"Excellent!" said Ned Land.
"Exquisite!" answered Conseil.
"And I don't imagine," said the Canadian, "that your Nemo would object to our bringing a cargo of coconuts aboard his ship?"
"I don't suppose he would," I replied, "but he'll never want to taste them!"
"His loss!" said Conseil.
"And our gain!" Ned Land shot back. "That leaves more for us."
"Just one word, Master Land," I said to the harpooner, who was getting ready to lay waste to another coconut palm. "Coconuts are a fine thing, but before we fill the dinghy with them, it seems sensible to find out whether the island doesn't produce some other substance just as useful. Fresh vegetables would be very welcome in the Nautilus's pantry."
"Master is right," answered Conseil, "and I propose we set aside three spaces in our boat — one for fruit, one for vegetables, and the third for game, of which I haven't yet glimpsed the slightest specimen."
"Conseil, we mustn't despair of anything," answered the Canadian.
"Let's press on with our excursion, then," I said, "but let's keep our eyes open. The island may look uninhabited, but it might still harbor a few individuals who'd be less particular than we are about the kind of game they'll eat!"
"Ho! ho!" went Ned Land, with a very meaningful working of his jaw.
"Really, Ned!" cried Conseil.
"On my word," the Canadian shot back, "I'm beginning to understand the charms of cannibalism!"
"Ned! Ned! What are you saying!" retorted Conseil. "You, a cannibal! Why, I'll never be safe near you again, and I share your cabin! Am I to wake up one morning half devoured?"
"Conseil, my friend, I'm very fond of you, but not fond enough to eat you when there's no need for it."
"I don't trust it," answered Conseil. "To the hunt! We absolutely must bring down some game to satisfy this cannibal, or one of these mornings Master will find nothing left but a few scraps of servant to wait on him."
While this banter passed back and forth, we made our way beneath the dark vaults of the forest, and for two hours we roamed it in every direction.
Chance served this search for edible plants exactly as we could have wished, and one of the most useful products of the tropical zones furnished us with a precious foodstuff that was missing aboard ship. I mean the breadfruit tree, very plentiful on Gueboroar Island, and I noticed there above all that seedless variety which in Malay goes by the name of "rima."
This tree stood apart from the others by a straight trunk forty feet high. Its crown, gracefully rounded and formed of large many-lobed leaves, marked it out plainly enough to a naturalist's eye as that artocarpus which has been so happily naturalized in the Mascarene Islands. Out of its mass of greenery hung large globular fruit, a decimeter across, their outer skin covered with roughnesses arranged in a hexagonal pattern — a useful plant with which nature has favored those regions that lack wheat, and which, requiring no cultivation, bears fruit for eight months of the year.
Ned Land knew these fruit well. He had already eaten them on his many voyages, and he knew how to prepare their edible flesh. So the sight of them fired his appetite, and he could hold out no longer.
"Master," he said to me, "let me die if I don't get a taste of this breadfruit paste!"
"Taste away, Ned, my friend, taste to your heart's content. We're here to run experiments — let's run them."
"It won't take long," answered the Canadian.
And, armed with a lens, he lit a fire of dead wood that crackled away merrily. Meanwhile Conseil and I picked out the best of the artocarpus fruit. Some had not yet reached a sufficient degree of ripeness, and their thick skin covered a white pulp that was not very fibrous. Others, in great number, yellowish and gelatinous, were only waiting to be gathered.
These fruit contained no pit. Conseil brought a dozen of them to Ned Land, who cut them into thick slices and laid them on a bed of coals, all the while repeating:
"You'll see, Master, how good this bread is!"
"Especially when you've gone without it for so long," said Conseil.
"It isn't even bread anymore," added the Canadian. "It's a delicate pastry. You've never eaten it, Master?"
"No, Ned."
"Well then, get ready to take in something truly succulent. If you don't come back for more, my name's not the king of harpooners!"
After a few minutes, the part of the fruit exposed to the fire was completely charred. Inside, a white paste had appeared, a sort of tender crumb whose flavor recalled that of an artichoke.
I have to admit, this bread was excellent, and I ate it with great pleasure.
"Unfortunately," I said, "such a paste won't keep fresh, so it seems pointless to lay in a store of it for the ship."
"Come now, Master!" cried Ned Land. "There you speak like a naturalist, but I'm going to act like a baker. Conseil, gather up a harvest of these fruit that we'll take back on our way home."
"And how will you prepare them?" I asked the Canadian.
"By making a fermented paste out of their pulp that will keep indefinitely without spoiling. When I want to use it, I'll bake it in the galley aboard ship, and in spite of a slightly sour flavor, you'll find it excellent."
"Then, Master Ned, I see there's nothing lacking in this bread..."
"There is, Professor," answered the Canadian. "It lacks a bit of fruit, or at the very least a few vegetables! Let's go find the fruit and the vegetables."
Once our harvest was finished, we set out to complete this "terrestrial" dinner.
Our searches were not in vain, and by around midday we had laid in an ample supply of bananas. These delicious products of the torrid zone ripen all year round, and the Malays, who have given them the name "pisang," eat them without cooking. Along with the bananas, we gathered enormous jackfruit with a very pronounced taste, savory mangoes, and pineapples of unbelievable size. But this harvest took up a large part of our time — which, for that matter, there was no cause to regret.
Conseil kept his eye on Ned the whole while. The harpooner walked ahead, and as he strolled through the forest, he gleaned with a sure hand excellent fruit that were meant to round out his stores.
"So then," Conseil asked, "you're not missing anything now, Ned my friend?"
"Hmph!" went the Canadian.
"What! You're complaining?"
"All this greenery can't make up a meal," answered Ned. "It's the end of a meal, it's dessert. But the soup? The roast?"
"Indeed," I said, "Ned promised us cutlets that are looking rather doubtful to me."
"Professor," answered the Canadian, "the hunt isn't just unfinished — it hasn't even begun. Patience! We'll manage to come across some creature of feather or fur sooner or later, and if not in this spot, then in another..."
"And if not today, then tomorrow," added Conseil, "for we mustn't wander too far. I'd even propose that we head back to the dinghy."
"What! Already!" cried Ned.
"We ought to be back before nightfall," I said.
"But what time is it, then?" asked the Canadian.
"Two o'clock, at least," answered Conseil.
"How time flies on solid ground!" sighed Master Ned Land with a note of regret.
"Let's move," answered Conseil.
So we made our way back through the forest, rounding out our harvest with a raid on some palm cabbages that had to be gathered from the tops of the trees, some small beans I recognized as the Malays' "abrou," and some yams of superior quality.
We were loaded down when we reached the dinghy. Even so, Ned Land didn't consider his supply sufficient yet. But luck was on his side. Just as we were about to board, he spotted several trees, twenty-five to thirty feet tall, belonging to the palm family. These trees, as valuable as the artocarpus, are rightly counted among the most useful products of Malaysia.
They were sago palms, plants that grow without cultivation, propagating themselves, like mulberry trees, through their shoots and their seeds.
Ned Land knew the way to handle these trees. He took up his axe, and wielding it with great vigor, he soon had two or three sago palms lying on the ground, their ripeness betrayed by the white dust that powdered their fronds.
I watched him work more with the eyes of a naturalist than with the eyes of a hungry man. He began by stripping from each trunk a band of bark an inch thick, which covered a network of long fibers knotted in an inextricable tangle, held together by a sort of gummy flour. This flour was sago, an edible substance that serves above all to feed the populations of Melanesia.
For the moment Ned Land was content to cut these trunks into pieces, as he would have done with firewood, saving for later the job of extracting the flour, straining it through a cloth to separate it from its fibrous ligaments, evaporating its moisture in the sun, and letting it harden in molds.
At last, at five in the evening, loaded down with all our riches, we left the shore of the island, and half an hour later we drew alongside the Nautilus. No one appeared at our arrival. The enormous cylinder of sheet iron seemed deserted. Once the provisions were aboard, I went down to my cabin. I found my supper waiting for me. I ate, and then I fell asleep.
The next day, January 6, nothing new aboard. Not a sound inside, not a sign of life. The dinghy had stayed alongside, in the very spot where we had left it. We resolved to return to Gueboroar Island. Ned Land hoped to have better luck than the day before from a hunter's point of view, and wanted to explore another part of the forest.
At sunrise we were on our way. The boat, borne along by the tide that ran toward land, reached the island in no time.
We landed, and thinking it best to trust the Canadian's instinct, we followed Ned Land, whose long legs threatened to leave us behind.
Ned Land worked his way up the coast toward the west, then, wading across a few torrent beds, he reached the high plain bordered by admirable forests. A few kingfishers prowled along the watercourses, but they wouldn't let us come near. Their wariness proved to me that these birds knew what to expect from bipeds of our kind, and I concluded that, even if the island wasn't inhabited, at least human beings frequented it.
After crossing a fairly lush meadow, we came to the edge of a small wood alive with the song and flight of a great many birds.
"They're still only birds," said Conseil.
"But some of them are edible!" answered the harpooner.
"Not so, Ned my friend," retorted Conseil, "for I see nothing there but ordinary parrots."
"Conseil, my friend," Ned answered gravely, "the parrot is the pheasant of a man with nothing else to eat."
"And I'll add," I said, "that this bird, properly prepared, is well worth the fork's trouble."
And in fact, beneath the thick foliage of that wood, a whole world of parrots fluttered from branch to branch, wanting only a more careful education to speak the language of men. For the moment they chattered away in the company of parakeets of every color, of solemn cockatoos that seemed to be meditating on some philosophical problem, while lories of a brilliant red flashed past like scraps of bunting carried off by the breeze, amid loud-flying hornbills, Papuan parrots painted in the finest shades of azure, and a whole variety of charming birds, though most of them barely fit to eat.
Yet one bird peculiar to these lands, one that has never crossed beyond the limits of the Aru Islands and the Papuan islands, was missing from this collection. But fate had it in store for me to admire it before long.
After passing through a copse of no great thickness, we came again upon a plain choked with brush. There I saw rising into the air some magnificent birds whose long feathers were arranged so as to oblige them to fly against the wind. Their undulating flight, the grace of their aerial curves, the shimmer of their colors, drew and charmed the eye. I had no trouble recognizing them.
"Birds of paradise!" I cried.
"Order of passerines, section of clystomores," answered Conseil.
"Family of partridges?" asked Ned Land.
"I don't think so, Master Land. Still, I'm counting on your skill to catch one of these charming products of tropical nature!"
"We'll give it a try, Professor, though I'm more used to handling the harpoon than the gun."
The Malays, who carry on a great trade in these birds with the Chinese, have various means of taking them that we couldn't make use of. Sometimes they set snares at the tops of the tall trees the birds of paradise prefer to live in. Sometimes they capture them with a sticky birdlime that paralyzes their movements. They even go so far as to poison the springs where these birds are in the habit of drinking. As for us, we were reduced to shooting them on the wing, which left us little chance of hitting them. And in fact we wasted a good part of our ammunition to no purpose.
Toward eleven in the morning we had crossed the first range of mountains that form the center of the island, and we still hadn't killed a thing. Hunger spurred us on. The hunters had counted on the yield of their hunt, and they'd been wrong. Very luckily, Conseil, to his own great surprise, brought off a double shot and secured our lunch. He knocked down a white pigeon and a wood pigeon, which, briskly plucked and hung on a skewer, roasted before a blazing fire of dead wood. While these interesting creatures cooked, Ned prepared some artocarpus fruit. Then the pigeon and the wood pigeon were devoured down to the bone and declared excellent. The nutmeg they habitually gorge on scents their flesh and makes it delicious eating.
"It's as if the fatted hens fed on truffles," said Conseil.
"And now, Ned, what are you still missing?" I asked the Canadian.
"Some four-legged game, Professor," answered Ned Land. "All these pigeons are nothing but appetizers and little amusements for the mouth. So until I've killed an animal with cutlets on it, I won't be satisfied!"
"Nor I, Ned, if I don't catch a bird of paradise."
"Let's keep hunting, then," answered Conseil, "but working our way back toward the sea. We've reached the first slopes of the mountains, and I think it's better to regain the region of the forests."
That was sensible advice, and it was followed. After an hour's march we had reached a veritable forest of sago palms. A few harmless snakes fled from beneath our feet. The birds of paradise slipped away at our approach, and I was truly despairing of ever reaching them, when Conseil, who was walking ahead, suddenly stooped, let out a cry of triumph, and came back to me carrying a magnificent bird of paradise.
"Ah! Bravo, Conseil!" I cried.
"Master is very kind," answered Conseil.
"No, no, my boy. You've pulled off a masterstroke. To take one of these birds alive, and to take it by hand!"
"If Master will examine it closely, he'll see that I deserve no great credit."
"And why is that, Conseil?"
"Because this bird is as drunk as a quail."
"Drunk?"
"Yes, Master, drunk on the nutmegs it was gobbling under the nutmeg tree where I caught it. Look, Ned my friend, look at the monstrous effects of intemperance!"
"A thousand devils!" the Canadian shot back. "For the little gin I've drunk these past two months, you've no call to hold it against me!"
Meanwhile I was examining the curious bird. Conseil was not mistaken. The bird of paradise, intoxicated by the heady juice, was reduced to helplessness. It couldn't fly. It could barely walk. But that worried me little, and I let it sleep off its nutmegs.
This bird belonged to the most beautiful of the eight species found in Papua and the neighboring islands. It was the "great emerald" bird of paradise, one of the rarest. It measured three decimeters in length. Its head was relatively small, its eyes, set near the opening of the beak, small as well. But it offered an admirable assembly of shades — beak yellow, feet and claws brown, wings hazel with crimson tips, head and back of the neck pale yellow, throat emerald, belly and breast maroon. Two horny, downy filaments rose above its tail, which was drawn out by long, very light feathers of admirable delicacy, and they completed the ensemble of this marvelous bird, which the natives have poetically named the "sun bird."
I longed dearly to be able to bring back to Paris this superb specimen of the birds of paradise, to make a gift of it to the Jardin des Plantes, which does not possess a single living one.
"Is it really so rare, then?" asked the Canadian, in the tone of a hunter who rates game very low from the artistic point of view.
"Very rare, my good companion, and above all very hard to take alive. Even dead, these birds are still the object of an important trade. So the natives have hit on the idea of manufacturing them, the way one manufactures pearls or diamonds."
"What!" cried Conseil. "People make fake birds of paradise?"
"Yes, Conseil."
"And does Master know the natives' method?"
"Perfectly. During the east monsoon, the birds of paradise shed those magnificent feathers that surround their tail, which naturalists have named the subalar feathers. It's these feathers that the counterfeiters in birds collect, and cleverly fit onto some poor parakeet previously mutilated for the purpose. Then they dye the seam, they varnish the bird, and they ship off to the museums and collectors of Europe these products of their peculiar industry."
"Good!" said Ned Land. "If it isn't the bird, it's still its feathers, and as long as the object isn't meant to be eaten, I don't see much harm in it!"
But if my own desires were satisfied by possession of this bird of paradise, those of the Canadian hunter were not yet. Luckily, toward two o'clock, Ned Land brought down a magnificent forest hog, of the kind the natives call "bari-outang." The animal came just in time to supply us with real quadruped meat, and it was warmly welcomed. Ned Land was very proud of his shot. The hog, struck by the electric bullet, had dropped stone dead.
The Canadian skinned it and gutted it cleanly, after taking out half a dozen cutlets meant to furnish a grill for the evening meal. Then the hunt resumed, and it was to be marked yet again by the exploits of Ned and Conseil.
For in fact the two friends, beating the bushes, flushed a troop of kangaroos, which fled off bounding on their elastic legs. But these animals didn't flee so fast that the electric charge couldn't stop them in their course.
"Ah, Professor!" cried Ned Land, seized with a hunter's frenzy, "what excellent game, stewed above all! What a stock of provisions for the Nautilus! Two! Three! Five down! And to think we'll devour all this meat, and those fools aboard won't get a scrap of it!"
I believe that, in his excess of joy, if the Canadian hadn't talked so much, he'd have massacred the whole herd! But he contented himself with a dozen of these interesting marsupials, which form the first order of the aplacental mammals — so Conseil informed us.
These animals were small in size. It was one of those "kangaroo-rabbit" species that usually den in the hollows of trees, and whose speed is extreme; but if they're only middling in size, they furnish, at least, the most prized meat.
We were very pleased with the results of our hunt. Merry Ned proposed to return the next day to this enchanted island, which he meant to strip of every one of its edible quadrupeds. But he was reckoning without the events to come.
At six in the evening we had regained the beach. Our dinghy was aground in its usual spot. The Nautilus, like a long reef, emerged from the waves two miles off the shore.
Ned Land, without further delay, busied himself with the great affair of dinner. He understood this whole business of cookery admirably. The "bari-outang" cutlets, grilled over the coals, soon spread a delicious smell that perfumed the air!...
But I notice I'm following in the Canadian's footsteps. Here I am, in raptures over a grill of fresh pork! Let me be forgiven, as I forgave Master Land, and for the same reasons!
At last the dinner was excellent. Two wood pigeons rounded out this extraordinary menu. The sago paste, the artocarpus bread, a few mangoes, half a dozen pineapples, and the fermented liquor of certain coconuts put us in high spirits. I even suspect that the wits of my worthy companions were not as clear as one might have wished.
"What if we didn't go back to the Nautilus tonight?" said Conseil.
"What if we never went back?" added Ned Land.
At that moment a stone came falling at our feet and cut short the harpooner's proposal.
We had been looking toward the forest, without getting up, my hand frozen halfway to my mouth, Ned Land's completing its errand.
"A stone doesn't fall out of the sky," said Conseil, "unless it has earned the name of a meteorite."
A second stone, carefully rounded, which knocked a savory pigeon thigh clean out of Conseil's hand, lent still more weight to his observation.
All three of us on our feet, rifles to our shoulders, we were ready to answer any attack.
"Are those monkeys?" cried Ned Land.
"More or less," answered Conseil. "They're savages."
"To the boat!" I said, heading for the sea.
Retreat was the only choice, for a good twenty natives, armed with bows and slings, were emerging at the edge of a thicket that hid the horizon to our right, barely a hundred paces off.
Our dinghy lay grounded about twenty meters from us.
The savages came on, not running, but making the most hostile displays imaginable. Stones and arrows rained down.
Ned Land had refused to leave his provisions behind, and despite the imminent danger, his pig on one side, his kangaroos on the other, he made off at a fair clip.
In two minutes we were on the beach. Loading the dinghy with the provisions and weapons, shoving it into the sea, setting the two oars — all of it was the work of an instant. We hadn't gained two cable-lengths when a hundred savages, howling and gesturing, waded into the water up to their waists. I watched to see whether their appearance would draw a few of the Nautilus's men onto the platform. But no. The enormous machine, lying out in the deeper water, remained utterly deserted.
Twenty minutes later we were climbing aboard. The hatches were open. After making the dinghy fast, we went back inside the Nautilus.
I went down to the salon, from which a few chords were drifting. Captain Nemo was there, bent over his organ, lost in a musical trance.
"Captain!" I said to him.
He didn't hear me.
"Captain!" I said again, touching him with my hand.
He shuddered, and turning around:
"Ah! it's you, Professor?" he said to me. "Well! did you have good hunting? did you botanize with success?"
"Yes, Captain," I answered, "but unfortunately we've brought back a troop of bipeds whose nearness strikes me as troubling."
"What bipeds?"
"Savages."
"Savages!" answered Captain Nemo in an ironic tone. "And you're surprised, Professor, that having set foot on one of the lands of this globe, you should find savages there? Savages — where are there not any? And besides, are they any worse than the others, these people you call savages?"
"But, Captain—"
"For my part, sir, I've met them everywhere."
"Well," I answered, "if you'd rather not receive any aboard the Nautilus, you'd do well to take a few precautions."
"Set your mind at ease, Professor, there's nothing here to worry about."
"But these natives are numerous."
"How many did you count?"
"A hundred, at least."
"Professor Aronnax," answered Captain Nemo, his fingers settling back onto the keys of the organ, "if every last one of the natives of Papua were gathered on that beach, the Nautilus would have nothing to fear from their attacks!"
The captain's fingers were running over the keyboard now, and I noticed that he struck only the black keys, which gave his melodies an essentially Scottish color. Soon he had forgotten I was there, sunk in a reverie I no longer tried to break.
I went back up onto the platform. Night had already fallen, for at that low latitude the sun sets quickly and without any twilight. I could no longer make out Gueboroar Island except as a blur. But numerous fires, lit along the beach, showed that the natives had no thought of leaving it.
I stayed there alone for several hours, now musing on these natives — but without any real fear of them, for the captain's imperturbable confidence was catching — now forgetting them altogether to admire the splendors of this tropical night. My memory flew off toward France, following those zodiacal stars that would be shining over it in a few hours. The moon blazed among the constellations at the zenith. I thought then that this faithful and obliging satellite would come back the day after tomorrow, to this same spot, to lift these waters and tear the Nautilus free of its bed of coral. Toward midnight, seeing that all was quiet on the darkened waves as well as beneath the trees along the shore, I returned to my cabin and fell peacefully asleep.
The night passed without mishap. The Papuans were no doubt frightened off by the mere sight of the monster stranded in the bay, for the hatches, left open, would have offered them easy access to the interior of the Nautilus.
At six in the morning — January 8 — I went back up onto the platform. The shadows of dawn were lifting. Soon the island showed itself through the scattering mists — its beaches first, then its summits.
The natives were still there, more numerous than the day before — five or six hundred, perhaps. A few, taking advantage of the low tide, had come out onto the heads of coral, less than two cable-lengths from the Nautilus. I could make them out easily. They were true Papuans, of athletic build, men of a fine race, with broad, high foreheads, big but not flattened noses, and white teeth. Their woolly hair, dyed red, stood out against a body black and glistening like that of the Nubians. From the lobes of their ears, cut and stretched, hung strings of bone beads. These men were generally naked. Among them I noticed a few women, dressed from hip to knee in a true crinoline of grasses held up by a plant-fiber belt. Some of the chiefs had adorned their necks with a crescent and with necklaces of red and white glass beads. Almost all of them, armed with bows, arrows, and shields, carried at their shoulder a kind of net holding those rounded stones that their slings launch with such skill.
One of these chiefs, come fairly close to the Nautilus, was examining it with attention. He must have been a "mado" of high rank, for he draped himself in a mat of banana leaves, notched at the edges and set off with brilliant colors.
I could easily have brought this native down, standing as he was within short range; but I thought it better to wait for genuinely hostile moves. Between Europeans and savages, it is only right that the Europeans answer an attack and never start one.
All through the low tide these natives prowled near the Nautilus, but they did not grow loud. I heard them often repeat the word "assai," and from their gestures I understood that they were inviting me to come ashore — an invitation I felt I ought to decline.
So that day the dinghy did not leave the ship, much to the displeasure of Master Land, who could not complete his provisions. The resourceful Canadian spent his time preparing the meats and flours he had brought back from Gueboroar Island. As for the savages, they returned to shore around eleven in the morning, as soon as the heads of coral began to disappear under the rising tide. But I saw their numbers swell considerably on the beach. It seemed likely they were coming from the neighboring islands, or from Papua proper. Still, I had not glimpsed a single native canoe.
Having nothing better to do, I thought of dredging these beautiful clear waters, which showed shells, zoophytes, and sea plants in abundance. This was, moreover, the last day the Nautilus would spend in these waters — provided, that is, that it floated free on tomorrow's high tide, according to Captain Nemo's promise.
So I called Conseil, who brought me a small light dredge, rather like the ones used to fish for oysters.
"And those savages?" Conseil asked me. "With all respect to Master, they don't strike me as very wicked!"
"They're cannibals all the same, my boy."
"One can be a cannibal and a decent fellow," answered Conseil, "just as one can be a glutton and an honest man. The one doesn't rule out the other."
"Fine, Conseil, I grant you they're honest cannibals, and that they devour their prisoners honestly. But since I have no wish to be devoured, even honestly, I'll keep on my guard, for the commander of the Nautilus seems to be taking no precautions at all. And now, to work."
For two hours our dredging was actively carried on, but without bringing up anything rare. The dredge filled with Midas' ears, harp shells, melania snails, and in particular the finest hammer shells I had seen up to that day. We also took a few sea cucumbers, some pearl oysters, and a dozen little turtles that were set aside for the ship's larder.
But just when I was least expecting it, I laid my hand on a marvel — I should say on a natural deformity, very rare to come upon. Conseil had just cast the dredge, and his apparatus was coming back up loaded with various fairly ordinary shells, when all at once he saw me plunge my arm quickly into the net, draw out a shell, and let loose the cry of a conchologist — that is, the most piercing cry a human throat can produce.
"Eh! what's the matter with Master?" asked Conseil, very surprised. "Has Master been bitten?"
"No, my boy, and yet I would gladly have paid for my discovery with a finger!"
"What discovery?"
"This shell," I said, holding up the object of my triumph.
"But that's simply a porphyry olive, of the genus Oliva, order Pectinibranchia, class Gastropoda, phylum Mollusca—"
"Yes, Conseil, but instead of coiling from right to left, this olive turns from left to right!"
"Is it possible!" cried Conseil.
"Yes, my boy, it's a left-handed shell!"
"A left-handed shell!" repeated Conseil, his heart pounding.
"Look at its spire!"
"Ah! Master may believe me," said Conseil, taking the precious shell in a trembling hand, "but I've never felt an emotion like it!"
And there was reason to be moved! Everyone knows, as the naturalists have pointed out, that right-handedness is a law of nature. The stars and their satellites, in their movements of revolution and rotation, move from right to left. Man uses his right hand more often than his left, and consequently his tools and instruments, stairways, locks, watch springs, and so on, are designed to be worked from right to left. Now, nature has generally followed this same law for the coiling of her shells. They are all right-handed, with rare exceptions, and when, by some chance, their spire runs left-handed, collectors will pay for them their weight in gold.
Conseil and I were thus lost in the contemplation of our treasure, and I was already promising myself to enrich the Museum with it, when a stone, unluckily flung by a native, came and shattered the precious object in Conseil's hand.
I let out a cry of despair! Conseil threw himself on my rifle and took aim at a savage who was swinging his sling ten meters from him. I tried to stop him, but his shot went off and broke the bracelet of amulets that hung from the native's arm.
"Conseil!" I cried, "Conseil!"
"What of it! Doesn't Master see that this cannibal started the attack?"
"A shell isn't worth a man's life!" I told him.
"Ah! the wretch!" cried Conseil. "I'd sooner he had broken my shoulder!"
Conseil was sincere, but I didn't share his view. Meanwhile the situation had changed in the last few moments, and we hadn't noticed. A good twenty canoes now surrounded the Nautilus. These canoes, hollowed out of tree trunks, long, narrow, well built for speed, were kept steady by a double bamboo outrigger that floated on the surface of the water. They were handled by skillful half-naked paddlers, and I did not watch them advance without misgivings.
It was plain that these Papuans had already had dealings with Europeans, and that they knew their ships. But this long cylinder of iron stretched out in the bay, without masts, without a funnel — what were they to make of it? Nothing good, for at first they had kept a respectful distance. But seeing it motionless, they were little by little regaining confidence and trying to grow familiar with it. Now it was precisely this familiarity that had to be prevented. Our weapons, which fired without any report, could have only a middling effect on these natives, who respect nothing but noisy contrivances. Lightning without the rolling of thunder would frighten men very little, though the danger lies in the flash, not in the sound.
At that moment the canoes drew closer to the Nautilus, and a cloud of arrows came down on it.
"The devil! it's hailing," said Conseil, "and maybe a poisoned hail!"
"We must warn Captain Nemo," I said, going back in through the hatch.
I went down to the salon. I found no one there. I ventured to knock at the door that opened onto the captain's stateroom.
An "Enter" answered me. I went in, and found Captain Nemo absorbed in a calculation in which x's and other algebraic signs were not lacking.
"Am I disturbing you?" I said, out of politeness.
"Indeed you are, Professor Aronnax," the captain answered me, "but I imagine you've had serious reasons for wanting to see me?"
"Very serious ones. The natives' canoes have surrounded us, and in a few minutes we'll certainly be assailed by several hundred savages."
"Ah!" said Captain Nemo calmly. "They've come in their canoes?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, sir, then all we need do is close the hatches."
"Precisely, and I came to tell you—"
"Nothing simpler," said Captain Nemo.
And, pressing an electric button, he transmitted an order to the crew's quarters.
"There, it's done, sir," he said to me after a few moments. "The dinghy is in place, and the hatches are closed. You don't fear, I suppose, that these gentlemen will stave in walls that the shells of your frigate couldn't dent?"
"No, Captain, but there's still one danger."
"What danger, sir?"
"It's that tomorrow, at about this same hour, we'll have to reopen the hatches to renew the air of the Nautilus—"
"No doubt about it, sir, since our vessel breathes after the manner of the cetaceans."
"Now, if at that moment the Papuans are occupying the platform, I don't see how you'll be able to keep them from coming in."
"Then, sir, you suppose they'll climb aboard?"
"I'm certain of it."
"Well, sir, let them climb aboard. I see no reason to prevent them. At bottom they're poor devils, these Papuans, and I don't want my visit to Gueboroar Island to cost the life of a single one of these unfortunate people!"
That said, I was about to withdraw; but Captain Nemo held me back and invited me to sit down beside him. He questioned me with interest about our excursions ashore, about our hunting, and seemed not to understand that craving for meat which so consumed the Canadian. Then the conversation touched on various subjects, and without being any more communicative, Captain Nemo showed himself more amiable.
Among other things, we came to speak of the Nautilus's situation, grounded as it was precisely in this strait where Dumont d'Urville had nearly been lost. Then, on that subject:
"He was one of your great seamen," the captain said to me, "one of your most intelligent navigators, that d'Urville! He's your Captain Cook, you Frenchmen. Poor, ill-fated man of science! To have braved the ice fields of the South Pole, the coral reefs of Oceania, the cannibals of the Pacific, only to perish miserably in a railway train! If that energetic man was able to reflect during the last seconds of his life, imagine what his final thoughts must have been!"
Speaking this way, Captain Nemo seemed moved, and I credit him for that emotion.
Then, chart in hand, we went back over the French navigator's labors, his voyages of circumnavigation, his twofold attempt at the South Pole that led to the discovery of the Adélie and Louis-Philippe lands, and finally his hydrographic surveys of the principal islands of Oceania.
"What your d'Urville did on the surface of the seas," Captain Nemo said to me, "I have done inside the Ocean, and more easily, more completely than he. The Astrolabe and the Zélée, tossed endlessly by the storms, could never be worth the Nautilus — a quiet study, and truly settled, in the midst of the waters!"
"Still, Captain," I said, "there's one point of resemblance between Dumont d'Urville's corvettes and the Nautilus."
"What point, sir?"
"It's that the Nautilus has run aground just as they did!"
"The Nautilus has not run aground, sir," Captain Nemo answered me coldly. "The Nautilus is made to rest on the bed of the seas, and the painful labors, the maneuvers that refloating his corvettes forced on d'Urville, I shall not undertake. The Astrolabe and the Zélée nearly perished, but my Nautilus is in no danger. Tomorrow, on the day appointed, at the hour appointed, the tide will lift it peacefully, and it will resume its voyage across the seas."
"Captain," I said, "I don't doubt—"
"Tomorrow," added Captain Nemo, rising, "tomorrow, at two forty in the afternoon, the Nautilus will float free and leave the Torres Strait without any damage."
These words spoken in a very clipped tone, Captain Nemo bowed slightly. This was his way of dismissing me, and I went back to my room.
There I found Conseil, who was eager to know the outcome of my interview with the captain.
"My boy," I answered, "when I made a show of believing that his Nautilus was threatened by the natives of Papua, the captain answered me very ironically. So I have only one thing to say: trust him, and go sleep in peace."
"Master has no need of my services?"
"No, my friend. What is Ned Land doing?"
"Begging Master's pardon," answered Conseil, "but friend Ned is cooking up a kangaroo pâté that will be a wonder!"
I was left alone; I lay down, but I slept rather badly. I could hear the noise of the savages, who were stamping on the platform and letting out deafening cries. The night passed like that, without the crew ever stirring from its usual inertia. It worried no more about the presence of these cannibals than the soldiers of an armored fort worry about the ants running over its plating.
At six in the morning I got up. The hatches had not been opened. So the air had not been renewed inside, but the tanks, charged against just such an occasion, worked in good time and released a few cubic meters of oxygen into the impoverished atmosphere of the Nautilus.
I worked in my room until noon, without having seen Captain Nemo even for a moment. No preparations for departure seemed to be under way aboard.
I waited a while longer, then made my way to the grand salon. The clock read half past two. In ten minutes the tide would reach its maximum height, and, if Captain Nemo had not made a rash promise, the Nautilus would be freed at once. Otherwise, many months would pass before it could leave its bed of coral.
But some warning shudders soon made themselves felt in the vessel's hull. I heard the calcareous roughness of the coral bottom grating along her plating.
At thirty-five minutes past two, Captain Nemo appeared in the salon.
"We're about to leave," he said.
"Ah!" I said.
"I've given the order to open the hatches."
"And the Papuans?"
"The Papuans?" answered Captain Nemo, giving a slight shrug of his shoulders.
"Won't they get inside the Nautilus?"
"And how?"
"By climbing through the hatches you've had opened."
"Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo answered calmly, "one does not enter through the hatches of the Nautilus that way, even when they are open."
I looked at the captain.
"You don't understand?" he said to me.
"Not in the least."
"Well then! come and you'll see."
I made for the central stairway. There Ned Land and Conseil, very intrigued, were watching a few of the crew open the hatches, while cries of rage and appalling howls resounded outside.
The covers were thrown back on the outside. Twenty hideous faces appeared. But the first of these natives to lay a hand on the stair rail was flung backward by some invisible force I couldn't name, and fled, letting out horrible cries and leaping about wildly.
Ten of his companions came after him. Ten met the same fate.
Conseil was in ecstasy. Ned Land, carried away by his violent instincts, rushed onto the stairway. But the moment he seized the rail with both hands, he too was thrown down.
"A thousand devils!" he cried. "I've been struck by lightning!"
That word explained everything to me. It was no longer a rail, but a metal cable, fully charged with the ship's electricity, running up to the platform. Anyone who touched it felt a tremendous shock — and that shock would have been fatal, had Captain Nemo sent the whole current of his apparatus into this conductor! One could truly say that between himself and his attackers he had stretched an electric net that no one could cross unharmed.
Meanwhile the terrified Papuans had beaten a retreat, wild with fear. And we, half laughing, were comforting and rubbing down the wretched Ned Land, who was swearing like a man possessed.
But at that instant the Nautilus, lifted by the last swells of the tide, left its bed of coral at that fortieth minute exactly fixed by the captain. Its propeller beat the waters with a majestic slowness. Its speed built up little by little, and, sailing on the surface of the Ocean, it left behind, safe and sound, the dangerous passages of the Torres Strait.
The next day, January 10, the Nautilus resumed its course between two waters, but at a remarkable speed that I could not put at less than thirty-five miles an hour. Its propeller turned so fast that I could neither follow nor count its revolutions.
When I reflected that this marvelous electric agent, having given the Nautilus its motion, its heat, and its light, also protected the ship against attacks from outside and transformed it into a sacred ark that no profaner could touch without being struck down by lightning, my admiration knew no bounds — and from the machine it climbed at once to the engineer who had created it.
We were heading due west, and on January 11 we rounded Cape Wessel, situated at 135° longitude and 10° north latitude, which forms the eastern tip of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The reefs were still numerous, but more scattered, and marked on the chart with extreme precision. The Nautilus easily avoided the Money shoals to port and the Victoria reefs to starboard, placed at 130° longitude, along that tenth parallel we were following without deviation.
On January 13, Captain Nemo, having reached the Timor Sea, sighted the island of that name at 122° longitude. This island, whose area comes to sixteen hundred and twenty-five square leagues, is governed by rajahs. These princes call themselves sons of crocodiles — that is to say, sprung from the highest origin to which any human being can lay claim. And so their scaly ancestors swarm in the rivers of the island and are the objects of a particular veneration. People protect them, pamper them, flatter them, feed them; they offer them young girls to devour, and woe to the stranger who lays a hand on these sacred lizards.
But the Nautilus had no dealings with these ugly beasts. Timor was visible for only a moment, at noon, while the first officer took his bearings. And I caught no more than a glimpse of the little island of Rotti, part of the same group, whose women enjoy a well-established reputation for beauty in the Malay markets.
From this point, the course of the Nautilus, in latitude, bent away to the southwest. We were headed for the Indian Ocean. Where would Captain Nemo's whim carry us now? Would he sail back up toward the coasts of Asia? Would he draw near the shores of Europe? Unlikely resolutions for a man who fled the inhabited continents. Would he sail south, then? Would he go on to round the Cape of Good Hope, then Cape Horn, and push toward the Antarctic pole? Would he come back at last to his Pacific seas, where the Nautilus found its sailing easy and unhindered? The future would have to tell us.
After running along the reefs of Cartier, of Hibernia, of Seringapatam, of Scott — the last efforts of the solid element against the liquid one — by January 14 we were beyond all land. The speed of the Nautilus was strangely slackened, and, very capricious in its ways, sometimes it swam in the midst of the waters, and sometimes it floated on the surface.
During this stretch of the voyage, Captain Nemo carried out some interesting experiments on the various temperatures of the sea at different depths. Under ordinary conditions, such readings are obtained by means of fairly complicated instruments whose reports are dubious at best — whether thermometric sounding-lines, whose glass often shatters under the pressure of the water, or devices based on the varying resistance of metals to electric currents. The results obtained this way can never be checked with any real certainty. Captain Nemo, on the contrary, went to find this temperature himself, down in the depths of the sea, and his thermometer, put in contact with the various liquid strata, gave him the degree he sought immediately and reliably.
And so, whether by overloading his ballast tanks or by descending on a slant by means of his diving planes, the Nautilus reached, one after another, depths of three, four, five, seven, nine, and ten thousand meters — and the final result of these experiments was that the sea maintained a permanent temperature of four and a half degrees at a depth of a thousand meters, under every latitude.
I followed these experiments with the keenest interest. Captain Nemo brought a genuine passion to them. Often I asked myself to what end he made these observations. Was it for the good of his fellow men? That was hardly likely, for one day or another his work would perish with him in some unknown sea. Unless he meant to leave the results of his experiments to me. But that was to assume that my strange voyage would have an end — and that end I still could not see anywhere.
Be that as it may, Captain Nemo also shared with me various figures he had obtained, establishing the relative densities of the water in the principal seas of the globe. From this exchange I drew a personal lesson that had nothing to do with science.
It was during the morning of January 15. The captain, with whom I was strolling on the platform, asked me whether I knew the different densities that the waters of the sea present. I answered no, and added that science lacked rigorous observations on the subject.
"I have made them, those observations," he told me, "and I can vouch for their certainty.
"Very well," I answered, "but the Nautilus is a world apart, and the secrets of its scientists never reach the land."
"You are right, Professor," he said, after a few moments of silence. "It is a world apart. It is as foreign to the earth as the planets that accompany this globe around the sun, and the labors of the scientists of Saturn or Jupiter will never be known. Still, since chance has bound our two existences together, I can share with you the result of my observations."
"I am listening, Captain."
"You know, Professor, that seawater is denser than fresh water, but this density is not uniform. In fact, if I represent the density of fresh water by one, I find one and twenty-eight thousandths for the waters of the Atlantic, one and twenty-six thousandths for the waters of the Pacific, one and thirty thousandths for the waters of the Mediterranean —"
"Aha!" I thought. "So he ventures into the Mediterranean?"
"— one and eighteen thousandths for the waters of the Ionian Sea, and one and twenty-nine thousandths for the waters of the Adriatic."
Clearly the Nautilus did not shun the frequented seas of Europe, and I concluded from this that it would carry us back — perhaps before long — toward more civilized continents. I thought that Ned Land would learn of this detail with a very natural satisfaction.
For several days our time was taken up with experiments of every kind, bearing on the degrees of saltness of the waters at different depths, on their electrification, their coloration, their transparency — and in all these circumstances Captain Nemo displayed an ingenuity equaled only by his graciousness toward me. Then, for some days, I saw no more of him, and once again found myself as though isolated aboard his ship.
On January 16, the Nautilus seemed to fall asleep only a few meters below the surface of the waves. Its electric apparatus had stopped working, and its motionless propeller left it to drift at the mercy of the currents. I supposed the crew was busy with interior repairs, made necessary by the violence of the machine's mechanical movements.
My companions and I then witnessed a curious spectacle. The panels of the salon were open, and since the Nautilus's beacon was not lit, a vague darkness reigned in the midst of the waters.
The stormy sky, thick with heavy clouds, gave the upper layers of the ocean only an insufficient light.
I was observing the state of the sea under these conditions, and the biggest fish appeared to me only as barely sketched shadows, when the Nautilus suddenly found itself transported into full light. At first I thought the beacon had been relit, and was casting its electric brilliance through the liquid mass. I was mistaken, and after a quick look I recognized my error.
The Nautilus was floating in the midst of a phosphorescent layer that, in this darkness, became dazzling. It was produced by myriads of luminous animalcules, whose sparkle grew as they slid over the ship's metal hull. I caught, then, flashes in the midst of these luminous sheets, like streams of molten lead in a blazing furnace, or masses of metal heated white-hot — so that, by contrast, certain bright portions cast shadow in this fiery medium, from which every shadow ought to have been banished. No! this was no longer the calm radiance of our ordinary lighting. There was an uncommon vigor and movement in it. You could feel that this light was alive!
For in truth it was an infinite mass of pelagic infusoria, of miliary noctilucae, true globules of transparent jelly, furnished with a threadlike tentacle, of which as many as twenty-five thousand have been counted in thirty cubic centimeters of water. And their light was doubled again by the peculiar glow of the medusae, the starfish, the aurelia jellyfish, the date-shell pholads, and other phosphorescent zoophytes, steeped in the grease of organic matter decomposed by the sea, and perhaps in the mucus secreted by the fish.
For several hours the Nautilus floated in these gleaming waves, and our wonder grew as we watched the great sea animals frolic in them like salamanders. There, in the midst of that fire that does not burn, I saw porpoises — elegant, swift, tireless clowns of the seas — and swordfish three meters long, intelligent forerunners of hurricanes, whose formidable blades sometimes struck the salon's window. Then smaller fish appeared: varied triggerfish, leaping scomberoids, wolf-snouted filefish, and a hundred others that streaked the luminous atmosphere as they darted through it.
There was an enchantment in that dazzling spectacle! Perhaps some atmospheric condition was heightening the intensity of the phenomenon. Perhaps some storm was breaking loose on the surface of the waves. But at this depth of a few meters, the Nautilus felt nothing of its fury, and it rocked peacefully in the midst of the tranquil waters.
So we went on, endlessly charmed by some new marvel. Conseil observed and classified his zoophytes, his articulates, his mollusks, his fish. The days slipped by rapidly, and I no longer counted them. Ned, following his habit, tried to vary the fare on board. Like true snails, we had grown used to our shell, and I can affirm that it is an easy thing to become a perfect snail.
And so this existence seemed to us easy, natural, and we no longer imagined that a different sort of life existed on the surface of the terrestrial globe — when an event came to remind us of the strangeness of our situation.
On January 18, the Nautilus was at 105° longitude and 15° south latitude. The weather was threatening, the sea rough and heaving. A strong breeze was blowing from the east. The barometer, which had been falling for some days, announced an imminent battle of the elements.
I had climbed onto the platform just as the first officer was taking his measurements of hour angles. I waited, as usual, for the daily phrase to be spoken. But that day it was replaced by another phrase, no less incomprehensible. Almost at once I saw Captain Nemo appear, his eyes — fitted to a telescope — turned toward the horizon.
For a few minutes the captain stood motionless, without leaving the point framed within his lens. Then he lowered his glass and exchanged a dozen words with his first officer. The man seemed in the grip of an emotion he was vainly trying to contain. Captain Nemo, more master of himself, remained cold.
He appeared, moreover, to be raising certain objections, to which the officer replied with firm assurances. At least, that was how I understood it, from the difference in their tone and their gestures.
As for me, I had looked carefully in the direction they were observing, without seeing anything. Sky and water merged along a line of horizon of perfect clarity.
Meanwhile Captain Nemo paced from one end of the platform to the other, without looking at me — perhaps without seeing me. His step was firm, but less regular than usual. Sometimes he stopped, and, arms crossed on his chest, he watched the sea. What could he be searching for on that immense expanse? The Nautilus was then some hundreds of miles from the nearest coast.
The first officer had taken up his telescope again and was stubbornly questioning the horizon, coming and going, stamping his foot, contrasting with his chief by his nervous agitation.
In any case, this mystery would necessarily be cleared up, and before long — for on an order from Captain Nemo, the engine, increasing its propulsive power, drove the propeller into a faster rotation.
At that moment the first officer once more drew the captain's attention. Nemo broke off his pacing and pointed his telescope toward the indicated spot. He observed it a long while. For my part, seriously intrigued, I went down to the salon and brought back an excellent spyglass that I ordinarily used. Then, resting it on the cage of the beacon that jutted out at the front of the platform, I prepared to sweep the whole line of sky and sea.
But my eye had not yet been fixed to the eyepiece when the instrument was snatched violently from my hands.
I turned around. Captain Nemo stood before me — but I did not recognize him. His face was transfigured. His eye, gleaming with a somber fire, had retreated beneath his knitted brow. His teeth were half bared. His stiff body, his clenched fists, his head drawn down between his shoulders, bore witness to the violent hatred that breathed from his whole person. He did not move. My spyglass, fallen from his hand, had rolled to his feet.
Had I then, without meaning to, provoked this posture of rage? Did he imagine — this incomprehensible man — that I had surprised some secret forbidden to the guests of the Nautilus?
No! that hatred, I was not its object, for he was not looking at me, and his eye stayed obstinately fixed on that impenetrable point of the horizon.
At last Captain Nemo became master of himself again. His face, so profoundly altered, resumed its habitual calm. He addressed a few words to his first officer in the foreign language, then he turned back to me.
"Professor Aronnax," he said to me in a rather imperious tone, "I ask you to observe one of the pledges that bind you to me.
"What is it, Captain?"
"You must let yourself be confined, you and your companions, until the moment when I judge it fitting to give you back your freedom."
"You are the master," I answered, looking at him steadily. "But may I ask you a question?"
"None, sir."
At that word, I had nothing to argue, only to obey, since all resistance would have been impossible.
I went down to the cabin occupied by Ned Land and Conseil, and told them of the captain's decision. I leave it to be imagined how this news was received by the Canadian. In any case, there was no time for any explanation. Four members of the crew were waiting at the door, and they led us to that cell where we had spent our first night aboard the Nautilus.
Ned Land tried to protest, but the door closed on him for all answer.
"Will Master tell me what this means?" Conseil asked me.
I recounted to my companions what had happened. They were as astonished as I was, and no further along.
Meanwhile, I was plunged into an abyss of reflections, and the strange, apprehensive look on Captain Nemo's face would not leave my thoughts. I was incapable of linking two logical ideas together, and was losing myself in the most absurd hypotheses, when I was pulled from my mental strain by these words of Ned Land's:
"Well, look at that! Lunch is served!"
Indeed, the table had been laid. It was obvious that Captain Nemo had given this order at the same time that he had the Nautilus hurried along.
"Will Master permit me to make him a recommendation?" Conseil asked.
"Yes, my boy," I answered.
"Well then — let Master eat his lunch. It is the prudent thing, for we do not know what may happen."
"You're right, Conseil."
"Unfortunately," said Ned Land, "they've only given us the regular fare of the ship."
"Friend Ned," Conseil replied, "what would you say, then, if there had been no lunch at all?"
This reasoning cut the harpooner's grumbling short.
We sat down to table. The meal passed in near silence. I ate little. Conseil "forced himself," always out of prudence, and Ned Land, whatever his mood, did not miss a single bite. Then, lunch over, each of us settled into his corner.
At that moment the luminous globe that lit the cell went out and left us in deep darkness. Ned Land was not slow to fall asleep, and — what astonished me — Conseil too gave way to a heavy drowsiness. I was asking myself what could have brought on this imperious need for sleep in him, when I felt my own brain steeping in a thick torpor. My eyes, which I wanted to keep open, closed in spite of me. I was in the grip of a painful hallucination. Plainly, some sleeping drug had been mixed into the food we had just eaten. So prison was not enough to hide Captain Nemo's plans from us — sleep had to be added to it as well!
I heard then the panels closing again. The undulations of the sea, which had set up a slight rolling motion, ceased. Had the Nautilus, then, left the surface of the ocean? Had it gone back down into the motionless stratum of the waters?
I tried to resist sleep. It was impossible. My breathing weakened. I felt a deadly cold freeze my heavy, half-paralyzed limbs. My eyelids, true caps of lead, fell over my eyes. I could not lift them. A morbid sleep, full of hallucinations, took hold of my whole being. Then the visions faded, and left me in a total annihilation.
The next morning I woke with my head remarkably clear. To my great surprise, I was in my own room. My companions, no doubt, had been carried back to their cabin without noticing it any more than I had. What had happened during the night, they knew as little as I did myself, and to unravel that mystery I could count on nothing but the chances of the future.
Then I thought of leaving my room. Was I once more free, or still a prisoner? Entirely free. I opened the door, made my way along the passageways, and climbed the central staircase. The panels, shut the evening before, now stood open. I came out onto the platform.
Ned Land and Conseil were waiting for me there. I questioned them. They knew nothing. Sunk in a heavy sleep that had left them no memory at all, they had been very much astonished to find themselves back in their cabin.
As for the Nautilus, it seemed to us as calm and mysterious as ever. It floated on the surface of the waves at a moderate pace. Nothing on board appeared to have changed.
Ned Land, with those piercing eyes of his, studied the sea. It was empty. The Canadian could point to nothing new on the horizon — no sail, no land. A west wind blew loud and gusty, and long swells, their crests torn ragged by the wind, set the vessel rolling noticeably.
Once it had renewed its air, the Nautilus held to an average depth of fifteen meters, so as to be able to return quickly to the surface. This maneuver, contrary to habit, was carried out several times over the course of that day, the nineteenth of January. Each time, the first officer would climb up onto the platform, and the customary phrase would ring out through the interior of the ship.
As for Captain Nemo, he did not appear. Of the crew I saw no one but the impassive steward, who served me with his usual precision and his usual silence.
Toward two o'clock I was in the salon, busy organizing my notes, when the captain opened the door and came in. I greeted him. He returned an almost imperceptible nod, without a word to me. I went back to my work, hoping he might perhaps give me some explanation of the events that had marked the previous night. He did nothing of the sort. I watched him. His face struck me as exhausted; his reddened eyes had found no refreshment in sleep; his whole expression spoke of a deep sadness, a genuine grief. He paced back and forth, sat down and got up again, picked up a book at random and set it aside at once, consulted his instruments without taking his usual notes, and seemed unable to stay still for a single moment.
At last he came over to me and said:
"Are you a physician, Professor Aronnax?"
So little did I expect the question that I looked at him for some time without answering.
"Are you a physician?" he repeated. "Several of your colleagues studied medicine — Gratiolet, Moquin-Tandon, and others."
"That's true," I said. "I am a doctor; I served my residency in the hospitals. I practiced for several years before joining the Museum."
"Good, sir."
My answer had plainly satisfied Captain Nemo. But not knowing what he was driving at, I waited for further questions, meaning to answer as circumstances required.
"Professor Aronnax," the captain said, "would you consent to look after one of my men?"
"You have a sick man aboard?"
"Yes."
"I'm ready to follow you."
"Come."
I confess my heart was pounding. I don't know why I saw some connection between this man's illness and the events of the night before, and that mystery preoccupied me at least as much as the patient himself.
Captain Nemo led me to the after part of the Nautilus and showed me into a cabin next to the crew's quarters.
There, on a bed, lay a man of about forty, with strong features — a true Anglo-Saxon type.
I bent over him. This was not merely a sick man; this was a wounded one. His head, swathed in bloodstained cloths, rested on a doubled pillow. I unwound the bandages, and the wounded man, watching me with his wide, fixed eyes, let me do it without uttering a single complaint.
The wound was horrible. The skull, shattered by some blunt instrument, laid the brain bare, and the cerebral matter had suffered a deep bruising. Clots of blood had formed in the dissolving mass, which had taken on the color of wine dregs. There had been both contusion and concussion of the brain. The man's breathing was slow, and a few spasmodic twitches ran through the muscles of his face. Inflammation of the brain was complete, and it had brought on the paralysis of feeling and of movement.
I took the wounded man's pulse. It was intermittent. The extremities of the body were already growing cold, and I saw that death was coming on, without its seeming possible for me to hold it back. Having dressed the poor man's wound, I readjusted the bandages about his head and turned back to Captain Nemo.
"How did he get this wound?" I asked him.
"What does it matter?" the captain answered evasively. "A shock to the Nautilus broke one of the levers of the engine, and it struck this man. But your opinion of his condition?"
I hesitated to pronounce it.
"You may speak," the captain told me. "This man does not understand French."
I looked one last time at the wounded man, then answered:
"This man will be dead in two hours."
"Is there nothing that can save him?"
"Nothing."
Captain Nemo's hand clenched, and a few tears slid from those eyes I had not believed made for weeping.
For a few moments I went on watching the dying man, whose life was ebbing little by little. His pallor deepened still further under the electric glow that bathed his deathbed. I looked at that intelligent head, furrowed with premature wrinkles that misfortune, and perhaps misery, had carved there long ago. I searched for the secret of his life in the last words to escape his lips.
"You may withdraw, Professor Aronnax," said Captain Nemo.
