ton or two of water that we had to bail out. But thanks to our
skillful coxswain, we were fouled on the bias rather than broadside,
so we didn’t capsize. Clinging to the stempost, Ned Land thrust his
harpoon again and again into the gigantic animal, which imbedded its
teeth in our gunwale and lifted the longboat out of the water as a
lion would lift a deer. We were thrown on top of each other, and I
have no idea how the venture would have ended had not the Canadian,
still thirsting for the beast’s blood, finally pierced it to the
heart.
I heard its teeth grind on sheet iron, and the dugong disappeared,
taking our harpoon along with it. But the barrel soon popped up on the
surface, and a few moments later the animal’s body appeared and rolled
over on its back. Our skiff rejoined it, took it in tow, and headed to
the Nautilus.
It took pulleys of great strength to hoist this dugong onto the
platform. The beast weighed 5,000 kilograms. It was carved up in sight
of the Canadian, who remained to watch every detail of the
operation. At dinner the same day, my steward served me some slices of
this flesh, skillfully dressed by the ship’s cook. I found it
excellent, even better than veal if not beef.
The next morning, February 11, the Nautilus’s pantry was enriched by
more dainty game. A covey of terns alighted on the Nautilus. They were
a species of Sterna nilotica unique to Egypt: beak black, head gray
and stippled, eyes surrounded by white dots, back, wings, and tail
grayish, belly and throat white, feet red. Also caught were a couple
dozen Nile duck, superior-tasting wildfowl whose neck and crown of the
head are white speckled with black.
By then the Nautilus had reduced speed. It moved ahead at a saunter,
so to speak. I observed that the Red Sea’s water was becoming less
salty the closer we got to Suez.
Near five o’clock in the afternoon, we sighted Cape Ras Mohammed to
the north. This cape forms the tip of Arabia Petraea, which lies
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 make out a high mountain crowning Ras Mohammed
between the two gulfs. It was Mt. Horeb, that biblical Mt. Sinai on
whose summit Moses met God face to face, that summit the mind’s eye
always pictures as wreathed in lightning.
At six o’clock, sometimes afloat and sometimes submerged, the Nautilus
passed well out from El Tur, which sat at the far end of a bay whose
waters seemed to be dyed red, as Captain Nemo had already
mentioned. Then night fell in the midst of a heavy silence
occasionally broken by the calls of pelicans and nocturnal birds, by
the sound of surf chafing against rocks, or by the distant moan of a
steamer churning the waves of the gulf with noisy blades.
From eight to nine o’clock, the Nautilus stayed a few meters beneath
the waters. According to my calculations, we had to be quite close to
Suez. Through the panels in the lounge, I spotted rocky bottoms
brightly lit by our electric rays. It seemed to me that the strait was
getting narrower and narrower.
At 9:15 when our boat returned to the surface, I climbed onto the
platform. I was quite impatient to clear Captain Nemo’s tunnel,
couldn’t sit still, and wanted to breathe the fresh night air.
Soon, in the shadows, I spotted a pale signal light glimmering a mile
away, half discolored by mist.
“A floating lighthouse,” said someone next to me.
I turned and discovered the captain.
“That’s the floating signal light of Suez,” he went on. “It won’t be
long before we reach the entrance to the tunnel.”
“It can’t be very easy to enter it.”
“No, sir. Accordingly, I’m in the habit of staying in the pilothouse
and directing maneuvers myself. And now if you’ll kindly go below,
Professor Aronnax, the Nautilus is about to sink beneath the waves,
and it will only return to the surface after we’ve cleared the Arabian
Tunnel.”
I followed Captain Nemo. The hatch closed, the ballast tanks filled
with water, and the submersible sank some ten meters down.
Just as I was about to repair to my stateroom, the captain stopped me.
“Professor,” he said to me, “would you like to go with me to the
wheelhouse?”
“I was afraid to ask,” I replied.
“Come along, then. This way, you’ll learn the full story about this
combination underwater and underground navigating.”
Captain Nemo led me to the central companionway. In midstair he opened
a door, went along the upper gangways, and arrived at the wheelhouse,
which, as you know, stands at one end of the platform.
It was a cabin measuring six feet square and closely resembling those
occupied by the helmsmen of steamboats on the Mississippi or Hudson
rivers. In the center stood an upright wheel geared to rudder cables
running to the Nautilus’s stern. Set in the cabin’s walls were four
deadlights, windows of biconvex glass that enabled the man at the helm
to see in every direction.
The cabin was dark; but my eyes soon grew accustomed to its darkness
and I saw the pilot, a muscular man whose hands rested on the pegs of
the wheel. Outside, the sea was brightly lit by the beacon shining
behind the cabin at the other end of the platform.
“Now,” Captain Nemo said, “let’s look for our passageway.”
Electric wires linked the pilothouse with the engine room, and from
this cabin the captain could simultaneously signal heading and speed
to his Nautilus. He pressed a metal button and at once the propeller
slowed down significantly.
I stared in silence at the high, sheer wall we were skirting just
then, the firm base of the sandy mountains on the coast. For an hour
we went along it in this fashion, staying only a few meters
away. Captain Nemo never took his eyes off the two concentric circles
of the compass hanging in the cabin. At a mere gesture from him, the
helmsman would instantly change the Nautilus’s heading.
Standing by the port deadlight, I spotted magnificent coral
substructures, zoophytes, algae, and crustaceans with enormous
quivering claws that stretched forth from crevices in the rock.
At 10:15 Captain Nemo himself took the helm. Dark and deep, a wide
gallery opened ahead of us. The Nautilus was brazenly swallowed
up. Strange rumblings were audible along our sides. It was the water
of the Red Sea, hurled toward the Mediterranean by the tunnel’s
slope. Our engines tried to offer resistance by churning the waves
with propeller in reverse, but the Nautilus went with the torrent, as
swift as an arrow.
Along the narrow walls of this passageway, I saw only brilliant
streaks, hard lines, fiery furrows, all scrawled by our speeding
electric light. With my hand I tried to curb the pounding of my heart.
At 10:35 Captain Nemo left the steering wheel and turned to me:
“The Mediterranean,” he told me.
In less than twenty minutes, swept along by the torrent, the Nautilus
had just cleared the Isthmus of Suez.
CHAPTER 6
The Greek Islands
AT SUNRISE the next morning, February 12, the Nautilus rose to the
surface of the waves.
I rushed onto the platform. The hazy silhouette of Pelusium was
outlined three miles to the south. A torrent had carried us from one
sea to the other. But although that tunnel was easy to descend, going
back up must have been impossible.
Near seven o’clock Ned and Conseil joined me. Those two inseparable
companions had slept serenely, utterly unaware of the Nautilus’s feat.
“Well, Mr. Naturalist,” the Canadian asked in a gently mocking tone,
“and how about that Mediterranean?”
“We’re floating on its surface, Ned my friend.”
“What!” Conseil put in. “Last night . . . ?”
“Yes, last night, in a matter of minutes, we cleared that insuperable
isthmus.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” the Canadian replied.
“And you’re in the wrong, Mr. Land,” I went on. “That flat coastline
curving southward is the coast of Egypt.”
“Tell it to the marines, sir,” answered the stubborn Canadian.
“But if master says so,” Conseil told him, “then so be it.”
“What’s more, Ned,” I said, “Captain Nemo himself did the honors in
his tunnel, and I stood beside him in the pilothouse while he steered
the Nautilus through that narrow passageway.”
“You hear, Ned?” Conseil said.
“And you, Ned, who have such good eyes,” I added, “you can spot the
jetties of Port Said stretching out to sea.”
The Canadian looked carefully.
“Correct,” he said. “You’re right, professor, and your captain’s a
superman. We’re in the Mediterranean. Fine. So now let’s have a chat
about our little doings, if you please, but in such a way that nobody
overhears.”
I could easily see what the Canadian was driving at. In any event, I
thought it best to let him have his chat, and we all three went to sit
next to the beacon, where we were less exposed to the damp spray from
the billows.
“Now, Ned, we’re all ears,” I said. “What have you to tell us?”