I left the captain in the dying man's cabin and went back to my room, deeply shaken by the scene. All through the day I was troubled by grim forebodings. That night I slept badly, and between my frequently interrupted dreams I thought I heard distant sighs, like the chanting of a funeral dirge. Was it the prayer for the dead, murmured in that language I could not understand?
The next morning I went up on deck. Captain Nemo was there before me. As soon as he caught sight of me, he came over.
"Professor," he said, "would it suit you to make an underwater excursion today?"
"With my companions?" I asked.
"If they care to come."
"We are at your orders, Captain."
"Then be so good as to go and put on your diving suits."
Of the dying man, or the dead one, not a word was said. I rejoined Ned Land and Conseil and told them of Captain Nemo's proposal. Conseil hastened to accept, and this time the Canadian showed himself very willing to come along.
It was eight o'clock in the morning. By half past eight we were dressed for this new outing and fitted with the two devices for light and for breathing. The double door was opened, and, accompanied by Captain Nemo with a dozen crewmen behind him, we set foot at a depth of ten meters on the firm ground where the Nautilus rested.
A gentle slope led down to an uneven bottom some fifteen fathoms deep. This bottom was completely different from the one I had visited during my first excursion beneath the waters of the Pacific. Here there was no fine sand, no undersea meadows, no open-water forest. I recognized at once the marvelous region that Captain Nemo was that day doing us the honors of. It was the coral kingdom.
In the branch of the zoophytes and the class of the alcyonarians, one finds the order of the gorgonaceans, which contains the three groups of the gorgonians, the isidians, and the corallians. It is to this last that coral belongs — a curious substance that has been classified in turn among the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. A medicine to the ancients, a jewel to the moderns, it was not until 1694 that the Marseillais Peysonnel definitively assigned it to the animal kingdom.
Coral is a colony of tiny animals joined together on a brittle, stony framework called a polypary. These polyps have a single generating parent that produced them all by budding, and each possesses an existence of its own while sharing in the common life. It is, then, a kind of natural socialism. I was familiar with the latest work done on this strange zoophyte, which mineralizes even as it branches out like a tree — the naturalists' apt observation — and nothing could have been more fascinating to me than to visit one of these petrified forests that nature has planted at the bottom of the seas.
The Ruhmkorff lamps were switched on, and we followed a bank of coral still in the making, which, given time, will one day close off this whole portion of the Indian Ocean. The path was bordered by impenetrable thickets, tangles of shrubs covered with little star-shaped flowers whose rays were white. Only, contrary to the plants of dry land, these branchings, anchored to the rocks of the seafloor, all pointed downward from above.
The light produced a thousand charming effects as it played among these vividly colored boughs. I seemed to see those membranous, cylindrical tubes trembling under the undulation of the water. I was tempted to gather their fresh corollas, adorned with delicate tentacles, some newly opened, others scarcely born, while nimble little fish, quick-finned, brushed past them as they swam by, like flights of birds. But if my hand came near these living flowers, these animated sensitive plants, the alarm ran at once through the whole colony. The white corollas drew back into their red sheaths, the flowers vanished before my eyes, and the bush turned into a block of stony knobs.
Chance had set me there in the presence of the most precious specimens of this zoophyte. This coral was the equal of what is fished up in the Mediterranean, off the coasts of France, Italy, and Barbary. By its vivid tones it justified those poetic names the trade gives to its loveliest products — flower of blood, foam of blood. Coral sells for as much as five hundred francs a kilogram, and here the liquid depths covered the fortune of a whole world of coral-fishers. This precious material, often mingled with other polyparies, formed dense, inextricable masses called "macciota," on which I noticed some admirable specimens of pink coral.
But soon the bushes drew closer together, the tree-forms grew taller. Real petrified copses and long spans of fantastic architecture opened before our steps. Captain Nemo turned in under a dark gallery whose gentle downward slope led us to a depth of a hundred meters. The light from our glass coils produced magical effects at times, catching on the rough irregularities of these natural arches and on the hanging formations arranged like chandeliers, pricking them with points of fire. Among the coral shrubs I observed other polyps no less curious — melites, irises with jointed branches, then a few tufts of corallines, some green, some red, true algae encrusted in their calcareous salts, which the naturalists, after long debate, have definitively placed in the vegetable kingdom. But, as one thinker has remarked, "this is perhaps the very point where life obscurely lifts itself out of the sleep of stone, without yet detaching itself from that rough point of departure."
At last, after two hours of walking, we had reached a depth of about three hundred meters — that is, the extreme limit at which coral begins to form. But here it was no longer the isolated bush, nor the modest low-growing copse. It was the immense forest, the great mineral vegetation, the enormous petrified trees, joined by garlands of graceful plumarias — those vines of the sea — all decked out in shifting hues and reflections. We passed freely beneath their tall boughs, lost in the shadow of the waters, while at our feet the organ-pipe corals, the brain corals, the star corals, the mushroom corals, and the caryophylls formed a carpet of flowers strewn with dazzling gems.
What an indescribable spectacle! Ah, if only we could have shared what we felt! Why were we imprisoned under this mask of metal and glass? Why were words forbidden between one of us and another? If only we could have lived, at least, the life of those fish that people the liquid element — or better still, the life of those amphibious creatures that, for long hours at a stretch, can roam at their own whim through the double domain of the land and the waters!
Meanwhile Captain Nemo had come to a halt. My companions and I stopped our own march, and, turning around, I saw that his men were forming a semicircle about their chief. Looking more closely, I noticed that four of them carried on their shoulders an object of oblong shape.
We stood, at this spot, in the center of a vast clearing ringed by the tall tree-forms of the undersea forest. Our lamps cast over the space a kind of twilight glimmer that stretched the shadows out enormously across the ground. At the edge of the clearing the darkness closed in again, deep, and gathered only faint sparks caught here and there on the sharp ridges of the coral.
Ned Land and Conseil were beside me. We watched, and the thought came to me that I was about to witness a strange scene. Studying the ground, I saw that it was swollen at certain points into slight mounds crusted over with calcareous deposits, and laid out with a regularity that betrayed the hand of man.
In the middle of the clearing, on a pedestal of roughly heaped stones, rose a cross of coral, spreading its long arms that seemed made of petrified blood.
At a sign from Captain Nemo, one of his men stepped forward, and a few feet from the cross he began to dig a hole with a pick he unhooked from his belt.
I understood it all! This clearing was a cemetery, this hole a grave, that oblong object the body of the man who had died in the night! Captain Nemo and his people had come to bury their companion in this common resting place, at the bottom of that unreachable ocean!
No — never had my mind been so wrought upon! Never had more overwhelming ideas come flooding into my brain! I did not want to see what my eyes were seeing!
Meanwhile the grave was slowly deepening. Fish fled this way and that from their disturbed retreat. I could hear the iron of the pick ringing on the calcareous floor, striking sparks now and then as it met some flint lost at the bottom of the waters. The hole lengthened, widened, and soon it was deep enough to receive the body.
Then the bearers drew near. The body, wrapped in a cloth of white byssus, was lowered into its watery grave. Captain Nemo, his arms folded across his chest, and all the friends of the man who had loved them knelt in the attitude of prayer. My two companions and I had bowed reverently.
The grave was then covered over with the fragments torn from the ground, forming a slight rise above it.
When this was done, Captain Nemo and his men rose to their feet; then, drawing near the grave, all bent the knee once more, and all stretched out a hand in a sign of final farewell.
Then the funeral procession took the road back to the Nautilus, passing again beneath the arches of the forest, through the copses, along the coral bushes, and always climbing.
At last the ship's lights appeared. Their luminous trail guided us back to the Nautilus. By one o'clock we had returned.
As soon as I had changed my clothes, I went back up onto the platform, and, in the grip of a terrible obsession of thoughts, I sat down near the beacon.
Captain Nemo joined me. I rose and said to him:
"So, just as I foresaw, that man died in the night?"
"Yes, Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo answered.
"And he rests now beside his companions, in that coral cemetery?"
"Yes — forgotten by all, but not by us! We dig the grave, and the polyps take it upon themselves to seal our dead there for eternity!"
And burying his face abruptly in his clenched hands, the captain tried in vain to hold back a sob. Then he added:
"There lies our peaceful cemetery, a few hundred feet beneath the surface of the waves!"
"Your dead sleep there in peace, at least, Captain, beyond the reach of the sharks!"
"Yes, sir," Captain Nemo answered gravely, "beyond the reach of the sharks — and of men!"
Here begins the second part of this voyage under the seas. The first had ended with that moving scene in the coral cemetery, which left a deep impression on my mind. So this, then, was how Captain Nemo's whole life unfolded, in the heart of that immense sea — even his grave he had made ready in the most impenetrable of its depths. There, not one of the ocean's monsters would come to trouble the last sleep of those companions of the Nautilus, those friends, bound to one another in death as surely as in life! "Nor any man, either!" the captain had added.
Always that same wild, implacable distrust of human society!
For my part, I could no longer content myself with the guesses that satisfied Conseil. That worthy fellow persisted in seeing the commander of the Nautilus as nothing more than one of those unappreciated scholars who repay humanity's indifference with scorn — a misunderstood genius who, weary of the disappointments of the land, had been driven to take refuge in this inaccessible element where his instincts could work freely. But to my mind, that theory explained only one side of Captain Nemo.
For the mystery of that last night, when we had been chained up in sleep and a locked cell; the violent precaution the captain had taken in tearing from my eyes the telescope I was about to sweep across the horizon; the mortal wound of that crewman, caused by some inexplicable collision of the Nautilus — all of this was pushing me down a new road. No! Captain Nemo was not merely fleeing from mankind! His formidable machine served not only his instincts for freedom, but perhaps also the interests of some terrible reprisal — I could not say what.
At this moment nothing is clear to me; in this darkness I still catch only glimmers, and I must confine myself to writing, so to speak, at the dictation of events.
Besides, nothing binds us to Captain Nemo. He knows that escape from the Nautilus is impossible. We are not even prisoners on parole. No pledge of honor holds us. We are only captives, prisoners dressed up with the name of "guests" by a show of courtesy. Ned Land, however, has not given up hope of recovering his freedom. He is sure to seize the first chance that luck may offer him. And I would no doubt do the same. And yet it would not be without a kind of regret that I would carry away what the captain's generosity had allowed us to learn of the Nautilus's secrets. For, in the end, must one hate this man or admire him? Is he a victim or an executioner? And then, to be honest, I would like — before I leave him forever — I would like to have completed this underwater tour of the world, whose opening chapters are so magnificent. I would like to have observed the complete series of wonders heaped up beneath the seas of the globe. I would like to have seen what no man has yet seen, even if I had to pay with my life for this insatiable need to learn! What have I discovered so far? Nothing, or next to nothing, since we have crossed only six thousand leagues of the Pacific!
And yet I know very well that the Nautilus is drawing near to inhabited lands, and that if some chance of deliverance offered itself to us, it would be cruel to sacrifice my companions to my passion for the unknown. I would have to follow them — perhaps even to lead them. But would that chance ever come? The man robbed by force of his free will longs for it, that chance; but the scholar, the curious mind, dreads it.
That day, January 21, 1868, at noon, the first officer came to take the sun's altitude. I climbed onto the platform, lit a cigar, and watched him at work. It seemed clear to me that this man did not understand French, for several times I made remarks aloud that ought to have drawn from him some involuntary sign of attention, had he understood them; but he remained impassive and silent.
While he was taking his sightings with the sextant, one of the Nautilus's sailors — that powerful man who had gone with us on our first underwater excursion to Crespo Island — came to clean the glass of the beacon. I studied then the arrangement of this apparatus, whose power was multiplied a hundredfold by lens-shaped rings set like those of a lighthouse, which kept its light trained in the useful plane. The electric lamp was designed to yield its full illuminating power. Its light, in fact, was produced in a vacuum, which ensured both its steadiness and its intensity. This vacuum also spared the graphite points between which the luminous arc springs — an important economy for Captain Nemo, who could not have replaced them easily. But under these conditions their wear was almost imperceptible.
When the Nautilus prepared to resume its underwater course, I went back down to the salon. The panels closed again, and our heading was set due west.
We were now furrowing the waters of the Indian Ocean, a vast liquid plain covering five hundred and fifty million hectares, whose waters are so transparent that they make you dizzy if you lean out over their surface. The Nautilus generally floated there at depths between one and two hundred meters. So it went for several days. To anyone but me, gripped by an immense love of the sea, the hours would no doubt have seemed long and monotonous; but these daily strolls on the platform, where I steeped myself again in the invigorating air of the ocean, the spectacle of these rich waters through the salon's glass, the reading of the books in the library, the writing of my memoirs — all of it filled my time and left me not one moment of weariness or boredom.
Our health, all of us, kept up in a very satisfactory state. The shipboard diet suited us perfectly, and for my part I could easily have done without the variations that Ned Land, out of sheer protest, took pains to introduce to it. What is more, in this constant temperature there was not even a cold to fear. Besides, that madreporarian coral the Dendrophyllia — known in Provence as "sea fennel," of which a certain supply was kept on board — would have furnished, with the melting flesh of its polyps, an excellent paste against a cough.
For several days we saw a great many aquatic birds, web-footed sorts, gulls or seagulls. Some were cleverly killed, and, prepared in a certain way, they made a very acceptable dish of waterfowl. Among the great gliders, carried off to long distances from any land and resting on the waves from the fatigue of flight, I made out magnificent albatrosses with a discordant cry like the braying of a donkey, birds that belong to the family of the long-winged. The web-toed family was represented by swift frigate birds that nimbly fished the surface waters, and by numerous phaetons or tropicbirds — among others, that red-tailed tropicbird, big as a pigeon, whose white plumage is shaded with rosy tints that set off the black tone of its wings.
The Nautilus's nets brought up several sorts of sea turtles, of the hawksbill kind, with an arched back, whose shell is highly prized. These reptiles, which dive easily, can stay a long time underwater by closing the fleshy valve at the external opening of their nasal passage. Some of these hawksbills, when they were caught, were still asleep in their shells, safe from marine animals. The flesh of these turtles was generally mediocre, but their eggs made an excellent treat.
As for the fish, they never failed to rouse our admiration whenever, through the open panels, we surprised the secrets of their aquatic life. I noticed several species I had never before had the chance to observe.
I will name chiefly certain boxfish peculiar to the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and that part of the ocean bathing the coasts of equatorial America. These fish, like the turtles, the armadillos, the sea urchins, and the crustaceans, are protected by an armor that is neither chalky nor stony, but genuinely bony. Sometimes it takes the shape of a triangular solid, sometimes of a four-sided one. Among the triangular kinds I noted a few half a decimeter long, of wholesome flesh and exquisite taste, brown at the tail and yellow at the fins, whose acclimatization I would recommend even in fresh water, to which, for that matter, a certain number of saltwater fish grow accustomed easily. I will also mention four-sided boxfish topped along the back with four large tubercles; boxfish speckled with white points along the lower part of the body, which grow as tame as birds; trunkfish armed with spines formed by the prolongation of their bony crust, whose peculiar grunting has earned them the nickname "sea pigs"; and then "dromedaries" with big cone-shaped humps, whose flesh is hard and leathery.
I find further, in the daily notes kept by Conseil, certain fish of the pufferfish kind, peculiar to these seas: red-backed, white-breasted Spengler's puffers, distinguished by three longitudinal rows of filaments, and electric ones, seven inches long, decked out in the liveliest colors. Then, as specimens of other kinds: ovoids resembling a blackish-brown egg, striped with white bands and lacking a tail; diodons, true porcupines of the sea, armed with spines and able to swell up so as to form a ball bristling with darts; seahorses common to every ocean; flying sea moths, with an elongated snout, whose very broad pectoral fins, arranged like wings, allow them — if not to fly — at least to launch themselves into the air; spoon-tailed "pigeons," whose tail is covered with many scaly rings; long-jawed spiny eels, excellent fish twenty-five centimeters long and gleaming with the most agreeable colors; livid dragonets, whose head is rough; myriads of leaping blennies, striped with black, with long pectoral fins, gliding over the surface of the water with prodigious speed; delicious sailfin blennies, which can hoist their fins like so many sails spread to the favoring currents; splendid kurtus, on which nature has lavished yellow, sky blue, silver, and gold; trichopters, whose wings are formed of filaments; bullheads, forever smeared with mud, which produce a certain rustling sound; gurnards, whose liver is considered poison; bodians, which wear a movable blinder over the eyes; and finally trumpetfish, with a long tubular snout, true flycatchers of the ocean, armed with a gun that neither the Chassepot nor the Remington ever foresaw, and which kill insects by striking them with a single drop of water.
In the eighty-ninth genus of the fish classified by Lacépède — belonging to the second subclass of the bony fishes, marked by a gill cover and a branchial membrane — I noticed the scorpionfish, whose head is fitted out with spines and which possesses only a single dorsal fin; these animals are clad in or stripped of small scales, according to the subgenus to which they belong. The second subgenus gave us specimens of dactylopterus, three to four decimeters long, striped with yellow, but with a head of fantastic appearance. As for the first subgenus, it furnished several specimens of that bizarre fish justly nicknamed "sea toad," a fish with a large head, sometimes hollowed with deep cavities, sometimes swollen with protuberances; bristling with spines and strewn with tubercles, it carries irregular, hideous horns; its body and tail are studded with calluses; its stingers inflict dangerous wounds; it is repugnant and horrible.
From January 21 to 23 the Nautilus traveled at the rate of two hundred and fifty leagues per twenty-four hours, that is, five hundred and forty miles, or twenty-two miles an hour.
If we recognized the various kinds of fish as they passed, it was because they were drawn by the electric glare and tried to keep us company; most, outstripped by our speed, soon fell behind; a few, however, managed to hold their place for a while in the Nautilus's wake.
On the morning of the 24th, at 12°5′ south latitude and 94°33′ longitude, we sighted Keeling Island, a madreporic upheaval planted with magnificent coconut palms, which was visited by Mr. Darwin and Captain Fitz-Roy. The Nautilus skirted the steep shores of this deserted island at a short distance. Its dredges brought up numerous specimens of polyps and echinoderms, and curious shells of the mollusk branch. A few precious products of the dolphin-shell species enriched Captain Nemo's treasures, to which I added a punctiferous star coral, a kind of parasitic coral often fixed on a shell.
Soon Keeling Island vanished below the horizon, and our heading was set to the northwest, toward the tip of the Indian peninsula.
"Civilized lands," Ned Land said to me that day. "That'll be better than these Papuan islands, where you meet more savages than roebuck! On that Indian soil, Professor, there are roads, railways, English, French, and Hindu towns. You wouldn't go five miles without running into a countryman. Well now! Isn't it about time we gave Captain Nemo the slip?"
"No, Ned, no," I answered in a very firm tone. "Let it run, as you sailors say. The Nautilus is drawing near the inhabited continents. It's coming back toward Europe — let it take us there. Once we've reached our own seas, we'll see what prudence advises us to attempt. Besides, I hardly suppose Captain Nemo will allow us to go hunting on the coasts of Malabar or Coromandel the way we did in the forests of New Guinea."
"Well then, Professor — can't we do without his permission?"
I did not answer the Canadian. I had no wish to argue. At bottom, I was set on running the chances of the destiny that had thrown me aboard the Nautilus all the way to the end.
From Keeling Island on, our pace generally slowed. It also grew more erratic and often carried us to great depths. Several times we made use of the inclined planes, which interior levers could set at an angle to the waterline. We went down that way to depths of two and three kilometers, but without ever having verified the great deeps of this Indian sea, which soundings of thirteen thousand meters have not been able to reach. As for the temperature of the lower layers, the thermometer always registered, invariably, four degrees above zero. I observed only that, in the upper sheets, the water was always colder over the shallows than in the open sea.
On January 25, the ocean being utterly deserted, the Nautilus spent the day on the surface, beating the waves with its powerful screw and flinging them up to a great height. How, under such conditions, could it not have been taken for a gigantic cetacean? I spent three-quarters of that day on the platform. I watched the sea. Nothing on the horizon, except, toward four in the afternoon, a long steamer running west on an opposite tack. Its masts were visible for a moment, but it could not make out the Nautilus, which lay too flush with the water. I thought this steamship must belong to the Peninsular and Oriental line, which runs the service from Ceylon to Sydney, calling at King George's Point and Melbourne.
At five in the evening, before that swift twilight that ties day to night in the tropical zones, Conseil and I were dazzled by a curious spectacle.
There is a charming animal whose encounter, according to the ancients, foretold good fortune. Aristotle, Athenaeus, Pliny, and Oppian had studied its tastes and exhausted upon it all the poetry of the scholars of Greece and Italy. They called it Nautilus and Pompylius. But modern science has not ratified their name, and this mollusk is now known as the Argonaut.
Anyone who had consulted Conseil would have learned from that good fellow that the mollusk branch divides into five classes; that the first class, the cephalopods — whose members are sometimes naked, sometimes shelled — includes two families, the dibranchiate and the tetrabranchiate, distinguished by the number of their gills; that the family of the dibranchiates contains three genera, the argonaut, the squid, and the cuttlefish, and that the family of the tetrabranchiates contains but one, the nautilus. And if, after this nomenclature, some unruly mind had confused the argonaut, which is acetabuliferous — that is, a bearer of suckers — with the nautilus, which is tentaculiferous — that is, a bearer of tentacles — he would have been without excuse.
Now, it was a whole troop of these argonauts that was then traveling over the surface of the ocean. We could count several hundred of them. They belonged to the species of the tuberculate argonauts, which is special to the seas of India.
These graceful mollusks moved backward by means of their locomotor tube, driving out through this tube the water they had sucked in. Of their eight tentacles, six — long and slender — floated on the water, while the two others, rounded into paddle shapes, spread to the wind like a light sail. I could see perfectly their spiraling, wavy shell, which Cuvier rightly compares to an elegant little skiff. A real boat, in fact. It carries the animal that secreted it, without the animal being attached to it.
"The argonaut is free to leave its shell," I said to Conseil, "but it never does."
"Just like Captain Nemo," Conseil replied shrewdly. "That's why he would have done better to call his ship the Argonaut."
For about an hour the Nautilus floated in the midst of this troop of mollusks. Then some sudden terror seized them, I know not what. As if at a signal, all the sails were abruptly struck; the arms folded back, the bodies contracted. The shells, capsizing, shifted their center of gravity, and the whole flotilla vanished beneath the waves. It was instantaneous, and never did the ships of a squadron maneuver with more unity.
At that moment night fell all at once, and the swells, barely lifted by the breeze, stretched out peacefully beneath the Nautilus's wales.
The next day, January 26, we cut the equator on the eighty-second meridian, and we passed back into the northern hemisphere.
During that day a formidable troop of sharks escorted us. Terrible animals, which swarm in these seas and make them very dangerous. There were Philippi sharks, brown-backed and whitish-bellied, armed with eleven rows of teeth; ocellated sharks, whose neck is marked with a large black spot ringed with white that looks like an eye; Isabella sharks with a rounded snout strewn with dark points. Often these powerful animals hurled themselves against the salon's glass with a violence hardly reassuring. Ned Land could no longer control himself. He wanted to go up to the surface and harpoon these monsters — especially certain smooth-hound sharks whose mouth is paved with teeth arranged like a mosaic, and great tiger sharks five meters long, which taunted him with a quite particular insistence. But soon the Nautilus, putting on speed, easily left behind the swiftest of these sharks.
On January 27, at the mouth of the vast Gulf of Bengal, we met more than once — a sinister sight! — corpses floating at the surface. They were the dead of the Indian cities, carried by the Ganges out to the open sea, and which the vultures, the country's only undertakers, had not finished devouring. But the sharks were not lacking to help them at their funereal work.
Toward seven in the evening, the Nautilus, half submerged, sailed through a sea of milk. As far as the eye could reach, the ocean seemed turned to milk. Was it the effect of the moon's rays? No, for the moon, barely two days old, was still lost below the horizon in the sun's rays. The whole sky, though lit by the radiance of the stars, seemed black by contrast with the whiteness of the waters.
Conseil could not believe his eyes, and he questioned me about the causes of this singular phenomenon. Luckily, I was in a position to answer him.
"This is what's called a milk sea," I told him, "a vast expanse of white waves often seen off the coasts of Amboina and in these waters."
"But," asked Conseil, "can Master teach me what cause produces such an effect, for this water hasn't turned into milk, I take it!"
"No, my boy, and this whiteness that surprises you is due only to the presence of myriads of tiny infusoria, a sort of little luminous worm, gelatinous and colorless, no thicker than a hair, whose length does not exceed a fifth of a millimeter. Some of these little creatures cling together over a span of several leagues."
"Several leagues!" exclaimed Conseil.
"Yes, my boy, and don't try to reckon the number of these infusoria! You'd never manage it, for, if I'm not mistaken, some navigators have floated on these milk seas for more than forty miles."
I do not know whether Conseil heeded my advice, but he seemed to sink into deep reflection, no doubt trying to calculate how many fifths of a millimeter forty square miles contain. As for me, I went on observing the phenomenon. For several hours the Nautilus cleaved with its ram these whitish waves, and I noticed that it glided noiselessly over this soapy water, as if it were floating in those eddies of foam that the currents and countercurrents of bays sometimes leave between them.
Toward midnight, the sea suddenly took back its ordinary hue; but behind us, all the way to the limits of the horizon, the sky, reflecting the whiteness of the waves, seemed for a long time steeped in the vague glimmers of an aurora borealis.
On February 28, when the Nautilus rose to the surface at noon at 9°4′ north latitude, it came in sight of land lying eight miles to the west. The first thing I made out was a cluster of mountains, about two thousand feet high, whose shapes had been molded into the most fanciful outlines. Once the reading was taken, I went back into the salon, and when the bearing had been plotted on the chart, I recognized that we stood off the island of Ceylon — that pearl hanging from the lower lobe of the Indian peninsula.
I went to the library to look for some book about this island, one of the most fertile on the globe. As it happened, I found a volume by Sirr H. C., esq., titled Ceylon and the Cingalese. Back in the salon, I first noted down the bearings of Ceylon, on which antiquity had lavished so many different names. It lay between 5°55′ and 9°49′ north latitude, and between 79°42′ and 82°4′ longitude east of the Greenwich meridian; its length was two hundred and seventy-five miles; its maximum width, one hundred and fifty miles; its circumference, nine hundred miles; its area, twenty-four thousand four hundred and forty-eight miles — in other words, a little smaller than Ireland.
At that moment Captain Nemo and his second officer appeared.
The captain glanced at the chart. Then, turning to me:
"The island of Ceylon," he said, "a land famous for its pearl fisheries. Would it please you, Professor Aronnax, to visit one of them?"
"Without a doubt, Captain."
"Good. That will be easy enough. Only, if we see the fisheries, we won't see the fishermen. The annual season hasn't opened yet. No matter. I'll give the order to make for the Gulf of Manaar, where we'll arrive during the night."
The captain said a few words to his second officer, who left at once. Soon the Nautilus sank back into its watery element, and the pressure gauge showed that it was holding at a depth of thirty feet.
With the chart before me, I searched for this Gulf of Manaar. I found it on the ninth parallel, off the northwest coast of Ceylon. It was formed by a long line running out from the little island of Manaar. To reach it, we would have to work our way up the entire western shore of Ceylon.
"Professor," Captain Nemo said to me then, "pearls are fished in the Bay of Bengal, in the Indian Sea, in the seas of China and Japan, in the seas of southern America, in the Gulf of Panama, in the Gulf of California; but it is at Ceylon that the fishing yields the finest results. We're arriving a bit early, no doubt. The fishermen don't gather in the Gulf of Manaar until the month of March, and then, for thirty days, their three hundred boats give themselves over to this lucrative harvest of the sea's treasures. Each boat is crewed by ten rowers and ten fishermen. The fishermen, divided into two teams, dive in turns and go down to a depth of twelve meters by means of a heavy stone that they grip between their feet and that a rope ties back to the boat."
"So," I said, "it's still this primitive method that's in use?"
"Still," Captain Nemo answered, "even though these fisheries belong to the most industrious people on the globe — the English, to whom the Treaty of Amiens ceded them in 1802."
"It seems to me, though, that the diving suit, such as you use it, would render great service in an operation like this."
"Yes, for these poor fishermen can't stay underwater for long. The Englishman Perceval, in his voyage to Ceylon, does speak of an African diver who could stay five minutes without coming up, but I find that hard to believe. I know that some divers reach fifty-seven seconds, and very skilled ones as much as eighty-seven; but they're rare, and once back aboard, these wretched men bleed from the nose and ears, the water tinged with blood. I believe the average time the fishermen can bear is thirty seconds, during which they hurry to cram into a little net all the pearl oysters they can wrench loose; but generally these fishermen don't live to old age. Their eyesight weakens; ulcers break out on their eyes; sores form on their bodies; and often they're even struck down by apoplexy at the bottom of the sea."
"Yes," I said, "it's a sad trade, and one that serves nothing but the satisfaction of a few whims. But tell me, Captain — how many oysters can a boat fish in a day?"
"Forty to fifty thousand or so. It's even said that in 1814, when the English government had fishing done on its own account, its divers, in twenty days of work, brought up seventy-six million oysters."
"At least," I asked, "are these fishermen decently paid?"
"Barely, Professor. In Panama they earn only a dollar a week. Most often, they get a single sou for an oyster that holds a pearl — and how many do they bring up that hold none!"
"A sou to these poor people who make their masters rich! It's disgraceful."
"And so, Professor," Captain Nemo said to me, "you and your companions will visit the bank of Manaar, and if by chance some early fisherman is already there, well, we'll watch him at work."
"Agreed, Captain."
"By the way, Professor Aronnax — you're not afraid of sharks?"
"Sharks?" I cried.
The question struck me as, to say the least, rather pointless.
"Well?" Captain Nemo went on.
"I'll admit, Captain, that I'm not yet very well acquainted with that kind of fish."
"We're used to them, we are," Captain Nemo replied, "and in time you will be too. Besides, we'll be armed, and along the way we might even hunt a shark or two. It's an interesting sport. So then — until tomorrow, Professor, and bright and early."
Having said this in an offhand tone, Captain Nemo left the salon.
If someone invited you to hunt bear in the mountains of Switzerland, you'd say, "Very good! Tomorrow we go bear-hunting." If someone invited you to hunt lion on the plains of the Atlas, or tiger in the jungles of India, you'd say, "Aha! So it seems we're off to hunt tiger or lion!" But if someone invited you to hunt shark in its natural element, you might well ask leave to think it over before accepting the invitation.
As for me, I passed my hand across my forehead, where a few beads of cold sweat had gathered.
"Let's think this over," I told myself, "and take our time. Hunting otters in the underwater forests, as we did in the forests of Crespo Island — that's one thing. But roaming the bottom of the sea when you're all but certain to meet sharks down there — that's another thing entirely! I know that in certain countries, in the Andaman Islands especially, the native divers don't hesitate to attack a shark with a dagger in one hand and a noose in the other; but I also know that many of those who face these formidable animals don't come back alive! Besides, I'm no native diver, and even if I were, I think a slight hesitation on my part, in this case, wouldn't be out of place."
And there I was dreaming of sharks, thinking of those vast jaws bristling with multiple rows of teeth, capable of cutting a man in two. I could already feel a certain ache around my kidneys. And I couldn't stomach the casual ease with which the captain had made this deplorable invitation! You'd have thought he was proposing to go track down some harmless fox in the underbrush.
"Well!" I thought. "Conseil will never agree to come, and that'll excuse me from going along with the captain."
As for Ned Land, I confess I didn't feel quite so sure of his good sense. A danger, however great, always held a certain appeal for his combative nature.
I went back to reading Sirr's book, but I leafed through it absentmindedly. Between the lines I kept seeing jaws opened terrifyingly wide.
Just then Conseil and the Canadian came in, looking calm and even cheerful. They had no idea what was in store for them.
"Well, Professor," Ned Land said to me, "your Captain Nemo — the devil take him! — has just made us a very kind proposal."
"Ah!" I said. "So you know—"
"Begging Master's pardon," Conseil answered, "the commander of the Nautilus has invited us to visit tomorrow, in Master's company, the magnificent fisheries of Ceylon. He did it in excellent terms and behaved like a true gentleman."
"He said nothing more to you?"
"Nothing, Professor," the Canadian answered, "except that he'd already spoken to you about this little outing."
"So he did," I said. "And he gave you no details about—"
"None, Professor. You'll be coming with us, won't you?"
"Me? Of course! I see you've taken a liking to the idea, Master Land."
"Yes! It's curious — very curious."
"Dangerous, perhaps!" I added in an insinuating tone.
"Dangerous," Ned Land answered, "a simple excursion onto an oyster bank!"
Captain Nemo had clearly decided it was pointless to plant the idea of sharks in my companions' minds. I looked at them with a troubled eye, as though they were already missing a limb or two. Should I warn them? Yes, surely, but I hardly knew how to go about it.
"Professor," Conseil said to me, "would Master be willing to give us some details about pearl fishing?"
"About the fishing itself?" I asked. "Or about the incidents that—"
"About the fishing," the Canadian said. "Before setting foot on the ground, it's good to know it."
"Well then! Sit down, my friends, and I'll teach you everything the Englishman Sirr has just taught me."
Ned and Conseil settled onto a divan, and the first thing the Canadian said to me was:
"Professor, what exactly is a pearl?"
"My good Ned," I answered, "to the poet, the pearl is a tear of the sea; to the peoples of the East, it's a drop of dew turned solid; to the ladies, it's a jewel of oblong shape, of a glassy luster, of a mother-of-pearl substance, which they wear on the finger, at the neck, or in the ear; to the chemist, it's a mixture of phosphate and carbonate of lime with a little gelatin; and finally, to the naturalist, it's simply a diseased secretion of the organ that produces mother-of-pearl in certain bivalves."
"Phylum of mollusks," said Conseil, "class of acephalans, order of testaceans."
"Precisely, learned Conseil. Now, among these testaceans, the iridescent sea-ear, the turban shells, the giant clams, the pinna shells — in a word, all those that secrete mother-of-pearl, that is, the blue, bluish, violet, or white substance lining the inside of their shells — are capable of producing pearls."
"Mussels too?" asked the Canadian.
"Yes! The mussels of certain streams of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Saxony, Bohemia, and France."
"Good! We'll keep an eye out for those from now on," the Canadian answered.
"But," I went on, "the mollusk above all others that distills the pearl is the pearl oyster, the Meleagrina margaritifera, the precious pintadine. The pearl is nothing but a nacreous concretion arranged in a globular form. Either it sticks to the oyster's shell, or it embeds itself in the folds of the animal. On the valves, the pearl is fixed; on the flesh, it's loose. But it always has for its nucleus some small hard body, either a sterile ovule or a grain of sand, around which the nacreous matter is deposited over several years, layer by layer, in thin concentric coats."
"Do you find several pearls in a single oyster?" Conseil asked.
"Yes, my boy. There are certain pintadines that form a veritable jewel-case. People have even cited one oyster — though I take the liberty of doubting it — that contained no fewer than a hundred and fifty sharks."
"A hundred and fifty sharks!" cried Ned Land.
"Did I say sharks?" I exclaimed quickly. "I mean a hundred and fifty pearls. Sharks would make no sense."
"Quite so," said Conseil. "But will Master now teach us the means by which these pearls are extracted?"
"They go about it in several ways, and often, when the pearls stick to the valves, the fishermen tear them loose with pincers. But most commonly, the pintadines are spread out on esparto-grass mats that cover the shore. There they die in the open air, and after ten days they're in a satisfactory state of putrefaction. They're then plunged into vast reservoirs of seawater, after which they're opened and washed. This is where the sorters' double task begins. First, they separate the layers of mother-of-pearl known in the trade as silver-true, white-bastard, and black-bastard, which are delivered in cases of a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and fifty kilograms. Then they strip out the flesh of the oyster, boil it, and sift it in order to extract even the smallest pearls."
"Does the price of these pearls vary according to their size?" Conseil asked.
"Not only according to their size," I answered, "but also according to their shape, according to their water — that is, their color — and according to their orient — that is, that shimmering, iridescent gleam that makes them so lovely to the eye. The finest pearls are called virgin pearls, or paragons; they form in isolation within the tissue of the mollusk; they're white, often opaque, but sometimes of an opaline transparency, and most commonly spherical or pear-shaped. The spherical ones make bracelets; the pear-shaped ones, pendants — and, being the most precious, they're sold one by one. The others stick to the oyster's shell and, being more irregular, are sold by weight. Finally, in a lower order come the little pearls known as seed pearls; they're sold by measure and serve especially for working embroidery onto church ornaments."
"But this work of separating the pearls by size must be long and difficult," said the Canadian.
"No, my friend. This work is done by means of eleven sieves, or riddles, pierced with a varying number of holes. The pearls that stay in the sieves with twenty to eighty holes are of the first order. Those that don't slip through the riddles pierced with a hundred to eight hundred holes are of the second order. And finally, the pearls for which they use the sieves pierced with nine hundred to a thousand holes make up the seed pearls."
"That's ingenious," said Conseil, "and I see that the dividing and sorting of pearls is done mechanically. And can Master tell us what the working of the pearl-oyster banks brings in?"
"To go by Sirr's book," I answered, "the fisheries of Ceylon are leased out annually for the sum of three million sharks."
"Francs, you mean!" Conseil put in.
"Yes, francs! Three million francs," I went on. "But I believe these fisheries no longer bring in what they once did. The same is true of the American fisheries, which under the reign of Charles the Fifth produced four million francs, now reduced to two-thirds of that. All told, one may put the overall yield of the pearl trade at nine million francs."
"But," Conseil asked, "aren't there a few famous pearls that have been valued at a very high price?"
"Yes, my boy. It's said that Caesar gave Servilia a pearl valued at a hundred and twenty thousand francs in our currency."
"I've even heard tell," said the Canadian, "of a certain lady of ancient times who used to drink pearls in her vinegar."
"Cleopatra," Conseil shot back.
"It must have tasted foul," Ned Land added.
"Detestable, friend Ned," Conseil answered; "but a little glass of vinegar that costs fifteen hundred thousand francs is a tidy price."
"I'm sorry I didn't marry that lady," said the Canadian, working his arm in a rather unsettling way.
"Ned Land the husband of Cleopatra!" cried Conseil.
"Well, I did nearly get married, Conseil," the Canadian answered seriously, "and it's not my fault the business fell through. I'd even bought a pearl necklace for Kat Tender, my fiancée — who married someone else, as it happens. Well, that necklace cost me no more than a dollar and a half, and yet — the Professor will kindly take my word for it — the pearls that made it up wouldn't have passed through the twenty-hole sieve."
"My good Ned," I answered, laughing, "those were artificial pearls, mere glass globules coated on the inside with essence of Orient."
"Essence of Orient?" asked the Canadian. "And what's that worth?"
"Next to nothing! It's nothing but the silvery matter of the bleak's scales, gathered in water and preserved in ammonia. It has no value at all."
"That's maybe why Kat Tender married someone else," Master Land replied philosophically.
"But," I said, "to come back to the pearls of high value, I don't believe any sovereign ever owned one superior to Captain Nemo's."
"This one," said Conseil, pointing to the magnificent jewel enclosed under its glass case.
"Certainly. I'm not mistaken in assigning it a value of two million—"
"Francs!" Conseil said quickly.
"Yes," I said, "two million francs, and no doubt it cost the captain nothing but the trouble of picking it up."
"Ha!" cried Ned Land. "Who's to say we won't run across its equal tomorrow, during our little walk!"
"Bah!" went Conseil.
"And why not?"
"What use would millions be to us aboard the Nautilus?"
"Aboard, none," said Ned Land, "but... elsewhere."
"Oh! Elsewhere!" went Conseil, shaking his head.
"Come to think of it," I said, "Master Land is right. And if we ever bring back to Europe or America a pearl worth a few million, that at least will lend great authenticity — and, at the same time, great value — to the account of our adventures."
"I believe it," said the Canadian.
"But," said Conseil, who always came back to the instructive side of things, "is this pearl fishing dangerous?"
"No," I answered quickly, "especially if one takes certain precautions."
"What's the risk in the trade?" said Ned Land. "Swallowing a few mouthfuls of seawater!"
"Just as you say, Ned. By the way," I said, trying to take on Captain Nemo's offhand tone, "are you afraid of sharks, brave Ned?"
"Me?" the Canadian answered. "A harpooner by trade! It's my job to laugh at them!"
"It's not a matter," I said, "of catching them with a swivel-hook, hoisting them onto a ship's deck, chopping off their tails with an axe, slitting open their bellies, tearing out their hearts, and throwing them back into the sea!"
"Then it's a matter of...?"
"Yes, precisely."
"In the water?"
"In the water."
"My word — with a good harpoon! You know, Professor, these sharks are pretty poorly built beasts. They have to roll over onto their bellies to snap you up, and in the meantime..."
Ned Land had a way of pronouncing the word "snap" that sent a chill down your spine.
"Well, and you, Conseil — what do you think of these sharks?"
"Me?" said Conseil. "I'll be frank with Master."
"That's the spirit," I thought.
"If Master faces the sharks," said Conseil, "I don't see why his faithful servant shouldn't face them right alongside him!"
Night came on. I went to bed. I slept badly. Sharks played a leading role in my dreams, and I found it both entirely fitting and entirely unfitting, that old etymology that traces the French word for shark — requin — back to the word requiem.
The next morning, at four o'clock, I was woken by the steward Captain Nemo had assigned specially to my service. I got up quickly, dressed, and went into the salon.
Captain Nemo was waiting for me there.
"Professor Aronnax," he said, "are you ready to leave?"
"I'm ready."
"Then follow me, please."
"And my companions, Captain?"
"They've been told, and they're waiting for us."
"Aren't we going to put on our diving suits?" I asked.
"Not yet. I didn't let the Nautilus come too close to this coast, and we're a fair distance out from the Manaar bank. But I've had the dinghy made ready. It'll carry us to the exact landing point and spare us a rather long swim. It's loaded with our diving gear, which we'll put on the moment this underwater expedition begins."
Captain Nemo led me toward the central staircase, whose steps ended at the platform. Ned and Conseil were there, delighted at the "pleasure outing" being got up. Five of the Nautilus's sailors, oars ready, waited for us in the dinghy, which had been made fast against the side.
The night was still dark. Sheets of cloud covered the sky and let only a few scattered stars show through. I looked toward the land, but I saw only a blurred line closing off three-quarters of the horizon, from southwest to northwest. The Nautilus, having worked its way up the western coast of Ceylon during the night, now lay west of the bay — or rather of the gulf formed by the mainland and the island of Manaar. There, beneath the dark waters, stretched the pearl-oyster bank, an inexhaustible field of pearls more than twenty miles long.
Captain Nemo, Conseil, Ned Land, and I took our places at the stern of the dinghy. The coxswain manned the tiller; his four companions leaned into their oars; the mooring line was cast off, and we pulled away.
The dinghy headed south. The rowers were in no hurry. I noticed that their oar strokes, driven hard beneath the water, came only every ten seconds, in the manner generally used in navies. While the boat ran on under its own way, the drops of water struck the black surface of the swell with a crackle, like spatters of molten lead. A small swell rolling in from the open sea gave the dinghy a slight roll, and a few wave crests slapped against its bow.
We were silent. What was Captain Nemo thinking about? Perhaps about this land he was drawing near — too near for his liking, unlike the Canadian, to whom it still seemed too far off. As for Conseil, he was there as a simple sightseer.
Around half past five, the first tints along the horizon picked out more sharply the upper line of the coast. Fairly flat to the east, it swelled a little toward the south. Five miles still separated us from it, and its shore blurred into the misty waters. Between it and us, the sea was deserted. Not a boat, not a diver. Deep solitude over this meeting place of the pearl fishers. As Captain Nemo had pointed out to me, we were arriving in these waters a month too early.
At six o'clock, day broke all at once, with that suddenness peculiar to the tropics, which know neither dawn nor dusk. The sun's rays pierced the curtain of clouds banked along the eastern horizon, and the radiant star climbed swiftly.
I saw the land distinctly now, with a few trees scattered here and there.
The dinghy drew on toward the island of Manaar, which curved away to the south. Captain Nemo had risen from his bench and was watching the sea.
At a sign from him, the anchor was dropped, and the chain barely ran out, for the bottom lay no more than a meter down, and at this spot it formed one of the highest points of the oyster bank. The dinghy at once swung round under the pull of the ebb tide, which carried it seaward.
"Here we are, Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo said then. "You see this narrow bay. It's right here that, a month from now, the fishing fleets of the exploiters will gather in numbers, and it's these waters their divers will come to search so boldly. This bay is happily arranged for that kind of fishing. It's sheltered from the strongest winds, and the sea here is never very rough — a very favorable condition for the divers' work. Now we'll put on our diving suits, and begin our walk."
I said nothing, and while I stared at these suspect waters, I began, with the help of the boat's sailors, to pull on my heavy sea garment. Captain Nemo and my two companions were dressing as well. None of the Nautilus's men were to go with us on this new excursion.
Soon we were sealed up to the neck in the rubber suit, and straps fixed the air tanks onto our backs. As for the Ruhmkorff apparatus, there was no question of it. Before fitting my head into its copper capsule, I remarked on this to the captain.
"Those devices would be useless to us," he answered. "We won't be going to any great depth, and the sun's rays will be enough to light our way. Besides, it wouldn't be wise to carry an electric lantern down into these waters. Its brightness might unexpectedly attract some dangerous resident of these parts."
While Captain Nemo was speaking these words, I turned toward Conseil and Ned Land. But my two friends had already boxed their heads into the metal helmet, and they could neither hear nor answer.
One last question remained for me to put to Captain Nemo.
"And our weapons?" I asked. "Our rifles?"
"Rifles! What for? Don't your mountain men attack the bear with a dagger in their hand? And isn't steel surer than lead? Here's a good solid blade. Put it in your belt, and let's go."
I looked at my companions. They were armed as we were, and, on top of that, Ned Land was brandishing an enormous harpoon he'd stowed in the dinghy before leaving the Nautilus.
Then, following the captain's example, I let them fit the heavy copper sphere over my head, and our air tanks were immediately switched on.
A moment later, the sailors were setting us down one after another, and, in a meter and a half of water, we planted our feet on smooth sand. Captain Nemo gave us a wave of his hand. We followed him, and down a gentle slope we vanished beneath the waves.
There, the fears that had been haunting my brain left me. I became astonishingly calm. The ease of my movements strengthened my confidence, and the strangeness of the spectacle captured my imagination.
The sun was already sending enough light down under the water. The smallest objects stayed visible. After ten minutes of walking, we were in five meters of water, and the ground had become nearly flat.
At our steps, like flocks of snipe over a marsh, there rose up flights of curious fish of the genus Monopterus, whose members have no fin but the one on the tail. I recognized the javanese, a true serpent eighty centimeters long, with a livid belly, which you'd easily mistake for a conger eel but for the golden lines along its flanks. Among the genus Stromateus, whose body is very flattened and oval, I made out some brightly colored fiatolas carrying their dorsal fin like a scythe — edible fish that, dried and marinated, make an excellent dish known as karawade — then some Tranquebar butterflyfish, belonging to the genus Aspidophoroides, whose body is covered by a scaly armor with eight lengthwise facets.
Meanwhile, the rising sun lit the mass of water more and more. The floor gradually changed. The fine sand gave way to a veritable causeway of rounded rocks, carpeted with mollusks and zoophytes. Among the specimens of these two branches, I noticed some Placuna with thin, unequal valves — a kind of oyster peculiar to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean — orange lucine clams with an orbicular shell, awl-shaped auger shells, some of those Persian murexes that supplied the Nautilus with such an admirable dye, horned rock shells fifteen centimeters long that reared up beneath the waves like hands ready to seize you, spiny turbinella shells all bristling with prickles, gaping lingula shells, anatina clams — edible shellfish that feed the markets of Hindustan — faintly luminous Pelagia jellyfish, and finally some splendid fan-shaped Oculina corals, magnificent fans that form one of the richest branchings of these seas.
In the midst of these living plants, and under the arbors of hydrophytes, ran clumsy legions of articulates, particularly toothed Ranina crabs, whose shell is a somewhat rounded triangle, coconut crabs special to these waters, and hideous Parthenope crabs, whose look was repellent to the eye. One animal no less loathsome, which I met with several times, was that enormous crab observed by Mr. Darwin, to which nature has given the instinct and the strength needed to feed on coconuts. It climbs the trees along the shore, knocks down the nut, which splits open in its fall, and then opens it with its powerful pincers. Here, beneath these clear waters, this crab scuttled about with unequaled agility, while green turtles, of the kind that frequent the Malabar coast, moved slowly among the shifting rocks.
Around seven o'clock, we at last were treading the pearl-oyster bank, where the oysters breed by the million. These precious mollusks clung to the rocks, held fast by that brown byssus that doesn't allow them to move — a respect in which these oysters are inferior even to the mussel, to which nature has not denied all power of locomotion.
The Meleagrina pintadina — the mother-of-pearl oyster, whose valves are roughly equal — takes the form of a rounded shell with thick walls, very rough on the outside. Some of these shells were leaved and furrowed with greenish bands radiating out from the top. These belonged to the young oysters. The others, with a rough black surface, ten years old and more, measured as much as fifteen centimeters across.
Captain Nemo pointed his hand at this prodigious heap of oysters, and I understood that this mine was truly inexhaustible, for nature's creative force outweighs man's destructive instinct. Ned Land, faithful to that instinct, was busy stuffing the finest of the mollusks into a net he carried at his side.
But we couldn't stop. We had to follow the captain, who seemed to be guiding himself along paths known to him alone. The bottom rose noticeably, and at times my arm, when I raised it, broke the surface of the sea. Then the level of the bank dipped again, capriciously. Often we rounded tall rocks tapered into little pyramids. In their dark crevices, big crustaceans, propped high on their legs like siege engines, watched us with fixed eyes, and under our feet crawled myrians, glycerids, aricians, and other annelids, stretching out their antennae and tentacle-like cirri to absurd lengths.
Just then a vast grotto opened before our steps, hollowed out of a picturesque tumble of rocks hung with all the high-warp tapestries of the underwater flora. At first this grotto looked deeply dark to me. The sun's rays seemed to die out inside it by successive degrees. Its dim transparency was no more than drowned light.
Captain Nemo went in. We went in after him. My eyes soon grew used to that relative darkness. I could make out the strangely twisting spring of the vault, borne on natural pillars set broadly on their granite bases, like the heavy columns of Tuscan architecture. Why was our unfathomable guide drawing us down into the depths of this underwater crypt? I would soon find out.
After going down a fairly steep slope, our feet trod the bottom of a kind of circular well. There Captain Nemo stopped, and with his hand he pointed out to us an object I had not yet noticed.
It was an oyster of extraordinary size, a gigantic tridacna — a holy-water basin that could have held a whole lake of blessed water, a bowl more than two meters across, and therefore larger than the one that adorned the salon of the Nautilus.
I went up to this phenomenal mollusk. By its byssus it clung to a slab of granite, and there it grew all alone in the calm waters of the grotto. I put the weight of this tridacna at three hundred kilograms. Now, such an oyster holds fifteen kilos of flesh, and it would take the stomach of a Gargantua to put away a few dozen of them.
Captain Nemo clearly knew of this bivalve's existence. This was not the first time he'd visited it, and I thought that in leading us to this spot he meant only to show us a natural curiosity. I was mistaken. Captain Nemo had a particular interest in checking the present state of this tridacna.
The mollusk's two valves were half open. The captain went up and slid his dagger between the shells to keep them from snapping shut; then, with his hand, he lifted the membranous, fringe-edged tunic that formed the animal's mantle.
There, between the leafy folds, I saw a loose pearl the size of a coconut. Its globular shape, its perfect clarity, its wonderful orient made it a jewel of priceless value. Carried away by curiosity, I reached out my hand to seize it, to weigh it, to feel it! But the captain stopped me, made a sign of refusal, and, drawing back his dagger with a quick movement, let the two valves suddenly snap shut.
Then I understood what Captain Nemo intended. By leaving that pearl buried under the tridacna's mantle, he was letting it slowly grow. With each year the mollusk's secretion added new concentric layers to it. He alone knew the grotto where this admirable fruit of nature was "ripening"; he alone raised it, so to speak, meaning one day to carry it off to his precious museum. Perhaps he'd even, following the example of the Chinese and the Indians, brought on the making of this pearl by slipping some scrap of glass or metal under the folds of the mollusk, which had little by little coated it in mother-of-pearl. In any case, comparing this pearl to those I already knew, to those that gleamed in the captain's collection, I put its value at ten million francs at the very least. A superb natural curiosity, and no luxury jewel — for I don't know what feminine ear could ever have borne it.
Our visit to the opulent tridacna was over. Captain Nemo left the grotto, and we climbed back up onto the oyster bank, among those clear waters not yet troubled by the labor of the divers.
We walked separately now, like true strollers, each of us stopping or wandering off at the whim of his fancy. For my part, I no longer had any worry about the dangers my imagination had so absurdly exaggerated. The shallows drew noticeably nearer the surface of the sea, and soon, in a meter of water, my head broke the level of the ocean. Conseil rejoined me, and pressing his big helmet against mine, he gave me a friendly greeting with his eyes. But this raised plateau measured only a few fathoms, and soon we had gone back down into our element. I believe I've now earned the right to call it that.
Ten minutes later, Captain Nemo suddenly stopped. I thought he was halting to turn back. No. With a gesture, he ordered us to crouch down beside him at the bottom of a wide crevice. His hand pointed toward a spot in the mass of water, and I looked hard.
Five meters from me, a shadow appeared and sank down to the floor. The uneasy thought of sharks crossed my mind. But I was mistaken, and once again we were not dealing with the monsters of the ocean.