“What I’ve got to tell you is very simple,” the Canadian
replied. “We’re in Europe, and before Captain Nemo’s whims take us
deep into the polar seas or back to Oceania, I say we should leave
this Nautilus.”
I confess that such discussions with the Canadian always baffled me. I
didn’t want to restrict my companions’ freedom in any way, and yet I
had no desire to leave Captain Nemo. Thanks to him and his
submersible, I was finishing my undersea research by the day, and I
was rewriting my book on the great ocean depths in the midst of its
very element. Would I ever again have such an opportunity to observe
the ocean’s wonders? Absolutely not! So I couldn’t entertain this idea
of leaving the Nautilus before completing our course of inquiry.
“Ned my friend,” I said, “answer me honestly. Are you bored with this
ship? Are you sorry that fate has cast you into Captain Nemo’s hands?”
The Canadian paused for a short while before replying. Then, crossing
his arms:
“Honestly,” he said, “I’m not sorry about this voyage under the
seas. I’ll be glad to have done it, but in order to have done it, it
has to finish. That’s my feeling.”
“It will finish, Ned.”
“Where and when?”
“Where? I don’t know. When? I can’t say. Or, rather, I suppose it will
be over when these seas have nothing more to teach us. Everything that
begins in this world must inevitably come to an end.”
“I think as master does,” Conseil replied, “and it’s extremely
possible that after crossing every sea on the globe, Captain Nemo will
bid the three of us a fond farewell.”
“Bid us a fond farewell?” the Canadian exclaimed. “You mean beat us to
a fare-thee-well!”
“Let’s not exaggerate, Mr. Land,” I went on. “We have nothing to fear
from the captain, but neither do I share Conseil’s views. We’re privy
to the Nautilus’s secrets, and I don’t expect that its commander, just
to set us free, will meekly stand by while we spread those secrets all
over the world.”
“But in that case what do you expect?” the Canadian asked.
“That we’ll encounter advantageous conditions for escaping just as
readily in six months as now.”
“Great Scott!” Ned Land put in. “And where, if you please, will we be
in six months, Mr. Naturalist?”
“Perhaps here, perhaps in China. You know how quickly the Nautilus
moves. It crosses oceans like swallows cross the air or express trains
continents. It doesn’t fear heavily traveled seas. Who can say it
won’t hug the coasts of France, England, or America, where an escape
attempt could be carried out just as effectively as here.”
“Professor Aronnax,” the Canadian replied, “your arguments are rotten
to the core. You talk way off in the future: ‘We’ll be here, we’ll be
there!’ Me, I’m talking about right now: we are here, and we must take
advantage of it!”
I was hard pressed by Ned Land’s common sense, and I felt myself
losing ground. I no longer knew what arguments to put forward on my
behalf.
“Sir,” Ned went on, “let’s suppose that by some impossibility, Captain
Nemo offered your freedom to you this very day. Would you accept?”
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“And suppose he adds that this offer he’s making you today won’t ever
be repeated, then would you accept?”
I did not reply.
“And what thinks our friend Conseil?” Ned Land asked.
“Your friend Conseil,” the fine lad replied serenely, “has nothing to
say for himself. He’s a completely disinterested party on this
question. Like his master, like his comrade Ned, he’s a
bachelor. Neither wife, parents, nor children are waiting for him back
home. He’s in master’s employ, he thinks like master, he speaks like
master, and much to his regret, he can’t be counted on to form a
majority. Only two persons face each other here: master on one side,
Ned Land on the other. That said, your friend Conseil is listening,
and he’s ready to keep score.”
I couldn’t help smiling as Conseil wiped himself out of
existence. Deep down, the Canadian must have been overjoyed at not
having to contend with him.
“Then, sir,” Ned Land said, “since Conseil is no more, we’ll have this
discussion between just the two of us. I’ve talked, you’ve
listened. What’s your reply?”
It was obvious that the matter had to be settled, and evasions were
distasteful to me.
“Ned my friend,” I said, “here’s my reply. You have right on your side
and my arguments can’t stand up to yours. It will never do to count on
Captain Nemo’s benevolence. The most ordinary good sense would forbid
him to set us free. On the other hand, good sense decrees that we take
advantage of our first opportunity to leave the Nautilus.”
“Fine, Professor Aronnax, that’s wisely said.”
“But one proviso,” I said, “just one. The opportunity must be the real
thing. Our first attempt to escape must succeed, because if it
misfires, we won’t get a second chance, and Captain Nemo will never
forgive us.”
“That’s also well put,” the Canadian replied. “But your proviso
applies to any escape attempt, whether it happens in two years or two
days. So this is still the question: if a promising opportunity comes
up, we have to grab it.”
“Agreed. And now, Ned, will you tell me what you mean by a promising
opportunity?”
“One that leads the Nautilus on a cloudy night within a short distance
of some European coast.”
“And you’ll try to get away by swimming?”
“Yes, if we’re close enough to shore and the ship’s afloat on the
surface. No, if we’re well out and the ship’s navigating under the
waters.”
“And in that event?”
“In that event I’ll try to get hold of the skiff. I know how to handle
it. We’ll stick ourselves inside, undo the bolts, and rise to the
surface, without the helmsman in the bow seeing a thing.”
“Fine, Ned. Stay on the lookout for such an opportunity, but don’t
forget, one slipup will finish us.”
“I won’t forget, sir.”
“And now, Ned, would you like to know my overall thinking on your
plan?”
“Gladly, Professor Aronnax.”
“Well then, I think—and I don’t mean ‘I hope’—that your promising
opportunity won’t ever arise.”
“Why not?”
“Because Captain Nemo recognizes that we haven’t given up all hope of
recovering our freedom, and he’ll keep on his guard, above all in seas
within sight of the coasts of Europe.”
“I’m of master’s opinion,” Conseil said.
“We’ll soon see,” Ned Land replied, shaking his head with a determined
expression.
“And now, Ned Land,” I added, “let’s leave it at that. Not another
word on any of this. The day you’re ready, alert us and we’re with
you. I turn it all over to you.”
That’s how we ended this conversation, which later was to have such
serious consequences. At first, I must say, events seemed to confirm
my forecasts, much to the Canadian’s despair. Did Captain Nemo view us
with distrust in these heavily traveled seas, or did he simply want to
hide from the sight of those ships of every nation that plowed the
Mediterranean? I have no idea, but usually he stayed in midwater and
well out from any coast. Either the Nautilus surfaced only enough to
let its pilothouse emerge, or it slipped away to the lower depths,
although, between the Greek Islands and Asia Minor, we didn’t find
bottom even at 2,000 meters down.
Accordingly, I became aware of the isle of Karpathos, one of the
Sporades Islands, only when Captain Nemo placed his finger over a spot
on the world map and quoted me this verse from Virgil:
Est in Carpathio Neptuni gurgite vates
Caeruleus Proteus . . .*
*Latin: “There in King Neptune’s domain by Karpathos, his spokesman /
is azure-hued Proteus . . . ” Ed.
It was indeed that bygone abode of Proteus, the old shepherd of King
Neptune’s flocks: an island located between Rhodes and Crete, which
Greeks now call Karpathos, Italians Scarpanto. Through the lounge
window I could see only its granite bedrock.
The next day, February 14, I decided to spend a few hours studying the
fish of this island group; but for whatever reason, the panels
remained hermetically sealed. After determining the Nautilus’s
heading, I noted that it was proceeding toward the ancient island of
Crete, also called Candia. At the time I had shipped aboard the
Abraham Lincoln, this whole island was in rebellion against its
tyrannical rulers, the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. But since then I had
absolutely no idea what happened to this revolution, and Captain Nemo,
deprived of all contact with the shore, was hardly the man to keep me
informed.
So I didn’t allude to this event when, that evening, I chanced to be
alone with the captain in the lounge. Besides, he seemed silent and
preoccupied. Then, contrary to custom, he ordered that both panels in
the lounge be opened, and going from the one to the other, he
carefully observed the watery mass. For what purpose? I hadn’t a
guess, and for my part, I spent my time studying the fish that passed
before my eyes.