It was a man, a living man, an Indian, a black man, a fisherman, a poor devil no doubt, who had come to glean ahead of the harvest. I could see the bottom of his boat, moored a few feet above his head. He was diving and coming back up, again and again. A stone cut in the shape of a sugarloaf, which he gripped between his feet while a rope tied it to his boat, served to bring him down more quickly to the sea floor. That was the whole of his equipment. Reaching the bottom, at about five meters' depth, he threw himself on his knees and filled his sack with oysters gathered at random. Then he came back up, emptied his sack, hauled his stone up again, and started over — the whole operation lasting no more than thirty seconds.
This diver didn't see us. The shadow of the rock hid us from his gaze. And besides, how would this poor Indian ever have supposed that men, beings like himself, were there beneath the waters, spying on his movements, missing no detail of his fishing?
Several times he came back up like this and dived again. He brought up no more than ten or so oysters on each dive, for they had to be torn from the bank they clung to by their tough byssus. And how many of those oysters were empty of the pearls for which he risked his life!
I watched him with deep attention. His work went along steadily, and for half an hour no danger seemed to threaten him. So I was growing used to the sight of this fascinating fishery when, all at once — at a moment when the Indian was kneeling on the floor — I saw him make a gesture of terror, spring up, and gather himself to shoot back to the surface.
I understood his horror. A gigantic shadow was rising above the wretched diver. It was a large shark, coming on diagonally, its eye ablaze, its jaws open!
I was struck dumb with horror, unable to make a move.
The ravenous animal, with a powerful stroke of its fin, hurled itself at the Indian, who threw himself to one side and dodged the shark's bite — but not the lash of its tail, for that tail, striking him in the chest, stretched him out on the floor.
This scene had barely lasted a few seconds. The shark came back, and rolling over on its back, it was getting ready to cut the Indian in two, when I felt Captain Nemo, posted beside me, rise suddenly. Then, dagger in hand, he walked straight at the monster, ready to fight it hand to hand.
The shark, at the very moment it was about to snap up the wretched fisherman, caught sight of its new adversary, and, turning belly-down again, made straight for him.
I can still see Captain Nemo's stance. Braced down on himself, he waited for the formidable shark with an admirable coolness, and when the beast rushed at him, the captain, throwing himself aside with prodigious quickness, dodged the impact and sank his dagger into its belly. But that wasn't the end of it. A terrible fight began.
The shark had roared, so to speak. Blood poured in streams from its wounds. The sea turned red, and through that opaque murk I could see nothing more.
Nothing more — until, in a clearing, I glimpsed the daring captain clinging to one of the animal's fins, fighting the monster body to body, plowing his dagger into his enemy's belly, yet unable to land the decisive blow, that is, to reach it full in the heart. The shark, thrashing, churned the mass of water with fury, and its wake threatened to knock me off my feet.
I would have liked to run to the captain's aid. But nailed in place by horror, I couldn't stir.
I watched, wild-eyed. I saw the phases of the struggle shift. The captain went down onto the floor, thrown over by the enormous bulk that bore down on him. Then the shark's jaws yawned open like a factory shears, and it would have been all over for the captain if, quick as thought, harpoon in hand, Ned Land had not rushed at the shark and struck it with his terrible point.
The waves filled with a mass of blood. They heaved under the movements of the shark, which beat them with indescribable fury. Ned Land had not missed his mark. This was the monster's death rattle. Struck to the heart, it thrashed in horrible spasms, whose backlash knocked Conseil off his feet.
Meanwhile, Ned Land had pulled the captain free. Nemo, back on his feet without a wound, went straight to the Indian, cut the rope that bound him to his stone with a quick stroke, took him in his arms, and, with a vigorous kick of his heel, rose to the surface of the sea.
We followed, all three of us, and in a few moments, miraculously saved, we reached the fisherman's boat.
Captain Nemo's first care was to call this wretched man back to life. I didn't know whether he'd succeed. I hoped so, for the poor devil hadn't been under long. But the shark's blow with its tail might have struck him a mortal wound.
Happily, under the vigorous rubbing of Conseil and the captain, I saw the drowned man little by little come back to his senses. He opened his eyes. What must his surprise have been — his terror, even — to see the four big copper heads leaning over him!
And above all, what must he have thought when Captain Nemo, drawing a bag of pearls from a pocket of his suit, put it into his hand? This magnificent act of charity, from the man of the waters to the poor Indian of Ceylon, was accepted by the latter with a trembling hand. His frightened eyes showed, moreover, that he didn't know to what superhuman beings he owed both his fortune and his life.
At a sign from the captain, we made our way back to the oyster bank, and, following the route already traveled, after half an hour's walk we came upon the anchor that held the Nautilus's dinghy to the bottom.
Once aboard, each of us, with the sailors' help, shed his heavy copper shell.
Captain Nemo's first word was for the Canadian.
"Thank you, Master Land," he said.
"It's a settling of scores, Captain," Ned Land answered. "I owed you that."
A pale smile slid across the captain's lips, and that was all.
"To the Nautilus," he said.
The boat flew over the waves. A few minutes later, we came upon the shark's carcass, floating.
By the black color marking the tips of its fins, I recognized the terrible melanopterus of the Indian sea, of the species of the true sharks. Its length exceeded twenty-five feet; its enormous mouth took up a third of its body. It was an adult, as could be seen from the six rows of teeth arranged in isosceles triangles along its upper jaw.
Conseil looked at it with a wholly scientific interest, and I'm sure he was filing it away — not without reason — in the class of cartilaginous fish, order Chondropterygii with fixed gills, family Selachii, genus Squalus.
While I was studying this inert mass, a dozen of these voracious melanopters appeared all at once around the boat; but, paying us no mind, they threw themselves on the carcass and fought over the scraps.
At half past eight, we were back aboard the Nautilus.
There I fell to reflecting on the incidents of our excursion to the Manaar bank. Two observations came out of it inevitably. One bore on the unequaled daring of Captain Nemo, the other on his devotion to a human being — one of the representatives of that race he was fleeing beneath the seas. Whatever he might say, this strange man had not yet managed to kill his heart entirely.
When I made this observation to him, he answered in a slightly moved tone:
"That Indian, Professor, is an inhabitant of the land of the oppressed, and I am still, and to my last breath I will remain, a man of that land!"
Over the course of January 29, the island of Ceylon dropped below the horizon, and the Nautilus, running at twenty miles an hour, slipped into that labyrinth of channels which separates the Maldives from the Laccadives. It even skirted Kittan Island, a bit of land of madreporic origin, discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1499 and one of the nineteen principal islands of that Laccadive archipelago, lying between 10° and 14°30′ north latitude and between 69° and 50°72′ east longitude.
By then we had covered sixteen thousand two hundred and twenty miles, or seven thousand five hundred leagues, since our starting point in the seas of Japan.
The next day, January 30, when the Nautilus rose back to the surface of the ocean, there was no longer any land in sight. She was steering north-northwest, heading toward that Sea of Oman which is hollowed out between Arabia and the Indian peninsula and serves as the outlet of the Persian Gulf.
This was plainly a dead end, with no way through. Where, then, was Captain Nemo taking us? I couldn't have said. And that failed to satisfy the Canadian, who that day asked me where we were going.
"We're going, Master Ned, wherever the captain's whim leads us."
"That whim," the Canadian answered, "can't take us far. The Persian Gulf has no way out, and if we go into it, we won't be long in doubling back on our own tracks."
"Well then, we'll double back, Master Land, and if after the Persian Gulf the Nautilus takes it into her head to visit the Red Sea, the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb is always there to give her passage."
"I don't need to remind you, Professor," Ned Land replied, "that the Red Sea is just as closed off as the Gulf, since the Isthmus of Suez isn't pierced through yet, and even if it were, a mysterious boat like ours wouldn't risk itself in canals cut up by locks. So the Red Sea still isn't the road that will bring us back to Europe."
"But I never said we'd go back to Europe."
"Then what do you suppose?"
"I suppose that, after visiting these curious waters off Arabia and Egypt, the Nautilus will drop back down through the Indian Ocean, perhaps by way of the Mozambique Channel, perhaps off the Mascarenes, so as to reach the Cape of Good Hope."
"And once at the Cape of Good Hope?" the Canadian asked, with a very particular insistence.
"Well, then we'll push on into that Atlantic we don't yet know. Come now, Ned my friend — are you growing weary of this voyage under the seas? Are you getting jaded by the endlessly changing spectacle of underwater marvels? For my part, I'll see with the keenest regret the end of a voyage that so few men have ever been granted."
"But do you realize, Professor Aronnax," the Canadian answered, "that it will soon be three months we've been imprisoned aboard this Nautilus?"
"No, Ned, I don't realize it, I don't want to realize it, and I count neither the days nor the hours."
"But how does it end?"
"The end will come in its own good time. Besides, there's nothing we can do about it, and we're arguing to no purpose. If you were to come to me, my good Ned, and say, 'A chance to escape is offered to us,' then I'd discuss it with you. But that's not the case, and to speak to you frankly, I don't believe Captain Nemo will ever venture into European waters."
From this short exchange you can see that, fanatic of the Nautilus that I'd become, I had climbed right inside her commander's skin.
As for Ned Land, he ended the conversation with these words, delivered as a sort of monologue: "That's all very fine and good, but to my mind, where there's constraint, there's no more pleasure."
For four days, until February 3, the Nautilus toured the Sea of Oman at various speeds and various depths. She seemed to be moving at random, as though hesitating over which route to take, but she never crossed the Tropic of Cancer.
As we left that sea, we caught a brief glimpse of Muscat, the most important town in the land of Oman. I admired its strange look, ringed by the black rocks against which its houses and forts stand out in white. I made out the rounded dome of its mosques, the elegant point of its minarets, its cool, green terraces. But it was no more than a vision, and the Nautilus soon plunged beneath the dark waves of those waters.
Then she ran for a distance of six miles along the Arabian coasts of Mahrah and Hadhramaut, with their undulating line of mountains relieved here and there by a few ancient ruins. On February 5 we at last entered the Gulf of Aden, a true funnel driven into that neck of Bab-el-Mandeb, which pours the waters of India into the Red Sea.
On February 6 the Nautilus floated in sight of Aden, perched on a promontory joined to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, a sort of unassailable Gibraltar whose fortifications the English rebuilt after seizing it in 1839. I glimpsed the octagonal minarets of that city, which was once, according to the historian Edrisi, the richest and busiest trading depot on the whole coast.
I felt sure that Captain Nemo, having reached this point, would turn back; but I was mistaken, and to my great surprise he did nothing of the sort.
The following day, February 7, we entered the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, whose name means, in Arabic, "the Gate of Tears." Twenty miles wide, it is only fifty-two kilometers long, and for the Nautilus running at full speed, crossing it was scarcely the business of an hour. But I saw nothing, not even the island of Perim, whose position the British government has fortified to strengthen Aden. Too many English and French steamers of the lines from Suez to Bombay, to Calcutta, to Melbourne, to Bourbon, to Mauritius were plowing that narrow passage for the Nautilus to attempt to show herself there. So she prudently kept between two waters.
At last, at noon, we were cutting through the swells of the Red Sea.
The Red Sea — that lake famous in biblical tradition, which the rains scarcely freshen, which no important river waters, which an excessive evaporation pumps at unceasingly, and which loses each year a sheet of water a meter and a half deep! Singular gulf, which, closed off and reduced to the conditions of a lake, would perhaps have dried up entirely — inferior in this to its neighbors the Caspian or the Dead Sea, whose levels have dropped only to the point where their evaporation has come to equal exactly the sum of the waters received into them.
This Red Sea is two thousand six hundred kilometers long, with an average width of two hundred and forty. In the time of the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors it was the great commercial artery of the world, and the piercing of the isthmus will restore to it that ancient importance which the Suez railways have already partly brought back.
I would not even try to understand this caprice of Captain Nemo's that could have decided him to draw us into this gulf. But I approved without reservation of the Nautilus's having entered it. She took a moderate pace, now holding to the surface, now diving to avoid some ship, and so I was able to observe both the depths and the surface of this most curious sea.
On February 8, in the earliest hours of the day, Mocha came into view — now a ruined town whose walls fall at the mere sound of a cannon, sheltered here and there by a few green date palms. Once an important city, it had contained six public markets and twenty-six mosques, and its walls, defended by fourteen forts, formed a belt three kilometers around it.
Then the Nautilus drew nearer the African shores, where the sea is considerably deeper. There, between two waters of crystal limpidity, through the open panels, she let us gaze upon splendid thickets of dazzling coral and vast faces of rock clothed in a magnificent green fur of algae and wrack. What an indescribable spectacle, and what a variety of settings and landscapes at the flat crowns of those reefs and volcanic islets that border the Libyan coast! But it was toward the eastern shores that these branching forms appeared in all their beauty, shores the Nautilus was not slow to make for. It was off the coasts of the Tihamah — for there not only did these displays of zoophytes flower below the level of the sea, but they also formed picturesque tangles that unrolled ten fathoms above it; these last more fanciful, but less brightly colored than the ones below, whose freshness was kept up by the moist vitality of the waters.
What charming hours I spent thus at the salon window! What new specimens of the underwater flora and fauna I admired under the blaze of our electric beacon! Agaric-shaped mushroom corals, slate-colored sea anemones, among them the Thalassianthus aster; organ-pipe corals ranged like flutes and only awaiting the breath of the god Pan; shells peculiar to this sea, which settle into the madreporic hollows and whose base is twisted into a short spiral; and finally a thousand specimens of a coral animal I had not yet observed — the common sponge.
The class of sponges, first in the group of polyps, was in fact founded upon this curious product, whose usefulness is beyond dispute. The sponge is not a plant, as some naturalists still hold, but an animal of the lowest order, a coral animal lower even than coral itself. Its animal nature is not in doubt, and one cannot even adopt the opinion of the ancients, who regarded it as a being intermediate between the plant and the animal. I must say, however, that naturalists are not in agreement about the sponge's mode of organization. For some it is a coral animal; for others, such as Monsieur Milne-Edwards, it is an isolated and single individual.
The class of sponges contains about three hundred species, which are found in a great many seas, and even in certain watercourses, where they have been given the name "fluviatile." But their favorite waters are those of the Mediterranean, the Greek archipelago, the coast of Syria, and the Red Sea. There the fine soft sponges reproduce and grow, sponges whose value rises as high as a hundred and fifty francs — the blond sponge of Syria, the hard sponge of Barbary, and so on. But since I could not hope to study these zoophytes in the ports of the Levant, from which we were separated by the impassable Isthmus of Suez, I contented myself with observing them in the waters of the Red Sea.
So I called Conseil to my side, while the Nautilus, at an average depth of eight to nine meters, was slowly grazing all those lovely rocks of the eastern coast.
There grew sponges of every shape — sponges stalked, leafed, globular, fingered. They justified rather exactly those names of baskets, chalices, distaffs, elk's horns, lion's paw, peacock's tail, and Neptune's glove which the fishermen — more poets than the scholars — have given them. From their fibrous tissue, coated with a half-fluid gelatinous substance, there escaped without cease little threads of water which, after carrying life into each cell, were expelled from it by a contractile movement. This substance disappears after the death of the polyp and putrefies, releasing ammonia. Then nothing remains but those horny or gelatinous fibers of which the household sponge is composed, which takes on a reddish tint and is put to various uses, according to its degree of elasticity, permeability, or resistance to soaking.
These coral animals clung to the rocks, to the shells of mollusks, and even to the stems of water plants. They filled the smallest crevices, some spreading flat, others rising up or hanging like coral-like outgrowths. I taught Conseil that these sponges are fished in two ways, either by dredge or by hand. This last method, which requires the use of divers, is the better one, for by sparing the tissue of the coral animal it leaves it a far higher value.
The other zoophytes swarming near the sponges consisted chiefly of jellyfish of a very elegant species; the mollusks were represented by varieties of squid which, according to d'Orbigny, are peculiar to the Red Sea, and the reptiles by virgata turtles, belonging to the genus Chelonia, which furnished our table with a wholesome and delicate dish.
As for the fish, they were numerous and often remarkable. Here are the ones the Nautilus's nets most frequently brought aboard: rays, among them the limma, oval in shape and brick-colored, its body strewn with uneven blue spots and recognizable by its double toothed spine; the arnak with its silvery back; the pastinaca with its stippled tail; and the bockat, vast mantles two meters long that rippled between the waters; the aodon, utterly toothless, a kind of cartilaginous fish akin to the shark; the dromedary trunkfish, whose hump ends in a curved spine a foot and a half long; the ophidion, true morays with silvery tails, bluish backs, and brown pectoral fins bordered with a gray edging; the fiatola, a kind of butterfish zebra-striped with narrow bands of gold and decked out in the three colors of France; the garamit blennies, four decimeters long; superb caranx, decorated with seven crosswise bands of a fine black, blue and yellow fins, and gold and silver scales; centropodes; goldflame mullets with yellow heads; parrotfish, wrasses, triggerfish, gobies, and so forth; and a thousand other fish common to the oceans we had already crossed.
On February 9 the Nautilus was cruising the widest part of the Red Sea, the stretch that runs between Suakin on the western shore and Quonfodah on the eastern, a hundred and ninety miles across.
That day at noon, after taking our position, Captain Nemo came up onto the platform, where I happened to be. I promised myself I would not let him go back down without at least sounding him out about his further plans. He came over the moment he saw me, graciously offered me a cigar, and said:
"Well, Professor, does this Red Sea please you? Have you seen enough of the wonders it hides — its fish and its zoophytes, its flower beds of sponge and its forests of coral? Have you caught sight of the towns scattered along its shores?"
"Yes, Captain Nemo," I answered, "and the Nautilus has lent itself marvelously to the whole study. Ah, she's an intelligent boat!"
"Yes, sir — intelligent, daring, and invulnerable! She fears neither the terrible storms of the Red Sea, nor its currents, nor its reefs."
"Quite so," I said. "This sea is reckoned among the worst of them all, and if I'm not mistaken, in the time of the ancients its reputation was detestable."
"Detestable, Professor Aronnax. The Greek and Latin historians have nothing good to say of it. Strabo tells us it is particularly rough during the season of the Etesian winds and the rains. The Arab geographer Edrisi, who describes it under the name of the Gulf of Colzoum, reports that ships perished in great numbers on its sandbanks, and that no one dared sail it by night. It is, he claims, a sea prone to frightful hurricanes, strewn with inhospitable islands, and one that 'offers nothing good' either in its depths or on its surface. And indeed, that is the opinion you find in Arrian, in Agatharchides, and in Artemidorus."
"You can tell," I replied, "that those historians never sailed aboard the Nautilus."
"True," the captain answered, smiling, "and in that respect the moderns are no further along than the ancients. It took mankind whole centuries to discover the mechanical power of steam! Who knows whether, a hundred years from now, the world will see a second Nautilus? Progress is slow, Professor Aronnax."
"That's true," I said. "Your ship is a century ahead of its time — several centuries, perhaps. What a tragedy that such a secret should die with the man who invented it!"
Captain Nemo made no reply. After a few minutes' silence, he said:
"You were telling me about the opinion the old historians held of the dangers of sailing the Red Sea?"
"I was," I answered. "But weren't their fears exaggerated?"
"Yes and no, Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo replied — and he struck me as a man who knew "his Red Sea" through and through. "What is no longer dangerous for a modern vessel — well rigged, solidly built, master of its own course thanks to obedient steam — offered every kind of peril to the ships of the ancients. Picture those first navigators venturing out in boats made of planks sewn together with palm-fiber rope, caulked with powdered resin, and smeared with the grease of sea-dogs. They hadn't even the instruments to take their bearings; they sailed by dead reckoning through currents they barely knew. Under those conditions, shipwrecks were bound to be many. But in our day the steamers running between Suez and the southern seas have nothing more to fear from the rages of this gulf, monsoons and all. Their captains and passengers no longer prepare for the voyage with propitiatory sacrifices, and on their return they no longer go, decked in garlands and gilded ribbons, to thank the gods in the temple nearby."
"I grant you that," I said, "and steam does seem to have killed off gratitude in the hearts of sailors. But Captain, since you appear to have made a special study of this sea, can you tell me the origin of its name?"
"There are numerous explanations on that score, Professor Aronnax. Would you care to hear the opinion of a fourteenth-century chronicler?"
"Gladly."
"This fanciful fellow claims the name was given after the passage of the Israelites, when Pharaoh perished in the waters that closed again at the voice of Moses:
To mark that marvel, the whole sea Turned red, and ran with crimson dye; And ever after, none knew how To name it but the Red Sea now.
"A poet's explanation, Captain Nemo," I answered, "but I couldn't be satisfied with it. I'll ask you, then, for your own opinion."
"Here it is. To my mind, Professor Aronnax, this name 'Red Sea' should be seen as a translation of the Hebrew word Edrom, and if the ancients gave it that name, it was on account of the peculiar coloring of its waters."
"So far, though, I've seen nothing but clear water, with no particular tint at all."
"No doubt. But as you push toward the head of the gulf, you'll notice that singular appearance. I remember seeing the Bay of Tor entirely red, like a lake of blood."
"And you attribute that color to the presence of a microscopic alga?"
"Yes. It's a purple, mucilaginous matter produced by those tiny plantlets known as trichodesmia, of which it takes forty thousand to fill the space of a single square millimeter. Perhaps you'll come across some when we reach Tor."
"So then, Captain Nemo, this isn't the first time you've traveled the Red Sea aboard the Nautilus?"
"No, sir."
"Then, since you spoke a moment ago of the passage of the Israelites and the disaster of the Egyptians, may I ask whether you've found, beneath these waters, any trace of that great historical event?"
"No, Professor — and for an excellent reason."
"Which is?"
"That the very spot where Moses crossed with all his people is now so silted up that the camels can barely wet their legs there. You'll understand that my Nautilus wouldn't have enough water under her."
"And that spot?" I asked.
"That spot lies a little above Suez, in the arm that once formed a deep estuary, back when the Red Sea reached all the way to the Bitter Lakes. Now, whether the crossing was miraculous or not, the Israelites nonetheless passed there to reach the Promised Land, and Pharaoh's army perished at that exact place. So I believe that excavations carried out in those sands would turn up a great quantity of weapons and implements of Egyptian origin."
"That's obvious," I answered, "and one can only hope, for the archaeologists' sake, that such digs will be made sooner or later, once new towns spring up on that isthmus after the cutting of the Suez Canal. A canal quite useless for a ship like the Nautilus!"
"No doubt, but useful to the whole world," said Captain Nemo. "The ancients understood very well how valuable it would be to their commerce to establish a link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; but they never thought of digging a direct canal, and took the Nile as their go-between. In all likelihood the canal joining the Nile to the Red Sea was begun under Sesostris, if we're to believe tradition. What is certain is that, six hundred and fifteen years before Jesus Christ, Necho undertook the works of a canal fed by the waters of the Nile, across that plain of Egypt which faces Arabia. It could be traveled up in four days, and it was wide enough for two triremes to pass abreast. It was continued by Darius, son of Hystaspes, and probably completed by Ptolemy II. Strabo saw it in use for navigation; but the slightness of its gradient between its starting point, near Bubastis, and the Red Sea made it navigable only during a few months of the year. This canal served commerce until the age of the Antonines; then it was abandoned, silted up, restored by order of the Caliph Omar, and finally filled in for good in the year 761 or 762 by the Caliph Al-Mansor, who wanted to cut off supplies to Mohammed-ben-Abdoallah, then in revolt against him. During the Egyptian campaign, your General Bonaparte found traces of these works in the desert of Suez, and, caught by the tide, he nearly perished a few hours before reaching Hadjaroth — the very place where Moses had camped three thousand three hundred years before him."
"Well, Captain, what the ancients didn't dare undertake — this joining of the two seas, which will cut nine thousand kilometers off the route from Cadiz to the Indies — Monsieur de Lesseps has done, and before long he'll have turned Africa into one immense island."
"Yes, Professor Aronnax, and you have every right to be proud of your countryman. He is a man who does a nation more honor than the greatest of its captains! Like so many others, he began amid frustrations and rebuffs, but he triumphed, for he has the genius of willpower. And it is sad to think that this work, which should have been an international undertaking, which would have been enough to make a reign illustrious, will have succeeded only through the energy of a single man. So — all honor to Monsieur de Lesseps!"
"Yes, all honor to that great citizen," I answered, quite taken aback by the tone in which Captain Nemo had just spoken.
"Unfortunately," he went on, "I can't take you through this Suez Canal. But you'll be able to make out the long jetties of Port Said the day after tomorrow, when we're in the Mediterranean."
"In the Mediterranean!" I exclaimed.
"Yes, Professor. Does that surprise you?"
"What surprises me is to think we'll be there the day after tomorrow."
"Really?"
"Yes, Captain — though I ought to be used to being surprised by nothing since I came aboard your ship!"
"But surprised at what, exactly?"
"At the appalling speed you'll have to drive the Nautilus to, if she's to find herself in the open Mediterranean the day after tomorrow, having rounded all of Africa and doubled the Cape of Good Hope!"
"And who told you she'll round Africa, Professor? Who said anything about doubling the Cape of Good Hope?"
"And yet, unless the Nautilus sails on dry land and passes over the isthmus —"
"Or under it, Professor Aronnax."
"Under it?"
"Just so," Captain Nemo replied calmly. "Long ago, nature made beneath this tongue of land what men are only now making on its surface."
"What! There's a passage?"
"Yes, an underground passage that I've named the Arabian Tunnel. It begins below Suez and comes out in the Gulf of Pelusium."
"But this isthmus is nothing but shifting sand?"
"Down to a certain depth. But at only fifty meters you strike an unshakable bed of rock."
"And was it by chance that you discovered this passage?" I asked, more astonished by the moment.
"Chance and reasoning, Professor — and reasoning even more than chance."
"Captain, I'm listening, but my ear resists what it hears."
"Ah, sir! Aures habent, et non audient — that has been true in every age. Not only does this passage exist, but I've made use of it several times. Otherwise I'd never have ventured today into this dead end of the Red Sea."
"Is it indiscreet to ask how you discovered this tunnel?"
"Sir," the captain answered, "there can be nothing secret between people who are never to part."
I let the insinuation pass and waited for Captain Nemo's account.
"Professor," he said, "it was a simple piece of naturalist's reasoning that led me to discover this passage, which I alone know. I had noticed that in the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean there exist a certain number of fish of absolutely identical species — snake-eels, butterfish, rainbow wrasse, parrotfish, sand-smelts, flying fish. Certain of this fact, I asked myself whether there wasn't some communication between the two seas. If there was, the underground current would necessarily run from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, simply because of the difference in their levels. So I caught a great many fish in the neighborhood of Suez. I slipped a copper ring over their tails and threw them back into the sea. A few months later, off the coast of Syria, I recovered several specimens of my fish, still wearing their telltale rings. The communication between the two seas was thus proved to me. I searched for it with my Nautilus, I found it, I ventured into it — and before long, Professor, you too will have passed through my Arabian Tunnel!"
That same day I reported to Conseil and Ned Land the part of the conversation that concerned them directly. When I told them that within two days we would be in the waters of the Mediterranean, Conseil clapped his hands, but the Canadian only shrugged.
"An underwater tunnel!" he cried. "A passage between the two seas! Who ever heard of such a thing?"
"Friend Ned," Conseil replied, "had you ever heard of the Nautilus? No! And yet here it is. So don't shrug so lightly, and don't dismiss a thing just because you've never heard of it."
"We'll see about that!" Ned Land shot back, shaking his head. "After all, I'd like nothing better than to believe in this captain and his passage, and heaven grant that he really does take us into the Mediterranean."
That very evening, at 21°30′ north latitude, the Nautilus, riding on the surface, drew near the Arabian coast. I made out Jeddah, that important trading port for Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and the Indies. I could see fairly clearly the whole sweep of its buildings, the ships moored along the quays, and those whose draft forced them to anchor out in the roadstead. The sun, rather low on the horizon, struck the houses of the town full on and set off their whiteness. Beyond them, a few huts of wood and reeds marked the quarter where the Bedouins lived.
Soon Jeddah faded into the shadows of evening, and the Nautilus slipped back beneath the faintly phosphorescent water.
The next day, February 10, several ships appeared, running on a course opposite to ours. The Nautilus resumed its underwater navigation; but at noon, at the moment of taking our position, the sea being empty, it rose again to its waterline.
With Ned and Conseil, I came and sat on the platform. The coast to the east showed only as a mass barely sketched in a damp haze.
Leaning against the sides of the dinghy, we were chatting about this and that when Ned Land, stretching his hand toward a point on the sea, said to me:
"Do you see something out there, Professor?"
"No, Ned," I answered, "but I don't have your eyes, as you know."
"Look hard," Ned went on. "There, off the starboard bow, about level with the beacon! You don't see a mass that seems to be moving?"
"Yes," I said, after watching closely, "I can make out a sort of long, blackish body on the surface of the water."
"Another Nautilus?" said Conseil.
"No," answered the Canadian, "unless I'm badly mistaken, that's some sea animal."
"Are there whales in the Red Sea?" Conseil asked.
"Yes, my boy," I replied, "you come across them now and then."
"That's no whale," Ned Land put in, never taking his eyes off the thing he'd spotted. "Whales and I are old acquaintances, and I couldn't mistake the look of one."
"Let's wait," said Conseil. "The Nautilus is heading that way, and before long we'll know what to make of it."
Sure enough, that blackish object was soon no more than a mile from us. It looked like a great reef stranded in the open sea. What was it? I still couldn't say.
"Ah! It's moving! It's diving!" cried Ned Land. "A thousand devils! What kind of animal can it be? Its tail isn't forked like a whale's or a sperm whale's, and its fins look like stumps of limbs."
"But then—" I began.
"There now," the Canadian went on, "it's rolled onto its back, and it's lifting its breasts into the air!"
"It's a mermaid," cried Conseil, "a real mermaid, saving Master's presence."
That word mermaid put me on the right track, and I understood that this animal belonged to that order of sea creatures which legend has turned into mermaids, half woman and half fish.
"No," I told Conseil, "it's not a mermaid, but a curious creature of which barely a few specimens survive in the Red Sea. It's a dugong."
"Order Sirenia, group Pisciforma, subclass Monodelphia, class Mammalia, phylum Vertebrata," answered Conseil.
And when Conseil had spoken like that, there was nothing left to add.
Meanwhile Ned Land kept watching. His eyes were shining with greed at the sight of the animal. His hand seemed ready to harpoon it. You would have said he was waiting for the moment to throw himself into the sea and attack it in its own element.
"Oh, Professor," he said to me in a voice trembling with emotion, "I've never killed one of those."
The whole harpooner was in that one word.
At that instant Captain Nemo appeared on the platform. He saw the dugong. He read the Canadian's whole attitude, and, addressing him directly:
"If you were holding a harpoon right now, Master Land, wouldn't it be burning a hole in your hand?"
"Just as you say, sir."
"And it wouldn't displease you to take up your fisherman's trade again for a day, and add this cetacean to the list of those you've already struck?"
"It wouldn't displease me in the least."
"Well then, you may try."
"Thank you, sir," Ned Land replied, his eyes blazing.
"Only," the captain went on, "I urge you not to miss this animal — and that's for your own sake."
"Is this dugong dangerous to attack?" I asked, in spite of the Canadian's shrug.
"Yes, sometimes," the captain answered. "The animal turns on its attackers and capsizes their boat. But for Master Land, there's no fear of that danger. His eye is quick, his arm is sure. If I tell him not to miss this dugong, it's because the creature is rightly considered fine game, and I know Master Land is no enemy of a good cut of meat."
"Ah!" said the Canadian. "So this beast treats itself to the luxury of being good to eat as well?"
"Yes, Master Land. Its flesh — real meat — is extremely prized, and all through Malaysia it's reserved for the tables of princes. That's why this excellent animal is hunted so relentlessly that, like the manatee, its cousin, it grows rarer and rarer."
"Then, Captain," said Conseil in all seriousness, "if by chance this one were the last of its kind, wouldn't it be right to spare it in the interest of science?"
"Perhaps," retorted the Canadian, "but in the interest of the kitchen, it's better to hunt it down."
"Have at it, then, Master Land," answered Captain Nemo.
At that moment seven crewmen, mute and impassive as always, climbed onto the platform. One carried a harpoon and a line like those used by whale fishermen. The dinghy was unshipped, hauled from its socket, and launched into the sea. Six oarsmen took their places on the benches, and the coxswain manned the tiller. Ned, Conseil, and I sat down in the stern.
"Aren't you coming, Captain?" I asked.
"No, sir, but I wish you a good hunt."
The dinghy shoved off and, driven by its six oars, headed quickly toward the dugong, which was floating then some two miles from the Nautilus.
When we had come within a few cable-lengths of the creature, the boat slowed, and the oars dipped noiselessly into the calm water. Ned Land, harpoon in hand, went to take his stand upright at the bow of the dinghy. The harpoon used to strike a whale is ordinarily attached to a very long rope that pays out quickly when the wounded animal drags it along. But here the rope measured no more than ten fathoms or so, and its end was simply made fast to a little barrel that, floating, would mark the dugong's course beneath the water.
I had risen and could clearly study the Canadian's adversary. This dugong — which also goes by the name halicore — closely resembled the manatee. Its oblong body ended in a very long tail fin, and its side flippers ended in what were truly fingers. Its difference from the manatee lay in this: its upper jaw was armed with two long, pointed teeth that formed diverging tusks on either side.
This dugong that Ned Land was preparing to attack had colossal dimensions; its length was at least seven meters. It wasn't moving, and it seemed to be asleep on the surface of the waves — a circumstance that made its capture easier.
The dinghy edged cautiously to within three fathoms of the animal. The oars hung suspended in their rowlocks. I half rose. Ned Land, his body thrown a little back, brandished his harpoon with a practiced hand.
Suddenly a hiss was heard, and the dugong vanished. The harpoon, flung with all Ned's force, had no doubt struck nothing but water.
"A thousand devils!" cried the Canadian in a fury. "I missed it!"
"No," I said, "the animal's wounded — there's its blood — but your weapon didn't stay lodged in its body."
"My harpoon! My harpoon!" cried Ned Land.
The sailors bent to their oars again, and the coxswain steered the boat toward the floating barrel. The harpoon fished up, the dinghy set off in pursuit of the animal.
The dugong came back to the surface from time to time to breathe. Its wound hadn't weakened it, for it shot along with extreme speed. The boat, worked by vigorous arms, flew after it. Several times it closed to within a few fathoms, and the Canadian held himself ready to strike; but the dugong would slip away with a sudden dive, and there was no reaching it.
You can judge the rage that boiled up in the impatient Ned Land. He hurled the most forceful oaths in the English language at the wretched animal. For my part, I'd gotten no further than vexation at seeing the dugong foil all our tricks.
We chased it without letup for an hour, and I was beginning to think it would be very hard to take, when the animal was seized by an unlucky notion of revenge that it would soon have cause to repent. It turned back on the dinghy to attack us in its turn.
This maneuver didn't escape the Canadian.
"Look out!" he said.
The coxswain spoke a few words in his strange language, no doubt warning his men to be on their guard.
The dugong, having come within twenty feet of the dinghy, stopped, snuffed the air sharply through its vast nostrils — pierced not at the tip but at the upper part of its muzzle — then, gathering its momentum, hurled itself at us.
The dinghy couldn't avoid the shock. Half overturned, it shipped a ton or two of water that had to be bailed out; but thanks to the coxswain's skill, taken at an angle instead of head-on, it didn't capsize. Ned Land, clinging to the stem, jabbed harpoon-blow after harpoon-blow into the gigantic animal, which, its teeth sunk into the gunwale, lifted the boat out of the water the way a lion lifts a young deer. We were thrown one on top of another, and I hardly know how the adventure would have ended if the Canadian, relentless against the beast, hadn't at last struck it to the heart.
I heard the grinding of teeth on the metal plating, and the dugong disappeared, dragging the harpoon down with it. But soon the barrel bobbed back to the surface, and a few moments later the animal's body appeared, rolled over on its back. The dinghy came up to it, took it in tow, and made for the Nautilus.
It took powerful tackle to hoist the dugong onto the platform. It weighed five thousand kilograms. It was cut up under the eyes of the Canadian, who insisted on following every detail of the operation. That same day the steward served me at dinner a few slices of that flesh, skillfully prepared by the ship's cook. I found it excellent, and even superior to veal, if not to beef.
The next day, February 11, the Nautilus's larder was enriched again with delicate game. A flock of sea swallows settled on the Nautilus. They were a species of Sterna nilotica, peculiar to Egypt, with a black beak, a gray dappled head, the eye ringed with white spots, the back, wings, and tail grayish, the belly and throat white, and red feet. We also caught a few dozen Nile ducks, wild birds of a high flavor, whose neck and crown are white and speckled with black.
The Nautilus's speed was moderate now. It was moving along at a saunter, so to speak. I noticed that the water of the Red Sea grew less and less salty the closer we came to Suez.
Toward five in the evening, we sighted Cape Ras Muhammad to the north. It's this cape that forms the tip of Arabia Petraea, held between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba.
The Nautilus entered the Strait of Jubal, which leads to the Gulf of Suez. I could clearly see a high mountain dominating Ras Muhammad between the two gulfs. It was Mount Horeb — that Sinai on whose summit Moses saw God face to face, and which the mind pictures forever crowned with lightning.
At six o'clock, the Nautilus, now floating, now submerged, passed off Tor, set at the bottom of a bay whose waters looked tinged with red — an observation Captain Nemo had already made. Then night fell, in the midst of a heavy silence broken now and then by the cry of a pelican and a few night birds, by the sound of the surf fretted against the rocks, or by the distant groan of a steamer beating the waters of the gulf with its ringing blades.
From eight to nine o'clock, the Nautilus stayed a few meters beneath the surface. By my reckoning, we had to be very near Suez. Through the panels of the salon, I could see the rocky bottom brilliantly lit by our electric light. It seemed to me that the strait was growing narrower and narrower.
At a quarter past nine, the boat having come back to the surface, I climbed onto the platform. Too impatient to pass through Captain Nemo's tunnel, I couldn't keep still, and I sought to breathe the fresh night air.
Soon, in the darkness, I made out a pale fire, half washed out by the haze, glowing a mile from us.
"A floating lighthouse," said a voice near me.
I turned and recognized the captain.
"That's the floating light of Suez," he went on. "It won't be long before we reach the mouth of the tunnel."
"The entrance can't be easy?"
"No, sir. And so I make it my habit to stay in the helmsman's cage and direct the maneuver myself. And now, if you'll go below, Professor Aronnax, the Nautilus is going to sink beneath the waves, and it won't come back to the surface until we've passed through the Arabian Tunnel."
I followed Captain Nemo. The hatch closed, the water tanks filled, and the vessel sank some ten meters.
Just as I was about to head back to my room, the captain stopped me.
"Professor," he said, "would you care to come with me into the pilot's cage?"
"I didn't dare ask you," I answered.
"Come along, then. This way you'll see everything there is to see of a voyage that's at once underground and underwater."
Captain Nemo led me toward the central stairway. Halfway up the steps, he opened a door, followed the upper gangways, and reached the pilot's cage, which, as we know, rose at the end of the platform.
It was a cabin measuring six feet on each side, much like those the helmsmen occupy on the steamboats of the Mississippi or the Hudson. In the middle a wheel was worked, set vertically, geared to the wheel ropes of the rudder that ran all the way to the stern of the Nautilus. Four portholes of lens-shaped glass, set into the walls of the cabin, let the man at the helm look out in every direction.
The cabin was dark; but soon my eyes grew used to the gloom, and I made out the pilot, a powerful man whose hands rested on the rim of the wheel. Outside, the sea appeared vividly lit by the beacon that shone behind the cabin, at the other end of the platform.
"Now," said Captain Nemo, "let's look for our passage."
Electric wires linked the helmsman's cage with the engine room, and from there the captain could signal to his Nautilus both direction and speed at once. He pressed a metal button, and at once the speed of the propeller dropped sharply.
I watched in silence the high, sheer wall we were skirting just then — the immovable base of the sandy massif of the coast. We followed it that way for an hour, only a few meters off. Captain Nemo never took his eyes off the compass hanging in the cabin between its two concentric rings. At a mere gesture from him, the helmsman altered the Nautilus's course from one instant to the next.
I had placed myself at the port porthole, and I could see magnificent substructures of coral, zoophytes, algae, and crustaceans waving their enormous claws, which reached out from the crevices of the rock.
At a quarter past ten, Captain Nemo took the helm himself. A wide gallery, black and deep, opened before us. The Nautilus plunged boldly into it. An unfamiliar rushing sound made itself heard along its flanks. It was the waters of the Red Sea that the slope of the tunnel was hurling toward the Mediterranean. The Nautilus followed the torrent, swift as an arrow, despite the efforts of its engine, which, to resist, was beating the water with its propeller reversed.
On the narrow walls of the passage I could see nothing now but blazing streaks, straight lines, furrows of fire traced by our speed under the glare of the electricity. My heart was pounding, and I pressed it down with my hand.
At ten thirty-five, Captain Nemo let go of the wheel, and turning to me:
"The Mediterranean," he said.
In less than twenty minutes, the Nautilus, carried along by that torrent, had crossed the Isthmus of Suez.
The next day, February 12, at daybreak, the Nautilus rose to the surface of the waves. I rushed up onto the platform. Three miles to the south the hazy silhouette of Pelusium took shape. A torrent had carried us from one sea to the other. But that tunnel, easy enough to run down, must surely be impossible to climb back up.
Toward seven o'clock, Ned and Conseil joined me. These two inseparable companions had slept soundly, without troubling themselves in the least over the exploits of the Nautilus.
"Well, Professor," asked the Canadian, in a tone of light mockery, "and this Mediterranean of yours?"
"We're floating on the surface of it, friend Ned."
"What!" said Conseil. "This very night?"
"Yes, this very night, in the space of a few minutes, we crossed that uncrossable isthmus."
"I don't believe a word of it," the Canadian answered.
"Then you're wrong, Master Land," I replied. "That low coast curving away to the south is the coast of Egypt."
"Tell that to someone else, Professor," retorted the stubborn Canadian.
"But since Master says so," Conseil told him, "then Master must be believed."
"What's more, Ned, Captain Nemo did me the honors of his tunnel himself, and I was standing right beside him, in the pilot's cage, while he steered the Nautilus through that narrow passage with his own hands."
"You hear that, Ned?" said Conseil.
"And you, with those sharp eyes of yours," I added, "you can make out the jetties of Port Said stretching out into the sea."
The Canadian looked closely.
"You're right at that," he said. "You're right, Professor, and that captain of yours is a master among men. We're in the Mediterranean. Good. Then let's talk, if you please, about our own little affairs — but in such a way that no one can overhear us."
I saw well enough what the Canadian was driving at. In any case, I thought it was better to talk, since he wanted to, and the three of us went and sat down near the beacon, where we were less exposed to the damp spray of the waves.
"Now then, Ned, we're listening," I said. "What do you have to tell us?"
"What I have to tell you is very simple," the Canadian answered. "We're in Europe, and before Captain Nemo's whims drag us off to the bottom of the polar seas or carry us back to Oceania, I'm asking to leave the Nautilus."
I admit this discussion with the Canadian always put me in an awkward spot. I had no wish whatsoever to hinder my companions' freedom, and yet I felt not the slightest desire to leave Captain Nemo. Thanks to him, thanks to his machine, I was completing my underwater studies day by day, rewriting my book of the ocean depths in the very midst of its element. Would I ever again find such a chance to observe the wonders of the sea? No, surely not! And so I couldn't reconcile myself to the idea of abandoning the Nautilus before our cycle of investigations was done.
"Friend Ned," I said, "answer me honestly. Are you bored aboard? Do you regret that fate threw you into Captain Nemo's hands?"
The Canadian went a few moments without answering. Then, folding his arms:
"Honestly," he said, "I don't regret this voyage under the seas. I'll be glad to have made it. But to have made it, it has to end. That's how I feel."
"It will end, Ned."
"Where and when?"
"Where? I have no idea. When? I can't say — or rather, I suppose it will finish when these seas have nothing more to teach us. Everything that begins in this world necessarily has an end."
"I think as Master does," Conseil put in, "and it's quite possible that after sailing across all the seas of the globe, Captain Nemo will give the three of us the boot."
"The boot!" cried the Canadian. "You mean a boot, I hope!"
"Let's not exaggerate, Master Land," I went on. "We have nothing to fear from the captain, but I don't share Conseil's ideas either. We're masters of the Nautilus's secrets, and I don't expect its commander, just to give us back our freedom, will resign himself to letting those secrets roam the world with us."
"Then what do you hope for?" asked the Canadian.
"That circumstances will arise which we can — which we must — take advantage of, just as well six months from now as this minute."
"Oh ho!" said Ned Land. "And where will we be six months from now, if you please, Professor?"
"Perhaps here, perhaps in China. You know the Nautilus is a swift traveler. It crosses the oceans the way a swallow crosses the air, or an express train crosses the continents. It has no fear of frequented waters. Who's to say it won't come alongside the coasts of France, England, or America, where an escape could be attempted just as favorably as here?"
"Professor Aronnax," the Canadian answered, "your arguments are rotten at the root. You speak in the future: 'We'll be there! We'll be here!' Me, I speak in the present: 'We are here, and we'd better make the most of it.'"
I was hard pressed by Ned Land's logic, and I felt myself beaten on that ground. I no longer knew what arguments to bring forward in my own favor.
"Professor," Ned went on, "let's suppose — impossible as it is — that Captain Nemo offers you your freedom this very day. Would you accept?"
"I don't know," I answered.
"And if he adds that this offer he's making you today, he won't renew it later on, would you accept then?"
I didn't answer.
"And what does friend Conseil think?" asked Ned Land.
"Friend Conseil," the worthy fellow answered calmly, "friend Conseil has nothing to say. He is entirely disinterested in the question. Like his master, like his comrade Ned, he is a bachelor. No wife, no relatives, no children wait for him back home. He is in Master's service, he thinks as Master thinks, he speaks as Master speaks, and, much to his regret, no one can count on him to make a majority. Only two people are here in contention: Master on the one side, Ned Land on the other. That said, friend Conseil is listening, and he stands ready to keep the score."
I couldn't help smiling to see Conseil annihilate his own personality so completely. Deep down, the Canadian must have been delighted not to have him against him.
"Then, Professor," said Ned Land, "since Conseil doesn't exist, let's argue it out between the two of us. I've spoken, you've heard me. What have you got to answer?"
Clearly I had to come to a conclusion, and evasions were repugnant to me.
"Friend Ned," I said, "here is my answer. You're right and I'm wrong, and my arguments can't stand up against yours. There's no counting on Captain Nemo's goodwill. The most ordinary prudence forbids him to set us free. By the same token, prudence demands that we seize the first chance to leave the Nautilus."
"Well said, Professor Aronnax. Now that's talking wisely."
"Only," I said, "one observation, just one. The chance has to be a serious one. Our first attempt to escape has to succeed; because if it fails, we won't get another opening to try again, and Captain Nemo won't forgive us."
"That's all quite true," the Canadian answered. "But your observation applies to any escape attempt, whether it happens in two years or in two days. So the question is always this: if a favorable chance presents itself, we have to seize it."
"Agreed. And now, Ned, will you tell me what you mean by a favorable chance?"
"It would be one that, on some dark night, brings the Nautilus a short distance off a European coast."
"And you'd try to save yourself by swimming for it?"
"Yes, if we were close enough to a shore, and if the ship were floating on the surface. No, if we were far out, and if the ship were running underwater."
"And in that case?"
"In that case, I'd try to get hold of the dinghy. I know how it's handled. We'd slip inside, and with the bolts drawn, we'd rise to the surface without so much as the helmsman, stationed up forward, noticing our escape."
"Good, Ned. Then keep watch for that chance; but don't forget that a failure would be the end of us."
"I won't forget it, Professor."
"And now, Ned, do you want to know my whole thought on your plan?"
"Gladly, Professor Aronnax."
"Well, I think — I won't say I hope — I think that this favorable chance will never present itself."
"Why is that?"
"Because Captain Nemo can't hide from himself that we haven't given up hope of recovering our freedom, and he'll stay on his guard, above all in the seas and within sight of the coasts of Europe."
"I'm of Master's opinion," said Conseil.
"We'll see about that," answered Ned Land, shaking his head with a determined air.
"And now, Ned Land," I added, "let's leave it there. Not another word on any of this. The day you're ready, warn us and we'll follow you. I put myself completely in your hands."
That was how this conversation ended — a conversation that was to have such grave consequences later on. And I must say now that events seemed to confirm my predictions, to the Canadian's great despair. Did Captain Nemo distrust us in these frequented seas, or did he simply want to keep out of sight of the countless ships of every nation that furrow the Mediterranean? I don't know, but most of the time he kept us between two waters and well out from the coasts. Either the Nautilus surfaced, showing nothing but the pilot's cage, or it slipped away to great depths, for between the Greek archipelago and Asia Minor we found no bottom at two thousand meters.
And so it was only through a line of Virgil that I came to know of the island of Karpathos, one of the Sporades, when Captain Nemo quoted it to me, laying his finger on a point of the planisphere:
Est in Carpathio Neptuni gurgite vates Coeruleus Proteus...
It was indeed the ancient dwelling of Proteus, the old shepherd of Neptune's flocks — now the island of Scarpanto, lying between Rhodes and Crete. I saw nothing of it but the granite foundations through the glass of the salon.
The next day, February 14, I resolved to spend a few hours studying the fishes of the Archipelago; but for some reason or other, the panels stayed hermetically shut. Taking the bearings of the Nautilus's course, I noticed that it was heading toward Candia, the ancient island of Crete. At the moment when I had embarked on the Abraham Lincoln, that island had just risen up in its entirety against Turkish despotism. But what had become of the insurrection since that time, I had absolutely no idea, and it certainly wasn't Captain Nemo, cut off from all communication with the land, who could have told me.
So I made no allusion to that event when, that evening, I found myself alone with him in the salon. Besides, he struck me as taciturn, preoccupied. Then, contrary to his habits, he ordered both panels of the salon opened, and, moving from one to the other, he studied the mass of water attentively. To what end? I couldn't guess, and for my part I spent my time studying the fish that passed before my eyes.
Among others, I noticed those aphysa gobies mentioned by Aristotle and commonly known as "sea loaches," which one meets particularly in the salt waters bordering the delta of the Nile. Near them unrolled some half-phosphorescent pagres, a kind of sea bream that the Egyptians ranked among their sacred animals, and whose arrival in the river's waters — announcing its fertile flooding — was celebrated with religious ceremonies. I noted as well some cheilines three decimeters long, bony fish with transparent scales, their livid color mixed with red spots; they are great eaters of marine plants, which gives them an exquisite flavor; and so these cheilines were much sought after by the gourmets of ancient Rome, and their entrails, dressed with the milt of moray eels, the brains of peacocks, and the tongues of flamingos, made up that divine dish which so delighted Vitellius. Another inhabitant of these seas caught my attention and brought back to my mind all the memories of antiquity. This was the remora, which travels attached to the belly of sharks; according to the ancients, this little fish, clinging to the keel of a ship, could stop it in its course, and one of them, holding back Antony's vessel during the Battle of Actium, thus helped Augustus to victory. On what slender threads the destinies of nations hang! I also observed some admirable anthias, which belong to the order of the lutjanids, fish sacred to the Greeks, who credited them with the power to drive sea monsters from the waters they frequented; their name means "flower," and they justified it by their shimmering colors, their shades ranging across the whole scale of red from the paleness of rose to the blaze of ruby, and by the fleeting reflections that shot moiré patterns across their dorsal fins. My eyes couldn't tear themselves away from these marvels of the sea, when suddenly they were struck by an unexpected apparition.
In the midst of the waters, a man appeared — a diver, carrying a leather pouch at his belt. This was no corpse abandoned to the waves. This was a living man, swimming with a vigorous stroke of one arm, vanishing now and again to go breathe at the surface, then plunging back down at once.
I turned toward Captain Nemo, and in a stirred voice:
"A man! A castaway!" I cried. "We must save him at all costs!"
The captain didn't answer me and went to lean against the glass.
The man had come closer, and, his face pressed to the panel, he was looking in at us.
To my utter astonishment, Captain Nemo made him a sign. The diver answered him with his hand, rose immediately toward the surface of the sea, and did not reappear.
"Don't be alarmed," the captain told me. "That's Nicolas, of Cape Matapan, nicknamed the Pesce. He's well known throughout the Cyclades. A bold diver! Water is his element, and he lives in it more than on land, forever going from one island to another, all the way to Crete."
"You know him, Captain?"
"Why not, Professor Aronnax?"
That said, Captain Nemo walked over to a cabinet standing near the left-hand panel of the salon. Beside this cabinet I saw an iron-bound chest, its lid bearing on a copper plate the monogram of the Nautilus, with its motto, Mobilis in Mobili.
At that moment the captain, without concerning himself over my presence, opened the cabinet — a sort of safe that held a great number of ingots.
They were ingots of gold. Where did this precious metal come from, this metal that represented an enormous sum? Where was the captain gathering this gold, and what was he going to do with it?
I didn't utter a word. I watched. Captain Nemo took these ingots one by one and arranged them methodically in the chest, which he filled completely. I estimated that it held then more than a thousand kilograms of gold — that is, close to five million francs.
The chest was securely closed, and the captain wrote an address on its lid in characters that must have belonged to modern Greek.
This done, Captain Nemo pressed a button whose wire connected with the crew's quarters. Four men appeared, and, not without difficulty, they pushed the chest out of the salon. Then I heard them hoisting it by means of tackle up the iron staircase.
At that moment Captain Nemo turned to me:
"You were saying, Professor?" he asked.
"I was saying nothing, Captain."
"Then, Professor, you'll permit me to wish you good evening."
And with that, Captain Nemo left the salon.
I went back to my cabin greatly intrigued, as one can imagine. I tried in vain to sleep. I kept searching for some connection between the appearance of that diver and this chest full of gold. Soon, from certain movements of rolling and pitching, I felt that the Nautilus was leaving the lower layers and coming back to the surface of the waters.
Then I heard the sound of footsteps on the platform. I understood that the dinghy was being unfastened and launched into the sea. It knocked for an instant against the flanks of the Nautilus, and then all sound ceased.
Two hours later, the same sound, the same comings and goings repeated themselves. The boat, hoisted aboard, was fitted back into its socket, and the Nautilus plunged once more beneath the waves.
So those millions had been carried to their destination. To what point on the continent? Who was Captain Nemo's correspondent?
The next day I recounted to Conseil and the Canadian the events of that night, which excited my curiosity to the highest degree. My companions were no less surprised than I was.
"But where does he get these millions?" asked Ned Land.
To that, no answer was possible. I went into the salon after breakfast and set to work. Until five in the evening, I was writing up my notes. At that moment — was I to put it down to some personal disposition? — I felt an extreme heat, and I had to take off my coat of byssus. An incomprehensible effect, for we were not at high latitudes, and besides, the Nautilus, submerged, should have felt no rise in temperature at all. I looked at the pressure gauge. It showed a depth of sixty feet, a depth the warmth of the atmosphere could never have reached.
I went on with my work, but the temperature rose to the point of becoming intolerable.
"Could there be a fire aboard?" I asked myself.
I was about to leave the salon when Captain Nemo came in. He went up to the thermometer, consulted it, and, turning back to me:
"Forty-two degrees," he said.
"I feel it, Captain," I answered, "and if this heat increases even a little, we won't be able to bear it."
"Oh, Professor, this heat won't increase unless we want it to."
"So you can moderate it at will?"
"No, but I can move away from the source that produces it."
"So it's external?"
"Of course. We're floating in a current of boiling water."
"Is it possible?" I cried.
"Look."
The panels opened, and I saw the sea gone entirely white all around the Nautilus. A smoke of sulfurous vapors was unrolling through the middle of the waves, which bubbled like the water of a boiler. I laid my hand against one of the glass panes, but the heat was such that I had to pull it away.
"Where are we?" I asked.
"Near the island of Santorini, Professor," the captain answered, "and precisely in that channel which separates Nea Kameni from Palea Kameni. I wanted to give you the curious spectacle of an undersea eruption."
"I thought," I said, "that the formation of these new islands was finished."
"Nothing is ever finished in volcanic waters," answered Captain Nemo, "and the globe is forever being worked here by its underground fires. Already, in the nineteenth year of our era, according to Cassiodorus and Pliny, a new island, Theia the divine, appeared in the very place where these islets have recently formed. Then it sank beneath the waves, only to show itself again in the year sixty-nine and sink once more. From that time down to our own day, the plutonian labor was suspended. But on February 3, 1866, a new islet, which they named the islet of George, emerged amid the sulfurous vapors near Nea Kameni, and welded itself to it on the sixth of the same month. Seven days later, on February 13, the islet Aphroessa appeared, leaving a channel of ten meters between itself and Nea Kameni. I was in these seas when the phenomenon occurred, and I was able to observe all its phases. The islet Aphroessa, round in shape, measured three hundred feet in diameter by thirty feet in height. It was made of black glassy lavas, mixed with fragments of feldspar. Finally, on March 10, a smaller islet, called Reka, showed itself near Nea Kameni, and since then these three islets, welded together, form no more than a single, selfsame island."
"And the channel where we are at this moment?" I asked.
"Here it is," answered Captain Nemo, showing me a map of the Archipelago. "You see that I've marked the new islets on it."
"But this channel will fill in one day?"
"That's probable, Professor Aronnax, for since 1866, eight little islets of lava have surged up facing the port of Saint Nicholas on Palea Kameni. It's therefore obvious that Nea and Palea will join together before long. If, in the middle of the Pacific, it's the infusoria that build the continents, here it's the eruptive phenomena. Look, Professor, look at the labor being accomplished beneath these waves."
I came back toward the glass. The Nautilus had stopped moving. The heat was becoming intolerable. From white as it had been, the sea was turning red, a coloration due to the presence of an iron salt. Despite the hermetic sealing of the salon, an unbearable sulfurous odor was escaping, and I could make out scarlet flames whose brightness killed the glare of the electric light.
I was drenched in sweat, I was suffocating, I was going to cook. Yes, truly, I felt myself cooking!
"We can't stay any longer in this boiling water," I said to the captain.
"No, that wouldn't be prudent," answered the impassive Nemo.
An order was given. The Nautilus came about and drew away from that furnace it couldn't brave with impunity. A quarter of an hour later, we were breathing at the surface of the waves.
The thought then came to me that if Ned Land had chosen these waters to carry out our escape, we would never have come out alive from this sea of fire.
The next day, February 16, we left that basin which, between Rhodes and Alexandria, counts depths of three thousand meters, and the Nautilus, passing well off Cerigo, left the Greek archipelago behind, after doubling Cape Matapan.
The Mediterranean — the blue sea above all others, the "Great Sea" of the Hebrews, "the sea" of the Greeks, the mare nostrum of the Romans; fringed with orange groves, aloes, cactus, and maritime pines, sweet with the scent of myrtle, framed by rugged mountains, steeped in a pure and transparent air yet endlessly worked upon by the fires of the earth — is a whole world unto itself. It is here, on its shores and its waters, Michelet says, that a man is tempered anew in one of the mightiest climates on the globe.
But beautiful as it is, I could catch no more than a hurried glimpse of this basin, whose surface covers two million square kilometers. Captain Nemo's personal knowledge failed me here as well, for the enigmatic man did not appear once during this high-speed crossing. I reckon that the Nautilus traveled some six hundred leagues beneath the waves of this sea, and it covered that distance in twice twenty-four hours. Setting out on the morning of February 16 from the waters off Greece, by the 18th, at sunrise, we had cleared the Strait of Gibraltar.
It was plain to me that this Mediterranean, pinched in among the very lands he wished to flee, was hateful to Captain Nemo. Its waves and its breezes carried too many memories back to him, if not too many regrets. Here he no longer had that freedom of movement, that independence of maneuver that the open oceans allowed him, and his Nautilus felt cramped between these close-set shores of Africa and Europe.
And so our speed ran to twenty-five miles an hour — that is, twelve leagues of four kilometers each. It goes without saying that Ned Land, to his great disgust, had to give up his plans for escape. There was no using the dinghy when it was being dragged along at twelve or thirteen meters a second. Leaving the Nautilus under such conditions would have been like jumping from a train going at that speed — a reckless move if ever there was one. Besides, our craft rose to the surface only at night, to renew its supply of air, and it steered solely by the readings of the compass and the log.
So of the interior of this Mediterranean I saw only what the traveler on an express train glimpses of the landscape fleeing before his eyes — the far horizons, and not the foregrounds that flash past like lightning. Even so, Conseil and I were able to observe a few of those Mediterranean fish that the power of their fins kept for a moment or two in the waters of the Nautilus. We kept watch at the windows of the salon, and my notes let me sketch, in a few words, the ichthyology of this sea.
Of the various fish that inhabit it, some I saw clearly, others I only half-glimpsed, to say nothing of those the Nautilus's speed stole from my eyes altogether. Let me be permitted, then, to classify them according to this improvised scheme. It will better convey the swiftness of my observations.
Through the mass of waters, brightly lit by our electric sheets, wound a few of those lampreys a meter long, common to nearly every climate. Oxyrhynchus rays, a kind of skate, five feet across, white-bellied, their backs an ashen gray and speckled, spread themselves out like great shawls swept along by the currents. Other rays flashed by so fast that I could not tell whether they deserved the name of "eagles" the Greeks gave them, or the labels of rat, toad, and bat that modern fishermen have saddled them with. Tope sharks, twelve feet long and especially dreaded by divers, raced one another for speed. Thresher sharks — "sea foxes" — eight feet long and gifted with an extraordinarily keen sense of smell, appeared like great bluish shadows. Gilthead bream, of the sparus family, some of them measuring as much as thirteen decimeters, showed themselves in their livery of silver and azure banded with ribbons, which stood out against the dark tone of their fins — fish consecrated to Venus, their eyes set in a brow of gold; a precious species, at home in every water, fresh or salt, dwelling in rivers, lakes, and oceans, living under every climate, bearing every temperature, and whose race, reaching back to the geological ages of the earth, has kept all its beauty of those first days. Magnificent sturgeons, nine to ten meters long, great travelers, struck the glass of the panels with a powerful tail, showing their bluish backs dotted with small brown spots: they resemble the sharks, though they do not match their strength, and are found in every sea; in spring they love to run up the great rivers, to fight the currents of the Volga, the Danube, the Po, the Rhine, the Loire, the Oder, and they feed on herring, mackerel, salmon, and cod; and though they belong to the class of cartilaginous fish, they are a delicacy — eaten fresh, dried, marinated, or salted, and in the old days they were borne in triumph to the table of the Luculli. But of these varied dwellers in the Mediterranean, the ones I could study to best advantage, whenever the Nautilus drew near the surface, belonged to the sixty-third genus of bony fishes. These were tunny — mackerel-tribe fish, blue-black on the back, their bellies armored in silver, their dorsal rays throwing off gleams of gold. They have a reputation for following in a ship's wake, seeking the cool of its shadow under the fires of a tropical sky, and they did not belie it, escorting the Nautilus as they once escorted the vessels of La Pérouse. For hours on end they matched their speed against our craft. I could not tire of admiring these creatures, truly built for the race — their small heads, their smooth spindle-shaped bodies, which in some ran to more than three meters, their pectoral fins of remarkable power, and their forked tails. They swam in a triangle, like certain flocks of birds whose speed they equaled — which made the ancients say that geometry and strategy were second nature to them. And yet they do not escape the pursuit of the Provençals, who prize them as highly as the peoples of the Propontis and of Italy once did; and it is blindly, heedlessly, that these precious creatures rush in and perish by the thousand in the tuna traps of Marseille.
I will mention, for the record only, those Mediterranean fish that Conseil or I did no more than half-glimpse. There were whitish cusk-eels — pearl-fish — that passed like unseizable vapors; conger-morays, snakes three to four meters long, prettied up in green, blue, and yellow; hakes of the cod family, three feet long, their livers a choice morsel; band-fish, ribbon-like, that floated like fine seaweed; gurnards, which the poets call lyre-fish and sailors call whistlers, their snouts adorned with two triangular, toothed plates that mimic old Homer's instrument; flying gurnards — "swallows" — swimming with the swiftness of the bird whose name they have taken; red-headed soldierfish, their dorsal fins fringed with filaments; shad speckled with black, gray, brown, blue, yellow, and green, sensitive to the silvery ringing of little bells; and splendid turbot — those pheasants of the sea — a kind of diamond-shape with yellowish fins, brown-stippled, whose upper side, the left, is generally marbled in brown and yellow; and, last of all, whole schools of admirable red mullet, true birds of paradise of the ocean, which the Romans paid as much as ten thousand sesterces apiece, and which they killed on their tables so as to follow with a cruel eye their changing colors, from the cinnabar red of life to the pale white of death.
And if I could not observe monkfish, triggerfish, puffers, seahorses, John Dorys, snipefish, blennies, striped mullet, wrasses, smelt, flying fish, anchovies, sea bream, bogues, sea perch, nor any of those chief representatives of the order of flatfish — the dabs, the flounders, the plaice, the soles, the brill — all common to both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the blame must fall on the dizzying speed that carried the Nautilus through these teeming waters.
As for the marine mammals, I believe I made out, in passing before the mouth of the Adriatic, two or three sperm whales fitted with a dorsal fin of the physeter kind; a few dolphins of the pilot-whale genus, native to the Mediterranean, the fronts of their heads streaked with little pale lines; and also a dozen seals with white bellies and black coats, known as "monks," which for all the world look like Dominican friars three meters long.
For his part, Conseil believes he caught sight of a turtle six feet across, ornamented with three ridges running lengthwise. I was sorry not to have seen the reptile, for from the description Conseil gave me, I thought I recognized the leatherback, which forms a fairly rare species. For my own part, I noticed only a few loggerheads with elongated shells.
As for the zoophytes, for a few moments I was able to admire a superb orange sea-fir that fastened itself to the glass of the port panel; it was a long slender filament, branching out into endless boughs and ending in the finest lacework the rivals of Arachne ever spun. Unfortunately, I could not fish up this admirable specimen, and no other Mediterranean zoophyte would likely have offered itself to my eyes, if the Nautilus, on the evening of the 16th, had not markedly slackened its speed. This was how it came about.
We were passing then between Sicily and the coast of Tunis. In that narrow space between Cape Bon and the Strait of Messina, the sea floor rises almost abruptly. There a veritable crest has formed, over which only seventeen meters of water remain, while on either side the depth is a hundred and seventy meters. The Nautilus therefore had to maneuver carefully so as not to strike this underwater barrier.
I showed Conseil, on the map of the Mediterranean, the place occupied by this long reef.
"But, if Master doesn't mind my saying so," Conseil observed, "it's like a genuine isthmus joining Europe to Africa."
"Yes, my boy," I answered, "it bars the whole Strait of Libya, and Smith's soundings have proven that the continents were once joined between Cape Boco and Cape Furina."
"I can well believe it," said Conseil.
"I'll add," I went on, "that a similar barrier exists between Gibraltar and Ceuta, which in the geological ages closed off the Mediterranean completely."
"Well now!" said Conseil. "What if some volcanic upheaval were to raise these two barriers back above the waves one day?"
"That's hardly likely, Conseil."
"Still, let Master allow me to finish — if it did happen, it would be a sorry business for Monsieur de Lesseps, who is going to such trouble to cut through his isthmus!"
"I grant you that. But I tell you again, Conseil, that phenomenon will not occur. The violence of the subterranean forces keeps steadily diminishing. The volcanoes, so numerous in the world's first days, are dying out little by little; the internal heat is weakening, the temperature of the globe's lower layers is dropping by an appreciable amount each century — and to our globe's cost, for that heat is its life."
"But the sun—"
"The sun is not enough, Conseil. Can it give heat back to a corpse?"
"Not that I know of."
"Well then, my friend, one day the earth will be that cooled corpse. It will become uninhabitable, and it will be uninhabited, like the moon, which lost its vital heat long ago."
"In how many centuries?" asked Conseil.
"In a few hundred thousand years, my boy."
"Then," replied Conseil, "we have time to finish our voyage — provided Ned Land doesn't meddle in it!"
And Conseil, reassured, went back to studying the shoal that the Nautilus was skimming close over at a moderate speed.
There, on a rocky, volcanic bed, a whole living flora blossomed: sponges, sea cucumbers, glassy cydippes trimmed with reddish cirri and giving off a faint phosphorescence; beroës, commonly known as sea gooseberries, bathed in the shimmerings of a solar spectrum; walking feather stars a meter across, whose crimson reddened the waters; tree-like basket stars of the greatest beauty; peacock-plumes on long stems; a great number of edible sea urchins of varied species; and green sea anemones with grayish trunks and brown disks, lost in their olive-tinted manes of tentacles.
Conseil had busied himself particularly with observing the mollusks and the articulates, and although the nomenclature is a little dry, I don't want to do this good fellow the injustice of leaving out his personal observations.
Among the branch of the mollusks, he lists numerous comb-shaped scallops; donkey's-foot spondylus heaped one upon another; triangular donax clams; three-toothed hyalaea with yellow fins and transparent shells; orange pleurobranchs; sea slugs stippled or sown with greenish points; sea hares, also known as aplysias; dolabellas; fleshy acera; umbrella-shells peculiar to the Mediterranean; sea-ears whose shell yields a much-prized mother-of-pearl; flame-marked scallops; anomias, which the Languedoc folk are said to prefer to oysters; carpet-shells so dear to the people of Marseille; double white fatty venus-clams; a few of those clams that abound on the coasts of North America and command such a considerable trade in New York; scallops with lids of varied colors; date-mussels tucked into their burrows, whose peppery flavor I greatly relished; furrowed venericardias, their shells domed at the top with jutting ribs; sea squirts bristling with scarlet tubercles; carinarias with recurved points, like light little gondolas; crowned pterotracheas; atlantas with spiral shells; gray thetys spotted with white and covered by their fringed mantles; eolids like little slugs; cavolinias crawling on their backs; ear-shells, among them the forget-me-not ear-shell with its oval shell; tawny wentletraps; periwinkles; janthinas; cinerarias; petricolas; lamellarias; cabochons; pandoras; and so on.
As for the articulates, Conseil had, in his notes, very rightly divided them into six classes, three of which belong to the marine world. These are the classes of crustaceans, of cirripedes, and of annelids.
The crustaceans subdivide into nine orders, and the first of these orders comprises the decapods — that is, the animals whose head and thorax are most often fused together, whose mouth apparatus is made up of several pairs of limbs, and which possess four, five, or six pairs of thoracic or walking legs. Conseil had followed the method of our master Milne-Edwards, who makes three sections of the decapods: the brachyurans, the macrurans, and the anomurans. These names are a shade barbarous, but they are exact and precise. Among the brachyurans, Conseil lists amathias, their brows armed with two great diverging spikes; the scorpion inachus, which — I don't know why — symbolized wisdom among the Greeks; masséna and spiny-clawed lambrus crabs, probably strayed onto this shoal, for they ordinarily live at great depths; xanthos; pilumnus crabs; rhomboid crabs; granular calappas — very easy to digest, Conseil notes; toothless corystes; ebalias; cymopolias; woolly dorippes; and so on. Among the macrurans, subdivided into five families — the armored, the burrowers, the crayfish tribe, the prawns, and the ochyzopods — he lists common spiny lobsters, whose flesh is so esteemed in the females; bear-slipper lobsters, or sea-cicadas; shore-dwelling mud-shrimps; and all sorts of edible species — but he says nothing of the crayfish-tribe subdivision that includes the true lobsters, for the spiny lobsters are the Mediterranean's only lobsters. Finally, among the anomurans, he saw common drocinas sheltered behind the abandoned shell they seize for themselves; spiny-fronted homolas; hermit crabs; porcelain crabs; and so on.
There Conseil's work broke off. He had run out of time to complete the class of crustaceans by examining the stomatopods, the amphipods, the homopods, the isopods, the trilobites, the branchiopods, the ostracods, and the entomostracans. And to round off the study of the marine articulates, he would have had to cite the class of cirripedes, which contains the cyclops and the argulus, and the class of annelids, which he would surely have divided into tube-dwellers and dorsibranchs. But the Nautilus, having passed the shoal of the Strait of Libya, resumed its accustomed speed in deeper waters. From then on, no more mollusks, no more articulates, no more zoophytes — barely a few large fish that passed like shadows.
During the night of February 16 to 17, we had entered that second Mediterranean basin, whose greatest depths run to three thousand meters. The Nautilus, driven by its propeller and gliding on its inclined planes, sank down to the sea's lowest layers.
There, in place of nature's marvels, the mass of waters offered my eyes many a moving and terrible scene. For we were now crossing that whole part of the Mediterranean so fertile in disasters. From the Algerian coast to the shores of Provence, how many ships have been wrecked, how many vessels have vanished! The Mediterranean is a mere lake compared to the vast liquid plains of the Pacific, but it is a capricious lake, with changeable waves — today kind and caressing to the frail tartan that seems to float between the double blue of the waters and the sky; tomorrow raging, tormented, torn up by the winds, breaking the strongest ships with its short seas that batter them in quick, hurried blows.
And so, in this rapid passage through the deep layers, how many wrecks I saw lying on the bottom — some already crusted over with corals, others clad only in a coat of rust: anchors, cannon, cannonballs, iron fittings, propeller blades, pieces of machinery, broken cylinders, staved-in boilers, then hulls floating between two waters, some upright, others capsized.
Of these wrecked ships, some had perished by collision, others by striking some granite reef. I saw ships that had gone straight down, their masts erect, their rigging stiffened by the water. They looked as though they were riding at anchor in some immense open roadstead, waiting for the moment to sail. When the Nautilus passed among them and wrapped them in its electric sheets, it seemed those ships were about to salute it with their colors and send it their signal number! But no — nothing but silence and death over that field of catastrophes.
I noticed that the Mediterranean bottom grew more and more cluttered with these grim wrecks as the Nautilus drew near the Strait of Gibraltar. There the coasts of Africa and Europe close in, and in that narrow space collisions are frequent. There I saw numerous iron keels, the fantastic ruins of steamers, some lying on their sides, others standing upright, like formidable beasts. One of these vessels, its flanks torn open, its funnel bent, its paddle wheels stripped down to the frames, its rudder parted from the sternpost and still held by an iron chain, its stern transom eaten away by the sea salts, presented a terrible sight! How many lives shattered in its wreck! How many victims dragged down beneath the waves! Had some sailor aboard survived to tell of that dreadful disaster, or did the waves still keep the secret of the calamity? I don't know why, but the thought came to me that this vessel buried under the sea might be the Atlas, lost with all hands some twenty years before, and never heard of since! Ah, what a sinister tale might be told of these Mediterranean depths — of this vast ossuary, where so many riches have been lost, where so many victims have met their death!
Meanwhile the Nautilus, indifferent and swift, ran at full propeller through the midst of these ruins. On February 18, toward three in the morning, it presented itself at the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar.
There are two currents there: an upper current, long recognized, which brings the ocean's waters into the basin of the Mediterranean; and then a lower counter-current, whose existence reasoning has demonstrated today. In effect, the sum of the Mediterranean's waters, ceaselessly swelled by the flow of the Atlantic and by the rivers emptying into it, ought to raise the level of this sea year by year, for its evaporation is not enough to restore the balance. And yet it does not, and one has naturally had to admit the existence of a lower current that, through the Strait of Gibraltar, pours the Mediterranean's overflow into the basin of the Atlantic.
A true fact, indeed. And it was this counter-current the Nautilus took advantage of. It advanced rapidly through the narrow pass. For an instant I could make out the admirable ruins of the temple of Hercules, sunk — according to Pliny and Avienus — along with the low island that once bore it up, and a few minutes later we were floating on the waves of the Atlantic.
The Atlantic! That vast sheet of water, twenty-five million square miles across, nine thousand miles long and, on average, two thousand seven hundred wide. A great sea almost unknown to the ancients — except perhaps to the Carthaginians, those Dutchmen of antiquity, who on their trading voyages followed the western coasts of Europe and Africa. An ocean whose shores, winding in parallel curves, embrace an immense perimeter, watered by the greatest rivers in the world — the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Plata, the Orinoco, the Niger, the Senegal, the Elbe, the Loire, the Rhine — bringing it the waters of the most civilized nations and the wildest lands alike. A magnificent plain, forever furrowed by the ships of every nation, sheltered under every flag in the world, and closed off at either end by those two dreaded headlands, the terror of navigators — Cape Horn and the Cape of Storms.
The Nautilus was cutting through its waters with the edge of its ram, having covered nearly ten thousand leagues in three and a half months — a run longer than one of the earth's great circles. Where were we bound now, and what did the future hold for us?
Out of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Nautilus had stood for the open sea. It rose back to the surface, and so our daily walks on the platform were restored to us.
I climbed up at once, with Ned Land and Conseil. About twelve miles off, Cape St. Vincent loomed vaguely — the southwestern tip of the Iberian peninsula. A fairly stiff wind was blowing from the south. The sea ran high and heavy, rolling the Nautilus in violent lurches. It was almost impossible to keep one's footing on the platform, which great masses of water swept over every few seconds. So, after a few good breaths of air, we went back down.
I returned to my cabin. Conseil went off to his, but the Canadian, looking distinctly preoccupied, followed me. Our quick dash across the Mediterranean had left him no chance to carry out his plans, and he made little effort to hide his disappointment.
When the door of my cabin had shut, he sat down and looked at me without a word.
"Ned, my friend," I said, "I understand you, but you've nothing to reproach yourself for. Given the way the Nautilus was traveling, to think of leaving it would have been madness."
Ned Land said nothing. His pressed lips and knitted brows marked a man in the grip of a single fixed idea.
"Come now," I went on, "nothing is lost yet. We're working our way up the coast of Portugal. France and England aren't far off — places where we could easily find refuge. If the Nautilus, coming out of Gibraltar, had headed south, if it had carried us off toward those regions where there are no continents, I'd share your worries. But we know now that Captain Nemo doesn't shun the civilized seas, and in a few days, I think you'll be able to act with some measure of safety."
Ned Land only stared at me harder, and at last unsealed his lips.
"It's for tonight," he said.
I sat bolt upright. I confess I was hardly prepared for this announcement. I wanted to answer the Canadian, but the words wouldn't come.
"We agreed to wait for the right circumstances," Ned Land went on. "Well, I've got them. Tonight we'll be only a few miles from the Spanish coast. It's a dark night. The wind's blowing off the sea. I have your word, Professor Aronnax, and I'm counting on you."
As I still kept silent, the Canadian rose and came closer.
"Tonight, at nine o'clock," he said. "I've warned Conseil. By then Captain Nemo will be shut up in his cabin, most likely asleep. Neither the engineers nor the crew can see us. Conseil and I will make our way to the central staircase. You, Professor Aronnax, will wait in the library, two steps from us, for my signal. The oars, the mast, and the sail are all in the dinghy. I've even managed to stow some provisions aboard. I've got hold of a wrench to unscrew the bolts that fasten the dinghy to the hull of the Nautilus. So everything's ready. Until tonight."
"The sea is rough," I said.
"I'll grant you that," the Canadian answered, "but we have to risk it. Freedom is worth the price. Besides, the boat is sound, and a few miles with a following wind are nothing to worry about. Who knows if by tomorrow we won't be a hundred leagues out to sea? Let circumstances favor us, and between ten and eleven o'clock we'll have landed somewhere on solid ground — or we'll be dead. So, God help us, and until tonight!"
With that the Canadian withdrew, leaving me all but stunned. I had imagined that, when the moment came, I'd have time to think, to talk it over. My stubborn companion wouldn't allow me that. And what, after all, would I have said to him? Ned Land was right a hundred times over. This was as good as the right circumstance, and he was seizing it. Could I go back on my word and take on myself the responsibility of ruining my companions' future for a purely personal interest? Might not Captain Nemo, tomorrow, carry us far from any land?
Just then a fairly loud hiss told me the ballast tanks were filling, and the Nautilus sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
I stayed in my cabin. I wanted to avoid the captain, to hide from his eyes the emotion that had taken hold of me. What a wretched day I spent that way, torn between the longing to regain my free will and the regret of abandoning this marvelous Nautilus, leaving my undersea studies unfinished! To leave this ocean like that — "my Atlantic," as I liked to call it — without having observed its deepest layers, without having stolen from it those secrets the Indian and Pacific seas had yielded to me! My novel was slipping from my hands at the first volume, my dream was breaking off at its finest moment! What miserable hours dragged by like that, now seeing myself safe ashore with my companions, now wishing — against all reason — that some unforeseen circumstance would prevent Ned Land's plans from coming off.
Twice I went to the salon. I wanted to consult the compass. I wanted to see whether the Nautilus's course was really bringing us closer to the coast, or carrying us away from it. But no. The Nautilus was still holding to Portuguese waters, pointing north as it ran along the shores of the ocean.
So there was nothing for it but to resign myself and get ready to flee. My baggage wasn't heavy. My notes, nothing more.
As for Captain Nemo, I wondered what he'd make of our escape — what anxieties, what harm perhaps it would cause him, and what he'd do if it were either discovered or bungled. Certainly I had no complaint against him; quite the opposite. Never was hospitality more open than his. In leaving him, I couldn't be charged with ingratitude. No oath bound us to him. It was on the force of circumstance alone that he counted, and not on any promise of ours, to keep us with him forever. But this openly avowed intention of holding us prisoner aboard for the rest of our lives justified every attempt we might make to get away.
I hadn't seen the captain since our visit to the island of Santorini. Would chance throw me in his path before our departure? I both wished it and feared it. I listened for the sound of him moving in his cabin, which adjoined mine. Not a sound reached my ear. The room must have been empty.
At which point I began to wonder whether that strange man was even aboard. Ever since the night the dinghy had left the Nautilus on some mysterious errand, my ideas about him had shifted a little. I believed — whatever he might have said — that Captain Nemo must have kept up some kind of relations with the land. Did he never leave the Nautilus? Whole weeks had often passed without my meeting him. What did he do during that time, and while I imagined him a prey to fits of misanthropy, wasn't he off somewhere carrying out some secret act whose nature had escaped me until now?
All these ideas and a thousand others assailed me at once. In the strange situation we were in, the field of conjecture could only be infinite. I felt an unbearable unease. This day of waiting seemed endless. The hours struck too slowly for my impatience.
My dinner was served in my cabin as usual. I ate badly, too preoccupied. I left the table at seven o'clock. A hundred and twenty minutes — I counted them — still separated me from the moment I was to join Ned Land. My agitation kept building. My pulse pounded. I couldn't stay still. I paced back and forth, hoping to calm the turmoil of my mind through movement. The idea of dying in our reckless venture was the least of my worries; but at the thought of our plan being discovered before we'd even left the Nautilus, at the thought of being hauled back before an angry Captain Nemo — or, worse still, one wounded by my desertion — my heart hammered.
I wanted to see the salon one last time. I went along the corridors and came to that museum where I'd passed so many pleasant and profitable hours. I looked at all those riches, all those treasures, like a man on the eve of an eternal exile who is leaving never to return. These wonders of nature, these masterpieces of art, among which my whole life had been concentrated for so many days — I was about to abandon them forever. I would have liked to plunge my gaze through the salon window and out into the waters of the Atlantic; but the panels were sealed tight, and a mantle of iron plate cut me off from that ocean I still didn't know.
Wandering the salon that way, I came near the door set into the cut-off corner, the one that opened onto the captain's cabin. To my great surprise, that door stood ajar. I stepped back involuntarily. If Captain Nemo were in his cabin, he might see me. But hearing no sound, I moved closer. The room was empty. I pushed the door open. I took a few steps inside. The same severe, monkish look as before.
Just then some etchings hanging on the wall, which I hadn't noticed during my first visit, caught my eye. They were portraits — portraits of those great historical figures whose whole existence had been one perpetual devotion to some great human ideal: Kosciuszko, the hero who fell with the cry of Finis Poloniae; Botzaris, the Leonidas of modern Greece; O'Connell, the defender of Ireland; Washington, the founder of the American Union; Manin, the Italian patriot; Lincoln, struck down by the bullet of a defender of slavery; and, last of all, that martyr to the emancipation of the black race, John Brown, hanging from his gallows, just as Victor Hugo's pencil so terribly drew him.
What bond existed between these heroic souls and the soul of Captain Nemo? Could I, at last, draw from this gathering of portraits the mystery of his life? Was he the champion of oppressed peoples, the liberator of enslaved races? Had he played a part in the latest political or social upheavals of the century? Had he been one of the heroes of that terrible American war — a war so lamentable and forever glorious?
All at once the clock struck eight. The stroke of the first hammer-blow on the chime tore me from my musings. I started, as though some invisible eye had been able to plunge into my most secret thoughts, and I hurried out of the cabin.
There, my gaze fell on the compass. Our heading was still north. The log showed a moderate speed, the pressure gauge a depth of about sixty feet. So circumstances were favoring the Canadian's plans.
I went back to my cabin. I dressed warmly — sea boots, an otter-skin cap, a jacket of byssus lined with sealskin. I was ready. I waited. Only the shivering of the propeller broke the deep silence that reigned aboard. I listened, straining my ears. Wouldn't some sudden burst of voices tell me that Ned Land had just been caught in his plans of escape? A mortal anxiety came over me. In vain I tried to recover my composure.
At a few minutes to nine, I pressed my ear to the captain's door. Not a sound. I left my cabin and returned to the salon, which lay in half-darkness, but empty.
I opened the door leading into the library. The same feeble light, the same solitude. I went to take up my post by the door that opened onto the cage of the central staircase. I waited for Ned Land's signal.
At that moment, the shivering of the propeller noticeably slackened, then stopped altogether. Why this change in the Nautilus's movement? Whether the halt helped or hindered Ned Land's designs, I couldn't have said.
The silence was broken now only by the beating of my own heart.
Suddenly, a slight jolt made itself felt. I understood that the Nautilus had come to rest on the ocean floor. My anxiety redoubled. The Canadian's signal didn't reach me. I felt an urge to go join Ned Land and urge him to put off the attempt. I sensed that our navigation was no longer proceeding under ordinary conditions.
At that moment the door of the grand salon opened, and Captain Nemo appeared. He caught sight of me and, without further preamble:
"Ah, Professor," he said in a friendly tone, "I was looking for you. Do you know the history of Spain?"
You could know your own country's history through and through, and in the state I was in — my mind troubled, my head lost — you couldn't have quoted a word of it.
"Well?" Captain Nemo resumed. "Did you hear my question? Do you know the history of Spain?"
"Very poorly," I answered.
"There you have your scholars," said the captain. "They don't know. Well then, sit down," he added, "and I'll tell you a curious episode from that history."
The captain stretched out on a divan, and mechanically I took a seat beside him, in the half-light.
"Professor," he said to me, "listen closely. This story will interest you in a certain respect, for it will answer a question you've no doubt been unable to solve."
"I'm listening, Captain," I said, not knowing where my companion was heading, and wondering whether this incident had anything to do with our plans for flight.
"Professor," Captain Nemo went on, "if you don't mind, we'll go back to the year 1702. You're not unaware that at that time your king, Louis XIV, believing that a mere gesture from a monarch was enough to sink the Pyrenees underground, had imposed his grandson, the Duke of Anjou, on the Spanish. This prince, who reigned more or less badly under the name of Philip V, had, abroad, a formidable adversary to deal with.
"For, the year before, the royal houses of Holland, Austria, and England had concluded a treaty of alliance at The Hague, aiming to wrest the crown of Spain from Philip V and set it on the head of an archduke, on whom they prematurely bestowed the name of Charles III.
"Spain had to resist this coalition. But she was almost entirely without soldiers or sailors. Money, however, she did not lack — provided always that her galleons, laden with the gold and silver of the Americas, made it into her ports. Now, toward the end of 1702, she was expecting a rich convoy, which France had arranged to escort with a fleet of twenty-three ships under Admiral de Château-Renault, since the coalition's navies were then roaming the Atlantic.
"This convoy was supposed to make for Cadiz, but the admiral, having learned that the English fleet was cruising in those waters, resolved to put in at a French port.
"The Spanish commanders of the convoy protested against this decision. They wanted to be taken to a Spanish port, and, failing Cadiz, to the bay of Vigo, on the northwest coast of Spain, which was not blockaded.
"Admiral de Château-Renault was weak enough to obey this injunction, and the galleons entered Vigo Bay.
"Unfortunately, this bay forms an open roadstead that cannot be defended at all. It was therefore urgent to unload the galleons before the coalition fleets arrived, and there would have been time enough for that unloading, had not a wretched question of rivalry suddenly cropped up.
"You're following the chain of events?" Captain Nemo asked me.
"Perfectly," I said, still not knowing what this history lesson was leading up to.
"Then I'll go on. Here is what happened. The merchants of Cadiz held a privilege by which all goods coming from the West Indies were to be received by them. Now, to unload the galleons' ingots at the port of Vigo was to go against their right. So they complained to Madrid, and they obtained from the feeble Philip V an order that the convoy, without proceeding to unload, should remain under seal in the roadstead of Vigo until the enemy fleets had drawn off.
"Now, while this decision was being taken, on October 22, 1702, the English ships arrived in Vigo Bay. Admiral de Château-Renault, despite his inferior forces, fought courageously. But when he saw that the convoy's riches were about to fall into the enemy's hands, he set fire to the galleons and scuttled them, and they went down with their immense treasures."
Captain Nemo had stopped. I confess I still didn't see how this story could interest me.
"Well?" I asked him.
"Well, Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo answered, "we are in that very bay of Vigo, and it rests only with you to penetrate its mysteries."
The captain rose and asked me to follow him. I'd had time to recover myself. I obeyed. The salon was dark, but through the transparent windows the waves of the sea gleamed. I looked.
Around the Nautilus, within a radius of half a mile, the waters appeared saturated with electric light. The sandy bottom was clean and clear. Crew members, dressed in diving suits, were busy clearing away half-rotted casks and staved-in crates, amid wreckage still blackened by fire. From these crates, from these barrels, spilled ingots of gold and silver, cascades of piastres and jewels. The sand was strewn with them. Then, laden with this precious plunder, the men would return to the Nautilus, set down their burden, and go back to that inexhaustible fishery of silver and gold.
I understood. This was the theater of the battle of October 22, 1702. Here was the very spot where the galleons freighted for the Spanish government's account had gone down. Here Captain Nemo came, as his needs required, to cash in the millions with which he ballasted his Nautilus. It was for him, for him alone, that America had yielded up her precious metals. He was the direct and undivided heir to those treasures wrenched from the Incas and the peoples conquered by Hernán Cortés!
"Did you know, Professor," he asked me, smiling, "that the sea held such riches?"
"I knew," I answered, "that the silver held in suspension in its waters is reckoned at two million tons."
"No doubt, but to extract that silver, the costs would outweigh the profit. Here, on the contrary, I have only to gather up what men have lost — and not only in this bay of Vigo, but at a thousand other scenes of shipwreck whose positions my underwater chart has recorded. Do you understand now why I'm rich to the tune of billions?"
"I understand, Captain. Allow me, though, to tell you that in working precisely this bay of Vigo, you've only forestalled the efforts of a rival company."
"And which one?"
"A company that received from the Spanish government the privilege of searching for the sunken galleons. Its shareholders are lured by the bait of an enormous profit, for the value of these shipwrecked riches is estimated at five hundred million."
"Five hundred million!" Captain Nemo replied. "They were here — but they're here no longer."
"Just so," I said. "So a word of warning to those shareholders would be an act of charity. Though who knows whether it would be well received. What gamblers regret above all, as a rule, is not so much the loss of their money as the loss of their wild hopes. Still, I pity them less, after all, than those thousands of unfortunates for whom such riches, fairly distributed, might have done some good — whereas for them they'll remain forever barren!"
No sooner had I voiced this regret than I felt it must have wounded Captain Nemo.
"Barren!" he shot back, kindling. "So you believe, sir, that these riches are lost when it's I who gather them up? Is it for myself, in your opinion, that I take the trouble to collect these treasures? Who tells you I don't put them to good use? Do you think I'm unaware that there are suffering beings, oppressed races on this earth — the wretched to be relieved, the victims to be avenged? Don't you understand?"
Captain Nemo stopped on these last words, regretting perhaps that he had said too much. But I had guessed. Whatever the motives that had forced him to seek independence beneath the seas, above all else he had remained a man! His heart still throbbed for the sufferings of humanity, and his vast charity went out to enslaved races as much as to individuals.
And I understood, then, for whom those millions were destined that Captain Nemo had shipped off when the Nautilus was cruising in the waters of insurgent Crete!
The next morning, February 19, I saw Ned come into my cabin. I had been expecting him. He looked thoroughly crestfallen.
"Well, Professor?" he said.
"Well, Ned, our luck was out yesterday."
"Right! That cursed captain had to stop just at the very hour we were about to slip away from his boat."
"Yes, Ned. He had business with his banker."
"His banker!"
"Or rather his banking house. By which I mean that Ocean out there, where his riches are safer than they'd be in the vaults of any government."
I then told the Canadian about the previous night's events, in the secret hope of nudging him back toward the idea of not abandoning the captain; but the only result of my account was Ned's forcefully expressed regret at not having managed to take a little stroll of his own across the battlefield of Vigo.
"Well," he said, "it's not over yet! It's just one harpoon thrown and missed! Next time we'll pull it off — this very evening, if we have to..."
"Which way is the Nautilus heading?" I asked.
"No idea," Ned answered.
"All right. At noon we'll get our position."
The Canadian went back to Conseil. As soon as I was dressed, I stepped into the salon. The compass was anything but reassuring. The Nautilus's course lay south-southwest. We were turning our backs on Europe.
I waited with a certain impatience for the fix to be marked on the chart. Toward half past eleven the ballast tanks emptied, and our vessel rose to the surface of the Ocean. I rushed up to the platform. Ned Land had beaten me there.
No more land in sight. Nothing but the immense sea. A few sails on the horizon — bound, no doubt, all the way out to Cape San Roque in search of the favorable winds for rounding the Cape of Good Hope. The sky was overcast. A gale was brewing.
Ned, seething, tried to pierce the hazy horizon. He was still hoping that behind all that fog stretched the land he wanted so badly.
At noon the sun showed itself for a moment. The first mate seized on the break in the clouds to take its altitude. Then, as the sea grew heavier, we went back down and the hatch was shut.
An hour later, when I consulted the chart, I saw that the Nautilus's position was marked at 16°17′ longitude and 33°22′ latitude, a hundred and fifty leagues from the nearest coast. There was no thinking of escape now, and I leave you to imagine the Canadian's fury when I gave him the news.
For my own part, I didn't take it too hard. I felt as though a weight that had been pressing on me had lifted, and I was able to go back to my usual work with something like relative calm.
That evening, around eleven o'clock, I had a most unexpected visit from Captain Nemo. He asked me very graciously whether I felt tired after sitting up the night before. I answered that I did not.
"Then, Professor Aronnax, I have a curious excursion to propose."
"Propose away, Captain."
"So far you've only seen the sea floor by day, under the light of the sun. Would it suit you to see it on a dark night?"
"Very gladly."
"This walk will be tiring, I warn you. We'll have to march a long way and climb a mountain. The roads aren't very well kept."
"What you tell me, Captain, only sharpens my curiosity. I'm ready to follow you."
"Come along, then, Professor. We'll go put on our diving suits."
When I reached the changing room, I saw that neither my companions nor any member of the crew was to come with us on this excursion. Captain Nemo hadn't even offered to bring Ned or Conseil.
In a few moments we had climbed into our gear. The air tanks, generously charged, were set on our backs, but the electric lamps were not made ready. I pointed this out to the captain.
"They'd be of no use to us," he answered.
I thought I must have misheard him, but I couldn't repeat my remark, because the captain's head had already vanished into its metal sheath. I finished harnessing myself up, felt an iron-tipped staff placed in my hand, and a few minutes later, after the usual maneuver, we set foot on the bottom of the Atlantic, at a depth of three hundred meters.
Midnight was near. The waters were profoundly dark, but Captain Nemo pointed out to me, far off, a reddish point, a kind of broad glow, shining about two miles from the Nautilus. What that fire was, what fed it, why and how it kept renewing itself within the mass of water, I couldn't have said. In any case, it lit our way — dimly, it's true, but I soon grew used to those peculiar shadows, and I understood, in these circumstances, why the Ruhmkorff lamps were useless.
Captain Nemo and I walked side by side, straight toward the beacon fire. The flat ground rose imperceptibly. We took long strides, helping ourselves along with the staff; but our pace was slow, all in all, for our feet kept sinking into a kind of mud kneaded through with seaweed and strewn with flat stones.
As I went, I heard a sort of crackling overhead. Now and then the noise doubled, becoming a continuous sputter. I soon understood the cause. It was rain, falling hard and pattering on the surface of the waves. Instinctively the thought came to me that I was about to get soaked! By water, in the middle of water! I couldn't help laughing at the absurd idea. But to tell the truth, under the thick coat of a diving suit, you no longer feel the liquid element; you imagine yourself in the middle of an atmosphere only a little denser than the one on land — and that's all there is to it.
After half an hour's walk, the ground turned rocky. Jellyfish, microscopic crustaceans, and sea pens lit it faintly with phosphorescent glimmers. I made out heaps of stones covered by a few million zoophytes and tangles of algae. My foot kept slipping on those slimy carpets of wrack, and without my iron-tipped staff I'd have fallen more than once. When I turned around, I could still see the whitish beacon of the Nautilus, beginning to pale in the distance.
Those piles of stone I've just mentioned were arranged on the ocean floor with a certain regularity I couldn't account for. I made out gigantic furrows that lost themselves in the far darkness, their length beyond any reckoning. Other oddities presented themselves too, things I couldn't bring myself to admit. It seemed to me that my heavy lead soles were crushing a litter of bones that snapped with a dry crack. What, then, was this vast plain I was crossing? I would have liked to question the captain, but his sign language — which let him talk with his companions when they followed him on his undersea excursions — was still incomprehensible to me.
Meanwhile the reddish light that guided us grew stronger and set the horizon ablaze. The presence of this furnace beneath the waters intrigued me to the highest degree. Was it some electrical discharge making itself known? Was I walking toward a natural phenomenon still unknown to the scientists of the land? Or even — for the thought crossed my mind — was a human hand at work in this conflagration? Was it a human hand fanning that blaze? Was I to meet, beneath these deep waters, companions and friends of Captain Nemo, living as he did this strange existence, and to whom he was paying a visit? Would I find down there a whole colony of exiles who, weary of the world's miseries, had sought and found their independence in the deepest reaches of the Ocean? All these wild, inadmissible notions pursued me, and in that state of mind, endlessly overexcited by the parade of marvels passing before my eyes, I would not have been surprised to come upon, at the bottom of that sea, one of those undersea cities Captain Nemo dreamed of!
Our road grew brighter and brighter. The whitening glow radiated from the summit of a mountain some eight hundred feet high. But what I saw was only a reflection, thrown up by the crystal of the layers of water. The furnace, the source of this inexplicable radiance, lay on the far slope of the mountain.
Through the stony labyrinths that seamed the floor of the Atlantic, Captain Nemo advanced without hesitation. He knew this dark road. He had traveled it often, no doubt, and could not lose his way on it. I followed him with unshakable confidence. He seemed to me one of the sea's own genies, and when he strode ahead of me, I admired his tall figure, cut out in black against the glowing background of the horizon.
It was one in the morning. We had reached the first slopes of the mountain. But to tackle them, we had to venture along the difficult paths of a vast thicket.
Yes! A thicket of dead trees, leafless and sapless, trees turned to stone under the action of the water, with here and there a gigantic pine towering above them. It was like a coalfield still standing upright, holding to the sunken ground by its roots, its branches, like the fine cutout of black paper, drawn sharply against the ceiling of the waters. Picture a forest in the Harz Mountains, clinging to the flanks of a slope — but a forest swallowed by the sea. The paths were choked with seaweed and wrack, among which swarmed a whole world of crustaceans. On I went, scaling the rocks, striding over the fallen trunks, snapping the sea vines that swung from tree to tree, startling the fish that flitted from branch to branch. Swept along, I no longer felt tired. I followed my guide, who never tired at all.
What a spectacle! How to convey it? How to paint the look of these woods and rocks in that liquid element — their undersides dark and savage, their tops washed with red tones under a light doubled by the reflecting power of the water? We climbed rocks that then broke away in enormous slabs, tumbling down with the muffled roar of an avalanche. To the right and left yawned shadowy galleries where the eye lost itself. Here vast clearings opened up, as though a human hand had cleared them, and I wondered at times whether some inhabitant of these undersea regions might not suddenly appear before me.
But Captain Nemo climbed on and on. I did not want to fall behind. I followed him boldly. My staff was a real help. A false step would have been dangerous on those narrow ledges hollowed out along the flanks of the chasms; but I trod them with a firm foot, feeling none of the dizzy pull of vertigo. Now I leaped a crevasse whose depth would have made me draw back among the glaciers on land; now I ventured out onto the swaying trunk of a tree flung from one abyss to another, never looking beneath my feet, my eyes only for the wild scenery of this region. Here monumental rocks, tilted on their irregularly cut bases, seemed to defy the laws of balance. Between their stone knees, trees sprang up as though shot out under tremendous pressure, and held up the very rocks that held them. Then natural towers, broad sheer faces cut like the curtain walls of a fortress, leaned at an angle that the laws of gravity would never have permitted on the surface of the land.
And did I not feel that difference myself, owing to the powerful density of the water, when — despite my heavy garments, my copper head, my metal soles — I climbed slopes of impossible steepness, clearing them, so to speak, with the lightness of a mountain goat or a chamois!
In telling the story of this excursion beneath the waves, I feel well enough that no one will believe me! I am the historian of things that seem impossible and yet are real, beyond dispute. I did not dream it. I saw and felt it!
Two hours after leaving the Nautilus, we had crossed the tree line, and a hundred feet above our heads rose the peak of the mountain, its shadow thrown across the dazzling glow of the opposite slope. A few petrified shrubs straggled here and there in grimacing zigzags. Fish rose in masses beneath our steps, like birds startled in tall grass. The rocky mass was pitted with impenetrable crevices, deep grottoes, unfathomable holes, at the bottom of which I could hear formidable things stirring. My blood ran back to my heart when I glimpsed some enormous feeler barring my path, or some terrifying claw snapping shut with a clack in the shadow of the hollows! Thousands of luminous points glittered amid the darkness. They were the eyes of gigantic crustaceans crouched in their dens — giant lobsters rearing up like halberdiers and clashing their legs with a rattle of old iron, titanic crabs trained like cannon on their carriages, and hideous octopuses interlacing their tentacles like a living bramble of serpents.
What was this extravagant world I still knew nothing of? To what order did these jointed creatures belong, for whom the rock formed a kind of second shell? Where had nature found the secret of their sluggish, plantlike existence, and for how many centuries had they lived like this in the lowest layers of the Ocean?
But I could not stop. Captain Nemo, familiar with these dreadful animals, no longer paid them any heed. We had reached a first plateau, where still other surprises awaited me. There stood picturesque ruins that betrayed the hand of man, and no longer that of the Creator. They were vast heaps of stone in which one could make out the vague forms of castles and temples, clothed in a whole world of flowering zoophytes, and over which the algae and wrack, in place of ivy, spread a thick vegetal mantle.
But what was this portion of the globe, swallowed up by cataclysms? Who had set these rocks and stones in place like the dolmens of prehistoric times? Where was I? Where had Captain Nemo's whim carried me?
I longed to ask him. Unable to, I stopped him. I seized his arm. But he, shaking his head and pointing to the last summit of the mountain, seemed to say to me:
"Come! Come on! Come along!"
I followed him in one last effort, and in a few minutes I had scaled the peak, which rose some ten meters above the whole rocky mass.
I looked back at the side we had just crossed. On this face the mountain rose only seven or eight hundred feet above the plain; but on its opposite slope it towered to twice that height above the sunken floor of this part of the Atlantic. My gaze stretched far and took in a vast space lit by a violent blaze. For this mountain was, in fact, a volcano. Fifty feet below the peak, amid a rain of stones and cinders, a broad crater vomited torrents of lava that scattered in a cascade of fire through the mass of water. Set there, this volcano, like an immense torch, lit the plain below all the way to the farthest limits of the horizon.
I said the undersea crater threw up lava, but not flames. Flames need the oxygen of the air, and cannot develop underwater; but streams of lava, which carry within themselves the principle of their own incandescence, can heat to white heat, do battle victoriously with the liquid element, and turn it to vapor on contact. Swift currents swept away all these gases in diffusion, and the lava torrents slid down to the foot of the mountain, like the discharges of Vesuvius over some second Torre del Greco.
And there, indeed, before my eyes, ruined, wrecked, cast down, lay a destroyed city — its roofs caved in, its temples toppled, its arches wrenched apart, its columns lying on the ground, where you could still feel the solid proportions of a kind of Tuscan architecture; farther off, some remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here the silted-up rise of an acropolis, with the floating outlines of a Parthenon; there the vestiges of a quay, as though some ancient harbor had once sheltered, on the shores of a vanished ocean, the merchant ships and the war triremes; farther still, long lines of crumbled walls, broad deserted streets — a whole Pompeii buried beneath the waters, which Captain Nemo was raising again before my eyes!
Where was I? Where was I? I had to know at any price, I wanted to speak, I wanted to tear off the copper sphere that imprisoned my head.
But Captain Nemo came over and stopped me with a gesture. Then, picking up a piece of chalky stone, he stepped toward a rock of black basalt and traced this single word:
What a flash of lightning shot through my mind! Atlantis — the ancient Meropis of Theopompus, the Atlantis of Plato, that continent denied by Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d'Anville, Malte-Brun, and Humboldt, who set its disappearance down to the tales of legend, and admitted by Posidonius, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus, Tertullian, Engel, Scherer, Tournefort, Buffon, and d'Avezac — there it was, beneath my very eyes, still bearing the undeniable evidence of its catastrophe! So this was that sunken region that had existed beyond Europe, beyond Asia, beyond Libya, out past the Pillars of Hercules, where that mighty people the Atlanteans had lived — against whom the first wars of ancient Greece were waged!
The historian who set down in his writings the great deeds of those heroic times is Plato himself. His dialogue of Timaeus and Critias was traced, so to speak, under the inspiration of Solon, the poet and lawgiver.
One day Solon was talking with some wise old men of Saïs, a city already eight hundred years old, as its annals engraved on the sacred wall of its temples bore witness. One of these old men told the story of another city, a thousand years older still. This first Athenian city, ninety thousand years old, had been invaded and partly destroyed by the Atlanteans. These Atlanteans, he said, occupied an immense continent larger than Africa and Asia combined, covering an area that ran from the twelfth degree of latitude to the fortieth degree north. Their dominion reached even to Egypt. They tried to force it as far as Greece, but they had to fall back before the indomitable resistance of the Hellenes. Centuries passed. A cataclysm struck — floods, earthquakes. A single night and day were enough to blot out this Atlantis, whose highest peaks — Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde islands — still rise above the waves.