Among others I noted that sand goby mentioned by Aristotle and
commonly known by the name sea loach, which is encountered exclusively
in the salty waters next to the Nile Delta. Near them some
semiphosphorescent red porgy rolled by, a variety of gilthead that the
Egyptians ranked among their sacred animals, lauding them in religious
ceremonies when their arrival in the river’s waters announced the
fertile flood season. I also noticed some wrasse known as the tapiro,
three decimeters long, bony fish with transparent scales whose bluish
gray color is mixed with red spots; they’re enthusiastic eaters of
marine vegetables, which gives them an exquisite flavor; hence these
tapiro were much in demand by the epicures of ancient Rome, and their
entrails were dressed with brains of peacock, tongue of flamingo, and
testes of moray to make that divine platter that so enraptured the
Roman emperor Vitellius.
Another resident of these seas caught my attention and revived all my
memories of antiquity. This was the remora, which travels attached to
the bellies of sharks; as the ancients tell it, when these little fish
cling to the undersides of a ship, they can bring it to a halt, and
by so impeding Mark Antony’s vessel during the Battle of Actium, one
of them facilitated the victory of Augustus Caesar. From such slender
threads hang the destinies of nations! I also observed some wonderful
snappers belonging to the order Lutianida, sacred fish for the Greeks,
who claimed they could drive off sea monsters from the waters they
frequent; their Greek name anthias means “flower,” and they live up to
it in the play of their colors and in those fleeting reflections that
turn their dorsal fins into watered silk; their hues are confined to a
gamut of reds, from the pallor of pink to the glow of ruby. I couldn’t
take my eyes off these marine wonders, when I was suddenly jolted by an
unexpected apparition.
In the midst of the waters, a man appeared, a diver carrying a little
leather bag at his belt. It was no corpse lost in the waves. It was a
living man, swimming vigorously, sometimes disappearing to breathe at
the surface, then instantly diving again.
I turned to Captain Nemo, and in an agitated voice:
“A man! A castaway!” I exclaimed. “We must rescue him at all cost!”
The captain didn’t reply but went to lean against the window.
The man drew near, and gluing his face to the panel, he stared at us.
To my deep astonishment, Captain Nemo gave him a signal. The diver
answered with his hand, immediately swam up to the surface of the sea,
and didn’t reappear.
“Don’t be alarmed,” the captain told me. “That’s Nicolas from Cape
Matapan, nicknamed ‘Il Pesce.’* He’s well known throughout the
Cyclades Islands. A bold diver! Water is his true element, and he
lives in the sea more than on shore, going constantly from one island
to another, even to Crete.”
*Italian: “The Fish.” Ed.
“You know him, captain?”
“Why not, Professor Aronnax?”
This said, Captain Nemo went to a cabinet standing near the lounge’s
left panel. Next to this cabinet I saw a chest bound with hoops of
iron, its lid bearing a copper plaque that displayed the Nautilus’s
monogram with its motto Mobilis in Mobili.
Just then, ignoring my presence, the captain opened this cabinet, a
sort of safe that contained a large number of ingots.
They were gold ingots. And they represented an enormous sum of
money. Where had this precious metal come from? How had the captain
amassed this gold, and what was he about to do with it?
I didn’t pronounce a word. I gaped. Captain Nemo took out the ingots
one by one and arranged them methodically inside the chest, filling it
to the top. At which point I estimate that it held more than 1,000
kilograms of gold, in other words, close to 5,000,000 francs.
After securely fastening the chest, Captain Nemo wrote an address on
its lid in characters that must have been modern Greek.
This done, the captain pressed a button whose wiring was in
communication with the crew’s quarters. Four men appeared and, not
without difficulty, pushed the chest out of the lounge. Then I heard
them hoist it up the iron companionway by means of pulleys.
Just then Captain Nemo turned to me:
“You were saying, professor?” he asked me.
“I wasn’t saying a thing, captain.”
“Then, sir, with your permission, I’ll bid you good evening.”
And with that, Captain Nemo left the lounge.
I reentered my stateroom, very puzzled, as you can imagine. I tried in
vain to fall asleep. I kept searching for a relationship between the
appearance of the diver and that chest filled with gold. Soon, from
certain rolling and pitching movements, I sensed that the Nautilus had
left the lower strata and was back on the surface of the water.