Such were the historical memories that Captain Nemo's inscription set throbbing in my mind. And so, led here by the strangest of destinies, I was treading one of the mountains of that continent! My hand was touching those ruins a thousand times ancient, contemporaries of the geological ages! I was walking on the very spot where the contemporaries of the first man had walked! Under my heavy soles I was crushing the skeletons of animals from fabled times, animals that these trees, now turned to stone, had once covered with their shade!
Ah! Why did I not have more time! I would have liked to descend the steep slopes of this mountain, to cross this whole immense continent — which no doubt once joined Africa to America — and to visit those great cities of before the Flood. There, perhaps, spread out beneath my eyes, lay Machimos the warlike and Eusebes the pious, whose giant inhabitants lived for whole centuries, and who had strength enough to heap up these blocks that still resisted the action of the water. One day, perhaps, some eruptive upheaval will bring these sunken ruins back to the surface! Many undersea volcanoes have been reported in this part of the Ocean, and many ships have felt extraordinary tremors as they passed over these tormented depths. Some have heard hollow rumblings that told of the deep struggle of the elements; others have gathered volcanic ash flung up out of the sea. All this ground, right down to the Equator, is still being worked by the plutonic forces. And who knows whether, in some distant age, swollen by volcanic discharges and by successive layers of lava, the peaks of fire-vomiting mountains may not one day break the surface of the Atlantic!
While I mused like this, while I tried to fix in my memory every detail of that magnificent landscape, Captain Nemo — leaning on a moss-grown pillar — stood motionless, as if turned to stone, in a mute rapture. Was he thinking of those vanished generations, asking them the secret of human destiny? Was this the place where this strange man came to steep himself again in the memories of history, and to relive that ancient life — he who wanted nothing of the modern one? What would I not have given to know his thoughts, to share them, to understand them!
We stayed in that spot for a full hour, gazing at the vast plain under the glow of the lava, which now and then flared to a startling intensity. The seething deep within sent quick shudders running across the crust of the mountain. Deep sounds, transmitted with perfect clarity through this liquid element, echoed back with a majestic breadth.
At that moment the moon appeared for an instant through the mass of the waters and cast a few pale rays over the sunken continent. It was only a glimmer, but the effect was beyond describing. The captain rose, took one last look at the immense plain; then with his hand he signaled me to follow him.
We came down the mountain quickly. Once past the mineral forest, I caught sight of the Nautilus's beacon shining like a star. The captain walked straight toward it, and we were back aboard just as the first tints of dawn were whitening the surface of the Ocean.
The next day, February 20, I woke very late. The exhaustion of the night had stretched my sleep until eleven o'clock. I dressed quickly. I was eager to know which way the Nautilus was heading. The instruments told me she was still running south at a speed of twenty miles an hour, at a depth of a hundred meters.
Conseil came in. I told him about our nighttime excursion, and since the panels were open, he could still catch a glimpse of that submerged continent.
The Nautilus was in fact skimming barely ten meters above the floor of the Atlantis plain. She glided along like a balloon carried on the wind above the meadows of the earth — though it would be truer to say that we sat in that salon as if in the car of an express train. The nearest features rushing past our eyes were rocks carved into fantastic shapes, forests of trees that had passed from the vegetable kingdom into the mineral, their motionless silhouettes grimacing beneath the waves. There were stony masses buried under carpets of sea squirts and anemones, bristling with tall vertical water-plants, and then blocks of lava strangely twisted, testifying to all the fury of the earth's volcanic upheavals.
While these bizarre landscapes blazed under our electric beams, I told Conseil the story of these Atlanteans, who — on the purely imaginary side of things — inspired so many charming pages in Bailly. I described to him the wars of those heroic peoples. I argued the question of Atlantis like a man who can no longer doubt. But Conseil, distracted, was hardly listening, and his indifference to this historical matter was soon explained to me.
The fact was that a great many fish were catching his eye, and whenever fish went by, Conseil, swept off into the abysses of classification, took leave of the real world. When that happened, I had nothing to do but follow him and take up our ichthyological studies alongside him.
These fish of the Atlantic did not, for that matter, differ noticeably from those we had observed so far. There were rays of gigantic size, five meters long and endowed with such muscular power that it lets them leap clear of the waves; sharks of various species, among them a blue shark fifteen feet long, with sharp triangular teeth, whose transparency made it almost invisible in the water; brown dogfish; humantins shaped like prisms and armored in a warty hide; sturgeons like their cousins of the Mediterranean; and trumpet pipefish a foot and a half long, yellow-brown, fitted with little gray fins, without teeth or tongue, filing past like slender, supple serpents.
Among the bony fish, Conseil noted blackish marlins three meters long, armed on the upper jaw with a piercing sword; weevers, brightly colored, known in Aristotle's day as sea dragons, whose dorsal spines make them very dangerous to seize; then dolphinfish, their brown backs striped with fine blue lines and framed in a border of gold; beautiful sea bream; moonfish, a kind of disc with azure gleams that, lit from above by the sun's rays, looked like patches of silver; and finally swordfish eight meters long, traveling in schools, carrying yellowish fins cut like scythes and long six-foot blades — intrepid creatures, more herbivorous than fish-eating, obeying the least sign from their females like well-trained husbands.
But even as I studied these various specimens of marine life, I did not stop examining the long plains of Atlantis. Now and then some capricious irregularity of the ground forced the Nautilus to slow down, and she would slip with the skill of a whale through narrow bottlenecks between the hills. If the maze grew impassable, the craft rose like a balloon, and once the obstacle was cleared she resumed her swift course a few meters above the floor. An admirable, delightful way to travel, calling to mind the maneuvers of a balloon voyage — with this one difference, that the Nautilus obeyed, passively and precisely, the hand of her helmsman.
Toward four in the afternoon, the terrain — generally made up of a thick ooze mixed with mineralized branches — changed little by little. It grew rockier and seemed strewn with conglomerates, with basaltic tuffs, and here and there with scatterings of lava and sulfurous obsidian. I judged that a region of mountains was about to succeed the long plains, and sure enough, as the Nautilus swung through certain maneuvers, I saw the southern horizon barred by a high wall that seemed to shut off every exit. Its summit clearly rose above the level of the ocean. It had to be a continent, or at the very least an island — one of the Canaries, perhaps, or one of the Cape Verde group. Since our position had not been taken — deliberately, perhaps — I had no idea where we were. In any case, such a wall seemed to me to mark the end of this Atlantis, of which, all told, we had crossed only a tiny portion.
Night did not interrupt my observations. I had stayed on alone. Conseil had gone back to his cabin. The Nautilus, slackening her pace, hovered above the confused masses of the sea floor, now grazing them as though she meant to settle there, now rising capriciously toward the surface of the waves. Through the crystal of the waters I would then catch sight of a few brilliant constellations, and precisely five or six of those zodiacal stars that trail at the tail of Orion.
I would have lingered a long while yet at my window, admiring the beauties of the sea and the sky, when the panels closed. At that moment the Nautilus had come up flush against the high wall. How she would maneuver, I could not guess. I went back to my room. The Nautilus was no longer moving. I fell asleep with the firm intention of waking after a few hours' rest.
But the next morning it was eight o'clock when I returned to the salon. I looked at the pressure gauge. It told me that the Nautilus was floating on the surface of the ocean. What was more, I heard the sound of footsteps on the platform. And yet not a roll betrayed the swell of the waves above.
I climbed to the hatch. It was open. But instead of the broad daylight I expected, I found myself surrounded by deep darkness. Where were we? Had I been mistaken? Was it still night? No! Not a single star was shining, and the night has no such absolute blackness.
I did not know what to think, when a voice said to me:
"Is that you, Professor?"
"Ah, Captain Nemo," I answered, "where are we?"
"Underground, Professor."
"Underground!" I cried. "And the Nautilus is still afloat?"
"She is always afloat."
"But I don't understand."
"Wait a few moments. Our beacon is about to be lit, and if you like a situation made clear, you'll be satisfied."
I set foot on the platform and waited. The darkness was so complete that I could not even make out Captain Nemo. Still, looking up at the zenith, exactly above my head, I thought I caught an uncertain gleam, a kind of half-light filling a circular hole. At that instant the beacon suddenly blazed on, and its brilliance made that vague light vanish.
I looked, after shutting for a moment my eyes dazzled by the electric flood. The Nautilus was stationary. She floated beside a bank arranged like a quay. This sea that bore her up at present was a lake imprisoned within a ring of walls measuring two miles across, or six miles around. Its level — the pressure gauge showed as much — could only be the level outside, for a passage necessarily existed between this lake and the sea. The high walls, sloping inward at their base, curved over into a vault and formed an immense inverted funnel, five or six hundred meters high. At the summit opened a circular mouth through which I had glimpsed that faint clarity, plainly the light of day.
Before examining more closely the interior arrangement of this enormous cavern, before asking myself whether it was the work of nature or of man, I went over to Captain Nemo.
"Where are we?" I said.
"At the very heart of an extinct volcano," the captain answered, "a volcano whose interior the sea invaded after some convulsion of the ground. While you were sleeping, Professor, the Nautilus entered this lagoon through a natural channel that opens ten meters below the surface of the ocean. This is her home port — a safe, convenient, secret harbor, sheltered from every point of the compass. Find me, on the coasts of your continents or your islands, a roadstead to match this refuge against the fury of the hurricanes."
"You're right," I answered. "Here you are safe, Captain Nemo. Who could reach you at the heart of a volcano? But at its summit — didn't I see an opening?"
"Yes, its crater, a crater once brimming with lava, vapors, and flame, and which now gives passage to the life-giving air we breathe."
"But what volcanic mountain is this?" I asked.
"It belongs to one of the many islets with which this sea is sown. A mere reef for ships, for us an immense cavern. Chance let me discover it, and in that, chance served me well."
"But couldn't a person climb down through that mouth that forms the crater of the volcano?"
"No more than I could climb up it. Up to about a hundred feet, the inner base of this mountain can be walked; but above that the walls overhang, and their slopes could never be scaled."
"I see, Captain, that nature serves you everywhere and always. You are safe on this lake, and no one but you can visit its waters. But what good is this refuge? The Nautilus needs no port."
"No, Professor, but she needs electricity to move, elements to produce her electricity, sodium to feed her elements, coal to make her sodium, and coal mines to dig out her coal. Now, precisely here, the sea covers whole forests that were engulfed in geological ages; mineralized now and turned to coal, they are for me an inexhaustible mine."
"So your men, Captain, work here as miners?"
"Exactly. These mines stretch out beneath the waves like the coalfields of Newcastle. It is here that, clad in the diving suit, pick and mattock in hand, my men go to dig out this coal — which I have never had to ask of any mine on land. When I burn this fuel to make sodium, the smoke that escapes through the crater of this mountain still gives it the look of a volcano in eruption."
"And will we see them at work, your crew?"
"No, not this time, at least, for I'm in a hurry to continue our tour of the underwater world. So I'll content myself with drawing on the reserves of sodium I already have. The time to load them — a single day, that is — and we'll be on our way again. If you'd like to explore this cavern and walk around the lagoon, take advantage of this day, Professor Aronnax."
I thanked the captain and went to fetch my two companions, who had not yet left their cabin. I invited them to follow me without telling them where they were.
They climbed onto the platform. Conseil, whom nothing ever astonished, thought it a perfectly natural thing to wake up beneath a mountain after falling asleep beneath the waves. But Ned Land had no other idea in his head than to see whether the cavern offered any way out.
After breakfast, around ten o'clock, we went down onto the bank.
"So here we are on dry land once more," said Conseil.
"I don't call this 'land,'" the Canadian retorted. "And besides, we're not on it, we're under it."
Between the foot of the mountain walls and the waters of the lake stretched a sandy shore that, at its widest, measured five hundred feet. Along this strand one could easily make the circuit of the lake. But the base of the high walls formed a tortured ground, on which lay, in picturesque heaps, volcanic blocks and enormous pumice stones. All these crumbled masses, coated with a polished glaze under the action of the underground fires, blazed at the touch of the beacon's electric jets. The mica-flecked dust of the shore, kicked up by our steps, flew off like a cloud of sparks.
The ground rose noticeably as we drew away from the water's edge, and we soon reached long, winding ramps — genuine steep tracks that let us climb little by little; but one had to walk carefully among these conglomerates, bound together by no cement, and the foot kept slipping on the glassy trachytes, made of crystals of feldspar and quartz.
The volcanic nature of this enormous excavation asserted itself on every side. I pointed it out to my companions.
"Can you picture," I asked them, "what this funnel must have been when it filled with boiling lava, and the level of that incandescent liquid rose to the mouth of the mountain, like molten iron up the sides of a furnace?"
"I picture it perfectly," Conseil answered. "But will Master tell me why the great smelter suspended his operation, and how it comes about that the furnace has been replaced by the peaceful waters of a lake?"
"Most likely, Conseil, because some convulsion produced, below the surface of the ocean, this opening that served as a passage for the Nautilus. Then the waters of the Atlantic rushed into the interior of the mountain. There was a terrible struggle between the two elements, a struggle that ended to Neptune's advantage. But many centuries have passed since then, and the submerged volcano has changed into a peaceful grotto."
"Very good," Ned Land replied. "I accept the explanation, but I regret, for our own sakes, that this opening the Professor speaks of wasn't made above the level of the sea."
"But, friend Ned," Conseil put in, "if this passage hadn't been underwater, the Nautilus couldn't have entered it!"
"And I'll add, Master Land, that the waters wouldn't have rushed in beneath the mountain, and the volcano would have stayed a volcano. So your regrets are wasted."
Our climb went on. The ramps grew steeper and narrower by degrees. Deep gullies cut across them now and then, which had to be crossed. Overhanging masses had to be worked around. We slid along on our knees, we crawled on our bellies. But with Conseil's agility and the Canadian's strength to help, every obstacle was overcome.
At a height of about thirty meters, the nature of the ground changed, without becoming any easier to walk. Black basalts succeeded the conglomerates and trachytes — some spread in sheets all pocked with blowholes, others forming regular prisms, arranged like a colonnade that bore up the springings of this immense vault, an admirable specimen of nature's architecture. Then, between these basalts, wound long flows of cooled lava, encrusted with streaks of bitumen, and here and there spread broad carpets of sulfur. A stronger daylight, entering through the crater above, flooded with a hazy clarity all these volcanic ejecta, forever buried in the bosom of the extinct mountain.
Before long, however, our upward march was halted, at a height of about two hundred and fifty feet, by impassable obstacles. The inner curve of the vault came back in an overhang, and the climb had to turn into a walk around the rim. At this last level the vegetable kingdom began to contend with the mineral. A few shrubs, and even certain trees, sprang from the crevices of the wall. I recognized spurges letting their caustic sap run out. Heliotropes, quite unfit to justify their name, since the sun's rays never reached them, drooped sadly their clusters of flowers with colors and scents half faded away. Here and there a few chrysanthemums pushed up timidly at the foot of long-leaved aloes, sickly and forlorn. But between the lava flows I caught sight of little violets, still perfumed with a faint scent, and I confess I breathed them in with delight. Fragrance is the soul of the flower, and the flowers of the sea, those splendid water-plants, have no soul!
We had reached the foot of a clump of sturdy dragon trees, which were prying apart the rocks with the effort of their muscular roots, when Ned Land cried out:
"Ah! Professor, a beehive!"
"A beehive!" I replied, with a gesture of perfect disbelief.
"Yes! a beehive," the Canadian repeated, "and bees buzzing around it."
I went closer and had to face the facts. There, at the mouth of a hole bored into the trunk of a dragon tree, were several thousand of these ingenious insects, so common all through the Canaries, and whose product is especially prized there.
Naturally the Canadian meant to lay in a store of honey, and it would have been churlish of me to object. A certain quantity of dry leaves mixed with sulfur was set alight under the spark of his tinderbox, and he began smoking out the bees. The buzzing died away little by little, and the gutted hive yielded several pounds of fragrant honey. Ned Land filled his knapsack with it.
"Once I've mixed this honey with breadfruit paste," he told us, "I'll be in a position to offer you a scrumptious cake."
"By heaven!" said Conseil, "it'll be gingerbread."
"Gingerbread it is," I said, "but let's get on with this interesting walk."
At certain turns of the path we were now following, the lake came into view in its whole extent. The beacon lit up entirely its tranquil surface, which knew neither ripples nor swell. The Nautilus kept a perfect stillness. On her platform and along the bank the men of her crew were moving about, black shadows sharply cut out in that luminous atmosphere.
Just then we were rounding the highest crest of these first tiers of rock that held up the vault. I saw then that the bees were not the only representatives of the animal kingdom inside this volcano. Birds of prey soared and wheeled here and there in the shadow, or fled from their nests perched on points of rock. These were white-bellied hawks, and screeching kestrels. On the slopes there also scampered off, with all the speed of their long legs, fine plump bustards. I leave you to imagine how the Canadian's appetite was kindled at the sight of this tasty game, and how he regretted not having a rifle in his hands. He tried to make stones do the work of buckshot, and after several fruitless attempts he managed to wound one of these magnificent bustards. To say that he risked his life twenty times to get hold of it is only the plain truth, but he managed so well that the creature went to join the honeycakes in his bag.
We then had to go back down toward the shore, for the crest was becoming impassable. Above us the gaping crater looked like the wide mouth of a well. From this spot the sky could be made out quite clearly, and I watched clouds go racing by, tousled by the west wind, trailing their misty rags right down to the summit of the mountain. Sure proof that these clouds hung at no great height, for the volcano rose no more than eight hundred feet above the level of the ocean.
Half an hour after the Canadian's last exploit, we had regained the inner shore. Here the flora was represented by broad carpets of that samphire, a small umbelliferous plant very good for pickling, which also goes by the names of sea-fennel and rock-samphire. Conseil gathered a few bunches of it. As for the fauna, it counted crustaceans of every sort by the thousand: lobsters, brown crabs, prawns, mysid shrimp, sand-hoppers, squat lobsters, and a prodigious number of shellfish — cowries, murex shells, and limpets.
At this spot a magnificent grotto opened up. My companions and I took pleasure in stretching out on its fine sand. Fire had polished its enameled, glittering walls, all dusted with the powder of mica. Ned Land was feeling the walls and trying to sound their thickness. I could not help smiling. The conversation then turned to his eternal projects of escape, and I felt I could, without going too far, hold out this hope to him: that Captain Nemo had gone south only to renew his supply of sodium. So I hoped that now he would head back toward the coasts of Europe and America, which would let the Canadian take up his botched attempt again with more chance of success.
We had been stretched out an hour in this charming grotto. The conversation, lively at the start, was flagging by then. A certain drowsiness was creeping over us. Since I saw no reason to resist sleep, I let myself drift into a deep torpor. I dreamed — one does not choose one's dreams — I dreamed that my existence had been reduced to the vegetative life of a simple mollusk. It seemed to me that this grotto formed the two valves of my shell...
All at once I was awakened by Conseil's voice.
"Alarm! Alarm!" the worthy fellow was shouting.
"What is it?" I asked, half rising.
"The water's coming up on us!"
I sat bolt upright. The sea was pouring like a torrent into our retreat, and since we most decidedly were not mollusks, we had to get out.
In a few moments we were safe on the very top of the grotto.
"What on earth is happening?" asked Conseil. "Some new phenomenon?"
"Why no, my friends," I answered. "It's the tide, only the tide, which nearly caught us out like the hero of Walter Scott! The ocean is swelling outside, and by a perfectly natural law of equilibrium, the level of the lake is rising too. We've got off with a half-bath. Let's go change on the Nautilus."
Three quarters of an hour later we had finished our circular walk and were back on board. The men of the crew were just then finishing loading the stores of sodium, and the Nautilus could have left at once.
Yet Captain Nemo gave no order. Did he mean to wait for night and slip out in secret through his underwater passage? Perhaps.
Be that as it may, the next day the Nautilus, having left her home port, was sailing well clear of any land, a few meters below the waves of the Atlantic.
The Nautilus had not changed course. For the moment, then, every hope of returning to European waters had to be set aside. Captain Nemo held his heading due south. Where was he taking us? I did not dare imagine it.
That day the Nautilus crossed a singular stretch of the Atlantic Ocean. No one is unaware of the great current of warm water known as the Gulf Stream. After emerging from the channels of Florida, it makes for Spitsbergen. But before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico, at about the forty-fourth degree of north latitude, this current splits into two arms; the main one heads toward the coasts of Ireland and Norway, while the second bends south at the latitude of the Azores, then strikes the shores of Africa and, tracing a long oval, comes back around toward the Antilles.
Now, this second arm — more a collar, really, than an arm — encircles with its rings of warm water that portion of the ocean that is cold, still, and motionless, the region we call the Sargasso Sea. A genuine lake in the middle of the Atlantic, whose circumference the waters of the great current take no less than three years to travel around.
The Sargasso Sea, strictly speaking, covers the entire submerged expanse of Atlantis. Certain authors have even held that the countless weeds strewn across it were torn from the meadows of that ancient continent. It is more likely, however, that this greenery — the algae and the wrack — ripped from the shores of Europe and America, is carried all the way to this zone by the Gulf Stream. That was one of the reasons that led Columbus to suppose the existence of a new world. When the ships of that bold seeker reached the Sargasso Sea, they sailed only with difficulty through the midst of these weeds, which halted their progress to the great terror of the crews, and they lost three long weeks in crossing them.
Such was the region the Nautilus was visiting at that moment — a true meadow, a dense carpet of algae, of floating wrack (Fucus natans), of tropic grapes, so thick and so compact that a vessel's prow could not have parted it without effort. And so Captain Nemo, unwilling to foul his propeller in this weedy mass, kept a few meters below the surface of the waves.
The name Sargasso comes from the Spanish word "sargazzo," meaning kelp. This kelp — the floating or berry-bearing kelp — is what chiefly forms this immense bank. And here, according to the learned Maury, author of The Physical Geography of the Globe, is why these water-plants gather in this tranquil basin of the Atlantic:
"The explanation one can offer," he says, "seems to me to follow from an experiment everyone knows. If you drop fragments of cork, or any floating bodies, into a bowl, and give the water in the bowl a circular motion, you will see the scattered fragments come together in a group at the center of the liquid surface — that is, at the least agitated point. In the phenomenon that concerns us, the bowl is the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream is the circular current, and the Sargasso Sea is the central point where the floating bodies gather."
I share Maury's opinion, and I was able to study the phenomenon in that particular setting, which ships rarely enter. Above us floated bodies of every origin, heaped up among these brownish weeds: tree trunks torn from the Andes or the Rocky Mountains and rafted down by the Amazon or the Mississippi; countless pieces of wreckage; remnants of keels and hulls; smashed-in planking so weighed down by shells and barnacles that it could no longer rise to the surface of the ocean. And time will one day bear out that other opinion of Maury's — that these materials, accumulated in this way over the centuries, will be mineralized by the action of the waters and will go on to form inexhaustible coal beds. A precious reserve that provident nature is laying up against the day when men will have exhausted the mines of the continents.
Amid this inextricable weave of weeds and wrack, I noticed charming star-shaped soft corals in shades of pink, sea anemones trailing their long tresses of tentacles, jellyfish green and red and blue, and above all those great Cuvier's rhizostomes, whose bluish umbrella is fringed with a border of violet.
That whole day of February 22 was spent in the Sargasso Sea, where fish that are fond of marine plants and crustaceans find abundant food. By the next day the ocean had resumed its accustomed look.
From that moment on, for nineteen days — from February 23 to March 12 — the Nautilus, keeping to the middle of the Atlantic, carried us along at a steady speed of a hundred leagues every twenty-four hours. Captain Nemo clearly meant to carry out his underwater itinerary, and I had no doubt that, after rounding Cape Horn, he intended to return toward the southern seas of the Pacific.
Ned Land, then, had been right to fear as much. In these wide seas, empty of islands, there could be no more thought of leaving the ship. Nor was there any way to oppose Captain Nemo's will. The only course was to submit; but what we could no longer expect from force or cunning, I liked to think we might obtain through persuasion. Once this voyage was over, might not Captain Nemo consent to give us our freedom on our sworn oath never to reveal his existence? An oath of honor that we would have kept. But this delicate question would have to be taken up with the captain. And would I even be within my rights to claim that freedom? Had he not himself declared, from the very outset and in the most formal terms, that the secret of his life required our perpetual imprisonment aboard the Nautilus? Might not my silence these four months seem to him a tacit acceptance of the situation? Would returning to the subject not simply rouse suspicions that could harm our plans, if some favorable circumstance should later present itself for taking them up again? I weighed all these reasons, turned them over in my mind, laid them out for Conseil, who was no less at a loss than I was. In short, though I am not easily discouraged, I understood that the chances of ever seeing my fellow men again were dwindling day by day — especially now, with Captain Nemo running so recklessly toward the south of the Atlantic!
During the nineteen days I have mentioned, no particular incident marked our voyage. I saw little of the captain. He was working. In the library I often came upon books he had left lying open — books of natural history above all. My own work on the ocean depths, thumbed through by him, was covered with notes in the margins, notes that sometimes contradicted my theories and my systems. But the captain contented himself with refining my work in this way, and it was rare that he discussed it with me. Sometimes I heard the melancholy strains of his organ, which he played with great feeling — but only at night, in the most secret darkness, when the Nautilus lay sleeping in the ocean's wastes.
During this stretch of the voyage we sailed whole days on the surface of the waves. The sea seemed deserted. Barely a few sailing ships, laden for the Indies, making for the Cape of Good Hope. One day we were chased by the boats of a whaler that no doubt took us for some enormous, high-priced whale. But Captain Nemo would not let these good men waste their time and their labor, and he ended the hunt by diving beneath the waters. The incident seemed to interest Ned Land keenly. I do not think I am mistaken in saying that the Canadian must have regretted that our whale of sheet metal could not be struck dead by those fishermen's harpoons.
The fish that Conseil and I observed during this period differed little from those we had already studied in other latitudes. The chief ones were a few specimens of that fearsome class of cartilaginous fish, divided into three subgenera that number no fewer than thirty-two species: broadband sharks, five meters long, with a head flattened and broader than the body, a rounded tail fin, and a back marked by seven great black bands, parallel and running lengthwise; and then perlon sharks, ash-gray, pierced with seven gill openings and furnished with a single dorsal fin set about the middle of the body.
Great dogfish passed by as well — voracious fish if ever there were any. One has every right to disbelieve the tales of fishermen, but here is what they tell. In the body of one of these animals a buffalo's head and a whole calf were found; in another, two tunas and a sailor in uniform; in another, a soldier with his saber; and in yet another, a horse and its rider. None of this, to tell the truth, is an article of faith. What is certain is that not one of these animals let itself be taken in the Nautilus's nets, so I was unable to verify their voracity.
Elegant, frolicking troops of dolphins kept us company for whole days at a stretch. They went in bands of five or six, hunting in packs like wolves out in the countryside — and no less voracious than the dogfish, if I am to believe a professor from Copenhagen who drew from a dolphin's stomach thirteen porpoises and fifteen seals. This one, it is true, was a killer whale, belonging to the largest known species, whose length sometimes exceeds twenty-four feet. This family of dolphins counts ten genera, and the ones I glimpsed belonged to the genus of bottlenose dolphins, remarkable for an exceedingly narrow snout, four times as long as the skull. Their bodies, measuring three meters, black above, were below a rosy white sown with very sparse little spots.
I will also mention, in these seas, some curious specimens of those fish of the order Acanthopterygii and the family of the drums. Certain authors — more poets than naturalists — claim that these fish sing melodiously, and that their voices together form a concert that no chorus of human voices could equal. I will not say no; but these fish gave us no serenade as we passed, and I regret it.
To finish, then, Conseil classified a great many flying fish. Nothing was more curious than to watch the dolphins give chase to them with marvelous precision. Whatever the range of its flight, whatever trajectory it traced — even above the Nautilus — the luckless fish always found the dolphin's mouth open to receive it. These were either flying gurnards or firewing sea-robins with luminous mouths, which, by night, after tracing streaks of fire across the sky, plunged into the dark waters like so many shooting stars.
Our navigation continued under these conditions until March 13. On that day the Nautilus was put to sounding experiments that interested me keenly.
By then we had traveled nearly thirteen thousand leagues since our departure in the high seas of the Pacific. Our position put us at 45°37′ south latitude and 37°53′ west longitude. These were the very waters where Captain Denham, of the Herald, had let out fourteen thousand meters of sounding line without finding bottom. Here too Lieutenant Parker, of the American frigate Congress, had been unable to reach the ocean floor at fifteen thousand one hundred forty meters.
Captain Nemo resolved to send his Nautilus down to the farthest depth in order to check these various soundings. I made ready to note down all the results of the experiment. The panels of the salon were opened, and the maneuvers began for reaching those prodigiously remote layers.
It will readily be understood that there was no question of diving by filling the ballast tanks. Perhaps they could not have increased the Nautilus's specific gravity enough. Besides, to come back up, that excess of water would have had to be forced out, and the pumps would not have been powerful enough to overcome the outside pressure.
Captain Nemo resolved to seek the ocean floor along a suitably long diagonal, by means of his side planes, which were set at an angle of forty-five degrees with the Nautilus's waterlines. Then the propeller was driven to its maximum speed, and its four blades beat the waters with indescribable violence.
Under this powerful thrust, the Nautilus's hull quivered like a sounding string and sank steadily beneath the waters. The captain and I, posted in the salon, followed the needle of the pressure gauge as it swung rapidly. Soon we passed beyond that habitable zone where most fish reside. If some of these animals can live only at the surface of seas or rivers, others, fewer in number, keep to fairly great depths. Among the latter I observed the sixgill shark, a kind of dogfish equipped with six respiratory slits; the telescope fish, with its enormous eyes; the armored sea-poacher, with its gray thoracic fins and black pectorals, protected by a breastplate of pale-red bony plates; and finally the grenadier, which, living at twelve hundred meters down, was withstanding a pressure of a hundred and twenty atmospheres.
I asked Captain Nemo whether he had observed fish at still more considerable depths.
"Fish?" he answered me. "Rarely. But in the present state of science, what does one suppose — what does one really know?"
"Here is what we know, Captain. We know that as one descends toward the lower layers of the ocean, plant life disappears faster than animal life. We know that where living creatures are still to be found, not a single water-plant grows any longer. We know that scallops and oysters live at two thousand meters of water, and that McClintock, the hero of the polar seas, drew a living starfish from a depth of two thousand five hundred meters. We know that the crew of the Bulldog, of the Royal Navy, fished up a starfish from two thousand six hundred twenty fathoms — more than a league of depth. But perhaps, Captain Nemo, you will tell me that we know nothing?"
"No, Professor," the captain replied, "I would not be so rude. Still, I will ask you how you explain that beings can live at such depths?"
"I explain it by two reasons," I answered. "First, because the vertical currents, set in motion by differences in the salinity and density of the waters, produce a movement that is enough to sustain the rudimentary life of the sea lilies and starfish."
"True," said the captain.
"And second, because if oxygen is the basis of life, we know that the quantity of oxygen dissolved in seawater increases with depth instead of diminishing, and that the pressure of the lower layers helps to compress it there."
"Ah! that is known?" replied Captain Nemo, in a slightly surprised tone. "Well, Professor, one is right to know it, for it is the truth. Indeed, I will add that the swim bladder of fish holds more nitrogen than oxygen when these animals are caught at the surface of the waters, and more oxygen than nitrogen, on the contrary, when they are drawn from the great depths. Which bears out your system. But let us go on with our observations."
My eyes turned back to the pressure gauge. The instrument showed a depth of six thousand meters. Our descent had already lasted an hour. The Nautilus, gliding on its inclined planes, kept sinking. The deserted waters were admirably transparent, of a clarity nothing could paint. An hour later we were at thirteen thousand meters — about three and a quarter leagues — and the ocean floor still gave no sign of itself.
At fourteen thousand meters, however, I made out blackish peaks rising up amid the waters. But these summits might belong to mountains as high as the Himalaya or Mont Blanc, higher even, and the depth of these abysses remained impossible to gauge.
The Nautilus went down lower still, despite the powerful pressures it was undergoing. I felt its plates trembling at the joints of their bolts; its bars bowed; its bulkheads groaned; the windows of the salon seemed to buckle under the pressure of the waters. And this solid vessel would surely have given way if, as its captain had said, it had not been capable of resisting like a solid block.
Skimming the slopes of these rocks lost beneath the waters, I still caught sight of a few shells, some tube worms, living spirorbis, and certain specimens of starfish.
But soon these last representatives of animal life vanished, and below three leagues the Nautilus passed the limits of underwater existence, as a balloon does when it rises through the air above the breathable zones. We had reached a depth of sixteen thousand meters — four leagues — and the flanks of the Nautilus were now bearing a pressure of sixteen hundred atmospheres, that is, sixteen hundred kilograms on every square centimeter of its surface!
"What a place!" I cried. "To travel through these deep regions where man has never come! Look, Captain, look at these magnificent rocks, these uninhabited grottoes, these last recesses of the globe, where life is no longer possible! What unknown sights — and why must we be reduced to keeping nothing of them but the memory?"
"Would it please you," Captain Nemo asked me, "to bring back better than the memory?"
"What do you mean by those words?"
"I mean that nothing is easier than to take a photograph of this undersea region!"
I had not had time to voice the surprise this new proposal caused me before, at a call from Captain Nemo, a lens was brought into the salon. Through the wide-open panels, the liquid medium, lit electrically, spread out with perfect clarity. Not a shadow, not the least dimming of our artificial light. The sun would have been no more favorable to an operation of this kind. The Nautilus, under the thrust of its propeller, held in check by the tilt of its planes, remained motionless. The instrument was aimed at these sites on the ocean floor, and in a few seconds we had obtained a negative of extreme purity.
It is the positive print of it that I give here. In it one sees those primordial rocks that have never known the light of the heavens, those nether granites that form the mighty foundation of the globe, those deep grottoes hollowed out of the stony mass, those profiles of incomparable sharpness whose outer edge stands out in black, as though it were owed to the brush of certain Flemish painters. Then, beyond, a horizon of mountains, an admirable undulating line that composes the backgrounds of the landscape. I cannot describe this whole array of smooth, black, polished rocks, without a trace of moss, without a stain, strangely cut in their forms and solidly set on that carpet of sand which sparkled under the jets of the electric light.
Captain Nemo, however, having finished his operation, said to me:
"Let us go back up, Professor. We must not abuse this situation, nor expose the Nautilus too long to such pressures."
"Let us go back up!" I answered.
"Hold on tight."
I had not yet had time to grasp why the captain gave me this warning when I was flung down onto the carpet.
At a signal from the captain, its propeller engaged and its planes set vertical, the Nautilus, carried up like a balloon into the air, shot upward with dizzying speed. It sliced through the mass of the waters with a resonant shudder. Not a single detail was visible. In four minutes it had covered the four leagues that separated it from the surface of the ocean, and, after breaking the surface like a flying fish, it fell back, sending the waves spurting to a prodigious height.
During the night of March 13th to 14th, the Nautilus resumed its course toward the south. I assumed that once we reached the latitude of Cape Horn it would swing west, cross into the Pacific, and finish its voyage around the world. It did nothing of the kind. It kept climbing toward the far southern regions. Where on earth did it mean to go? The Pole? That was madness. I was beginning to think that the captain's recklessness more than justified Ned Land's fears.
For some time now the Canadian had stopped talking to me about his escape plans. He had grown less talkative, almost silent. I could see how heavily this long imprisonment weighed on him. I could feel the anger banking up inside him. Whenever he crossed paths with the captain, his eyes lit with a dark fire, and I was always afraid his natural violence would carry him to some extreme.
That day, March 14th, he and Conseil came looking for me in my cabin. I asked what had brought them.
"Just a simple question, Professor," the Canadian answered.
"Go ahead, Ned."
"How many men do you suppose there are aboard the Nautilus?"
"I couldn't say, my friend."
"It seems to me," Ned Land went on, "that running her doesn't call for a big crew."
"True enough," I replied. "In her present conditions, ten men at most should be enough to handle her."
"Well then," said the Canadian, "why should there be any more than that?"
"Why?" I echoed.
I looked hard at Ned Land, whose intentions were easy enough to guess.
"Because," I said, "if I can trust my instincts, if I've understood the captain's life at all, the Nautilus is not merely a ship. She must also be a refuge for men who, like her commander, have broken off every tie with the land."
"Perhaps," said Conseil, "but surely the Nautilus can only hold so many men. Couldn't Master estimate that maximum?"
"How would I do that, Conseil?"
"By calculation. Given the ship's capacity, which Master knows, and therefore the quantity of air she contains — and knowing, on the other hand, how much each man uses up in the act of breathing — and comparing all that with the fact that the Nautilus has to surface every twenty-four hours..."
Conseil's sentence went on and on, but I saw clearly where he was heading.
"I follow you," I said. "But that calculation, easy enough to set up, can only give a very rough figure."
"Never mind," Ned Land pressed.
"Here's the calculation, then," I answered. "Each man uses up, in one hour, the oxygen contained in a hundred liters of air — so, in twenty-four hours, the oxygen contained in two thousand four hundred liters. We only have to work out how many times over the Nautilus holds two thousand four hundred liters of air."
"Exactly," said Conseil.
"Now," I went on, "the capacity of the Nautilus being fifteen hundred tons, and that of a ton being a thousand liters, the Nautilus holds fifteen hundred thousand liters of air, which, divided by two thousand four hundred..."
I worked it out quickly in pencil.
"...gives a quotient of six hundred and twenty-five. Which is to say that the air held in the Nautilus could, strictly speaking, keep six hundred and twenty-five men alive for twenty-four hours."
"Six hundred and twenty-five!" Ned repeated.
"But you can take it as certain," I added, "that passengers, sailors, and officers all together, we don't make up a tenth of that number."
"Still too many for three men!" muttered Conseil.
"So, my poor Ned, all I can do is advise you to be patient."
"And better than patience," said Conseil, "resignation."
Conseil had found exactly the right word.
"After all," he went on, "Captain Nemo can't keep heading south forever! He'll have to stop sooner or later — if only at the ice barrier — and turn back toward more civilized seas! Then it will be time to take up Ned Land's plans again."
The Canadian shook his head, ran a hand across his forehead, said nothing, and withdrew.
"If Master will allow me a remark," Conseil said to me then, "poor Ned thinks about everything he can't have. Everything from his old life keeps coming back to him. Everything we're denied strikes him as a loss. His old memories weigh on him and his heart is heavy. You have to understand him. What is there for him to do here? Nothing. He's no man of science like Master, and he can't take the same pleasure we do in the marvelous things of the sea. He'd risk anything just to walk into a tavern back home!"
There was no denying that the monotony aboard must have felt unbearable to the Canadian, a man used to a free and active life. The events that could stir him were rare. That day, though, one incident came to remind him of his glory days as a harpooner.
Around eleven in the morning, running along the surface of the ocean, the Nautilus fell in with a pod of right whales. The encounter didn't surprise me, for I knew that these animals, hunted to the brink, have taken refuge in the basins of the high latitudes.
The part the whale has played in the world of the sea, and its influence on geographical discovery, has been considerable. It was the whale that drew after it, first the Basques, then the Asturians, the English, and the Dutch, emboldening them against the dangers of the ocean and leading them from one end of the earth to the other. Whales like to haunt the southern and northern seas. Old legends even claim that these cetaceans led fishermen to within a mere seven leagues of the North Pole. If that is not yet true, it will be one day, and it is probably in just this way — by hunting the whale into the Arctic or Antarctic regions — that men will reach that unknown point of the globe.
We were sitting on the platform in a calm sea. But October in these latitudes gave us fine autumn days. It was the Canadian — he couldn't be mistaken about it — who sighted a whale on the horizon to the east. Watching closely, you could see its blackish back rise and fall above the waves, five miles off the Nautilus.
"Ah!" cried Ned Land, "if I were aboard a whaler, there's an encounter that would do my heart good! That's a big animal! Look at the power in it — the columns of air and vapor its blowholes throw up! A thousand devils! Why must I be chained to this sheet of metal?"
"What, Ned," I answered, "you still haven't gotten over your old fishing notions?"
"How could a whaler forget his old trade, Professor? How does a man ever tire of the thrill of a hunt like that?"
"You've never fished these seas, Ned?"
"Never, Professor. Only the northern seas — the Bering Strait as much as the Davis Strait."
"Then the southern right whale is still unknown to you. What you've hunted up to now is the common right whale, and it would never risk crossing the warm waters of the Equator."
"Ah, Professor, what are you telling me?" the Canadian replied in a distinctly skeptical tone.
"I'm telling you how it is."
"Come now! Take me, the man talking to you — back in sixty-five, two and a half years ago, off Greenland, I brought in a whale that still carried in its flank the punch-stamped harpon of a Bering whaler. Now I ask you — how, after being struck west of America, could the animal have come to be killed in the east, unless, after rounding either Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, it had crossed the Equator?"
"I'm of Ned's mind," said Conseil, "and I'm waiting to hear what Master will answer."
"Master will answer, my friends, that whales keep to certain seas, according to their species, and don't leave them. And if one of these animals came from the Bering Strait to the Davis Strait, it's quite simply because there's a passage from one sea to the other, whether along the coasts of America or of Asia."
"Am I supposed to believe that?" the Canadian asked, closing one eye.
"You're supposed to believe Master," said Conseil.
"In that case," the Canadian went on, "since I've never fished these waters, I don't know the first thing about the whales that frequent them?"
"That's what I told you, Ned."
"All the more reason to make their acquaintance," Conseil replied.
"Look! Look!" cried the Canadian, his voice trembling. "She's coming closer! She's heading straight for us! She's mocking me! She knows there's nothing I can do to her!"
Ned stamped his foot. His hand quivered as it brandished an imaginary harpoon.
"These cetaceans," he asked, "are they as big as the ones in the northern seas?"
"Just about, Ned."
"Because I've seen big whales, Professor — whales that measured as much as a hundred feet long! I've even been told that the Hullamock and the Umgallick of the Aleutian Islands sometimes topped a hundred and fifty feet."
"That strikes me as exaggerated," I answered. "Those animals are only rorquals, fitted with dorsal fins, and like the sperm whales they're generally smaller than the common right whale."
"Ah!" cried the Canadian, whose eyes never left the ocean, "she's coming nearer, she's coming into the Nautilus's waters!"
Then, picking up the conversation again:
"You talk about the sperm whale," he said, "as if it were some little beast! And yet there are stories of gigantic sperm whales. They're intelligent cetaceans. Some of them, they say, cover themselves with seaweed and wrack. People take them for little islands. They land on them, they set up camp, they light a fire..."
"They build houses," said Conseil.
"Yes, joker," Ned Land replied. "Then one fine day the animal dives and drags all its inhabitants down to the bottom of the abyss."
"Just like in the voyages of Sinbad the Sailor," I put in, laughing.
"Ah, Master Land, it seems you're fond of tall tales! What sperm whales you have! I hope you don't believe in them yourself!"
"Professor," the Canadian answered seriously, "when it comes to whales, you have to believe anything!"
"Look at her go, this one! Look how she slips away!"
"They say those animals can travel around the world in a fortnight."
"I won't say no."
"But what you probably don't know, Professor Aronnax, is that at the beginning of the world, whales moved faster still."
"Oh, really, Ned? And why is that?"
"Because in those days their tails ran crosswise, like a fish's — that is, the tail, flattened vertically, struck the water from left to right and right to left. But the Creator, noticing they went too fast, gave their tails a twist, and ever since, they've beaten the waves up and down, at the cost of their speed."
"Well now, Ned," I said, borrowing one of the Canadian's own phrases, "am I supposed to believe that?"
"Not too much," Ned Land answered, "and no more than if I told you there are whales three hundred feet long weighing a hundred thousand pounds."
"That is a great deal, indeed," I said. "Still, one has to admit that certain cetaceans reach a considerable size, since they're said to yield as much as a hundred and twenty tons of oil."
"That I've seen," said the Canadian.
"I readily believe it, Ned, just as I believe that some whales equal a hundred elephants in bulk. Imagine the effect of a mass like that launched at full speed!"
"Is it true," asked Conseil, "that they can sink ships?"
"Ships — I don't think so," I answered. "And yet the story goes that in 1820, in these very southern seas, a whale hurled itself at the Essex and drove it backward at a speed of four meters a second. The sea poured in through the stern, and the Essex went down almost at once."
Ned gave me a mocking look.
"For my part," he said, "I once took a whale's tail — in my boat, needless to say. My mates and I were flung six meters into the air. But next to the Professor's whale, mine was no more than a calf."
"Do these animals live a long time?" Conseil asked.
"A thousand years," the Canadian answered without hesitation.
"And how do you know that, Ned?"
"Because that's what they say."
"And why do they say it?"
"Because that's what they know."
"No, Ned, they don't know it — they suppose it, and here's the reasoning they lean on. Four hundred years ago, when fishermen first hunted whales, these animals ran larger than they grow today. So it's supposed, reasonably enough, that the smaller size of today's whales comes from their not having had the time to reach their full growth. That's what made Buffon say these cetaceans could, and even should, live a thousand years. You follow?"
Ned Land didn't follow. He was no longer listening. The whale kept coming closer. He devoured it with his eyes.
"Ah!" he cried, "it's not one whale anymore, it's ten, it's twenty, it's a whole pod! And to be able to do nothing! To be stuck here, hand and foot bound!"
"But, friend Ned," said Conseil, "why not ask Captain Nemo's permission to hunt?..."
Conseil hadn't finished his sentence before Ned Land had dropped down through the hatch and gone running in search of the captain. A few moments later, the two of them reappeared on the platform.
Captain Nemo studied the pod of cetaceans sporting on the waters a mile off the Nautilus.
"Those are southern right whales," he said. "There's a whole whaling fleet's fortune out there."
"Well then, sir," the Canadian asked, "couldn't I give chase to them, if only so as not to forget my old trade as a harpooner?"
"What would be the point," Captain Nemo answered, "of hunting merely to destroy? We have no use for whale oil aboard."
"And yet, sir," the Canadian pressed, "in the Red Sea you gave us leave to go after a dugong!"
"That was a matter of getting fresh meat for my crew. Here, it would be killing for the sake of killing. I'm well aware that's a privilege reserved to man, but I don't hold with such murderous pastimes. In destroying the southern right whale and the common right whale — harmless, good creatures — your kind, Master Land, commit a blamable act. That's how they've already emptied the whole of Baffin Bay, and how they'll wipe out a class of useful animals. So leave these poor cetaceans in peace. They have quite enough to deal with in their natural enemies — the sperm whales, the swordfish, and the sawfish — without your meddling too."
I leave you to imagine the face the Canadian made during this lecture on morals. To give reasons of that kind to a hunter was to waste one's breath. Ned Land stared at Captain Nemo and plainly didn't grasp what he was trying to tell him. And yet the captain was right. The barbarous, thoughtless zeal of the fishermen will one day make the last whale vanish from the ocean.
Ned Land whistled his Yankee Doodle through his teeth, shoved his hands in his pockets, and turned his back on us.
Meanwhile Captain Nemo went on watching the pod of cetaceans, and, turning to me:
"I was right to say that, without counting man, whales have enemies enough. These are going to have a hard fight on their hands before long. Do you see, Professor Aronnax, eight miles off to leeward, those blackish points moving about?"
"Yes, Captain," I answered.
"Those are sperm whales — terrible animals that I've sometimes met in pods of two or three hundred! As for those, cruel and destructive brutes, people are right to exterminate them."
The Canadian turned around sharply at these last words.
"Well, Captain," I said, "there's still time, in the very interest of the right whales..."
"No need to put ourselves at risk, Professor. The Nautilus will be enough to scatter these sperm whales. She's armed with a steel ram every bit as good as Master Land's harpoon, I fancy."
The Canadian didn't trouble to hide a shrug. Attack cetaceans with a ram! Who had ever heard of such a thing?
"Wait, Professor Aronnax," said Captain Nemo. "We'll show you a hunt you don't know yet. No mercy for these ferocious cetaceans. They're nothing but mouth and teeth!"
Mouth and teeth! You couldn't better describe the great-headed sperm whale — the cachalot macrocéphalus — whose length sometimes exceeds twenty-five meters. This cetacean's enormous head takes up about a third of its body. Better armed than the whale, whose upper jaw carries only baleen, it is fitted out with twenty-five massive teeth, twenty centimeters high, cylindrical and coning to a point at the tip, each weighing two pounds. It's in the upper part of that huge head, in great cavities partitioned off by cartilage, that some three or four hundred kilograms of that precious oil are stored — the stuff called spermaceti, or "whale-white." The sperm whale is an ungainly animal, more tadpole than fish, as Frédol remarks. It is poorly built, "botched," so to speak, along the whole left side of its frame, seeing hardly at all except out of the right eye.
Meanwhile the monstrous pod kept drawing nearer. It had spotted the right whales and was preparing to attack them. You could tell in advance that the sperm whales would win — not only because they're better built for attack than their harmless adversaries, but because they can stay longer beneath the waves without coming up to breathe at the surface.
There was not a moment to lose in going to the whales' rescue. The Nautilus dropped to mid-depth. Conseil, Ned, and I took our places at the windows of the salon. Captain Nemo went to stand beside the helmsman, to work his machine like an engine of destruction. Soon I felt the beat of the propeller quicken and our speed pick up.
The battle between the sperm whales and the right whales had already begun when the Nautilus arrived. She maneuvered so as to cut through the pod of great-heads. At first they showed little alarm at the sight of the new monster joining the fray. But soon they had to guard themselves against her blows.
What a fight! Even Ned Land, soon carried away, ended up clapping his hands. The Nautilus was nothing now but a formidable harpoon, wielded by her captain's hand. She flung herself at those fleshy masses and ran them clean through, leaving two writhing halves of animal in her wake. The tremendous blows of the tails against her flanks — she didn't feel them. The shocks she dealt out — no more than that. One sperm whale finished off, she raced to another, pivoting in place so as not to miss her prey, going forward, going astern, obedient to her helm, diving when the cetacean sank into the deeper layers, rising with it when it came back to the surface, striking it head-on or aslant, cutting it or tearing it, in every direction and at every gait, piercing it with her terrible ram.
What a carnage! What an uproar over the surface of the waves! What shrill whistlings, what strange snorts from those terrified animals! In the midst of those normally so peaceful waters, their tails raised veritable swells.
For a whole hour this Homeric massacre dragged on, and the great-heads could not escape it. Several times, ten or a dozen of them together tried to crush the Nautilus under their mass. Through the window you could see their enormous jaws paved with teeth, their formidable eyes. Ned Land, beside himself, threatened them and hurled abuse at them. You could feel them clinging to our machine like hounds fastening on a wild boar in the thickets. But the Nautilus, forcing her propeller, carried them off, dragged them along, or hauled them back up to the higher levels of the water, heedless of their enormous weight or their powerful grip.
At last the mass of sperm whales thinned out. The waters grew calm again. I felt us rising to the surface of the ocean. The hatch was opened, and we rushed out onto the platform.
The sea was covered with mangled corpses. A tremendous explosion could not have split, torn, and shredded those fleshy masses with more violence. We floated among gigantic bodies, bluish along the back, whitish under the belly, and all knotted with enormous protuberances. A few terrified sperm whales fled toward the horizon. The waves were stained red over a stretch of several miles, and the Nautilus floated in the middle of a sea of blood.
Captain Nemo came to join us.
"Well, Master Land?" he said.
"Well, sir," the Canadian answered — his enthusiasm had cooled now — "it's a terrible sight, right enough. But I'm not a butcher, I'm a hunter, and this is nothing but a slaughter."
"It's a massacre of destructive animals," the captain replied, "and the Nautilus is no butcher's knife."
"I'd rather have my harpoon," the Canadian shot back.
"To each his own weapon," the captain answered, looking Ned Land straight in the eye.
I was afraid Ned might let himself be carried away into some act of violence that would have had deplorable consequences. But his anger was turned aside by the sight of a whale the Nautilus was coming alongside just then.
The animal hadn't been able to escape the sperm whales' teeth. I recognized the southern right whale, with its flattened head, entirely black. Anatomically, it differs from the white whale and the Nord-Caper by the fusion of its seven cervical vertebrae, and it carries two ribs more than its kin. The wretched cetacean, lying on its side, its belly riddled with bites, was dead. From the end of its mutilated fin there still hung a little calf it hadn't been able to save from the massacre. Its open mouth let the water run out, murmuring like surf through its baleen.
Captain Nemo brought the Nautilus up close to the animal's carcass. Two of his men climbed onto the whale's flank, and I saw, not without astonishment, that they were drawing off from its teats all the milk they held — the equivalent, that is, of two or three barrels.
The captain offered me a cup of this milk, still warm. I couldn't help showing him my distaste for the drink. He assured me it was excellent, and in no way different from cow's milk.
I tasted it and agreed. So it was a useful reserve for us, since this milk, in the form of salt butter or cheese, was bound to bring a pleasant variety to our usual fare.
From that day on, I noticed with unease that Ned Land's feelings toward Captain Nemo were turning worse and worse, and I resolved to keep a close watch on the Canadian's every move.
The Nautilus had resumed its unwavering course toward the south. It ran down the fiftieth meridian at a considerable speed. Did it mean, then, to reach the Pole? I didn't think so, for up to now every attempt to climb to that point of the globe had failed. And the season, besides, was already far advanced, since March 13 in the antarctic lands answers to September 13 in the northern regions — the start of the equinoctial period.
On March 14 I spotted floating ice at 55° latitude, mere pallid fragments twenty to twenty-five feet across, forming reefs on which the sea broke. The Nautilus was holding to the surface of the ocean. Ned Land, who had already fished in the arctic seas, was familiar with this spectacle of icebergs. Conseil and I were admiring it for the first time.
In the sky, off toward the southern horizon, there stretched a white band of dazzling brilliance. English whalers have given it the name "ice-blink." However thick the clouds may be, they cannot dim it. It announces the presence of a pack, or bank, of ice.
And in fact, larger blocks soon appeared, their gleam shifting with the whims of the mist. Some of these masses showed veins of green, as though copper sulfate had traced their rippling lines. Others, like enormous amethysts, let the light pass right through them. These threw back the rays of day off the thousand facets of their crystals. Those, tinted with the vivid glints of limestone, would have furnished enough stone to build a whole city of marble.
The farther south we went, the more these floating islands grew in number and in size. Polar birds nested there by the thousands. They were petrels, cape pigeons, shearwaters, and they deafened us with their cries. Some of them, taking the Nautilus for the carcass of a whale, came to settle on it and jabbed at its ringing plates with their beaks.
Through all this navigation among the ice, Captain Nemo often stayed out on the platform. He studied these forsaken waters closely. Now and then I saw his calm gaze come alive. Was he telling himself that here, in these polar seas closed to man, he was in his own domain, master of these impassable spaces? Perhaps. But he did not speak. He stood motionless, coming back to himself only when his instincts as a ship-handler took over again. Steering his Nautilus then with a consummate skill, he neatly dodged the shock of these masses, some of which measured several miles in length by a height that ran from seventy to eighty meters. Often the horizon seemed shut off entirely. At the level of the sixtieth degree of latitude, every passage had vanished. But Captain Nemo, searching carefully, soon found some narrow opening through which he slipped boldly, knowing perfectly well, all the same, that it would close again behind him.
And so it was that the Nautilus, guided by that skilled hand, passed all this ice, which Conseil classified — by shape or by size — with a precision that delighted him: icebergs, or mountains of ice; ice-fields, level and boundless expanses; drift-ice, or floating ice; packs, or broken fields, called palchs when they are circular and streams when they are made of elongated pieces.
The temperature was quite low. The thermometer, exposed to the outside air, read two to three degrees below zero. But we were warmly dressed in furs, paid for by the seals and the sea bears. The interior of the Nautilus, evenly heated by its electric apparatus, defied the most intense cold. Besides, it need only have sunk a few meters below the waves to find a bearable temperature there.
Two months earlier, we would have enjoyed perpetual daylight in this latitude; but already the night was falling for three or four hours, and later it would cast six months of shadow over these circumpolar regions.
On March 15 we passed the latitude of the New Shetland Islands and the South Orkneys. The captain told me that in the old days numerous tribes of seals had inhabited these lands; but the English and American whalers, in their rage for destruction, slaughtering the adults and the pregnant females wherever life stirred, had left the silence of death behind them.
On March 16, toward eight in the morning, the Nautilus, following the fifty-fifth meridian, crossed the antarctic polar circle. The ice hemmed us in on every side and closed off the horizon. Yet Captain Nemo went from passage to passage, still climbing.
"But where is he going?" I asked.
"Straight ahead," Conseil answered. "After all, when he can't go any farther, he'll stop."
"I wouldn't swear to it!" I replied.
And to be honest, I'll confess that this adventurous excursion was not at all displeasing to me. Words fail me to say how the beauties of these new regions astonished me. The ice took on superb attitudes. Here its whole mass formed an eastern city, with its minarets and its countless mosques. There, a fallen city, thrown flat as if by a convulsion of the earth. Scenes forever changing under the slanting rays of the sun, or lost in the gray mists amid hurricanes of snow. Then, on all sides, detonations, avalanches, great tumbling of icebergs that shifted the scenery like the landscape of a diorama.
When the Nautilus was submerged at the moment these balances broke, the noise carried under the water with a frightful intensity, and the fall of these masses set up formidable eddies down into the deep layers of the ocean. The Nautilus would then roll and pitch like a ship abandoned to the fury of the elements.
Often, seeing no way out anymore, I thought we were prisoners for good; but with instinct to guide him, on the slightest hint Captain Nemo would discover fresh passages. He was never wrong in reading the thin threads of bluish water that streaked the ice-fields. And so I had no doubt that he had already ventured the Nautilus into the midst of the antarctic seas before.
Yet in the course of that day, March 16, the ice-fields barred our way absolutely. This was not the ice barrier yet, but vast ice-fields cemented together by the cold. This obstacle could not stop Captain Nemo, and he flung himself against the ice-field with a terrible violence. The Nautilus drove in like a wedge into that brittle mass and split it apart with dreadful cracking. It was the ancient battering ram, driven by an infinite power. The shattered ice, hurled high, fell back in hail all around us. By its momentum alone our craft cut itself a channel. Sometimes, carried away by its own drive, it would ride up onto the ice-field and crush it under its weight, or now and then, wedged in beneath the ice-field, it would break the sheet apart with a simple pitching motion that tore long rifts through it.
During these days violent squalls assailed us. In certain thick fogs you could not have seen from one end of the platform to the other. The wind shifted abruptly to every point of the compass. The snow piled up in layers so hard we had to break it with pickaxes. At a temperature of a mere five degrees below zero, every outside part of the Nautilus was coated with ice. Rigging could not have been worked, for every rope would have jammed in the throats of the pulleys. Only a vessel without sails, driven by an electric motor that had no need of coal, could face latitudes as high as these.
Under these conditions the barometer generally held very low. It even dropped to 73°5′. The readings of the compass no longer offered any guarantee. Its frantic needles pointed in contradictory directions as we neared the southern magnetic pole, which does not coincide with the geographic south of the world. Indeed, according to Hansteen, this pole is situated at about 70° latitude and 130° longitude, and according to Duperrey's observations, at 135° longitude and 70°30′ latitude. We then had to take numerous readings from compasses carried to different parts of the ship and strike an average. But often we relied on dead reckoning to plot the course run — a poor method in the midst of these winding passages whose landmarks change without cease.
At last, on March 18, after twenty useless assaults, the Nautilus found itself definitively blocked. These were no longer streams, nor palchs, nor ice-fields, but an endless, motionless barrier formed of mountains welded to one another.
"The ice barrier!" the Canadian said to me.
I understood that for Ned Land, as for every navigator who had gone before us, this was the impassable obstacle. The sun having shown itself for a moment around noon, Captain Nemo obtained a fairly accurate reading that put our position at 51°30′ longitude and 67°39′ southern latitude. This was already a far-advanced point of the antarctic regions.
Of sea, of liquid surface, there was no longer any sign before our eyes. Beneath the ram of the Nautilus there stretched a vast tormented plain, tangled with confused blocks, with all that capricious jumble that marks the surface of a river some time before the ice breaks up, but on gigantic proportions. Here and there, sharp peaks, slender needles rose to a height of two hundred feet; farther off, a line of cliffs cut sheer and clothed in grayish tints, vast mirrors that reflected a few rays of sunlight half drowned in the mists. Then, over this desolate landscape, a savage silence, scarcely broken by the beating wings of the petrels or the shearwaters. Everything was frozen then, even sound.
The Nautilus was thus forced to halt in its adventurous course among the fields of ice.
"Professor," Ned Land said to me that day, "if your captain goes any farther —"
"Well?"
"He'll be a master among men."
"Why, Ned?"
"Because nobody can cross the ice barrier. He's powerful, your captain; but, a thousand devils! he's no more powerful than nature, and where she has set her boundaries, a man has to stop whether he likes it or not."
"True enough, Ned Land, and yet I would have liked to know what lies behind that ice barrier! A wall — that's what irritates me most!"
"Master is right," said Conseil. "Walls were only ever invented to annoy scholars. There ought not to be walls anywhere."
"Bah!" said the Canadian. "Behind that ice barrier we know perfectly well what's there."
"And what is that?" I asked.
"Ice, and more ice!"
"You may be sure of that fact, Ned," I answered, "but I am not. That's exactly why I'd like to go and see."
"Well, Professor," the Canadian answered, "give up the idea. You've reached the ice barrier, which is quite enough, and you'll go no farther — not you, not your Captain Nemo, not his Nautilus. And whether he likes it or not, we'll turn back north, that is, to the land of honest folk."
I have to admit that Ned Land was right, and until ships are built to navigate over fields of ice, they will have to stop before the ice barrier.
And in fact, despite its efforts, despite the powerful means employed to break the ice apart, the Nautilus was reduced to immobility. Ordinarily, one who can go no farther gets off simply by turning back. But here, to turn back was as impossible as to go forward, for the passages had closed behind us, and if our craft stayed stationary at all, it would soon be locked fast. That is exactly what happened toward two in the afternoon, and the young ice formed along its sides with astonishing speed. I had to admit that Captain Nemo's conduct was more than imprudent.
I was on the platform just then. The captain, who had been studying the situation for some minutes, said to me:
"Well, Professor, what do you think of it?"
"I think we're caught, Captain."
"Caught! And how do you mean that?"
"I mean that we can go neither forward nor back, nor to any side. That, I believe, is what is called 'caught' — at least on the inhabited continents."
"So, Professor Aronnax, you think the Nautilus won't be able to work itself free?"
"Only with difficulty, Captain, for the season is already too far gone for you to count on the ice breaking up."
"Ah, Professor," Captain Nemo replied in an ironic tone, "you'll always be the same! You see nothing but hindrances and obstacles! I tell you, not only will the Nautilus free itself, but it will go farther still!"
"Farther south?" I asked, looking at the captain.
"Yes, Professor, it will go to the Pole."
"To the Pole!" I cried, unable to hold back a movement of disbelief.
"Yes," the captain answered coldly, "to the antarctic pole, to that unknown point where all the meridians of the globe cross. You know that I make the Nautilus do whatever I wish."
Yes! I knew it. I knew this man was bold to the point of recklessness! But to conquer these obstacles that bristle around the South Pole — more inaccessible than the North Pole, which the boldest navigators had not yet reached — was that not an utterly insane undertaking, one that only the mind of a madman could conceive?
It then occurred to me to ask Captain Nemo whether he had already discovered this pole that no human foot had ever trodden.
"No, Professor," he answered me, "and we will discover it together. Where others have failed, I will not fail. Never have I taken my Nautilus so far across the southern seas; but, I repeat, it will go farther still."
"I want to believe you, Captain," I went on in a slightly ironic tone. "I do believe you! Let's go ahead! There are no obstacles for us! Let's break through this ice barrier! Let's blow it up, and if it resists, let's give the Nautilus wings, so it can pass over the top!"
"Over the top, Professor?" Captain Nemo answered calmly. "No, not over the top, but underneath."
"Underneath!" I cried.
A sudden revelation of the captain's plans had just lit up my mind. I understood. The wonderful qualities of the Nautilus were going to serve it once more in this superhuman enterprise!
"I see we're beginning to understand each other, Professor," the captain said to me with a half smile. "You already glimpse the possibility — I would say the success — of this attempt. What is impracticable with an ordinary ship becomes easy for the Nautilus. If a continent emerges at the Pole, it will stop before that continent. But if, on the contrary, it is open sea that washes the Pole, it will go to the Pole itself!"
"Just so," I said, carried along by the captain's reasoning. "If the surface of the sea is solidified by the ice, its lower layers are free, thanks to that providential fact which places the maximum density of seawater at a temperature above its freezing point. And, if I'm not mistaken, the submerged part of this ice barrier is to the emergent part as four is to one?"
"Roughly, Professor. For every foot the icebergs stand above the sea, they have three below it. Now, since these ice mountains do not exceed a height of a hundred meters, they sink only three hundred. And what are three hundred meters to the Nautilus?"
"Nothing, Captain."
"It can even go and seek, at a greater depth, that uniform temperature of the sea's waters, and there we'll defy with impunity the thirty or forty degrees of cold at the surface."
"Right, Captain, quite right," I replied, warming to it.
"The only difficulty," Captain Nemo went on, "will be to stay submerged several days without renewing our supply of air."
"Is that all?" I answered. "The Nautilus has vast tanks; we'll fill them, and they'll furnish us all the oxygen we need."
"Well thought, Professor Aronnax," the captain answered, smiling. "But not wanting to have you accuse me of recklessness, I lay all my objections before you in advance."
"Have you any more to make?"
"Just one. It's possible, if a sea exists at the South Pole, that this sea is entirely frozen over, and that consequently we won't be able to come back up to its surface!"
"Come, Captain, are you forgetting that the Nautilus is armed with a formidable ram, and can't we launch it diagonally against these fields of ice, which will open at the shock?"
"Ah, Professor, you've got ideas today!"
"Besides, Captain," I added, growing more and more enthusiastic, "why shouldn't one meet open sea at the South Pole as well as at the North Pole? The poles of cold and the poles of the earth do not coincide, either in the southern hemisphere or in the northern; and until there is proof to the contrary, we must assume either a continent or an ocean free of ice at these two points of the globe."
"I believe so too, Professor Aronnax," Captain Nemo answered. "I'll only point out to you that after raising so many objections against my project, you're now crushing me with arguments in its favor."
Captain Nemo was right. I had come to outdo him in daring! It was I who was dragging him to the Pole! I was outstripping him, leaving him behind... But no! You poor fool. Captain Nemo knew better than you the pros and cons of the question, and he was amusing himself to see you swept away in dreams of the impossible!
Meanwhile, he had not lost a moment. At a signal the first officer appeared. The two men spoke rapidly in their incomprehensible language, and whether the officer had been warned of it beforehand or found the project workable, he showed no surprise.
But impassive as he was, he showed no more complete impassiveness than Conseil when I told that worthy fellow of our intention to push on to the South Pole. A "Just as Master pleases" greeted my announcement, and I had to be content with that. As for Ned Land, if ever shoulders were raised high, they were the Canadian's.
"You see, Professor," he said to me, "you and your Captain Nemo — I feel sorry for you both!"
"But we'll reach the Pole, Master Ned."
"Possibly, but you won't come back from it!"
And Ned Land withdrew into his cabin, "so as not to do something desperate," he said as he left me.
Meanwhile, the preparations for this bold attempt had begun. The powerful pumps of the Nautilus were forcing air into the tanks and storing it there at high pressure. Around four o'clock, Captain Nemo announced to me that the platform hatches were about to be closed. I threw a last look at the thick ice barrier we were about to cross. The weather was clear, the air fairly pure, the cold very sharp, twelve degrees below zero; but the wind having died down, this temperature did not seem too unbearable.
Ten or so men climbed onto the sides of the Nautilus and, armed with pickaxes, broke the ice around the hull, which was soon cleared. The operation was quickly done, for the young ice was still thin. We all went back inside. The usual tanks filled with this water left free at the waterline. The Nautilus was not slow to descend.
I had taken a place in the salon with Conseil. Through the open window we watched the lower layers of the southern ocean. The thermometer was rising. The needle of the pressure gauge swung across the dial.
At about three hundred meters, just as Captain Nemo had foreseen, we were floating beneath the rippled underside of the ice barrier. But the Nautilus dove lower still. It reached a depth of eight hundred meters. The temperature of the water, which had given twelve degrees at the surface, now registered only eleven. Two degrees already gained. It goes without saying that the temperature inside the Nautilus, raised by its heating apparatus, held at a far higher level. Every maneuver was carried out with extraordinary precision.
"We'll get through, if Master doesn't mind my saying so," Conseil said to me.
"I certainly count on it!" I answered, in the tone of a deep conviction.
Under this open sea, the Nautilus had struck straight for the Pole, without straying from the fifty-second meridian. From 67°30′ to 90°, twenty-two and a half degrees of latitude remained to be crossed — that is, a little more than five hundred leagues. The Nautilus took an average speed of twenty-six miles an hour, the speed of an express train. If it kept it up, forty hours would be enough to reach the Pole.
For part of the night the novelty of the situation held Conseil and me at the salon window. The sea shone under the electric radiance of the beacon. But it was deserted. The fish did not linger in these imprisoned waters. They found there only a passage for going from the antarctic ocean to the open sea of the Pole. Our pace was swift. You could feel it in the shudders of the long steel hull.
Toward two in the morning I went to snatch a few hours' rest. Conseil did the same. Crossing the gangways, I did not meet Captain Nemo. I supposed he was in the helmsman's cage.
The next day, March 19, at five in the morning, I resumed my post in the salon. The electric log told me that the Nautilus had slackened its speed. It was rising now toward the surface, but cautiously, slowly emptying its tanks.
My heart was pounding. Were we going to surface and find the free air of the Pole?
No. A jolt told me that the Nautilus had struck the lower surface of the ice barrier, still very thick, to judge by the dull sound. In fact, we had "touched," to use the sailors' expression, but in reverse and at a depth of a thousand feet. That gave two thousand feet of ice above us, of which one thousand emerged. The ice barrier stood then at a height greater than the one we had measured along its edges. A not very reassuring circumstance.
Through that day the Nautilus began this same experiment several times over, and each time it came up against the wall that ceilinged over it. At certain moments it met the ice at nine hundred meters, which meant twelve hundred meters of thickness, of which two hundred meters rose above the surface of the ocean. That was double its height at the moment the Nautilus had sunk beneath the waves.
I carefully noted these various depths, and in this way I obtained the underwater profile of this range that unfolded beneath the waters.
That evening no change had come in our situation. Still the ice between four hundred and five hundred meters of depth. A clear decrease, but what a thickness still between us and the surface of the ocean!
It was eight o'clock by then. For four hours already the air inside the Nautilus should have been renewed, according to the daily custom aboard. Yet I was not suffering too much, though Captain Nemo had not yet drawn on his tanks for an extra supply of oxygen.
My sleep was troubled that night. Hope and fear besieged me by turns. I got up several times. The Nautilus went on groping. Toward three in the morning I noticed that the lower surface of the ice barrier was met at only fifty meters of depth. A hundred and fifty feet separated us then from the surface of the water. The ice barrier was gradually becoming ice-field again. The mountain was turning back into plain.
My eyes never left the pressure gauge. We kept rising, following a diagonal along the resplendent surface that glittered under the electric rays. The ice barrier sloped away above and below in long ramps. It thinned out mile by mile.
At last, at six in the morning, on that memorable day of March 19, the salon door opened. Captain Nemo appeared.
"The open sea!" he said to me.
I rushed up to the platform. Yes! Open sea. Only a few scattered chunks of ice here and there, a handful of drifting icebergs; far off, a wide expanse of water; a whole world of birds in the air, and myriads of fish beneath the waves, which — depending on the depth — shaded from deep blue to olive green. The thermometer read three degrees Celsius above zero. It was like a kind of relative springtime, sealed away behind that ice barrier whose distant masses stood out along the northern horizon.
"Are we at the Pole?" I asked the captain, my heart pounding.
"I don't know," he answered. "At noon we'll take our bearings."
"But will the sun show itself through these mists?" I said, glancing at the grayish sky.
"However little of it appears, that will be enough for me," the captain replied.
Ten miles from the Nautilus, to the south, a solitary islet rose to a height of two hundred meters. We steered toward it, cautiously, for these waters might be strewn with reefs.
An hour later we had reached the islet. Two hours after that we had finished circling it. It measured four or five miles around. A narrow channel separated it from a considerable stretch of land — a continent, perhaps — whose limits we could not make out.
The existence of this land seemed to bear out Maury's hypotheses. The American engineer had noticed, in fact, that between the South Pole and the sixtieth parallel the sea is covered with floating ice of enormous size, the like of which is never met with in the North Atlantic. From this he drew the conclusion that the Antarctic Circle encloses considerable landmasses, since icebergs cannot form in the open sea but only along coasts. According to his calculations, the mass of ice that wraps the southern pole forms a vast cap whose width must reach four thousand kilometers.
Meanwhile the Nautilus, for fear of running aground, had halted three cable-lengths off a beach dominated by a magnificent heap of rocks. The dinghy was launched. The captain, two of his men carrying the instruments, Conseil, and I climbed aboard it. It was ten o'clock in the morning. I had not seen Ned Land. No doubt the Canadian did not want to eat his own words in the presence of the South Pole.
A few strokes of the oars brought the dinghy onto the sand, where it ran aground. Just as Conseil was about to leap ashore, I held him back.
"Captain," I said to Nemo, "the honor of setting foot first on this land is yours."
"Yes, sir," the captain answered, "and if I do not hesitate to tread this polar soil, it is because, until now, no human being has ever left the print of a footstep here."
With that, he sprang lightly onto the sand. A keen emotion set his heart beating hard. He climbed a rock that ended in an overhang above a little promontory, and there, arms folded, his gaze burning, motionless, silent, he seemed to take possession of these southern regions. After five minutes spent in this rapture, he turned back toward us.
"Whenever you're ready, sir," he called to me.
I stepped ashore, followed by Conseil, leaving the two men in the dinghy.
Over a long stretch, the ground showed a reddish tufa, as though it were made of crushed brick. Scoria, streams of lava, and pumice stones covered it. There was no mistaking its volcanic origin. In certain spots, faint wisps of steam gave off a sulfurous smell, proof that the inner fires still kept their power to erupt. And yet, having climbed a high escarpment, I could see no volcano within a radius of several miles. It is known that in these Antarctic regions James Ross found the craters of Erebus and Terror in full activity on the one hundred and sixty-seventh meridian, at 77°32′ of latitude.
The vegetation of this desolate continent struck me as extremely sparse. A few lichens of the species Usnea melanoxantha spread over the black rocks. Certain microscopic plantlets, rudimentary diatoms — a sort of cell set between two quartz shells — and long fronds of crimson and purple wrack, buoyed up by little swim bladders and flung ashore by the surf, made up the whole meager flora of the region.
The shore was strewn with mollusks: small mussels, limpets, smooth heart-shaped cockles, and above all with clios, their bodies oblong and membranous, the head formed of two rounded lobes. I also saw myriads of those boreal clios, three centimeters long, of which a whale swallows a whole world at every mouthful. These charming pteropods — true butterflies of the sea — brought the open water to life all along the edge of the shore.
Among the other zoophytes there appeared, in the shallows, a few coral-like growths of the kind that, according to James Ross, live in the Antarctic seas down to a depth of a thousand meters; then small soft corals of the species Procellaria pelagica, and a great number of the starfish peculiar to these climates, sea stars that studded the ground like constellations.
But it was in the air that life overflowed. There, by the thousands, flew and fluttered birds of every kind, deafening us with their cries. Others crowded the rocks, watching us pass without fear and pressing familiarly under our feet. These were penguins, as nimble and supple in the water — where they have sometimes been mistaken for darting bonitos — as they are clumsy and heavy on land. They let out strange, harsh cries and gathered in great assemblies, sparing of gesture but lavish with clamor.
Among the birds, I noticed sheathbills, of the wader family, as big as pigeons, white in color, with short conical beaks and eyes ringed with red. Conseil laid in a supply of them, for these fowl, properly prepared, make an agreeable dish. Through the air passed sooty albatrosses with a wingspan of four meters, rightly called the vultures of the Ocean; giant petrels, among them the quebrantahuesos, or bone-breakers, with their arched wings, great eaters of seals; cape petrels, a kind of little duck black and white on the upper body; and finally a whole run of petrels, some whitish with brown-edged wings, others blue and peculiar to the Antarctic seas — the latter "so oily," I said to Conseil, "that the islanders of the Faroes need only fit them with a wick before lighting them."
"A little more," Conseil replied, "and they'd be perfect lamps! After that, we can hardly demand that nature should have gone and fitted them with a wick in advance!"
Half a mile on, the ground was riddled with the nests of penguins, a sort of burrow arranged for laying eggs, out of which streamed great numbers of birds. Captain Nemo later had several hundred of them hunted, for their dark flesh is very edible. They brayed like donkeys. These creatures, the size of a goose, slate-gray on the body, white underneath, and collared with a band of lemon yellow, let themselves be killed by the throw of a stone without even trying to flee.
Still the mist did not lift, and by eleven o'clock the sun had not yet appeared. Its absence troubled me more than a little. Without it, no observations were possible. How then were we to determine whether we had reached the Pole?
When I rejoined Captain Nemo, I found him silently leaning on a piece of rock, gazing up at the sky. He seemed impatient, vexed. But what could be done? This bold and powerful man did not command the sun as he commanded the sea.
Noon came without the day-star's having shown itself for a single instant. One could not even make out the place it occupied behind the curtain of mist. Before long the mist dissolved into snow.
"Until tomorrow," the captain said to me simply, and we made our way back to the Nautilus through swirling gusts of falling snow.
During our absence, the nets had been let out, and I studied with interest the fish that had just been hauled aboard. The Antarctic seas serve as a refuge for a great many migratory species that flee the storms of the lower latitudes only to fall, it is true, into the teeth of porpoises and seals. I noted a few southern cottus, a decimeter long, a kind of whitish cartilaginous fish crossed with livid bands and armed with spines; then some Antarctic chimaeras, three feet long, their bodies very elongated, the skin white, silvery, and smooth, the head rounded, the back fitted with three fins, the snout ending in a trunk that curves back toward the mouth. I tasted their flesh, but found it insipid, despite the opinion of Conseil, who made a very good meal of it.
The snowstorm lasted until the next day. It was impossible to stay on the platform. From the salon, where I was writing up the incidents of this excursion onto the polar continent, I could hear the cries of the petrels and albatrosses sporting in the middle of the tempest. The Nautilus did not stay still; running along the coast, it pushed another ten miles or so to the south, through that half-light the sun left as it grazed the edge of the horizon.
The next day, March 20, the snow had stopped. The cold was a little sharper. The thermometer read two degrees below zero. The fogs lifted, and I hoped that, on that day, our observation could be carried out.
Captain Nemo not having yet appeared, the dinghy took Conseil and me and set us ashore. The nature of the ground was the same — volcanic. Everywhere traces of lava, scoria, and basalt, without my catching sight of the crater that had spewed them out. Here as there, myriads of birds brought this part of the polar continent to life. But this realm they now shared with vast herds of marine mammals that watched us with their gentle eyes. They were seals of various species, some stretched out on the ground, others lying on drifting ice floes, several coming out of the sea or going back into it. They did not flee at our approach, never having had any dealings with man, and I counted enough of them there to stock a few hundred ships.
"My word," said Conseil, "it's a good thing Ned Land didn't come along with us!"
"Why is that, Conseil?"
"Because the mad hunter would have killed everything in sight."
"'Everything' is saying a lot, but I do think, in fact, that we couldn't have kept our friend the Canadian from harpooning a few of these magnificent creatures. Which would have displeased Captain Nemo, for he does not shed the blood of harmless beasts for nothing."
"He's right."
"Certainly, Conseil. But tell me — haven't you already classified these superb specimens of marine fauna?"
"Master knows perfectly well," Conseil replied, "that I'm not very strong on the practical side. Once Master has taught me the name of these animals..."
"They're seals and walruses."
"Two genera belonging to the family of pinnipeds," my learned Conseil hastened to say, "order of the carnivores, group of the unguiculates, subclass of the monodelphians, class of the mammals, phylum of the vertebrates."
"Well done, Conseil," I answered, "but these two genera, seals and walruses, divide into species, and if I'm not mistaken, we'll have the chance to observe them here. Let's walk on."
It was eight o'clock in the morning. We had four hours left to fill before the sun could be usefully observed. I directed our steps toward a broad bay that scooped into the granite cliff of the shore.
There, I can say, as far as the eye could see all around us, the land and the ice floes were crowded with marine mammals, and I found myself instinctively looking for old Proteus, the mythological herdsman who watched over these immense flocks of Neptune. They were seals, above all. They formed distinct groups, males and females, the father keeping watch over his family, the mother nursing her young, a few of the juveniles, already strong, striking out on their own a few paces off. When these mammals wanted to move, they went by little hops produced by the contraction of their bodies, helping themselves along rather awkwardly with their imperfect flipper, which, in the manatee — their cousin — forms a true forearm. I should say that in the water, their element above all others, these animals with their supple spine, narrow pelvis, short close-set fur, and webbed feet swim admirably. At rest and on land, they took on extremely graceful attitudes. And so it was that the ancients, observing their gentle expressions, their eloquent gaze that not even the loveliest gaze of a woman could surpass, their velvety limpid eyes, their charming poses, and poeticizing them in their own fashion, transformed the males into tritons and the females into sirens.
I pointed out to Conseil the considerable development of the cerebral lobes in these intelligent creatures. No mammal, man excepted, has richer brain matter. And so seals are capable of receiving a certain education; they are easily domesticated, and I believe, along with certain naturalists, that suitably trained they could render great service as fishing dogs.
Most of these seals were sleeping on the rocks or on the sand. Among these true seals — which have no external ears, differing in this from the sea lions whose ear is prominent — I observed several varieties of sea leopards, three meters long, white-furred, with bulldog heads, armed with ten teeth in each jaw, four incisors above and below and two great canines cut in the shape of a fleur-de-lis. Among them slid sea elephants, a kind of seal with a short mobile trunk, the giants of the species, which over a girth of twenty feet measured a length of ten meters. They made no movement at our approach.
"They aren't dangerous animals?" Conseil asked me.
"No," I answered, "unless you attack them. When a seal defends its pup, its fury is terrible, and it isn't rare for it to smash a fisherman's boat to pieces."
"It's within its rights," Conseil replied.
"I won't say otherwise."
Two miles farther on, we were brought up short by the headland that sheltered the bay against the south winds. It dropped sheer to the sea and foamed under the surf. Beyond it came bursts of tremendous bellowing, the kind a herd of cattle might produce.
"Well now," said Conseil, "a concert of bulls?"
"No," I said, "a concert of walruses. Are they fighting?"
"They're fighting or they're playing."
"With Master's leave, we ought to see this."
"We ought to, Conseil."
And so there we were, scrambling across the blackish rocks amid unexpected landslides, over stones the ice made dangerously slippery. More than once I went down, at the expense of my back. Conseil, more careful or more sure-footed, barely stumbled at all, and would haul me up, saying:
"If Master would be so good as to spread his legs a little, Master would keep his balance better."
Reaching the upper ridge of the headland, I saw a vast white plain covered with walruses. The animals were playing among themselves. Those were howls of joy, not of anger.
Walruses resemble seals in the shape of their bodies and the arrangement of their limbs. But they lack canines and incisors in the lower jaw, and as for the upper canines, these are two tusks eighty centimeters long that measure thirty-three around at the socket. These teeth, made of a compact, unstreaked ivory harder than an elephant's and slower to yellow, are much sought after. And so the walruses are the target of a reckless hunt that will soon destroy them down to the last one, since the hunters, slaughtering pregnant females and young indiscriminately, kill off more than four thousand of them every year.
Passing close by these curious creatures, I could examine them at my leisure, for they did not stir. Their hide was thick and rough, a tawny tone verging on red, their coat short and sparse. Some measured four meters in length. Calmer and less fearful than their northern cousins, they posted no chosen sentinels to watch the approaches to their camp.
After examining this city of walruses, I thought about turning back. It was eleven o'clock, and if Captain Nemo found conditions favorable for an observation, I wanted to be present for it. Yet I had little hope the sun would show itself that day. Clouds crushed low against the horizon hid it from our eyes. It was as if that jealous star refused to reveal this unreachable point of the globe to human beings.
Still, I made up my mind to head back to the Nautilus. We followed a narrow path that ran along the top of the cliff. At half past eleven we had reached the landing place. The beached dinghy had set the captain ashore. I spotted him standing on a block of basalt, his instruments beside him. His gaze was fixed on the northern horizon, near which the sun was tracing its long, drawn-out arc.
I took my place beside him and waited without a word. Noon came, and, just as the day before, the sun did not appear.
It was a stroke of bad luck. The observation had failed once more. If it was not accomplished tomorrow, we would have to give up for good on fixing our position.
For we were precisely at March 20. Tomorrow, the 21st, the day of the equinox, refraction not counted, the sun would drop below the horizon for six months, and with its disappearance the long polar night would begin. Since the September equinox it had risen out of the northern horizon, climbing in long spirals until December 21. At that point, the summer solstice of these austral regions, it had begun to descend again, and tomorrow it would cast down its last rays.
I shared my observations and my fears with Captain Nemo.
"You were right, Professor Aronnax," he told me. "If tomorrow I don't get the sun's altitude, I won't be able to try again for six months. But then, precisely because the chances of my navigation have brought me into these seas on March 21, my position will be easy to fix — if, at noon, the sun shows itself to us."
"Why is that, Captain?"
"Because when the sun traces such long spirals, it's difficult to measure its height above the horizon exactly, and the instruments are apt to make serious errors."
"So how will you proceed?"
"I'll use nothing but my chronometer," Captain Nemo answered. "If tomorrow, March 21, at noon, the sun's disk — allowing for refraction — is cut exactly in half by the northern horizon, then I'm at the South Pole."
"True enough," I said. "But that claim isn't mathematically rigorous, because the equinox doesn't necessarily fall at noon."
"No doubt, Professor, but the error won't be a hundred meters, and we need no better than that. Until tomorrow, then."
Captain Nemo returned aboard. Conseil and I stayed until five o'clock, pacing the beach, observing and studying. I gathered nothing curious, except for a penguin egg, remarkable for its size, that a collector would have paid more than a thousand francs for. Its isabelline color, the streaks and markings that adorned it like so many hieroglyphs, made it a rare trinket. I placed it in Conseil's hands, and the careful, sure-footed lad carried it back intact to the Nautilus, holding it like a precious piece of China porcelain.
There I set that rare egg beneath one of the museum's display cases. I had a hearty supper of an excellent slice of seal liver, whose taste recalled that of pork. Then I went to bed, not without invoking, like a Hindu, the favors of the radiant star.
The next morning, March 21, at five o'clock, I climbed up onto the platform. There I found Captain Nemo.
"The weather is clearing a little," he told me. "I have good hopes. After breakfast we'll go ashore to choose an observation post."
That settled, I went to find Ned Land. I would have liked to bring him with me. The stubborn Canadian refused, and I could plainly see that his silence, like his foul temper, was growing worse by the day. All in all, I didn't regret his obstinacy in this instance. There truly were too many seals ashore, and it wouldn't do to subject that rash hunter to such temptation.
Breakfast over, I went ashore. The Nautilus had risen a few more miles during the night. It lay well out, a good league from a coast dominated by a sharp peak four or five hundred meters high. The dinghy carried, along with me, Captain Nemo, two of the crew, and the instruments — that is, a chronometer, a telescope, and a barometer.
During our crossing I saw numerous whales belonging to the three species peculiar to the southern seas: the right whale — the "right-whale" of the English — which has no dorsal fin; the humpback, a rorqual with a pleated belly and vast whitish flippers that, despite their name, do not form wings; and the fin-back, a brownish-yellow whale, the liveliest of the cetaceans. This powerful animal can be heard from far off when it hurls up to a great height its columns of air and vapor, which look like whirls of smoke. These various mammals were frolicking in herds through the calm waters, and I could plainly see that this basin at the Antarctic pole now served as a refuge for the cetaceans too fiercely hunted by the whalers.
I also noticed long whitish strings of salps, a kind of clustered mollusk, and large jellyfish that swayed among the swell of the waves.
At nine o'clock we made land. The sky was brightening. The clouds were fleeing to the south. The mists were abandoning the cold surface of the waters. Captain Nemo made for the peak, which he no doubt meant to use as his observatory. It was a grueling climb over sharp lava and pumice stones, through an atmosphere often saturated with the sulfurous fumes of the fumaroles. The captain, for a man unused to treading on land, scaled the steepest slopes with a suppleness and an agility I couldn't match, and that a chamois hunter would have envied.
It took us two hours to reach the summit of this peak, half porphyry, half basalt. From there our eyes took in a vast sea that, toward the north, drew its terminal line sharply against the backdrop of the sky. At our feet, fields dazzling with whiteness. Over our heads, a pale blue, cleared of mist. To the north, the sun's disk like a ball of fire already notched by the edge of the horizon. From the bosom of the waters rose magnificent sheaves of liquid jets, hundreds of them. In the distance, the Nautilus, like a sleeping whale. Behind us, toward the south and east, an immense land, a chaotic heaping-up of rocks and ice whose limit could not be seen.
Reaching the summit of the peak, Captain Nemo carefully took its altitude by means of the barometer, since he would have to account for it in his observation.
At a quarter to noon the sun, now seen by refraction alone, showed itself as a disk of gold and scattered its last rays over this abandoned continent, over these seas that man has never yet furrowed.
Captain Nemo, equipped with a telescope fitted with crosshairs that corrected the refraction by means of a mirror, watched the sun sink little by little below the horizon, following a long-drawn-out diagonal. I held the chronometer. My heart was pounding. If the disappearance of the sun's half-disk coincided with noon on the chronometer, we were at the pole itself.
"Noon!" I cried out.
"The South Pole!" answered Captain Nemo in a grave voice, handing me the telescope, which showed the sun cut precisely into two equal portions by the horizon.
I watched the last rays crown the peak and the shadows climb slowly up its slopes.
At that moment Captain Nemo, resting his hand on my shoulder, said to me:
"Professor, in 1600 the Dutchman Ghéritk, carried off by currents and storms, reached 64° south latitude and discovered the New Shetlands. In 1773, on January 17, the illustrious Cook, following the thirty-eighth meridian, arrived at 67°30′ latitude, and in 1774, on January 30, on the one hundred and ninth meridian, he reached 71°15′ latitude. In 1819 the Russian Bellingshausen found himself on the sixty-ninth parallel, and in 1821 on the sixty-sixth at 111° west longitude. In 1820 the Englishman Brunsfield was stopped at the sixty-fifth degree. That same year the American Morrell, whose accounts are doubtful, working up the forty-second meridian, discovered open sea at 70°14′ latitude. In 1825 the Englishman Powell could get no farther than the sixty-second degree. That same year a simple seal-hunter, the Englishman Weddell, rose to 72°14′ latitude on the thirty-fifth meridian, and to 74°15′ on the thirty-sixth. In 1829 the Englishman Forster, commanding the Chanticleer, took possession of the Antarctic continent at 63°26′ latitude and 66°26′ longitude. In 1831 the Englishman Biscoe, on February 1, discovered Enderby Land at 68°50′ latitude; in 1832, on February 5, Adelaide Land at 67° latitude, and on February 21, Graham Land at 64°45′ latitude. In 1838 the Frenchman Dumont d'Urville, stopped before the ice pack at 62°57′ latitude, charted Louis-Philippe Land; two years later, on a fresh thrust south, he named — at 66°30′, on January 21 — Adélie Land, and eight days after that, at 64°40′, the Clarie Coast. In 1838 the Englishman Wilkes advanced as far as the sixty-ninth parallel on the hundredth meridian. In 1839 the Englishman Balleny discovered Sabrina Land, on the very edge of the polar circle. Finally, in 1842, the Englishman James Ross, aboard the Erebus and the Terror, on January 12, at 76°56′ latitude and 171°7′ east longitude, found Victoria Land; on the 23rd of the same month he charted the seventy-fourth parallel, the highest point reached until then; on the 27th he was at 76°8′, on the 28th at 77°32′, on February 2 at 78°4′, and in 1842 he came back to the seventy-first degree, which he could not pass. Well then — I, Captain Nemo, on this March 21, 1868, have reached the South Pole at the ninetieth degree, and I take possession of this part of the globe, equal to one-sixth of the known continents."
"In whose name, Captain?"
"In my own, Professor!"
And so saying, Captain Nemo unfurled a black flag, bearing a gold N quartered upon its field. Then, turning back toward the sun, whose last rays were licking the horizon of the sea:
"Farewell, sun!" he cried. "Vanish, radiant star! Set beneath this open sea, and let a night six months long spread its shadows over my new domain!"
The next morning, March 22, at six o'clock, the preparations for departure began. The last glimmers of twilight were melting away into night. The cold was biting. The constellations blazed with startling intensity. At the zenith glittered that magnificent Southern Cross, the polestar of the Antarctic regions.
The thermometer read twelve degrees below zero, and when the wind freshened it bit at us in sharp stings. The ice was thickening on the open water. The sea was beginning to freeze over on every side. Great blackish patches, spread across its surface, warned of the young ice about to form. Clearly, the southern basin, frozen through the six months of its winter, was utterly inaccessible. What became of the whales during that season? No doubt they went beneath the ice pack in search of more navigable seas. As for the seals and walruses, used to living in the harshest climates, they stayed on in these frozen waters. These animals have the instinct to dig holes in the ice-fields and keep them permanently open. They come to those holes to breathe; and once the birds, driven off by the cold, have migrated north, these marine mammals remain the sole masters of the polar continent.
Meanwhile the ballast tanks had filled, and the Nautilus was sinking slowly. At a depth of a thousand feet, it came to a stop. Its screw churned the water, and it drove due north at a speed of fifteen miles an hour. Toward evening it was already gliding beneath the immense frozen carapace of the ice pack.
The panels of the salon had been closed as a precaution, since the Nautilus's hull might strike some submerged block. So I spent the day writing up my notes. My mind was entirely given over to my memories of the Pole. We had reached that unreachable point without hardship, without danger, as though our floating railway car had simply slid along the rails of a track. And now the return had truly begun. Would it hold still more surprises like these in store for me? I believed it would, so inexhaustible is the parade of undersea marvels! Even so, in the five and a half months since chance had thrown us aboard this vessel, we had crossed fourteen thousand leagues, and along that course — longer than the earth's own Equator — how many incidents, curious or terrible, had graced our voyage: the hunt in the forests of Crespo, the grounding in the Torres Strait, the coral cemetery, the Ceylon fisheries, the Arabian tunnel, the fires of Santorini, the millions in Vigo Bay, Atlantis, the South Pole! All night long these memories, passing from dream to dream, never let my brain doze for an instant.
At three in the morning I was jolted awake by a violent shock. I had sat bolt upright in my bed and was listening in the darkness when I was flung headlong into the middle of the room. Clearly the Nautilus had struck something and heeled hard over.
I braced myself against the walls and dragged myself along the passageways to the salon, which was lit by its luminous ceiling. The furniture was overturned. Fortunately the display cases, firmly bolted at the base, had held fast. The pictures on the starboard side, following the shift in the vertical, were flattened against the tapestries, while those on the port side had swung a foot clear of the wall at their lower edge. So the Nautilus was lying over on its starboard side — and, what was more, completely motionless.
Inside I could hear footsteps and a confusion of voices. But Captain Nemo did not appear. Just as I was about to leave the salon, Ned Land and Conseil came in.
"What's happened?" I asked at once.
"I came to ask Master the very same thing," Conseil replied.
"A thousand devils!" cried the Canadian. "I know well enough what's happened! The Nautilus has struck, and judging by the list she's taking, I don't think she'll get out of it the way she did the first time, in the Torres Strait."
"But has she at least come back to the surface of the sea?" I asked.
"We don't know," Conseil answered.
"That's easy enough to find out," I said.
I checked the pressure gauge. To my great surprise, it showed a depth of three hundred and sixty meters.
"What does this mean?" I exclaimed.
"We'll have to ask Captain Nemo," said Conseil.
"But where do we find him?" asked Ned Land.
"Follow me," I told my two companions.
We left the salon. In the library, no one. At the central staircase, at the crew's quarters, no one. I supposed Captain Nemo must be stationed in the pilot's cage. The best thing was to wait. We all three went back to the salon.
I'll pass over the Canadian's grumbling. He had every excuse to lose his temper. I let him vent his ill humor to his heart's content, without answering him.
We had been waiting like this for twenty minutes, straining to catch the faintest sounds inside the Nautilus, when Captain Nemo came in. He did not seem to see us. His face, usually so impassive, betrayed a certain uneasiness. He studied the compass and the pressure gauge in silence, then laid his finger on a point of the chart, in that region representing the southern seas.
I did not want to interrupt him. Only some moments later, when he turned toward me, did I say to him — turning back on him an expression he himself had used in the Torres Strait:
"An incident, Captain?"
"No, Professor," he replied. "An accident this time."
"A serious one?"
"Perhaps."
"Is the danger immediate?"
"No."
"The Nautilus has run aground?"
"Yes."
"And this grounding came about...?"
"Through a whim of nature, not the incompetence of men. Not a single error was made in our maneuvers. And yet there's no preventing equilibrium from producing its effects. One may defy the laws of men, but one cannot resist the laws of nature."
An odd moment Captain Nemo had chosen to indulge in this philosophical reflection. In sum, his answer told me nothing.
"May I know, Captain," I asked him, "the cause of this accident?"
"An enormous block of ice, a whole mountain, has turned over," he answered. "When icebergs are undermined at their base by warmer waters or by repeated blows, their center of gravity rises. Then they flip clean over — they capsize. That is what happened. One of these blocks, as it rolled over, struck the Nautilus as she floated beneath the water. Then, sliding under her hull and lifting her with irresistible force, it carried her up into less dense layers, where she now lies on her side."
"But can't we free the Nautilus by emptying her tanks, so as to bring her back into balance?"
"That is exactly what is being done at this moment, Professor. You can hear the pumps at work. Look at the needle of the pressure gauge. It shows that the Nautilus is rising, but the block of ice is rising with her, and until some obstacle checks its upward movement, our position won't change."
Sure enough, the Nautilus was still taking the same list to starboard. No doubt she would right herself once the block itself came to a stop. But at that point, who could say whether we might not strike the underside of the ice pack — whether we might not find ourselves horribly crushed between the two frozen surfaces?
I turned over in my mind all the consequences of our situation. Captain Nemo never took his eyes off the pressure gauge. Since the iceberg's fall, the Nautilus had risen about a hundred and fifty feet, but she still held the same angle with the perpendicular.
Suddenly a slight movement made itself felt through the hull. Clearly the Nautilus was righting herself a little. The objects hanging in the salon were noticeably returning to their normal position. The walls were coming back toward the vertical. Not one of us spoke. With pounding hearts we watched, we felt the vessel come upright. The floor was leveling out beneath our feet. Ten minutes passed.
"At last, we're straight!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," said Captain Nemo, moving toward the salon door.
"But will we float?" I asked him.
"Certainly," he replied, "since the tanks aren't yet empty, and once they are, the Nautilus will have to rise back to the surface of the sea."
The captain went out, and I soon saw that, by his orders, the Nautilus's upward course had been halted. In fact she would soon have struck the underside of the ice pack, and it was better to keep her suspended between two waters.
"That was a close call!" said Conseil then.
"Yes. We might have been crushed between those blocks of ice, or at the very least imprisoned. And then, with no way to renew the air... Yes! That was a close call!"
"If it's over!" murmured Ned Land.
I had no wish to start a pointless argument with the Canadian, and I didn't answer. Besides, at that very moment the panels slid open, and the light from outside burst in through the uncovered window.
We were in open water, as I've said; but at a distance of ten meters, on either side of the Nautilus, rose a dazzling wall of ice. Above and below, the same wall. Above, because the underside of the ice pack stretched out like an immense ceiling. Below, because the capsized block, having gradually slid down, had found on the two side walls a pair of resting points that held it in this position. The Nautilus was imprisoned in a veritable tunnel of ice, roughly twenty meters wide, filled with still water. It would be easy enough for her to get out of it, then, by going either forward or astern, and to pick up again, a few hundred meters lower down, a clear passage beneath the ice pack.
The luminous ceiling had been switched off, and yet the salon still blazed with an intense light. The powerful reverberation of the ice walls was flinging the sheets of the beacon violently back into the room. I could never paint the effect of the voltaic rays on those great, whimsically cut blocks, each angle, each edge, each facet throwing off a different gleam according to the nature of the veins running through the ice. A dazzling mine of gemstones, and above all of sapphires crossing their blue jets with the green jet of emeralds. Here and there, opaline tints of infinite softness ran among burning points like so many diamonds of fire, whose brilliance the eye could not bear. The power of the beacon was multiplied a hundredfold, like that of a lamp shining through the lenticular panes of a first-order lighthouse.
"How beautiful! How beautiful!" cried Conseil.
"Yes!" I said. "It's a magnificent spectacle. Isn't it, Ned?"
"Eh! a thousand devils! yes," Ned Land shot back. "It's superb! I'm furious at being forced to admit it. No one's ever seen anything like it. But this spectacle here may cost us dear. And if I'm to say everything I think, I believe we're looking at things God meant to keep hidden from the eyes of man!"
Ned was right. It was too beautiful. All at once a cry from Conseil made me spin around.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Let Master shut his eyes! Let Master not look!"
As he said this, Conseil clapped his hands hard over his eyelids.
"But what's the matter, my boy?"
"I'm dazzled, blinded!"
My eyes turned involuntarily toward the window, but I couldn't bear the fire that was devouring it.
I understood what had happened. The Nautilus had just gotten under way at high speed. All the quiet flashes of the ice walls had suddenly turned into streaks of lightning. The fires of those myriad diamonds ran together. Carried along by her screw, the Nautilus was traveling through a sheath of lightning.
The panels of the salon then closed again. We kept our hands over our eyes, still steeped in those concentric glimmers that swim before the retina when the sun's rays have struck it too violently. It took a while for the disturbance in our sight to settle.
At last our hands came down.
"My word, I would never have believed it," said Conseil.
"And I still don't believe it!" the Canadian shot back.
"When we get back on land," Conseil added, "so jaded by all these wonders of nature, what will we think of those miserable continents and the little works turned out by the hand of man! No! the inhabited world is no longer worthy of us!"
Such words in the mouth of an unflappable Fleming showed just how far our enthusiasm had come to the boil. But the Canadian didn't fail to toss in his drop of cold water.
"The inhabited world!" he said, shaking his head. "Don't worry, friend Conseil, we won't be going back to it!"
It was then five o'clock in the morning. At that instant a shock came from the bow of the Nautilus. I understood that her ram had just struck a block of ice. It must have been a wrong maneuver, for this undersea tunnel, choked with blocks, made for no easy sailing. So I supposed that Captain Nemo, altering his course, would steer around these obstacles or follow the windings of the tunnel. In any case, the forward march could not be brought altogether to a halt. And yet, against my expectation, the Nautilus took a very pronounced backward movement.
"We're going astern?" said Conseil.
"Yes," I replied. "The tunnel must have no way out on this side."
"And so...?"
"So," I said, "the maneuver is simple enough. We'll retrace our steps and go out by the southern opening. That's all there is to it."
As I spoke this way, I wanted to appear more reassured than I really was. Meanwhile the Nautilus's backward movement was gathering speed, and driving against her screw, she was carrying us along at great pace.
"It'll mean a delay," said Ned.
"What does that matter — a few hours more or less, so long as we get out."
"Yes," Ned Land repeated, "so long as we get out!"
I paced for a while between the salon and the library. My companions sat in silence. Soon I threw myself down on a divan and picked up a book, which my eyes ran over mechanically.
A quarter of an hour later, Conseil came over to me and said:
"Is it very interesting, what Master is reading?"
"Very interesting," I replied.
"I don't doubt it. It's Master's own book that Master is reading!"
"My book?"
Sure enough, I was holding in my hand the work on The Mysteries of the Great Ocean Depths. I hadn't even realized it. I closed the book and resumed my pacing. Ned and Conseil rose to withdraw.
"Stay, my friends," I said, holding them back. "Let's stay together until we're out of this dead end."
"Just as Master pleases," Conseil replied.
A few hours went by. I often watched the instruments hanging on the salon wall. The pressure gauge showed that the Nautilus was holding at a constant depth of three hundred meters; the compass, that she was still steering south; the log, that she was moving at a speed of twenty miles an hour — an excessive speed in so cramped a space. But Captain Nemo knew he couldn't go too fast, and that now the minutes were worth centuries.
At twenty-five minutes past eight, a second shock came. From the stern, this time. I turned pale. My companions had drawn close to me. I had seized Conseil's hand. We questioned one another with our eyes, more directly than if words had put our thoughts into speech.
At that moment the captain came into the salon. I went up to him.
"The way is barred to the south?" I asked him.
"Yes, Professor. The iceberg, in turning over, has closed off every way out."
"We're blocked?"
"Yes."
So there it was: all around the Nautilus, above and below, an impenetrable wall of ice. We were prisoners of the ice pack. The Canadian brought one of his massive fists down on a table. Conseil said nothing. I looked at the captain. His face had settled back into its usual calm. He stood with his arms crossed, thinking. The Nautilus no longer stirred.
Then the captain spoke.
"Gentlemen," he said in a level voice, "there are two ways to die in the situation we're in."
This inexplicable man had the air of a mathematics professor laying out a proof for his students.
"The first," he went on, "is to be crushed. The second is to suffocate. I leave aside the possibility of starving, because the Nautilus's stores will certainly outlast us. So let us think about our chances of being crushed — or of asphyxiation."
"As for suffocating, Captain," I answered, "that's nothing to fear. Our tanks are full."
"True," said Captain Nemo, "but they'll give us only two days of air. Now, we've been buried under the water for thirty-six hours already, and the Nautilus's heavy atmosphere is asking to be renewed. In forty-eight hours, our reserve will be exhausted."
"Then, Captain, let's be free before forty-eight hours are out!"
"We'll at least attempt it, by cutting through the wall that surrounds us."
"On which side?" I asked.
"The sounding line will tell us. I'm going to ground the Nautilus on the lower shelf, and my men, in their diving suits, will attack the iceberg where its wall is thinnest."
"Can we open the panels of the salon?"
"No harm in it. We're no longer moving."
Captain Nemo went out. Soon a hissing told me that water was pouring into the tanks. The Nautilus sank slowly and came to rest on the bed of ice at a depth of three hundred and fifty meters — the depth at which the lower ice shelf lay submerged.
"My friends," I said, "the situation is grave, but I'm counting on your courage and your energy."
"Professor," the Canadian answered, "this is no moment to pester you with my complaints. I'm ready to do anything for the good of all of us."
"Well said, Ned," I told him, holding out my hand.
"Let me add," he went on, "that I'm as handy with a pick as with a harpoon. If I can be of use to the captain, he can put me to work."
"He won't turn down your help. Come on, Ned."
I led the Canadian to the room where the Nautilus's men were pulling on their diving suits. I passed Ned's offer along to the captain, who accepted it. The Canadian climbed into his sea gear and was ready as quickly as his fellow workers. Each of them carried on his back a Rouquayrol apparatus, into which the tanks had fed a generous supply of pure air. A heavy draw on the Nautilus's reserve, but a necessary one. As for the Ruhmkorff lamps, they were useless here, in water so bright and saturated with electric light.
Once Ned was dressed, I went back into the salon, whose windows were uncovered, and, taking my place beside Conseil, I studied the surrounding layers that held the Nautilus in place.
A few moments later, we saw a dozen crewmen set foot on the ice shelf, Ned Land among them, easy to pick out by his height. Captain Nemo was with them.
Before beginning to cut into the walls, he had soundings taken to make sure the work would be aimed in the right direction. Long probes were driven into the side walls, but after fifteen meters they were still stopped by the thick barrier. There was no point attacking the ceiling above us, since that was the ice pack itself, more than four hundred meters high. Captain Nemo then had the lower surface sounded. There, ten meters of ice separated us from the water. That was the thickness of the ice field. From now on, the task was to cut out a slab equal in area to the Nautilus's waterline — about six thousand five hundred cubic meters to detach, in order to open a hole through which we could descend below the ice field.
The work began at once and was carried on with tireless stubbornness. Rather than dig all the way around the Nautilus, which would have brought greater difficulties, Captain Nemo had the enormous pit traced out eight meters off her port quarter. Then his men bored into it at several points around its circumference at the same time. Soon the picks were biting hard into that dense material, and big blocks were torn loose from the mass. By a curious effect of specific gravity, these blocks, lighter than water, flew up, so to speak, to the roof of the tunnel, which thickened above by as much as it thinned below. But that hardly mattered, as long as the lower wall was growing thinner all the while.
After two hours of hard work, Ned Land came back exhausted. He and his companions were relieved by fresh workers, whom Conseil and I joined. The Nautilus's first officer directed us.
The water struck me as strangely cold, but I warmed up quickly once I was swinging the pick. My movements were quite free, even though I was working under a pressure of thirty atmospheres.
When I came back inside after two hours of work, to take some food and some rest, I found a marked difference between the pure air the Rouquayrol apparatus fed me and the atmosphere of the Nautilus, already thick with carbon dioxide. The air hadn't been renewed in forty-eight hours, and its life-giving qualities were badly weakened. And yet, in a span of twelve hours, we had removed only a layer of ice a meter thick over the marked-out area — about six hundred cubic meters. Assuming the same amount of work were done every twelve hours, it would still take five nights and four days to bring the job to a good end.
"Five nights and four days!" I said to my companions. "And we have only two days' worth of air in the tanks."
"Not to mention," Ned put in, "that once we're out of this cursed prison, we'll still be shut in under the ice pack, with no way to reach the open air."
A fair point. Who then could foresee the least amount of time we would need to win our freedom? Wouldn't we suffocate before the Nautilus could get back to the surface of the waves? Was she doomed to perish in this tomb of ice with everyone she held? The situation looked terrible. But everyone had faced it head-on, and all were resolved to do their duty to the very end.
As I'd expected, another meter-thick layer was carved out of the vast pit during the night. But in the morning, when, sheathed in my diving suit, I moved through the liquid mass in a temperature of six or seven degrees below zero, I noticed that the side walls were slowly closing in. The layers of water farther from the pit, which weren't warmed by the men's labor and the play of the tools, were showing a tendency to solidify. Faced with this new and imminent danger, what became of our chances of rescue, and how could we stop this liquid medium from freezing — a freezing that would burst the walls of the Nautilus like glass?
I didn't tell my two companions of this new danger. What good would it do to risk breaking the spirit they were pouring into the grueling work of our rescue? But when I got back on board, I pointed out this grave complication to Captain Nemo.
"I know," he said, in that calm tone that not even the most terrible circumstances could alter. "It's one more danger, but I see no way to guard against it. Our only chance of salvation is to move faster than the freezing. We have to get there first. That's all."
Get there first! Well — by now I should have been used to this way of talking.
That day I swung the pick doggedly for several hours. The work kept me going. Besides, to work was to leave the Nautilus, to breathe directly the pure air drawn from the tanks and delivered by the apparatus — to escape, for a while, an atmosphere grown thin and foul.
Toward evening, the pit had been dug another meter deeper. When I came back on board, I was nearly asphyxiated by the carbon dioxide that saturated the air. Ah, if only we'd had the chemical means to drive off that noxious gas! Oxygen we did not lack. All this water held a considerable quantity of it, and by breaking it down with our powerful batteries, it would have given us back the life-giving element. I had certainly thought of it — but what was the use, since the carbon dioxide, the product of our own breathing, had invaded every part of the ship? To absorb it, we would have had to fill containers with caustic potash and shake them without stopping. But that substance was lacking on board, and nothing could take its place.
That evening Captain Nemo had to open the valves of his tanks and release a few columns of pure air into the interior of the Nautilus. Without this precaution, we would never have woken up.
The next day, March 26, I took up my miner's work again, starting on the fifth meter. The side walls and the lower surface of the ice pack were visibly thickening. It was plain that they would meet before the Nautilus managed to break free. Despair seized me for a moment. The pick nearly slipped from my hands. What was the use of digging, if I was only going to die smothered, crushed by this water turning to stone — a torment the cruelty of savages could never even have invented? It seemed to me that I was caught between the fearsome jaws of a monster that were closing on me, and there was no resisting them.
Just then Captain Nemo, directing the work, working himself, passed near me. I touched him with my hand and pointed to the walls of our prison. The starboard wall had advanced to less than four meters from the Nautilus's hull.
The captain understood, and signaled me to follow him. We went back on board. Once I'd taken off my diving suit, I went with him into the salon.
"Professor Aronnax," he said, "we must try some heroic measure, or we're going to be sealed into this solidified water as if in cement."
"Yes!" I said. "But what can we do?"
"Ah!" he cried. "If only my Nautilus were strong enough to bear this pressure without being crushed!"
"Well?" I asked, not grasping his idea.
"Don't you see," he went on, "that this freezing of the water would come to our aid? Don't you see that by turning solid, it would burst apart the ice fields that imprison us, the way water, in freezing, bursts apart the hardest stones? Don't you feel that it would be an agent of rescue instead of an agent of destruction?"
"Yes, Captain, perhaps. But whatever resistance to crushing the Nautilus may have, it couldn't withstand that appalling pressure. It would be flattened like a sheet of tin plate."
"I know, Professor. So we mustn't count on the help of nature, but on ourselves. We have to fight this freezing. We have to hold it back. Not only are the side walls closing in, but there's not ten feet of water left ahead of or behind the Nautilus. The freezing is gaining on us from every side."
"How long," I asked, "will the air in the tanks let us breathe on board?"
The captain looked me full in the face.
"The day after tomorrow," he said, "the tanks will be empty."
A cold sweat came over me. And yet, should I have been surprised at his answer? On March 22 the Nautilus had plunged beneath the open waters of the Pole. We were now at the 26th. For five days we had been living on the ship's reserves! And what breathable air remained had to be saved for the workers. Even as I write these things, my impression of them is still so vivid that an involuntary terror takes hold of my whole being, and the air seems to fail in my lungs!
Meanwhile Captain Nemo sat thinking, silent and still. Plainly an idea was crossing his mind. But he seemed to push it away. He kept answering himself no. At last these words escaped his lips:
"Boiling water!" he murmured.
"Boiling water?" I exclaimed.
"Yes, Professor. We're shut up in a relatively confined space. Wouldn't jets of boiling water, injected constantly by the Nautilus's pumps, raise the temperature of this medium and slow its freezing?"
"It's worth trying," I said firmly.
"Then let's try it, Professor."
The thermometer outside then read seven degrees below zero. Captain Nemo led me to the galley, where huge distilling machines were at work, supplying drinking water by evaporation. They were filled with water, and all the electric heat of the batteries was sent through the coils steeped in the liquid. In a few minutes the water had reached a hundred degrees. It was directed to the pumps while fresh water took its place as fast as it was used. The heat the batteries produced was such that cold seawater, drawn up from the sea, arrived boiling at the pump chambers after passing through the machines alone.
The injection began, and three hours later the thermometer outside read six degrees below zero. That was one degree gained. Two hours after that, it read only four.
"We're going to succeed," I said to the captain, after following and checking the progress of the operation by many observations.
"I think so," he answered. "We won't be crushed. Now we have only suffocation to fear."
During the night, the temperature of the water rose to one degree below zero. The injections couldn't carry it any higher. But since seawater doesn't freeze until minus two degrees, I was reassured at last against the dangers of solidifying.
The next day, March 27, six meters of ice had been torn from the pit. Only four meters were left to remove — still forty-eight hours of work. The air on board the Nautilus could no longer be renewed. And so that day kept going from bad to worse.
An intolerable heaviness weighed me down. Toward three in the afternoon, this feeling of anguish was carried to a violent pitch. Yawns dislocated my jaws. My lungs gasped, searching for that vital, oxygen-rich element the breath needs, which was growing scarcer and scarcer. A moral torpor took hold of me. I lay stretched out without strength, all but unconscious. My good Conseil, seized with the same symptoms, suffering the same sufferings, never left my side. He took my hand, he cheered me on, and I heard him still, murmuring:
"Ah, if only I could stop breathing, to leave more air for Master!"
Tears came to my eyes to hear him speak that way.
If our situation, for all of us, was unbearable inside, with what haste, with what joy we pulled on our diving suits to take our turn at the work! The picks rang against the icy layer. Our arms tired, our hands were rubbed raw, but what were those pains, what did those wounds matter? The air of life was reaching our lungs. We could breathe! We could breathe!
And yet no one dragged his work under the water out past his allotted time. His task done, each man handed over to his gasping companions the tank that was to pour life into him. Captain Nemo set the example and was the first to submit to this stern discipline. When his hour came, he yielded his apparatus to another and went back into the ship's foul air, always calm, without a lapse, without a murmur.
That day the usual work was done with even greater vigor. Only two meters were left to cut through over the whole surface. Only two meters separated us from the open sea. But the tanks were nearly empty of air. The little that remained had to be saved for the workers. Not one atom for the Nautilus!
When I came back on board, I was half suffocated. What a night! I couldn't paint it. Such sufferings can't be described. The next day, my breathing was labored. To my headaches were joined dizzying spells of vertigo that made a drunken man of me. My companions felt the same symptoms. Some of the crewmen were rattling in their throats.
That day, the sixth of our imprisonment, Captain Nemo, finding the mattock and the pick too slow, resolved to crush the layer of ice that still separated us from the open water. This man had kept his cool and his energy. By his moral force he mastered his physical pains. He thought, he calculated, he acted.
On his order, the vessel was lightened — that is, raised off the icy bed by a change in specific gravity. Once she floated, she was hauled into position over the huge pit that had been traced out to follow her waterline. Then, as her ballast tanks filled, she came down and fitted herself into the socket.
At that moment the entire crew came back on board, and the double communication door was shut. The Nautilus now rested on the layer of ice that was less than a meter thick, and that the soundings had pierced in a thousand places.
The valves of the tanks were then thrown wide open, and a hundred cubic meters of water rushed in, adding a hundred thousand kilograms to the weight of the Nautilus.
We waited, we listened, forgetting our sufferings, still hoping. We were staking our survival on one last throw.
In spite of the roaring that filled my head, I soon heard a shuddering under the Nautilus's hull. The ship tilted. The ice cracked with a strange, sharp sound, like paper tearing, and the Nautilus dropped.
"We're through!" Conseil murmured in my ear.
I couldn't answer him. I seized his hand. I gripped it in a helpless spasm.
All at once, carried away by her fearful overload, the Nautilus plunged beneath the water like a cannonball — that is, she fell as she would have fallen through empty air.
The whole electric power was thrown onto the pumps, which at once began driving the water out of the tanks. After a few minutes, our fall was checked. Soon the pressure gauge even showed an upward movement. The screw, running at full speed, made the plated hull shudder down to its bolts, and swept us northward.
But how long would this voyage under the ice pack last before we reached open sea? Another day? I'd be dead before then!
Half stretched out on a divan in the library, I was suffocating. My face was purple, my lips blue, my faculties suspended. I could no longer see, no longer hear. Any sense of time had vanished from my mind. My muscles couldn't contract.
How many hours passed like that, I couldn't say. But I was aware of my death agony beginning. I understood that I was going to die.
Suddenly I came to. A few puffs of air worked their way into my lungs. Had we come back up to the surface of the waves? Had we crossed the ice pack?
No! It was Ned and Conseil, my two brave friends, sacrificing themselves to save me. A few atoms of air were still left at the bottom of an apparatus. Instead of breathing it themselves, they had saved it for me, and, while they were suffocating, they poured life into me drop by drop! I tried to push the apparatus away. They held my hands, and for a few moments I breathed with rapture.
My eyes turned to the clock. It was eleven in the morning. We must be at the 28th of March. The Nautilus was traveling at the terrifying speed of forty miles an hour. She was writhing through the water.
Where was Captain Nemo? Had he gone under? Had his companions died with him?
At that moment the pressure gauge showed we were no more than twenty feet from the surface. A single field of ice separated us from the open air. Couldn't it be broken?
Perhaps! In any case, the Nautilus was going to try. I felt her take a slanting position, dropping her stern and raising her ram. A single intake of water had been enough to break her balance. Then, driven by her powerful screw, she attacked the ice field from below like a colossal battering ram. She split it little by little, drew back, charged again at full speed against the field that was tearing apart, and finally, carried by one supreme burst, she flung herself onto the icy surface and crushed it under her weight.
The panel was opened — torn open, one might say — and pure air came flooding into every part of the Nautilus.
How I came to be up on the platform, I couldn't say. Perhaps the Canadian had carried me there. But I was breathing — I was drinking in the living air of the sea. Beside me my two companions were drunk on those cool, fresh molecules. Poor wretches too long starved of food can't fling themselves recklessly on the first meal set before them; but we had no need to hold back. We could fill our lungs to bursting with the atoms of that atmosphere, and it was the breeze, the breeze itself, that poured this voluptuous intoxication into us.
"Ah," Conseil kept saying, "oxygen — how good it is! Master needn't be afraid to breathe. There's plenty for everyone."
As for Ned Land, he said nothing, but he opened jaws wide enough to frighten a shark. And what mighty inhalations! The Canadian "drew" like a stove in full blaze.
Our strength came back to us quickly, and when I looked around I saw that we were alone on the platform. Not a single crewman. Not even Captain Nemo. The strange sailors of the Nautilus made do with the air circulating inside; none had come up to revel in the open atmosphere.
The first words I spoke were words of thanks and gratitude to my two companions. Ned and Conseil had stretched out my life through the last hours of that long agony. No amount of gratitude could ever repay such devotion.
"Come now, Professor," Ned Land answered me, "it's not worth talking about! What was there to it, on our part? Nothing at all. It was purely a matter of arithmetic. Your life was worth more than ours. So it had to be preserved."
"No, Ned," I replied, "it wasn't worth more. No one stands above a generous, good-hearted man — and that's what you are."
"All right, all right," repeated the Canadian, embarrassed.
"And you, my brave Conseil, you suffered badly too."
"Not so very badly, if I'm to tell Master the whole truth. I was short a few mouthfuls of air, but I think I'd have gotten used to it. Besides, I kept my eyes on Master, who was fainting away, and that took away any least desire I had to breathe. It fairly cut off my — as they say — my wind..."
Confused at having stumbled into a cliché, Conseil didn't finish.
"My friends," I answered, deeply moved, "we are bound to one another forever, and you have claims on me —"
"Which I intend to abuse," the Canadian shot back.
"Eh?" said Conseil.
"Yes," Ned Land went on, "the claim of dragging you off with me the day I leave this infernal Nautilus."
"For that matter," said Conseil, "are we heading the right way?"
"Yes," I replied, "since we're heading toward the sun, and here the sun means north."
"No doubt," said Ned Land, "but the question is still whether we're making for the Pacific or the Atlantic — that is, for the busy seas or the empty ones."
To that I had no answer, and I feared Captain Nemo might rather be taking us back toward that vast ocean that washes the coasts of both Asia and America at once. He would thus complete his round-the-world voyage beneath the sea and return to those seas where the Nautilus found its most perfect independence. But if we went back to the Pacific, far from any inhabited land, what became of Ned Land's plans?
We were soon to be settled on that important point. The Nautilus was traveling fast. The polar circle was quickly crossed, and the course laid for the promontory of Cape Horn. We were abreast of the American headland on March 31, at seven in the evening.
By then all our past sufferings were forgotten. The memory of that imprisonment in the ice was fading from our minds. We thought only of the future. Captain Nemo no longer appeared, either in the salon or on the platform. The daily position, plotted on the world chart by the first officer, let me determine the exact heading of the Nautilus. And that evening it became clear, to my great satisfaction, that we were coming back north by the Atlantic route.
I told the Canadian and Conseil the result of my observations.
"Good news," the Canadian answered, "but where is the Nautilus going?"
"I couldn't say, Ned."
"Could her captain be meaning, after the South Pole, to take on the North Pole and get back to the Pacific by the famous Northwest Passage?"
"I wouldn't put it past him," said Conseil.
"Well," said the Canadian, "we'll have given him the slip before then."
"In any case," Conseil added, "he's a real master of a man, this Captain Nemo, and we'll never regret having known him."
"Especially once we've left him!" Ned Land retorted.
The next day, April 1, a few minutes before noon, when the Nautilus rose to the surface of the waves, we sighted a coast to the west. It was Tierra del Fuego — the Land of Fire — so named by the first navigators when they saw the many columns of smoke rising from the natives' huts. This Tierra del Fuego forms a vast cluster of islands stretching thirty leagues long and eighty leagues wide, between 53° and 56° of southern latitude and 67°50′ and 77°15′ of western longitude. The coast looked low to me, but far off rose high mountains. I even thought I glimpsed Mount Sarmiento, rising two thousand and seventy meters above sea level — a pyramidal block of schist with a very sharp summit which, depending on whether it is veiled or clear of mist, "foretells fair weather or foul," Ned Land told me.
"A famous barometer, my friend."
"Yes, Professor, a natural barometer that never once deceived me when I sailed the channels of the Strait of Magellan."
Just then the peak stood out sharp against the sky. It was an omen of fine weather. And fine weather it was.
Back beneath the water, the Nautilus drew close to the coast and ran along it only a few miles off. Through the salon windows I saw long lianas and giant kelp — those pear-bearing wracks of which the free polar sea had held a few specimens. With their glossy, slimy filaments, they measured up to three hundred meters in length; genuine cables, thicker than a thumb and very tough, they often serve as mooring lines for ships. Another weed, known as kelp velp, with leaves four feet long, matted into the coral concretions, carpeted the seabed. It served as nest and food to myriads of crustaceans and mollusks — crabs, cuttlefish. There the seals and otters treated themselves to splendid meals, mixing fish flesh with the vegetables of the sea, after the English fashion.
Over these rich, luxuriant depths the Nautilus passed at extreme speed. Toward evening it approached the Falkland archipelago, whose harsh peaks I was able to make out the next day. The sea there was of only moderate depth. I concluded, and not without reason, that these two islands, ringed by a great many islets, had once formed part of the Magellanic lands. The Falklands were probably discovered by the famous John Davis, who gave them the name Davis Southern Islands. Later, Richard Hawkins called them the Maiden Islands, the Isles of the Virgin. They were afterward named the Malouines, at the start of the eighteenth century, by fishermen of Saint-Malo, and finally the Falklands by the English, to whom they belong today.
In these waters our nets brought up fine specimens of seaweed, and in particular a certain kelp whose roots were laden with mussels — the best in the world. Geese and ducks dropped by the dozen onto the platform and soon took their places in the ship's larders. As for fish, I especially noted bony species belonging to the goby genus, and above all some gudgeons two decimeters long, all speckled with whitish and yellow spots.
I also admired numerous jellyfish, and the loveliest of their kind — the chrysaoras peculiar to the seas of the Falklands. At times they formed a very smooth hemispherical umbrella streaked with reddish-brown lines and fringed with twelve regular festoons; at other times they were an upturned basket from which broad leaves and long red streamers gracefully spilled. They swam by waving their four leaf-shaped arms and let their opulent mane of tentacles drift and dangle behind them. I would have liked to keep a few samples of these delicate zoophytes; but they are only clouds, shadows, mere appearances, that melt and evaporate out of their native element.
When the last heights of the Falklands had dropped below the horizon, the Nautilus submerged to between twenty and twenty-five meters and followed the American coast. Captain Nemo did not show himself.
Until April 3 we did not leave the waters of Patagonia, now beneath the ocean, now on its surface. The Nautilus passed the wide estuary formed by the mouth of the Plata and, on April 4, found itself abreast of Uruguay, though fifty miles out to sea. Its heading held to the north, following the long windings of South America. By then we had covered sixteen thousand leagues since we first came aboard in the seas of Japan.
Around eleven in the morning, the Tropic of Capricorn was crossed on the thirty-seventh meridian, and we passed well off Cape Frio. Captain Nemo, much to Ned Land's displeasure, had no liking for the neighborhood of these inhabited coasts of Brazil, for he ran at a dizzying speed. Not a single fish, not a single bird, however swift, could keep up with us, and the natural curiosities of these seas escaped all observation.
This pace held up for several days, and on the evening of April 9 we sighted the easternmost point of South America, which forms Cape São Roque. But then the Nautilus veered off again, and went hunting at greater depths for an undersea valley that gouges its way between this cape and Sierra Leone on the African coast. This valley forks at the latitude of the Antilles and ends in the north in an enormous depression nine thousand meters deep. Here the geological cross-section of the ocean shows, as far as the Lesser Antilles, a sheer cliff six kilometers high, cut straight down, and, at the latitude of the Cape Verde Islands, another wall no less formidable — the two of them thus enclosing the whole submerged continent of Atlantis. The floor of this immense valley is broken by a few mountains that lend a picturesque aspect to these submarine depths. I speak of it mainly on the strength of the manuscript charts in the Nautilus's library — charts plainly drawn by Captain Nemo's own hand and mapped from his personal observations.
For two days these deserted and deep waters were visited by means of the inclined planes. The Nautilus made long diagonal tacks that carried it to every level. But on April 11 it rose abruptly, and land reappeared to us at the mouth of the Amazon River — a vast estuary whose outflow is so tremendous that it freshens the sea over a stretch of several leagues.
The equator was crossed. Twenty miles to the west lay the Guianas, French territory where we could have found an easy refuge. But the wind was blowing a stiff gale, and the furious waves would never have let a mere dinghy face them. Ned Land no doubt understood this, for he said nothing to me about it. On my side, I made no allusion to his plans of escape, for I had no wish to push him into some attempt that would inevitably have miscarried.
I easily made up for this delay with some interesting studies. During those two days, the 11th and 12th of April, the Nautilus did not leave the surface of the sea, and its trawl brought up a whole miraculous catch of zoophytes, fish, and reptiles.
A few zoophytes had been dredged up by the trawl's dragging chain. They were, for the most part, beautiful phyctallines belonging to the family of the actinidians, and among other species the Phyctalis protexta, native to this part of the ocean — a small cylindrical trunk trimmed with vertical lines and dotted with red points, crowned by a marvelous bloom of tentacles. As for the mollusks, they consisted of creatures I had already observed: turret shells; porphyry olive shells with regularly crisscrossed lines whose russet markings stood out vividly against a flesh-colored ground; fanciful pteroceras shells like petrified scorpions; translucent hyala; argonauts; cuttlefish excellent to eat; and certain species of squid that the naturalists of antiquity classed among the flying fish, and which are used chiefly as bait for cod fishing.
Of the fish of these waters that I had not yet had occasion to study, I noted several species. Among the cartilaginous ones: pricka lampreys, a kind of eel fifteen inches long, with a greenish head, violet fins, a bluish-gray back, and a silvery-brown belly strewn with bright spots, the iris of the eye ringed with gold — curious animals that the current of the Amazon must have swept out to sea, for they inhabit fresh water; tuberculate rays with a pointed snout, a long slender tail, and armed with a long serrated spine; small sharks a meter long, gray and whitish of skin, whose teeth, set in several rows, curve backward, and which are commonly known as pantouffliers, or "slipper sharks"; bat-fish, a kind of reddish isosceles triangle half a meter across, whose pectoral fins are attached by fleshy extensions that give them the look of bats, but whose horny appendage near the nostrils has earned them the nickname sea unicorns; and finally a few species of triggerfish — the curassavian, whose stippled flanks gleam with a brilliant golden color, and the pale-violet leatherjacket, iridescent in shifting hues like a pigeon's throat.
I'll end this somewhat dry but very exact nomenclature with the series of bony fish I observed: passans, of the aptenote genus, whose snout is very blunt and snow-white, the body painted a fine black, and which are furnished with a very long, very slender fleshy thong; spiny odontognaths, long sardines three decimeters in length, resplendent with a vivid silvery gleam; guaru mackerel, provided with two anal fins; black centronotes with dark tints, caught with lighted torches — long fish two meters in length, with fatty, white, firm flesh that, eaten fresh, tastes like eel, and dried, like smoked salmon; half-red wrasses, clad in scales only at the base of the dorsal and anal fins; chrysopterans, on which gold and silver mingle their sheen with that of the ruby and the topaz; gilthead breams, whose flesh is extremely delicate and whose phosphorescent properties betray them amid the waters; pob breams, with a fine tongue and orange tints; coro croakers with golden tail fins; blackish surgeonfish; four-eyed fish of Surinam; and so on.
This "et cetera" won't keep me from mentioning one more fish that Conseil will remember for a long time, and with good reason.
One of our nets had brought up a sort of very flattened ray which, had its tail been cut off, would have formed a perfect disk, and which weighed some twenty kilograms. It was white below, reddish above, with big round spots of dark blue ringed with black, very smooth of skin, and ending in a two-lobed fin. Laid out on the platform, it thrashed about, tried to flip itself over with convulsive movements, and struggled so hard that a final jerk was about to hurl it back into the sea. But Conseil, who prized his fish, threw himself upon it, and before I could stop him, seized it with both hands.
In an instant there he was, knocked flat on his back, legs in the air, one half of his body paralyzed, and crying out:
"Oh, master! My master! Come help me!"
It was the first time the poor fellow had ever spoken to me without using the third person.
The Canadian and I picked him up, rubbed him down with all our might, and when he came to his senses, that eternal classifier murmured in a broken voice:
"Class of cartilaginous fish, order of chondropterygians with fixed gills, suborder of selacians, family of rays, genus of torpedoes!"
"Yes, my friend," I answered, "it's a torpedo ray that put you in this deplorable state."
"Ah, Master can take my word for it," Conseil shot back, "but I'll have my revenge on this animal."
"And how?"
"By eating it."
Which he did that very evening — but purely out of reprisal, for frankly it was tough.
The luckless Conseil had tangled with a torpedo ray of the most dangerous species, the cumana. This bizarre animal, in a conducting medium such as water, strikes down fish several meters away, so great is the power of its electric organ, whose two main surfaces measure no less than twenty-seven square feet.
The next day, April 12, during the daytime, the Nautilus approached the Dutch coast, toward the mouth of the Maroni. There, several groups of manatees lived in family bands. These were the manatis which, like the dugong and the Steller's sea cow, belong to the order of sirenians. These beautiful animals, peaceable and harmless, six or seven meters long, must have weighed at least four thousand kilograms. I told Ned Land and Conseil that provident nature had assigned these mammals an important role. It is they, in fact, who, like the seals, are meant to graze the submarine meadows and so destroy the masses of weed that clog the mouths of tropical rivers.
"And do you know," I added, "what has come about since men have almost wholly wiped out these useful races? The rotting weeds have poisoned the air, and the poisoned air is the yellow fever that ravages these admirable regions. The venomous vegetation has multiplied beneath these torrid seas, and the evil has spread irresistibly from the mouth of the Río de la Plata all the way to the Floridas!"
And if we're to believe Toussenel, this scourge is nothing yet beside the one that will strike our descendants when the seas are emptied of whales and seals. Then, choked with octopuses, jellyfish, and squid, they will become vast breeding grounds of infection, since their waters will no longer possess "those vast stomachs that God had charged with skimming the surface of the seas."
Meanwhile, without scorning these theories, the crew of the Nautilus took possession of half a dozen manatis. The point, in fact, was to stock the galley with an excellent meat, superior to beef and veal. This hunt was not an interesting one. The manatis let themselves be struck without defending themselves. Several thousand kilos of meat, destined to be dried, were stored aboard.
That same day, a catch made in a singular fashion further swelled the Nautilus's reserves, so teeming with game were these seas. The trawl had brought up in its meshes a number of fish whose heads ended in an oval plate with fleshy borders. These were remoras, of the third family of the subbrachian malacopterygians. Their flattened disk is made up of movable transverse cartilaginous plates, between which the animal can create a vacuum, enabling it to cling to objects the way a suction cup does.
The remora I had observed in the Mediterranean belongs to this species. But the one in question here was the bony-scaled remora, peculiar to this sea. Our sailors, as they took them, dropped them into tubs full of water.
The fishing done, the Nautilus drew nearer to the coast. In this spot a number of sea turtles were sleeping at the surface of the waves. It would have been difficult to seize these precious reptiles, for the slightest noise wakes them, and their sturdy shell is harpoon-proof. But the remora was to carry out this capture with extraordinary sureness and precision. This animal is, in fact, a living fishhook, one that would make the fortune and delight of the naive angler with his line.
The men of the Nautilus fastened to the tail of these fish a ring wide enough not to hamper their movements, and to that ring a long cord made fast at the other end to the ship.
The remoras, tossed into the sea, at once began their work and went to fix themselves to the breastplates of the turtles. Their grip was so tenacious that they would have torn apart sooner than let go. They were hauled aboard, and with them the turtles to which they clung.
In this way we took several loggerheads, a meter across, weighing two hundred kilos. Their shells, covered with large, thin, transparent, brown horny plates flecked with white and yellow, made them very valuable. Besides, they were excellent from the standpoint of eating, as were the green turtles, which are of an exquisite flavor.
This catch ended our stay in the waters off the Amazon, and, when night came, the Nautilus regained the open sea.
For several days the Nautilus kept steadily away from the American coast. Clearly it had no wish to venture into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean Sea. There would have been no shortage of water beneath its keel — the average depth of those seas is eighteen hundred meters — but no doubt those waters, strewn with islands and furrowed by steamers, did not suit Captain Nemo.
On April 16 we raised Martinique and Guadeloupe, at a distance of about thirty miles. For a moment I caught sight of their high peaks.
The Canadian, who had counted on carrying out his plans somewhere in the Gulf — either by making land or by hailing one of the many boats that ply their coasting trade from island to island — was thoroughly put out. Escape would have been quite feasible if Ned Land could have gotten hold of the dinghy without the captain's knowledge. But out on the open ocean, it was no longer to be thought of.
The Canadian, Conseil, and I had a fairly long conversation on the subject. For six months now we had been prisoners aboard the Nautilus. We had covered seventeen thousand leagues, and, as Ned Land pointed out, there was no reason why it should ever end. So he made me a proposal I hadn't expected: to put the question to Captain Nemo point-blank. Did the captain mean to keep us aboard his vessel indefinitely?
Such a move went against my grain. As I saw it, it could lead nowhere. There was nothing to hope for from the commander of the Nautilus — everything, on the contrary, depended on ourselves alone. Besides, for some time now the man had been growing darker, more withdrawn, less sociable. He seemed to be avoiding me. I met him only at rare intervals. Once, he had taken pleasure in explaining the wonders of the deep to me; now he left me to my studies and no longer came to the salon.
What change had come over him? For what reason? I had nothing to reproach myself with. Perhaps our presence aboard weighed on him? Even so, I could hardly hope that he was the kind of man to give us back our freedom.
So I asked Ned to let me think the matter over before we acted. If the move produced no result, it might only revive Nemo's suspicions, make our situation harder, and jeopardize the Canadian's plans. I might add that there was no way I could plead ill health as an argument. Apart from the harsh ordeal of the ice barrier at the South Pole, none of us had ever been better — not Ned, not Conseil, not I. This wholesome food, this healthy air, this regularity of life, this uniformity of temperature, gave sickness no opening; and for a man to whom memories of the land brought no regret, for a Captain Nemo, who is at home wherever he goes, who goes where he pleases, who marches toward his goal by ways mysterious to others though not to himself — such an existence I could understand. But we had not broken with humanity. For my own part, I had no wish to bury my strange and wholly new studies along with myself. I had now earned the right to write the true book of the sea, and that book I wanted to see the light of day sooner rather than later.
There too, in those waters of the Antilles, ten meters below the surface, through the open panels, what a wealth of interesting specimens I had to enter in my daily notes! Among the zoophytes there were siphonophores known as the pelagic Physalia — great oblong bladders with a pearly sheen, spreading their membranes to the wind and letting their blue tentacles trail like threads of silk: charming jellyfish to the eye, true nettles to the touch, distilling a corrosive fluid. Among the articulates there were annelids a meter and a half long, armed with a pink proboscis and equipped with seventeen hundred organs of locomotion; they wound their way beneath the waters, casting off, as they passed, every color of the solar spectrum. In the branch of fishes there were molubar rays — enormous cartilaginous creatures ten feet long and weighing six hundred pounds, with a triangular pectoral fin, a slightly humped back, and eyes set at the outer edges of the front of the head; they floated like the wreckage of a ship and now and then clapped themselves against our window like an opaque shutter. There were American triggerfish, for which nature has ground up nothing but black and white; feathery gobies, long and fleshy, with yellow fins and a jutting jaw; mackerel of sixteen decimeters, with short sharp teeth and small scales, belonging to the albacore species. Then, in swarms, came surmullets girdled with stripes of gold from head to tail, waving their resplendent fins — true masterpieces of the jeweler's art, once dedicated to Diana, especially prized by wealthy Romans, and of which the old proverb ran: "Let him who catches them not eat them!" Finally, golden angelfish, adorned with emerald bands, dressed in velvet and silk, passed before our eyes like lords stepped out of a Veronese painting; spurred sea bream slipped away on the swift stroke of their thoracic fins; fifteen-inch clupanodons wrapped themselves in their phosphorescent glow; gray mullet beat the sea with their thick fleshy tails; red whitefish seemed to mow the waves with their knife-edged pectorals; and silvery moonfish, worthy of their name, rose over the watery horizon like so many pale-shining moons.
How many more marvelous new specimens I might have observed, had the Nautilus not gradually sunk toward the lower strata! Its inclined planes carried it down to depths of two thousand and three thousand five hundred meters. There animal life was represented only by sea lilies, starfish, lovely Medusa's-head feather stars whose straight stalks bore a little calyx, top shells, bloody-toothed shells, and keyhole limpets — littoral mollusks of the larger species.
On April 20 we had risen again to a mean depth of fifteen hundred meters. The nearest land was then the archipelago of the Lucayan Islands, scattered like a heap of paving stones over the surface of the waters. There rose high submarine cliffs, sheer walls built of rough-hewn blocks laid in broad courses, between which opened black holes that our electric beams could not light to the bottom.
These rocks were carpeted with tall grasses, giant kelp, gigantic wrack — a veritable espalier of water plants fit for a world of Titans.
From these colossal plants, Conseil, Ned, and I naturally fell to speaking of the sea's gigantic animals. The one is plainly meant to feed the other. Yet through the windows of the nearly motionless Nautilus, I could still make out on those long filaments nothing but the chief articulates of the brachyuran order — long-legged spider crabs, violet crabs, and clios peculiar to the Caribbean waters.
It was about eleven o'clock when Ned Land drew my attention to a tremendous swarming going on through the great weeds.
"Well," I said, "these are real devilfish caverns, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a few of those monsters here."
"What!" said Conseil. "Squid — plain ordinary squid — of the class of cephalopods?"
"No," I said, "devilfish of great size. But friend Land is surely mistaken, for I don't see anything."
"A pity," Conseil replied. "I'd like to meet one of those devilfish face to face — the ones I've heard so much about, that can drag ships down into the depths. Those beasts are called krak—"
"A crock is more like it," the Canadian cut in dryly.
"—Krakens," Conseil finished, not troubling himself over his companion's little joke.
"You'll never make me believe," said Ned Land, "that such animals exist."
"Why not?" answered Conseil. "We believed in Master's narwhal, after all."
"We were wrong, Conseil."
"No doubt! But others still believe in it, I'm sure."
"Very likely, Conseil. But for my part, I'm quite determined not to admit the existence of such monsters until I've dissected one with my own hands."
"So," Conseil asked me, "Master doesn't believe in giant devilfish?"
"Who the devil ever did believe in them?" cried the Canadian.
"A great many people, friend Ned."
"Not fishermen. Scholars, maybe!"
"Beg your pardon, Ned. Fishermen and scholars both!"
"But I who am speaking to you now," said Conseil, with the most serious air in the world, "remember perfectly well seeing a large boat dragged under the waves by the arms of a cephalopod."
"You saw that?" the Canadian demanded.
"Yes, Ned."
"With your own eyes?"
"With my own eyes."
"Where, if you please?"
"At Saint-Malo," Conseil answered, unruffled.
"In the harbor?" said Ned Land, mocking.
"No, in a church," Conseil replied.
"In a church!" cried the Canadian.
"Yes, friend Ned. It was a painting — a painting of the devilfish in question!"
"Good!" said Ned Land, bursting out laughing. "Monsieur Conseil, pulling my leg!"
"As a matter of fact, he's right," I said. "I've heard of that painting; but the subject it shows is drawn from a legend, and you know what to make of legends where natural history is concerned! Besides, when it comes to monsters, the imagination asks nothing better than to run wild.
"Not only has it been claimed that these devilfish could drag ships under, but a certain Olaus Magnus tells of a cephalopod a mile long that looked more like an island than an animal. There's also the tale of the bishop of Nidros, who one day set up an altar on an immense rock. When his Mass was over, the rock got under way and returned to the sea. The rock was a devilfish."
"And that's all?" asked the Canadian.
"No," I replied. "Another bishop, Pontoppidan of Bergen, likewise speaks of a devilfish on which a whole regiment of cavalry could maneuver!"
"They knew how to lay it on, those bishops of the old days!" said Ned Land.
"And finally, the naturalists of antiquity cite monsters whose maws were like a gulf, and which were too big to pass through the Strait of Gibraltar."
"Now that's more like it!" said the Canadian.
"But in all these stories," Conseil asked, "what is there that's true?"
"Nothing, my friends — nothing, at least, beyond the bounds of the plausible that mounts into fable or legend. Still, the imagination of storytellers needs, if not a cause, at least a pretext. There's no denying that devilfish and squid of very large species exist, though smaller nonetheless than the cetaceans. Aristotle recorded the dimensions of a squid five cubits long — that is, three meters ten. Our fishermen frequently see specimens more than a meter eighty in length. The museums of Trieste and Montpellier preserve skeletons of devilfish that measure two meters. Moreover, by the naturalists' reckoning, one of these animals only six feet long would have tentacles twenty-seven feet long. Which is quite enough to make a formidable monster."
"Are any caught nowadays?" asked the Canadian.
"If fishermen don't catch them, sailors at least see them. A friend of mine, Captain Paul Bos of Le Havre, has often assured me that he met one of these monsters, of colossal size, in the seas of India. But the most astonishing fact of all, the one that no longer allows the existence of these gigantic animals to be denied, took place only a few years ago, in 1861."
"What fact is that?" asked Ned Land.
"Here it is. In 1861, to the northeast of Tenerife — at just about the latitude where we are at this moment — the crew of the dispatch boat Alecton sighted a monstrous squid swimming in its waters. Commander Bouguer drew close to the animal and attacked it with harpoons and gunfire, without much success, for balls and harpoons passed through that soft flesh as through a jelly with no substance to it. After several fruitless attempts, the crew managed to slip a running knot around the mollusk's body. The knot slid down as far as the tail fins and stopped there. They then tried to haul the monster aboard, but its weight was so considerable that it tore away from its own tail under the pull of the rope, and, stripped of that ornament, it vanished beneath the waters."
"There, at last, is a fact," said Ned Land.
"An indisputable fact, my good Ned. And so it was proposed to name this devilfish 'Bouguer's squid.'"
"And how long was it?" the Canadian asked.
"Wasn't it about six meters?" said Conseil, who, posted at the window, was once more examining the crannies of the cliff.
"Precisely," I answered.
"Wasn't its head," Conseil went on, "crowned with eight tentacles that thrashed on the water like a nest of writhing serpents?"
"Precisely."
"Weren't its eyes, set flush with the head, of considerable size?"
"Yes, Conseil."
"And its mouth — wasn't it a real parrot's beak, but a formidable one?"
"Just so, Conseil."
"Well then! No offense to Master," Conseil replied calmly, "but if this isn't Bouguer's squid, here at least is one of its brothers."
I looked at Conseil. Ned Land rushed to the window.
"The frightful beast!" he cried.
I looked in my turn, and I couldn't hold back a shudder of revulsion. Before my eyes writhed a horrible monster, worthy of a place in the legends of the monster-mongers.
It was a squid of colossal dimensions, eight meters long. It was traveling backward with tremendous velocity, straight toward the Nautilus. It stared with its huge fixed eyes of a glaucous green. Its eight arms — or rather its eight feet, rooted in its head, which is what has earned these animals the name cephalopod, "head-foot" — were twice the length of its body and writhed like the hair of the Furies. One could see distinctly the two hundred and fifty suckers arranged along the inner face of the tentacles in the form of half-spherical capsules. From time to time these suckers fastened onto the salon window, drawing a vacuum against the glass. The monster's mouth — a horny beak shaped like a parrot's — opened and closed vertically. Its tongue, a horny substance itself armed with several rows of sharp teeth, came quivering out of that veritable pair of shears. What a whim of nature! A bird's beak on a mollusk! Its body, spindle-shaped and swollen in the middle, formed a fleshy mass that must have weighed twenty to twenty-five thousand kilograms. Its inconstant color, changing with extreme speed according to the creature's irritation, passed in turn from a livid gray to a reddish brown.
What was irritating this mollusk? No doubt the presence of the Nautilus, more formidable than itself, and on which its sucking arms and its mandibles could get no purchase. And yet — what monsters these devilfish are, what vitality the Creator has bestowed on them, what vigor in their movements, given that they possess three hearts!
Chance had brought us face to face with this squid, and I did not mean to let slip the chance to study this specimen of the cephalopods with care. I mastered the horror its appearance stirred in me and, taking up a pencil, I began to draw it.
"Perhaps it's the very same one the Alecton met," said Conseil.
"No," answered the Canadian, "since this one is whole and the other lost its tail!"
"That's no reason," I replied. "The arms and tail of these animals grow back by regeneration, and in seven years the tail of Bouguer's squid has surely had time to sprout again."
"Besides," Ned retorted, "if it isn't this one, maybe it's one of those!"
And in fact, other devilfish were appearing at the starboard window. I counted seven. They formed an escort around the Nautilus, and I heard the grinding of their beaks on the iron hull. We were served to our heart's content.
I went on with my work. These monsters held themselves in our waters with such precision that they seemed motionless, and I could have traced them foreshortened on the glass. In any case, we were moving at a moderate pace.
Suddenly the Nautilus stopped. A shock ran shuddering through its whole frame.
"Have we struck something?" I asked.
"In any case," the Canadian answered, "we'd already be free of it, since we're afloat."
The Nautilus was afloat, no doubt, but it was no longer moving. The blades of its propeller weren't beating the waves. A minute passed. Captain Nemo, followed by his first officer, came into the salon.
I hadn't seen him for some time. He seemed to me somber. Without speaking to us, without perhaps even seeing us, he went to the panel, looked at the devilfish, and said a few words to his officer.
The officer went out. Soon the panels closed again. The ceiling lit up.
I went over to the captain.
"A curious collection of devilfish," I said to him, in the offhand tone a hobbyist might take before the glass of an aquarium.
"Indeed, Professor," he answered me, "and we're going to fight them hand to hand."
I stared at the captain. I thought I hadn't heard him right.
"Hand to hand?" I repeated.
"Yes, Professor. The propeller has stopped. I believe the horny mandibles of one of these squid have gotten caught in the blades. That's what's keeping us from moving."
"And what do you mean to do?"
"Rise to the surface and slaughter every last one of this vermin."
"A difficult undertaking."
"So it is. The electric bullets are powerless against that soft flesh, where they don't meet enough resistance to burst. But we'll attack them with axes."
"And with the harpoon, Captain," said the Canadian, "if you won't refuse my help."
"I accept it, Master Land."
"We'll go with you," I said, and, following Captain Nemo, we made our way toward the central staircase.
There a dozen men, armed with boarding axes, stood ready for the attack. Conseil and I took up two axes. Ned Land seized a harpoon.
By now the Nautilus had returned to the surface. One of the sailors, posted on the topmost rungs, was unscrewing the bolts of the panel. But hardly were the nuts loosened when the panel flew up with tremendous violence, plainly wrenched open by the sucker of a devilfish's arm.
At once one of those long arms slid like a serpent through the opening, and twenty more thrashed above it. With one stroke of his axe, Captain Nemo cut off the formidable tentacle, which slid writhing down the rungs.
Just as we were pressing against one another to reach the platform, two other arms, lashing the air, came down on the sailor standing in front of Captain Nemo and lifted him away with irresistible force.
Captain Nemo let out a cry and hurled himself outside. We rushed after him.
What a scene! The wretched man, seized by the tentacle and glued to its suckers, was being swung through the air at the whim of that enormous trunk. He gasped, he choked, he screamed: "Help! Help me!" Those words, spoken in French, filled me with profound shock! So I had a countryman aboard — several, perhaps! That heart-rending cry I will hear for the rest of my life!
The unfortunate man was lost. Who could tear him from that powerful grip? Yet Captain Nemo had flung himself on the devilfish and, with one blow of his axe, had struck off another of its arms. His first officer struggled furiously against other monsters crawling up the flanks of the Nautilus. The crew fought with their axes. The Canadian, Conseil, and I drove our weapons into those fleshy masses. A violent smell of musk filled the air. It was horrible.
For an instant I thought the poor man, wound in the devilfish's coils, might be torn free of its powerful suction. Seven of the eight arms had been cut away. A single one, brandishing its victim like a feather, writhed in the air. But just as Captain Nemo and his officer flung themselves upon it, the animal shot out a column of blackish liquid, secreted from a pouch in its abdomen. We were blinded by it. When the cloud had cleared, the squid had vanished — and with it my luckless countryman!
What a rage then drove us against those monsters! We were beside ourselves. Ten or twelve devilfish had overrun the platform and the flanks of the Nautilus. We rolled pell-mell among those writhing serpent-stumps that leaped and jerked across the platform in floods of blood and black ink. It seemed as though those slimy tentacles grew back like the heads of the Hydra. At every stroke Ned Land's harpoon plunged into the glaucous eyes of the squid and burst them. But my daring companion was suddenly bowled over by the tentacles of a monster he hadn't been able to dodge.
Ah! how my heart did not break with terror and horror, I cannot say! The formidable beak of the squid had gaped open over Ned Land. The poor man was about to be cut in two. I threw myself to his rescue. But Captain Nemo had beaten me to it. His axe disappeared between the two enormous mandibles, and, miraculously saved, the Canadian rose to his feet and drove his harpoon clear through to the triple heart of the devilfish.
"I owed myself this revenge!" said Captain Nemo to the Canadian.
Ned bowed without answering him.
The battle had lasted a quarter of an hour. The monsters, beaten, mutilated, struck to death, at last gave way and vanished beneath the waves.
Captain Nemo, red with blood, motionless beside the beacon, gazed at the sea that had swallowed one of his companions, and great tears ran from his eyes.
None of us will ever be able to forget that terrible scene of April 20. I wrote it down under the pressure of a violent emotion. Since then I have gone back over the account. I read it aloud to Conseil and the Canadian. They found it accurate as to the facts, but inadequate as to the effect. To paint such scenes as those, one would need the pen of the most illustrious of our poets, the author of The Toilers of the Sea.
I have said that Captain Nemo wept as he gazed out over the waves. His grief was immense. This was the second companion he had lost since our arrival aboard. And what a death! That friend, crushed, smothered, broken in the fearsome arm of a devilfish, ground to pulp between its iron mandibles, would never rest with his shipmates in the peaceful waters of the coral cemetery!
For my own part, in the midst of that struggle, it was the cry of despair torn from the poor wretch that had ripped my heart open. That poor Frenchman, forgetting the artificial language of the crew, had gone back to speaking the tongue of his country and his mother, to hurl out one last appeal! So among this crew of the Nautilus, bound body and soul to Captain Nemo, fleeing like him from all contact with other men, I had a countryman! Was he the only one to represent France in this mysterious brotherhood, evidently made up of men of many different nationalities? It was one more of those insoluble problems that kept rising, endlessly, before my mind.
Captain Nemo went back into his cabin, and I did not see him again for some time. But how sad, how despairing, how irresolute he must have been, if I could judge by the ship itself, of which he was the soul and which received every one of his moods! The Nautilus no longer held any set course. It came and went, it drifted like a corpse at the mercy of the swells. Its propeller had been cleared, and yet it hardly used it. The ship sailed at random. It could not tear itself away from the scene of its last battle, from that sea which had devoured one of its own!
Ten days passed like this. It was only on May 1 that the Nautilus resolutely took up its course north again, after raising the Lucayas at the mouth of the Bahama Channel. We were then following the current of the sea's greatest river, a river with its own banks, its own fish, and its own temperature. I mean the Gulf Stream.
It is a river, in truth, that flows freely through the middle of the Atlantic, its waters never mingling with the waters of the ocean around it. It is a salt river, saltier than the surrounding sea. Its average depth is three thousand feet, its average width sixty miles. In certain places its current runs at a speed of four kilometers an hour. The unvarying volume of its waters is greater than that of all the rivers of the globe combined.
The true source of the Gulf Stream, identified by Commander Maury — its starting point, if you like — lies in the Bay of Biscay. There its waters, still weak in temperature and color, begin to form. It runs south, skirts equatorial Africa, warms its waves in the rays of the torrid zone, crosses the Atlantic, reaches Cape São Roque on the Brazilian coast, and forks into two branches, one of which goes off to saturate itself still further with the warm molecules of the Caribbean Sea. Then the Gulf Stream, charged with restoring the balance between the temperatures and blending the waters of the tropics with the waters of the north, begins its work as a great regulator. Heated white-hot in the Gulf of Mexico, it climbs north along the American coasts, pushes up as far as Newfoundland, is deflected under the thrust of the cold current from Davis Strait, resumes its ocean course by following the rhumb line along one of the globe's great circles, and divides into two arms around the forty-third degree — one of which, helped along by the northeast trade wind, returns to the Bay of Biscay and the Azores, while the other, after warming the shores of Ireland and Norway, runs on beyond Spitsbergen, where its temperature drops to four degrees, to form the open sea of the pole.
It was on this river of the ocean that the Nautilus was now sailing. As it comes out of the Bahama Channel, fourteen leagues wide and three hundred and fifty meters deep, the Gulf Stream moves at a rate of eight kilometers an hour. This speed decreases steadily as the current works its way north, and one can only hope that this regularity holds, for if — as some believe they have observed — its speed and its direction were ever to change, the climates of Europe would be thrown into disturbances whose consequences no one could begin to calculate.
Toward noon I was out on the platform with Conseil. I was explaining the peculiar features of the Gulf Stream to him. When my explanation was done, I invited him to plunge his hands into the current.
Conseil obeyed, and was very much surprised to feel no sensation of either heat or cold.
"That comes," I told him, "from the fact that the temperature of the Gulf Stream's waters, as they leave the Gulf of Mexico, differs very little from the temperature of the blood. This Gulf Stream is a vast heating system, one that lets the coasts of Europe deck themselves in an eternal green. And if Maury is to be believed, the heat of this current, if it could be harnessed entirely, would supply enough calories to keep a river of molten iron as large as the Amazon or the Missouri in a state of fusion."
At that moment the speed of the Gulf Stream was two meters twenty-five per second. Its current is so distinct from the surrounding sea that its compressed waters rise up above the level of the ocean, and a difference in level forms between them and the cold waters around them. Dark, moreover, and very rich in mineral salts, they stand out by their pure indigo against the green waves surrounding them. So sharp, in fact, is the line dividing them that the Nautilus, off the Carolinas, cut through the waves of the Gulf Stream with its ram while its propeller was still churning those of the open ocean.
This current swept along with it a whole world of living creatures. The argonauts, so common in the Mediterranean, traveled here in numerous shoals. Among the cartilaginous fish, the most remarkable were rays whose very slender tails made up almost a third of the body, and which formed vast diamonds twenty-five feet long; then small sharks a meter in length, with big heads, short rounded snouts, and pointed teeth arranged in several rows, their bodies seemingly covered with scales.
Among the bony fish I noted grey wrasses peculiar to these seas; synagris sea breams whose irises blazed like fire; croakers a meter long, with wide mouths bristling with small teeth, that gave off a faint cry; black centronotes, which I have mentioned before; blue dorados picked out in gold and silver; parrotfish, true rainbows of the ocean, that can rival in color the loveliest birds of the tropics; triangle-headed blennies; bluish rhombus flatfish without scales; batrachoids marked with a yellow crosswise band that forms a Greek letter T; swarms of little pointed gobies stippled with brown spots; dipterodons with silvery heads and yellow tails; various samples of salmon; slender, softly gleaming mullet that Lacépède dedicated to the gentle companion of his life; and finally a beautiful fish, the American cavalier, which — decorated with every order and bedecked with every ribbon — frequents the shores of that great nation where ribbons and decorations are held in such modest esteem.
I will add that, during the night, the phosphorescent waters of the Gulf Stream rivaled the electric glare of our beacon, especially in the stormy weather that threatened us so often.
On May 8 we were still abreast of Cape Hatteras, off the coast of North Carolina. The width of the Gulf Stream is there seventy-five miles, and its depth two hundred and ten meters. The Nautilus went on wandering at random. All watchfulness seemed to have been banished from on board. I will admit that, under these conditions, an escape might have succeeded. Indeed, the inhabited shores offered easy refuge everywhere. The sea was ceaselessly furrowed by the many steamers that run the service between New York or Boston and the Gulf of Mexico, and crossed night and day by those little schooners engaged in coastal trade along the various points of the American shore. There was hope of being picked up. It was, then, a favorable opportunity, despite the thirty miles that separated the Nautilus from the shores of the Union.
But one unfortunate circumstance thwarted the Canadian's plans completely. The weather was very bad. We were approaching those waters where storms are frequent, that homeland of waterspouts and cyclones, bred precisely by the Gulf Stream's current. To brave an often raging sea in a frail little boat was to run headlong to certain destruction. Ned Land admitted as much himself. And so he chafed at the bit, gripped by a furious homesickness that flight alone could have cured.
"Professor," he said to me that day, "this has got to end. I want to know where I stand. Your Nemo is pulling away from land and heading north. But I'm telling you plainly — I've had my fill of the South Pole, and I won't follow him to the North Pole."
"What can we do, Ned, when an escape is out of the question at the moment?"
"I keep coming back to my idea. We have to talk to the captain. You said nothing when we were in the seas off your country. I want to speak, now that we're in the seas off mine. When I think that in a few days the Nautilus is going to be off Nova Scotia, and that there, near Newfoundland, a wide bay opens up — that into that bay pours the Saint Lawrence, and that the Saint Lawrence is my river, the river of Quebec, my native city — when I think of that, the fury rises up in my face, my hair stands on end. Listen, Professor, I'd sooner throw myself into the sea! I won't stay here! I'm suffocating!"
The Canadian was clearly at the end of his patience. His vigorous nature could not adjust itself to this prolonged imprisonment. His face was altering by the day. His temper was growing darker and darker. Nearly seven months had gone by without our having had any news from the land. On top of that, Captain Nemo's withdrawal into himself, his changed mood — above all since the battle with the devilfish — his silence, all of it was making me see things in a different light. I no longer felt the enthusiasm of the early days. It took a Fleming like Conseil to accept such a situation, in this element reserved for whales and the other creatures of the sea. Truly, if that good fellow had had gills instead of lungs, I believe he would have made a distinguished fish!
"Well, Professor?" Ned Land went on, seeing that I did not answer.
"Well, Ned, you want me to ask Captain Nemo what his intentions are regarding us?"
"Yes, Professor."
"Even though he has already made them known?"
"Yes. I want to be certain one last time. Speak for me alone, in my name alone, if you like."
"But I hardly ever run into him. He even avoids me."
"That's all the more reason to go and find him."
"I'll put the question to him, Ned."
"When?" the Canadian pressed.
"When I run into him."
"Professor Aronnax, would you like me to go and find him myself?"
"No, let me handle it. Tomorrow —"
"Today," said Ned Land.
"So be it. Today I'll see him," I answered the Canadian, who, had he acted for himself, would certainly have ruined everything.
I was left alone. The request decided upon, I resolved to have done with it at once. I prefer a thing done to a thing still to do.
I went back to my cabin. From there I heard someone pacing in Captain Nemo's. I must not let this chance to meet with him slip by. I knocked at his door. I got no answer. I knocked again, then turned the knob. The door opened.
I went in. The captain was there. Bent over his worktable, he had not heard me. Determined not to leave without questioning him, I came up to him. He raised his head abruptly, knit his brows, and said to me in a fairly harsh tone:
"You, here! What do you want with me?"
"To speak with you, Captain."
"But I am busy, sir, I am working. This freedom I leave you to keep to yourself — may I not have it for myself?"
The welcome was hardly encouraging. But I was resolved to hear everything out, so as to answer everything.
"Captain," I said coldly, "I have to speak to you about a matter I cannot allow myself to put off."
"About what, sir?" he replied ironically. "Have you made some discovery that escaped me? Has the sea yielded up some new secret to you?"
We were far from any common ground. But before I could reply, he showed me a manuscript lying open on his table and said to me in a graver tone:
"Here, Professor Aronnax, is a manuscript written in several languages. It contains the summary of my studies of the sea, and, God willing, it will not perish with me. This manuscript, signed with my name, completed by the story of my life, will be sealed inside a small unsinkable container. The last of us all to survive aboard the Nautilus will throw this container into the sea, and it will go wherever the waves may carry it."
This man's name! His own history, written by his own hand! So his mystery would one day be laid bare? But at that moment I saw in this confidence nothing more than an opening.
"Captain," I answered, "I can only approve of the thought that moves you. The fruit of your studies must not be lost. But the means you are using strikes me as crude. Who knows where the winds will drive this container, into what hands it will fall? Could you not find something better? Can you not, or one of your men —?"
"Never, sir," said the captain sharply, cutting me off.
"But I, and my companions, we are ready to keep this manuscript in reserve, and if you give us back our freedom —"
"Your freedom!" said Captain Nemo, rising to his feet.
"Yes, sir, and that is the subject on which I wanted to question you. For seven months we have been aboard your vessel, and I ask you today, in the name of my companions as much as my own, whether it is your intention to keep us here forever."
"Professor Aronnax," said Captain Nemo, "I will answer you today what I answered you seven months ago: whoever enters the Nautilus must never leave it."
"But this is slavery itself that you are imposing on us!"
"Give it whatever name you please."
"But everywhere a slave keeps the right to win back his freedom! Whatever the means that offer themselves, he may hold them good!"
"That right," answered Captain Nemo, "who denies it to you? Have I ever thought of binding you by an oath?"
The captain looked at me, folding his arms.
"Sir," I said to him, "to come back a second time to this subject would be to neither your taste nor mine. But since we have begun it, let us have it out. I tell you again, it is not only myself that is at issue. For me study is a solace, a powerful diversion, a spur, a passion that can make me forget everything else. Like you, I am a man able to live unknown, obscure, in the fragile hope of one day bequeathing to the future the results of my labors, by means of some hypothetical container entrusted to the chance of the waves and the winds. In a word, I can admire you, I can follow you without displeasure in a role that I understand on certain points; but there are still other aspects of your life that let me glimpse it hedged about with complications and mysteries in which, alone here, my companions and I have no part. And even when our hearts have been able to beat for you, stirred by some of your sorrows or moved by your acts of genius and courage, we have had to choke back within ourselves the least sign of that sympathy which the sight of what is beautiful and good awakens, whether it comes from a friend or from an enemy. Well, it is this feeling — that we are strangers to everything that touches you — which makes our position something unacceptable, impossible, even for me, but impossible above all for Ned Land. Every man, simply by virtue of being a man, is worth thinking about. Have you asked yourself what schemes of vengeance the love of liberty, the hatred of slavery, might give rise to in a nature like the Canadian's — what he might be thinking, attempting, trying?"
I had fallen silent. Captain Nemo rose.
"Let Ned Land think, attempt, try whatever he likes — what is it to me? It was not I who went looking for him! It is not for my pleasure that I keep him aboard! As for you, Professor Aronnax, you are one of those who can understand anything, even silence. I have nothing more to answer you. Let this first time you have taken up this subject be also the last, for a second time I could not even bring myself to listen to you."
I withdrew. From that day on, our situation was very strained. I reported my conversation to my two companions.
"Now we know," said Ned, "that there is nothing to hope for from this man. The Nautilus is drawing near Long Island. We will make our escape, whatever the weather."
But the sky was growing more and more threatening. Symptoms of a hurricane were showing themselves. The atmosphere turned whitish and milky. To the cirrus clouds in their fine sheaves there succeeded, along the horizon, layers of nimbocumulus. Other low clouds went scudding rapidly past. The sea rose and swelled in long heaving rollers. The birds vanished, all but the storm petrels, those friends of foul weather. The barometer fell noticeably and indicated an extreme tension of vapors in the air. The mixture in the storm glass broke down under the influence of the electricity saturating the atmosphere. The struggle of the elements was near.
The storm broke on the day of May 18, just as the Nautilus was afloat off Long Island, a few miles from the New York channels. I am able to describe this struggle of the elements, because instead of fleeing it in the depths of the sea, Captain Nemo, out of some inexplicable whim, chose to face it out at the surface.
The wind was blowing from the southwest, at first a strong gale — that is, at a speed of fifteen meters a second — which rose to twenty-five meters toward three in the afternoon. That is the figure of a tempest.
Captain Nemo, unshakable under the squalls, had taken up his place on the platform. He had lashed himself around the waist to withstand the monstrous waves breaking over him. I had hauled myself up as well and tied myself down, dividing my wonder between this storm and this incomparable man who stood up to it.
The raging sea was swept by great rags of cloud that trailed down into its waves. I could no longer make out any of those small intermediate ripples that form in the bottom of the great troughs. Nothing but long soot-colored undulations, so compact that their crests did not break. Their height kept rising. They lashed each other into a frenzy. The Nautilus, now heeled over on its side, now standing up like a mast, rolled and pitched frightfully.
Toward five o'clock a torrential rain came down, and it beat down neither the wind nor the sea. The hurricane was unleashed at a speed of forty-five meters a second, that is, nearly forty leagues an hour. Under such conditions it topples houses, drives roof tiles through doors, snaps iron gratings, and shifts twenty-four-pounder cannon. And yet the Nautilus, in the midst of the tumult, bore out the words of a certain learned engineer: "There is no well-built hull that cannot defy the sea!" It was no resisting rock, which those waves would have demolished; it was a spindle of steel, obedient and mobile, without rigging, without masts, that braved their fury with impunity.
Meanwhile I studied those unleashed waves attentively. They measured up to fifteen meters in height over a length of a hundred and fifty to a hundred and seventy-five meters, and their speed of propagation, half that of the wind, was fifteen meters a second. Their volume and their power grew with the depth of the water. I understood then the role of these waves, which trap the air within their flanks and force it down to the bottom of the seas, where they carry life along with the oxygen. Their extreme force of pressure — it has been calculated — can rise as high as three thousand kilograms per square foot of the surface they beat against. It was waves like these that, in the Hebrides, shifted a block weighing eighty-four thousand pounds. It was waves like these that, in the storm of December 23, 1864, after leveling part of the town of Yedo, in Japan, and traveling seven hundred kilometers an hour, went and broke that same day on the shores of America.
The intensity of the storm grew with the night. The barometer, as in 1860 at Réunion during a cyclone, fell to 710 millimeters. At the close of day I saw a great ship pass on the horizon, laboring painfully. It was lying to under low steam, trying to hold itself head-on to the sea. It must have been one of the steamers on the lines from New York to Liverpool or Le Havre. It soon disappeared into the darkness.
At ten o'clock in the evening the sky was on fire. The atmosphere was streaked with violent flashes of lightning. I could not bear their brilliance, while Captain Nemo, looking them full in the face, seemed to breathe in the very soul of the storm. A terrible noise filled the air, a complex noise made up of the howling of the crushed waves, the bellowing of the wind, the crash of the thunder. The wind leaped to every point of the horizon, and the cyclone, setting out from the east, came back to it by way of the north, the west, and the south, in the direction opposite to the whirling storms of the southern hemisphere.
Ah, this Gulf Stream! It lived up to its name of king of storms! It is the Gulf Stream that creates these formidable cyclones, by the difference in temperature between the layers of air stacked above its currents.
The rain had given way to a downpour of fire. The droplets of water changed into blazing plumes. You would have thought that Captain Nemo, wanting a death worthy of himself, was seeking to have himself struck by lightning. In one appalling pitch of the ship, the Nautilus reared its steel ram up into the air like the rod of a lightning conductor, and I saw long sparks come streaming from it.
Broken, at the end of my strength, I dragged myself flat on my belly toward the hatch. I opened it and went back down into the salon. The storm was then reaching its maximum of intensity. It was impossible to stand upright inside the Nautilus.
Captain Nemo came back down toward midnight. I heard the ballast tanks fill little by little, and the Nautilus sank gently below the surface of the waves.
Through the open windows of the salon, I saw great terrified fish that passed like phantoms through the burning waters. Some of them were struck by lightning before my very eyes!
The Nautilus went on descending. I thought it would find calm at a depth of fifteen meters. No. The upper layers were too violently agitated. We had to go seek rest as far down as fifty meters, in the very bowels of the sea.
But there, what tranquility, what silence, what a peaceful realm! Who would have said that a terrible hurricane was raging just then on the surface of that ocean?
In the wake of that storm we had been thrown back to the east. Every hope of escaping onto the approaches of New York or of the St. Lawrence had vanished. Poor Ned, in despair, shut himself away as thoroughly as Captain Nemo. Conseil and I no longer left each other's side.
I said the Nautilus had been carried off to the east. I should have said, more precisely, to the northeast. For several days it wandered now over the surface of the waves, now beneath, in the midst of those fogs so dreaded by sailors. They are caused chiefly by the melting of the ice, which keeps the air here saturated with moisture. How many ships have been lost in these waters, running in to make out the uncertain lights of the coast! How many disasters owed to these dense, blinding banks of fog! How many shocks upon these reefs whose breaking surf is drowned out by the roar of the wind! How many collisions between vessels, in spite of their running lights, in spite of the warnings of their whistles and their alarm bells!
And so the bottom of these seas had the look of a battlefield, where all these vanquished of the Ocean still lay: some old and already thickly encrusted, others fresh and reflecting the glare of our beacon on their ironwork and their copper hulls. Among them, how many ships lost with all hands, with their crews and their whole crowds of emigrants, at those dangerous points flagged in the statistics — Cape Race, St. Paul's Island, the Strait of Belle Isle, the estuary of the St. Lawrence! And in these last few years alone, how many victims added to those grim records by the lines of the Royal Mail, the Inman, the Montreal — the Solway, the Isis, the Paramatta, the Hungarian, the Canadian, the Anglo-Saxon, the Humboldt, the United States, all run aground; the Arctic, the Lyonnais, sunk in collision; the President, the Pacific, the City of Glasgow, vanished for reasons never known — a scattering of dark wreckage through which the Nautilus now sailed, as though it were passing the dead in review!
On May 15 we were off the southern tip of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. These banks are a product of the sea's own deposits, an enormous accumulation of organic debris brought either from the Equator by the current of the Gulf Stream, or from the northern pole by that cold countercurrent that runs along the American coast. Here, too, pile up the erratic blocks dragged down by the breakup of the ice. Here has formed a vast ossuary of fish, of mollusks, of zoophytes, which perish here by the billion.
The sea is not especially deep over the Grand Banks. A few hundred fathoms at most. But toward the south there suddenly opens a deep trough, a pit three thousand meters down. Here the Gulf Stream spreads out. Its waters flower wide. It loses its speed and its warmth, but it becomes a sea in its own right.
Among the fish that the Nautilus startled as it passed, I will mention the lumpfish, a meter long, blackish along the back and orange on the belly, which sets its fellows an example of conjugal fidelity they rarely follow; a large unernack, a kind of emerald moray, excellent eating; some big-eyed karraks, whose heads bear a certain resemblance to a dog's; blennies, egg-laying like the snakes; black gobies, or gudgeon, two decimeters long; and long-tailed grenadiers with a silvery gleam, swift fish that had ventured far from the hyperborean seas.
The nets also brought up a bold, brazen fish, powerful and heavily muscled, armed with spines on its head and prickles along its fins — a veritable scorpion two to three meters long, the sworn enemy of the blennies, the cods, and the salmon: it was the sculpin of the northern seas, its body knobbed and warty, brown in color, red at the fins. The fishermen of the Nautilus had some trouble laying hold of this animal, which, thanks to the structure of its gill covers, keeps its breathing organs safe from the drying touch of the air and can survive some time out of the water.
I mention now — for the record — some little boskian fish that keep company with ships for long stretches in the northern seas; some sharp-snouted bleak, peculiar to the North Atlantic; some rascasses; and I come at last to the cods, and chiefly to that species the common cod, which I caught in its favorite haunt, on this inexhaustible bank of Newfoundland.
You might call these cods mountain fish, for Newfoundland is really nothing but an underwater mountain. When the Nautilus opened itself a path through their crowded ranks, Conseil could not hold back an observation:
"That! Cod?" he said. "But I always thought cod were flat, like dabs or soles."
"You innocent!" I cried. "Cod are only flat at the grocer's, where they're shown split open and laid out. In the water they're spindle-shaped, like mullet, and perfectly built for moving."
"I'll take Master's word for it," Conseil replied. "What a swarm — what an anthill of them!"
"Ah, my friend, there'd be far more still, if it weren't for their enemies — the rascasses and men! Do you know how many eggs have been counted in a single female?"
"Let's do the thing properly," Conseil replied. "Five hundred thousand."
"Eleven million, my friend."
"Eleven million. That I will never accept — not unless I count them myself."
"Then count them, Conseil. But you'll come round to believing me a great deal faster. Besides, it's by the thousands that the French, the English, the Americans, the Danes, the Norwegians fish for cod. They're eaten in prodigious quantities, and without these fish's astonishing fertility the seas would soon be stripped bare of them. In England and America alone, five thousand ships manned by seventy-five thousand sailors are employed in the cod fishery. Each ship brings back forty thousand on average, which comes to twenty-five million. And off the coasts of Norway, the same again."
"Fine," Conseil replied. "I'll defer to Master. I won't count them."
"Count what?"
"The eleven million eggs. But I will make one remark."
"And that is?"
"That if every one of those eggs hatched, four cod would be enough to feed England, America, and Norway."
As we skimmed the bottom of the Newfoundland banks, I could see, perfectly clearly, those long lines armed with two hundred hooks apiece that each boat pays out by the dozen. Each line, dragged down at one end by a small grapnel, was held at the surface by a rope made fast to a cork buoy. The Nautilus had to maneuver deftly through the middle of this underwater web.
In any case, it did not linger long in these busy waters. It rose toward the forty-second parallel of latitude. That put us on a level with St. John's, Newfoundland, and with Heart's Content, where the far end of the transatlantic cable comes ashore.
The Nautilus, instead of holding on to the north, took a course to the east, as though meaning to follow that telegraph plateau on which the cable rests, and whose relief repeated soundings have mapped with extreme precision.
It was on May 17, some five hundred miles from Heart's Content, at a depth of two thousand eight hundred meters, that I caught sight of the cable lying on the sea floor. Conseil, whom I had not warned, took it at first for some gigantic sea serpent and was getting ready to classify it by his usual method. But I set the good fellow straight, and to console him for his disappointment I told him various particulars about the laying of this cable.
The first cable was established during the years 1857 and 1858; but after transmitting some four hundred telegrams, it ceased to function. In 1863 the engineers built a new one, measuring three thousand four hundred kilometers and weighing four thousand five hundred tons, which was loaded aboard the Great Eastern. This attempt failed as well.
Now, on May 25, the Nautilus, submerged at a depth of three thousand eight hundred thirty-six meters, found itself precisely at the spot where the break occurred that ruined the enterprise. It was six hundred thirty-eight miles from the coast of Ireland. At two in the afternoon it had been noticed that communications with Europe had just been cut off. The electricians on board resolved to cut the cable before fishing it up, and by eleven that night they had brought up the damaged section. They made a fresh joint and splice; then the cable was lowered again. But a few days later it snapped once more, and could not be recovered from the depths of the Ocean.
The Americans were not discouraged. The daring Cyrus Field, promoter of the enterprise, who was risking his whole fortune on it, called for a new subscription. It was covered at once. Another cable was made, on better principles. The bundle of conducting wires, insulated in a sheath of gutta-percha, was protected by a padding of textile material held within a metal armature. The Great Eastern put to sea again on July 13, 1866.
The operation went well. There was, however, one incident. Several times, as they were paying out the cable, the electricians noticed that nails had recently been driven into it, meant to ruin its core. Captain Anderson, his officers, and his engineers met, deliberated, and posted a notice that if the guilty man were caught aboard, he would be thrown into the sea with no further trial. From that moment the criminal attempts stopped.
On July 23, the Great Eastern was no more than eight hundred kilometers from Newfoundland when it received word by telegraph from Ireland of the armistice concluded between Prussia and Austria after Sadowa. On the 27th, through the fog, it made out the port of Heart's Content. The enterprise had come to a happy end, and in its first dispatch young America sent old Europe these wise words, so rarely understood: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will."
I had not expected to find the electric cable in its original state, as it was when it left the workshops that made it. The long serpent, coated with fragments of shell, bristling with foraminifera, was crusted over in a stony sheath that protected it against the boring mollusks. It lay quietly, sheltered from the movements of the sea, and under a pressure favorable to the transmission of that electric spark which passes from America to Europe in thirty-two hundredths of a second. The life of this cable will no doubt be endless, for it has been observed that the gutta-percha sheath actually improves with its long stay in seawater.
Besides, on this so happily chosen plateau, the cable is never sunk to depths great enough to break it. The Nautilus followed it down to its lowest point, four thousand four hundred thirty-one meters down, and there it still rested without any strain of tension. Then we drew near the place where the accident of 1863 had happened.
The ocean floor there formed a valley a hundred and twenty kilometers wide, on which you might have set Mont Blanc without its summit breaking the surface of the waves. This valley is closed off to the east by a sheer wall two thousand meters high. We reached it on May 28, and the Nautilus was now no more than a hundred and fifty kilometers from Ireland.
Was Captain Nemo going to rise and make land on the British Isles? No. To my great surprise, he went back down to the south and returned toward European waters. Rounding the Emerald Isle, I caught a moment's glimpse of Cape Clear and the light of Fastnet, which guides the thousands of ships that put out from Glasgow or Liverpool.
An important question then presented itself to my mind.
Would the Nautilus dare to venture into the English Channel? Ned Land, who had reappeared since we began to close with land, never stopped questioning me. How was I to answer him? Captain Nemo remained invisible. Having let the Canadian glimpse the shores of America, was he now going to show me the coasts of France?
Meanwhile the Nautilus kept dropping steadily toward the south. On May 30 it passed in sight of Land's End, between the outermost point of England and the Scilly Isles, which it left to starboard.
If it meant to enter the Channel, it needed to bear frankly to the east. It did not.
All through the day of May 31, the Nautilus described a series of circles on the sea that intrigued me deeply. It seemed to be searching for a spot it was having some trouble finding. At noon Captain Nemo came up to take the ship's position himself. He did not say a word to me. He seemed to me gloomier than ever. What could be casting him down like this? Was it his nearness to the shores of Europe? Did he feel some resurgence of memory of the country he had left behind? What was he feeling then — remorse, or regret? For a long while this thought occupied my mind, and I had a kind of presentiment that chance would soon betray the captain's secrets.
The next day, June 31, the Nautilus held to the same maneuvers. It was plain that it was trying to fix a precise point in the Ocean. Captain Nemo came up to take the height of the sun, as he had done the day before. The sea was calm, the sky clear. Eight miles to the east, a great steamship stood out on the line of the horizon. No flag flew at its gaff, and I could not make out its nationality.
A few minutes before the sun crossed the meridian, Captain Nemo took his sextant and made his observation with extreme precision. The absolute calm of the waves made his task easier. The Nautilus lay motionless, feeling neither roll nor pitch.
I was on the platform at that moment. When his reading was finished, the captain spoke these words and no more:
"It is here!"
He went back down through the hatch. Had he seen the vessel that was altering its course and seemed to be drawing nearer to us? I could not say.
I returned to the salon. The hatch closed, and I heard the hiss of water in the tanks. The Nautilus began to sink, along a vertical line, for its screw, now checked, gave it no forward motion at all.
A few minutes later it came to rest at a depth of eight hundred thirty-three meters, settling on the bottom.
Then the luminous ceiling of the salon went out, the panels opened, and through the windows I saw the sea brilliantly lit by the rays of the beacon for a radius of half a mile.
I looked out to port, and saw nothing but the immensity of the tranquil waters.
To starboard, on the bottom, there rose a heavy swelling shape that caught my attention. You would have said it was ruins buried under a crust of whitish shells, as under a mantle of snow. Studying this mass closely, I thought I could make out the thickened forms of a ship, stripped of its masts, that must have gone down bow-first. The wreck certainly dated from a distant time. To have become so caked in the limestone of the waters, it had already spent many long years down there on the floor of the Ocean.
What ship was this? Why had the Nautilus come to visit its grave? Had it really been a shipwreck that dragged this vessel under the waves?
I did not know what to think, when, close beside me, I heard Captain Nemo say in a slow voice:
"In her day this ship was called the Marseillais. She carried seventy-four guns and was launched in 1762. On August 13, 1778, commanded by La Poype-Vertrieux, she fought boldly against the Preston. On July 4, 1779, she took part with Admiral d'Estaing's squadron in the capture of Grenada. On September 5, 1781, she joined the Comte de Grasse's action in Chesapeake Bay. In 1794 the French Republic changed her name. On April 16 of that same year she joined Villaret-Joyeuse's squadron at Brest, charged with escorting a convoy of wheat coming from America under the command of Admiral Van Stabel. On the 11th and 12th of Prairial, Year Two, this squadron met the English ships. Professor, today is the 13th of Prairial, the first of June, 1868. Seventy-four years ago to the day, at this very spot, at latitude 47°24′ and longitude 17°28′, this ship, after a heroic fight, dismasted of all three of her masts, the water in her holds, a third of her crew out of action, chose to go down with her three hundred and fifty-six sailors rather than surrender — and nailing her colors to her stern, she vanished beneath the waves to the cry of: Long live the Republic!"
"The Vengeur!" I cried.
"Yes, Professor. The Vengeur! A fine name!" murmured Captain Nemo, folding his arms.
The way he had said it, the suddenness of the whole scene, the history of that patriot ship recounted so coldly at first, and then the emotion with which the strange man had spoken his last words, that name Vengeur — whose meaning could not escape me — all of it came together to strike deep into my mind. My eyes never left the captain. He, his hands stretched out toward the sea, was gazing with a burning eye at that glorious wreck. Perhaps I would never know who he was, where he had come from, where he was going — but more and more I saw the man break free of the scholar. It was no ordinary misanthropy that had shut Captain Nemo and his companions inside the hull of the Nautilus, but a hatred, monstrous or sublime, that time could not weaken.
Was that hatred still hunting for vengeance? The future would soon teach me.
Meanwhile the Nautilus was rising slowly toward the surface, and I watched the dim shapes of the Vengeur disappear little by little. Soon a slight roll told me that we were floating in the open air.
At that moment a muffled detonation reached us. I looked at the captain. The captain did not move.
"Captain?" I said.
He did not answer.
I left him and climbed up onto the platform. Conseil and the Canadian had gotten there ahead of me.
"Where did that shot come from?" I asked.
"A cannon shot," Ned Land answered.
I looked in the direction of the ship I had spotted earlier. It had drawn closer to the Nautilus, and you could see it was cramming on steam. Six miles separated it from us.
"What ship is that, Ned?"
"From her rigging, from the height of her lower masts," the Canadian replied, "I'd bet she's a warship. May she come down on us and sink this damned Nautilus, if that's what it takes!"
"Friend Ned," Conseil replied, "what harm can it do the Nautilus? Will it go and attack us under the waves? Will it cannonade us on the ocean floor?"
"Tell me, Ned," I asked, "can you make out this ship's nationality?"
The Canadian, knitting his brows, lowering his lids, crinkling his eyes at the corners, stared for a few moments at the ship with all the force of his gaze.
"No, Professor," he answered. "I can't tell what nation she belongs to. Her flag isn't hoisted. But I can swear she's a warship, because there's a long pennant streaming from the top of her mainmast."
For a quarter of an hour we went on watching the ship as it bore down on us. Still, I couldn't believe it had recognized the Nautilus at that distance, still less that it knew what this underwater craft was.
Soon the Canadian announced that this ship was a great warship, ram-bowed, a two-decked ironclad. Thick black smoke poured from its two funnels. Its furled sails blended into the line of the yards. Its gaff flew no flag. The distance still made it impossible to make out the colors of its pennant, which streamed like a thin ribbon.
It was coming on fast. If Captain Nemo let it draw near, a chance of rescue was opening for us.
"Professor," Ned Land said to me, "let that ship pass within a mile of us and I'll throw myself into the sea, and I urge you to do the same."
I made no answer to the Canadian's proposal, and I went on watching the ship as it grew larger before my eyes. English, French, American, or Russian — whatever it was, it would surely take us in if we could only reach its side.
"Master will kindly remember," Conseil said then, "that we have some experience at swimming. He can rely on me to tow him toward that ship, should it suit him to follow friend Ned."
I was about to answer when a burst of white vapor spurted from the bow of the warship. Then, a few seconds later, the water — churned up by the fall of some heavy body — splashed over the stern of the Nautilus. A moment after that, a detonation struck my ear.
"What? They're firing on us!" I cried.
"Fine fellows!" muttered the Canadian.
"So they don't take us for castaways clinging to a wreck!"
"Begging Master's pardon... Well!" said Conseil, shaking off the water that a fresh cannonball had sent splashing all the way up to him. "Begging Master's pardon, they've recognized the narwhal, and they're firing on the narwhal."
"But surely they can see," I cried, "that they're dealing with men."
"Maybe that's exactly why!" Ned Land answered, looking at me.
A whole revelation dawned on me. No doubt people now knew what to make of the supposed monster's existence. No doubt, during its clash with the Abraham Lincoln, when the Canadian struck it with his harpoon, Commander Farragut had realized that the narwhal was an underwater boat, more dangerous than any supernatural whale. Yes, that had to be it, and on every sea, no doubt, they were now hunting this terrible engine of destruction!
Terrible indeed, if — as one might well suppose — Captain Nemo was using the Nautilus for a work of vengeance! That night when he shut us up in the cell, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, hadn't he attacked some ship? That man now buried in the coral cemetery — hadn't he been a victim of the collision the Nautilus had caused? Yes, I say it again. That must be how it was. A part of Captain Nemo's mysterious existence was coming to light. And even if his identity was not known, at least the nations banded together against him were now hunting not some fabulous creature, but a man who had sworn them an implacable hatred!
That whole formidable past rose up before my eyes. Instead of finding friends aboard the approaching ship, we could find nothing there but merciless enemies.
Meanwhile the cannonballs were multiplying around us. Some, striking the surface of the water, went ricocheting off to lose themselves at considerable distances. But not one hit the Nautilus.
The ironclad was now no more than three miles off. Despite its violent bombardment, Captain Nemo did not appear on the platform. And yet one of those conical shells, striking the hull of the Nautilus square on, would have been fatal to it.
The Canadian said to me then:
"Professor, we have to try everything to get ourselves out of this fix. Let's signal them! A thousand devils! Maybe they'll understand we're honest folk!"
Ned Land took out his handkerchief to wave it in the air. But he had barely unfurled it when — struck down by an iron hand, for all his prodigious strength — he crumpled to the deck.
"Wretch!" cried the captain. "Do you want me to nail you to the ram of the Nautilus before it hurls itself against that ship?"
Captain Nemo, terrible to hear, was more terrible still to see. His face had gone white with the spasms of his heart, which must have stopped beating for an instant. His pupils had contracted horribly. His voice no longer spoke — it roared. His body bent forward, he was wrenching the Canadian's shoulders beneath his hand.
Then, letting him go and turning back toward the warship whose shells were raining down around him:
"Ah! So you know who I am, ship of an accursed nation!" he cried in his powerful voice. "I had no need of your colors to know you! Look! I'll show you mine!"
And Captain Nemo unfurled at the front of the platform a black flag, like the one he had already planted at the South Pole.
At that instant a cannonball, striking the hull of the Nautilus at an angle without piercing it, ricocheted past the captain and went off to lose itself in the sea.
Captain Nemo shrugged. Then, turning to me:
"Go below," he told me curtly. "Go below, you and your companions."
"Captain," I cried, "are you really going to attack that ship?"
"Professor, I am going to sink it."
"You can't do that!"
"I will do it," Captain Nemo replied coldly. "Do not presume to judge me, Professor. Fate is showing you what you were never meant to see. The attack has come. The answer will be terrible. Get back inside."
"That ship — what is it?"
"You don't know? Well then — so much the better! Its nationality, at least, will stay a secret to you. Go below."
The Canadian, Conseil, and I could do nothing but obey. Some fifteen of the Nautilus's sailors surrounded the captain, watching with an implacable hatred the ship that was bearing down on them. You could feel that the same breath of vengeance drove every one of those souls.
I went below just as another shell grazed the hull of the Nautilus once more, and I heard the captain cry out:
"Strike, you mad ship! Squander your useless shot! You won't escape the ram of the Nautilus. But this is not the place where you're meant to die! I won't have your ruins mingle with the ruins of the Vengeur!"
I went back to my cabin. The captain and his first officer had stayed on the platform. The propeller was set turning, and the Nautilus, drawing swiftly away, put itself out of range of the warship's shells. But the pursuit went on, and Captain Nemo was content simply to hold his distance.
Around four in the afternoon, unable to hold back the impatience and dread devouring me, I came back to the central staircase. The hatch was open. I ventured out onto the platform. The captain was still pacing there with an agitated step. He was watching the ship, which lay to leeward five or six miles off. He circled around it like a wild beast, and, drawing it eastward, let himself be pursued. And yet he did not attack. Perhaps he was still hesitating?
I wanted to step in one last time. But I had barely called out to Captain Nemo when he silenced me:
"I am the law, I am justice!" he told me. "I am the oppressed, and there is the oppressor! Through him, everything I loved, cherished, revered — country, wife, children, my father, my mother — I watched it all perish! Everything I hate is there! Be silent!"
I cast one last look at the warship, which was cramming on steam. Then I rejoined Ned and Conseil.
"We're getting away!" I cried.
"Good," said Ned. "What ship is it?"
"I don't know. But whatever it is, it will be sunk before nightfall. In any case, better to die with it than to make ourselves accomplices to a reprisal whose justice no one can measure."
"That's my thinking too," Ned Land answered coldly. "Let's wait for night."
Night came. A deep silence reigned aboard. The compass showed that the Nautilus had not changed course. I could hear the beat of its propeller striking the waves with a swift regularity. It was holding at the surface, and a slight roll carried it now to one side, now to the other.
My companions and I had resolved to make our escape the moment the ship came close enough for us to be heard, or at least seen, for the moon — which would be full three days later — was shining brightly. Once aboard that ship, even if we couldn't ward off the blow that threatened it, at least we would do everything circumstances allowed us to attempt. Several times I thought the Nautilus was making ready to attack. But it only let its adversary draw nearer, and, a little while later, resumed its fleeing pace.
Part of the night passed without incident. We watched for our chance to act. We spoke little, being too overwrought. Ned Land would have liked to fling himself into the sea. I forced him to wait. To my mind, the Nautilus would attack the two-decker at the surface, and then escape would be not only possible but easy.
At three in the morning, uneasy, I climbed up onto the platform. Captain Nemo had not left it. He stood at the bow, near his flag, which a light breeze spread out above his head. He never took his eyes off the ship. His gaze, of an extraordinary intensity, seemed to draw it in, to hypnotize it, to reel it in more surely than if he had it under tow!
The moon was just then crossing the meridian. Jupiter was rising in the east. In the midst of all that peaceful nature, sky and ocean vied with each other in tranquility, and the sea offered to the queen of night the loveliest mirror that had ever reflected her image.
And when I thought of that deep calm of the elements, set against all the fury smoldering inside the hull of the all-but-invisible Nautilus, I felt my whole being shudder.
The ship was holding two miles off. It had come closer, still steering toward that phosphorescent glow that marked the Nautilus's presence. I saw its running lights, green and red, and its white lamp hung from the forestay of the foremast. A faint glow lit up its rigging and showed that its fires were being driven to the limit. Showers of sparks, cinders of blazing coal escaping from its funnels, studded the air with stars.
I stayed like that until six in the morning, without Captain Nemo seeming to notice me. The ship stayed a mile and a half from us, and with the first gleams of daylight its bombardment began again. The moment could not be far off when, the Nautilus attacking its adversary, my companions and I would leave forever this man I dared not judge.
I was getting ready to go below and warn them when the first officer came up onto the platform. Several sailors were with him. Captain Nemo did not see them, or did not want to see them. Certain preparations were made that you might have called the Nautilus's "clearing for action." They were very simple. The rail that formed a balustrade around the platform was lowered. Likewise, the cages of the beacon and the helmsman withdrew into the hull until they were flush with it. The surface of the long cigar of sheet metal no longer offered a single projection that might hamper its maneuvering.
I went back to the salon. The Nautilus was still riding at the surface. A few gleams of morning filtered down into the liquid layer. Beneath certain swells of the waves, the windows came alive with the reddish light of the rising sun. That terrible day of June 2 was dawning.
At five o'clock the log told me that the Nautilus's speed was slackening. I understood that it was letting the enemy close in. Besides, the detonations were coming louder now, more violent. The cannonballs plowed the surrounding water and screwed down into it with a strange whistling.
"My friends," I said, "the moment has come. A handshake, and may God watch over us!"
Ned Land was resolute, Conseil calm, and I on edge, barely holding myself together.
We passed into the library. Just as I was pushing open the door that led to the well of the central staircase, I heard the upper hatch slam shut.
The Canadian dashed for the steps, but I stopped him. A hiss I knew all too well told me that water was pouring into the ship's ballast tanks. And indeed, in a matter of moments, the Nautilus dove a few meters beneath the surface of the waves.
I understood its maneuver. It was too late to act.
The Nautilus had no intention of striking the two-decker in its impenetrable armor, but below its waterline, there where the metal shell no longer protects the planking.
We were prisoners once again, forced witnesses to the sinister drama being prepared. And in any case, we scarcely had time to think. Taking refuge in my cabin, we looked at one another without a word. A deep stupor had seized my mind. The movement of thought stopped inside me. I was in that painful state that comes just before the waiting for some appalling explosion. I waited, I listened, I lived by the sense of hearing alone!
Meanwhile the Nautilus's speed increased noticeably. It was gathering its run. Its whole hull was quivering.
Suddenly I let out a cry. A shock came — but a relatively slight one. I felt the piercing force of the steel ram. I heard scrapings, gratings. But the Nautilus, carried on by the power of its propulsion, passed straight through the mass of the ship like a sailmaker's needle through canvas!
I couldn't bear it. Wild, frantic, I burst out of my cabin and rushed into the salon.
Captain Nemo was there. Silent, grim, implacable, he was looking out through the port window.
An enormous mass was sinking beneath the waters, and so as to miss nothing of its death throes, the Nautilus was going down into the abyss along with it. Ten meters from me I saw that hull torn open, the water pouring in with a sound like thunder, then the double row of cannon and the bulwarks. The deck was covered with black shapes, struggling.
The water rose. The wretched men flung themselves into the shrouds, clung to the masts, writhed beneath the water. It was a human anthill caught in the sudden flooding of a sea!
Paralyzed, rigid with anguish, my hair standing on end, my eyes stretched wide, my breath coming short — breathless, voiceless — I too was watching! An irresistible pull held me pinned to the glass!
The huge ship was sinking slowly. The Nautilus, following it down, watched its every movement. All at once there came an explosion. Compressed air blew the ship's decks apart as if fire had reached the magazines. The surge of water was so violent that the Nautilus was thrown off course.
Then the doomed ship went down faster. Its tops, crowded with victims, came into view, then the crosstrees, bending under clusters of men, and finally the very peak of its mainmast. Then the dark mass vanished, and with it that crew of corpses, dragged down by a tremendous whirlpool...
I turned back toward Captain Nemo. That terrible dispenser of justice, that veritable archangel of hatred, was still watching. When it was all over, Captain Nemo went to the door of his cabin, opened it, and went in. I followed him with my eyes.
On the far bulkhead, beneath the portraits of his heroes, I saw the portrait of a woman, still young, and of two little children. Captain Nemo gazed at them for a few moments, stretched out his arms to them, and, sinking to his knees, broke into sobs.
The panels had slid shut over that terrifying sight, but the light had not been given back to the salon. Inside the Nautilus there was nothing but darkness and silence. It was leaving that place of desolation, a hundred feet below the surface, with prodigious speed. Where was it going? North or south? Where was this man fleeing to, after his horrible act of vengeance?
I had gone back to my cabin, where Ned and Conseil were sitting in silence. I felt an unconquerable horror for Captain Nemo. Whatever he had suffered at the hands of men, he had no right to punish like this. He had made me, if not the accomplice, then at least the witness of his revenge! That was already too much.
At eleven o'clock the electric light came back on. I went through to the salon. It was deserted. I consulted the various instruments. The Nautilus was fleeing northward at a speed of twenty-five miles an hour, sometimes at the surface, sometimes thirty feet beneath it.
Taking our bearings on the chart, I saw that we were passing the mouth of the English Channel, and that our course was carrying us toward the northern seas at an incomparable speed.
I could barely catch, as they flashed past, the long-nosed sharks, the hammerheads, the dogfish that haunt those waters, great sea eagles, clouds of seahorses like the knights on a chessboard, eels writhing like the little serpents of a fireworks display, whole armies of crabs fleeing sideways with their claws crossed over their shells, and finally schools of porpoises racing the Nautilus for speed. But of observing, studying, classifying — there was no longer any question.
By evening we had covered two hundred leagues of the Atlantic. Shadow fell, and the sea was overrun with darkness until the moon rose.
I went back to my cabin. I could not sleep. I was besieged by nightmares. The horrible scene of destruction kept playing over and over in my mind.
From that day on, who could ever say how far the Nautilus carried us into that basin of the North Atlantic? Always at that unmeasurable speed! Always in the middle of the hyperborean fogs! Did it touch the headlands of Spitsbergen, the sheer cliffs of Novaya Zemlya? Did it range across those uncharted seas, the White Sea, the Kara Sea, the Gulf of Ob, the Liakhov archipelago, and those unknown shores of the Asian coast? I could not say. I had lost all reckoning of the passing time. The hour had been suspended on the ship's clocks. It seemed that night and day, as in the polar lands, no longer followed their regular course. I felt myself drawn into that realm of the strange where the overwrought imagination of Edgar Allan Poe moved so freely. At every moment I expected to see, like the fabulous Gordon Pym, "that shrouded human figure, of proportions far vaster than those of any dweller upon the earth, thrown across the cataract that guards the approaches to the pole"!
I estimate — though perhaps I am mistaken — I estimate that this reckless dash of the Nautilus went on for fifteen or twenty days, and I do not know how long it might have lasted, but for the catastrophe that put an end to the voyage. Of Captain Nemo there was no further sign. Of his first officer, none either. Not a single member of the crew was visible for one instant. Almost without pause, the Nautilus stayed submerged. When it came up to the surface to renew its air, the panels opened and closed automatically. No more positions marked on the planisphere. I had no idea where we were.
I will say too that the Canadian, at the end of his strength and his patience, no longer showed himself. Conseil could not draw a single word out of him, and feared that in some fit of delirium, under the grip of a terrible homesickness, he might kill himself. So he watched over him with a devotion that never let up for a moment.
You can understand that, under these conditions, the situation had become impossible.
One morning — on what date, I could not say — I had dozed off toward the first hours of the day, a heavy, sickly sort of sleep. When I woke, I saw Ned Land leaning over me, and I heard him say in a low voice:
"We're going to make our escape!"
I sat up.
"When?" I asked.
"Tomorrow night. All watch seems to have vanished from the Nautilus. It's as if a stupor has settled over the whole ship. You'll be ready, Professor?"
"Yes. Where are we?"
"In sight of land I just made out this morning through the fog, twenty miles to the east."
"What land is it?"
"I've no idea, but whatever it is, we'll take shelter there."
"Yes, Ned. Yes, we'll escape tonight, even if the sea swallows us up!"
"The sea's rough, the wind's fierce, but twenty miles to cover in that light little boat of the Nautilus doesn't scare me. I've managed to carry some food and a few bottles of water aboard it without the crew knowing."
"I'll follow you."
"What's more," the Canadian added, "if I'm caught, I'll fight, I'll let them kill me."
"Then we'll die together, Ned my friend."
I was ready for anything. The Canadian left me. I made my way up to the platform, where I could barely keep my feet against the pounding of the waves. The sky was threatening, but since land was there in that thick fog, we had to run for it. We could not afford to lose a single day, or a single hour.
I went back to the salon, dreading and longing all at once to run into Captain Nemo, wanting and not wanting to see him. What would I have said to him? Could I have hidden from him the involuntary horror he now inspired in me? No! Better not to find myself face to face with him! Better to forget him! And yet!
How long that day was — the last I would spend aboard the Nautilus! I kept to myself. Ned Land and Conseil avoided speaking to me, for fear of giving themselves away.
At six o'clock I had dinner, but I had no appetite. I forced myself to eat, in spite of my revulsion, not wanting to weaken myself.
At half past six Ned Land came into my cabin. He said to me:
"We won't see each other again before we leave. At ten o'clock the moon won't be up yet. We'll take advantage of the dark. Come to the dinghy. Conseil and I will be waiting for you there."
Then the Canadian went out, without giving me time to answer him.
I wanted to check the Nautilus's heading. I went to the salon. We were running north-northeast at a frightening speed, at a depth of fifty meters.
I cast a last look over these marvels of nature, these treasures of art heaped up in this museum, this collection without rival, destined to perish one day at the bottom of the sea along with the man who had assembled it. I wanted to fix one final impression in my mind. I stayed there for an hour, bathed in the glow of the luminous ceiling, passing in review those treasures shining under their glass cases. Then I went back to my cabin.
There I put on stout sea clothes. I gathered up my notes and packed them carefully against my body. My heart was pounding hard. I could not still its beating. Surely my agitation, my distress, would have betrayed me to Captain Nemo's eyes.
What was he doing at that moment? I listened at the door of his cabin. I heard the sound of footsteps. Captain Nemo was there. He had not gone to bed. At every movement it seemed to me he was about to appear and ask me why I wanted to flee! I was seized by one alarm after another. My imagination magnified them. The feeling grew so agonizing that I asked myself whether it might not be better to walk into the captain's cabin, see him face to face, defy him with a look and a gesture!
It was a madman's impulse. Luckily I held myself back, and I stretched out on my bed to quiet the trembling of my body. My nerves calmed a little, but with my brain overexcited, I saw again, in one swift rush of memory, my whole life aboard the Nautilus — all the incidents, happy and unhappy, that had crossed it since I vanished from the Abraham Lincoln: the underwater hunts, the Torres Strait, the savages of Papua, the grounding, the coral cemetery, the passage through Suez, the island of Santorini, the Cretan diver, Vigo Bay, Atlantis, the ice barrier, the South Pole, the imprisonment in the ice, the battle with the devilfish, the storm in the Gulf Stream, the Avenger, and that horrible scene of the ship sunk with all her crew!... All these events passed before my eyes, like the painted backdrops that unroll behind the stage of a theater. And then Captain Nemo swelled to monstrous size in that strange setting. His figure grew sharper and took on superhuman proportions. He was no longer a fellow man, he was the man of the waters, the genie of the seas.
It was by then half past nine. I was gripping my head in both hands to keep it from bursting. I closed my eyes. I did not want to think anymore. Half an hour more to wait! Half an hour of a nightmare that might drive me mad!
At that moment I heard the vague strains of the organ, a mournful harmony beneath some indefinable chant, the true lament of a soul that wants to break its earthly bonds. I listened with every sense at once, barely breathing, plunged like Captain Nemo himself in those musical raptures that carried him away beyond the limits of this world.
Then a sudden thought terrified me. Captain Nemo had left his cabin. He was in that salon I had to cross in order to escape. There I would meet him one last time. He would see me, he might speak to me! A single gesture of his could annihilate me, a single word chain me to his ship!
Still, ten o'clock was about to strike. The moment had come to leave my cabin and rejoin my companions.
There was no hesitating, even if Captain Nemo should rise up before me. I opened my door carefully, and yet it seemed to me that as it turned on its hinges it made a frightful noise. Perhaps that noise existed only in my imagination!
I crept forward along the dark passageways of the Nautilus, stopping at every step to still the beating of my heart.
I reached the angled door of the salon. I opened it gently. The salon was sunk in deep darkness. The strains of the organ echoed faintly. Captain Nemo was there. He did not see me. I believe that even in full light he would not have noticed me, so completely was he absorbed in his rapture.
I dragged myself across the carpet, avoiding the least contact whose sound might have betrayed my presence. It took me five minutes to reach the far door that opened onto the library.
I was about to open it when a sigh from Captain Nemo froze me where I stood. I realized he was rising. I even caught a glimpse of him, for a few rays from the lighted library filtered through to the salon. He came toward me, arms folded, silent, gliding rather than walking, like a specter. His laboring chest heaved with sobs. And I heard him murmur these words — the last that ever struck my ear:
"Almighty God! Enough! Enough!"
Was it the confession of remorse escaping in this way from the conscience of that man?...
Beside myself, I rushed into the library. I climbed the central staircase, and, following the upper passageway, I reached the dinghy. I climbed in through the opening that had already let my two companions through.
"Let's go! Let's go!" I cried.
"Right now!" the Canadian answered.
The opening cut into the plating of the Nautilus was first closed and bolted shut with a wrench Ned Land had provided himself with. The opening of the dinghy was closed the same way, and the Canadian began to unscrew the bolts that still held us to the submarine boat.
Suddenly a noise from inside reached us. Voices were answering one another sharply. What was wrong? Had our escape been discovered? I felt Ned Land slip a dagger into my hand.
"Yes!" I murmured, "we'll know how to die!"
The Canadian had stopped his work. But one word, repeated twenty times over, one terrible word, revealed to me the cause of this commotion spreading through the Nautilus. It was not us that its crew was worried about!
"Maelström! Maelström!" they were crying.
The Maelström! Could a more terrifying name ring in our ears in a more terrifying situation? Were we then in those dangerous waters off the Norwegian coast? Was the Nautilus being dragged into that whirlpool, at the very moment our dinghy was about to break away from its flank?
As everyone knows, at the moment of the flood tide the waters squeezed between the Faroe Islands and the Lofotens are hurled forward with irresistible violence. They form a whirlpool from which no ship has ever managed to escape. From every point of the horizon come rushing monstrous waves. They form that gulf so aptly called the "Navel of the Ocean," whose power of attraction reaches out to a distance of fifteen kilometers. There are swallowed down not only ships, but whales, and even the white bears of the polar regions.
It was into this that the Nautilus — involuntarily, or perhaps deliberately — had been steered by its captain. It was tracing out a spiral whose radius grew smaller and smaller. And along with it, the dinghy, still hooked to its side, was carried along at a dizzying speed. I could feel it. I felt that sickening whirl that comes after a spinning motion carried on too long. We were in terror, in horror pushed to its utmost pitch, our blood halted in our veins, all nerve force annihilated, running with cold sweat like the sweat of the death agony! And what a roar around our frail little boat! What bellowings the echo flung back from miles away! What an uproar from those waters shattering on the sharp rocks of the bottom, there where the hardest bodies are broken, where tree trunks are worn away and take on "a coat of fur," as the Norwegian expression has it!
What a situation! We were pitched about horribly. The Nautilus was defending itself like a human being. Its steel muscles cracked. At times it reared up, and we with it!
"We have to hold on," said Ned, "and screw the bolts back down! By staying fastened to the Nautilus, we can still save ourselves...!"
He had not finished speaking when there came a splintering crack. The bolts gave way, and the dinghy, torn from its socket, was flung like a stone from a sling into the middle of the whirlpool.
My head struck an iron rib, and with that violent shock I lost consciousness.
Here, then, is the conclusion of this voyage beneath the seas. What happened during that night, how the dinghy tore free of the Maelström's terrible pull, how Ned Land, Conseil, and I came out of that abyss alive — I could never say. But when I came back to myself, I was lying in a fisherman's hut on one of the Lofoten Islands. My two companions, safe and sound, were beside me, gripping my hands. We threw our arms around one another and wept.
For the moment there is no thought of getting back to France. Between northern Norway and the south the means of travel are few and far between, and so I am forced to wait for the steamer that makes its twice-monthly run from the North Cape.
It is here, then, among the good people who took us in, that I go back over the record of these adventures. It is accurate. Not a single fact has been left out, not a single detail exaggerated. This is the faithful account of that improbable expedition beneath an element closed to humankind — an element that progress will one day open to free passage.
Will anyone believe me? I don't know. And it hardly matters, in the end. What I can affirm now is my right to speak of those seas, beneath which, in less than ten months, I crossed twenty thousand leagues — of that underwater tour of the world that unveiled so many wonders to me across the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the seas of the far south and the far north.
But what has become of the Nautilus? Did it withstand the grip of the Maelström? Is Captain Nemo still alive? Is he pursuing his terrible reprisals beneath the ocean, or did he stop short at that last slaughter? Will the waves one day bring us the manuscript that holds the whole story of his life? Will I ever learn this man's name? Will the sunken warship tell us, by its nationality, the nationality of Captain Nemo?
I hope so. And I hope, too, that his powerful vessel conquered the sea in its most dreadful whirlpool, and that the Nautilus survived where so many ships have perished! If that is so — if Captain Nemo still inhabits that ocean, the country he adopted as his own — then may the hatred be stilled in that fierce heart! May the contemplation of so many wonders quench the spirit of vengeance in him! May the avenger fade away, and the man of science go on with the peaceful exploration of the seas! If his destiny is strange, it is sublime as well. Have I not understood that for myself? Did I not live ten months of that other-than-natural existence? And so, to that question posed six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes — "Who has ever been able to sound the depths of the abyss?" — two men among all men now have the right to answer. Captain Nemo and I.