Then I heard the sound of footsteps on the platform. I realized that
the skiff was being detached and launched to sea. For an instant it
bumped the Nautilus’s side, then all sounds ceased.
Two hours later, the same noises, the same comings and goings, were
repeated. Hoisted on board, the longboat was readjusted into its
socket, and the Nautilus plunged back beneath the waves.
So those millions had been delivered to their address. At what spot on
the continent? Who was the recipient of Captain Nemo’s gold?
The next day I related the night’s events to Conseil and the Canadian,
events that had aroused my curiosity to a fever pitch. My companions
were as startled as I was.
“But where does he get those millions?” Ned Land asked.
To this no reply was possible. After breakfast I made my way to the
lounge and went about my work. I wrote up my notes until five o’clock
in the afternoon. Just then—was it due to some personal
indisposition?—I felt extremely hot and had to take off my jacket made
of fan mussel fabric. A perplexing circumstance because we weren’t in
the low latitudes, and besides, once the Nautilus was submerged, it
shouldn’t be subject to any rise in temperature. I looked at the
pressure gauge. It marked a depth of sixty feet, a depth beyond the
reach of atmospheric heat.
I kept on working, but the temperature rose to the point of becoming
unbearable.
“Could there be a fire on board?” I wondered.
I was about to leave the lounge when Captain Nemo entered. He
approached the thermometer, consulted it, and turned to me:
“42 degrees centigrade,” he said.
“I’ve detected as much, captain,” I replied, “and if it gets even
slightly hotter, we won’t be able to stand it.”
“Oh, professor, it won’t get any hotter unless we want it to!”
“You mean you can control this heat?”
“No, but I can back away from the fireplace producing it.”
“So it’s outside?”
“Surely. We’re cruising in a current of boiling water.”
“It can’t be!” I exclaimed.
“Look.”
The panels had opened, and I could see a completely white sea around
the Nautilus. Steaming sulfurous fumes uncoiled in the midst of waves
bubbling like water in a boiler. I leaned my hand against one of the
windows, but the heat was so great, I had to snatch it back.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Near the island of Santorini, professor,” the captain answered me,
“and right in the channel that separates the volcanic islets of Nea
Kameni and Palea Kameni. I wanted to offer you the unusual sight of an
underwater eruption.”
“I thought,” I said, “that the formation of such new islands had come
to an end.”
“Nothing ever comes to an end in these volcanic waterways,” Captain
Nemo replied, “and thanks to its underground fires, our globe is
continuously under construction in these regions. According to the
Latin historians Cassiodorus and Pliny, by the year 19 of the
Christian era, a new island, the divine Thera, had already appeared in
the very place these islets have more recently formed. Then Thera sank
under the waves, only to rise and sink once more in the year 69
A.D. From that day to this, such plutonic construction work has been
in abeyance. But on February 3, 1866, a new islet named George Island
emerged in the midst of sulfurous steam near Nea Kameni and was fused
to it on the 6th of the same month. Seven days later, on February 13,
the islet of Aphroessa appeared, leaving a ten-meter channel between
itself and Nea Kameni. I was in these seas when that phenomenon
occurred and I was able to observe its every phase. The islet of
Aphroessa was circular in shape, measuring 300 feet in diameter and
thirty feet in height. It was made of black, glassy lava mixed with
bits of feldspar. Finally, on March 10, a smaller islet called Reka
appeared next to Nea Kameni, and since then, these three islets have
fused to form one single, selfsame island.”
“What about this channel we’re in right now?” I asked.
“Here it is,” Captain Nemo replied, showing me a chart of the Greek
Islands. “You observe that I’ve entered the new islets in their
place.”
“But will this channel fill up one day?”
“Very likely, Professor Aronnax, because since 1866 eight little lava
islets have surged up in front of the port of St. Nicolas on Palea
Kameni. So it’s obvious that Nea and Palea will join in days to
come. In the middle of the Pacific, tiny infusoria build continents,
but here they’re built by volcanic phenomena. Look, sir! Look at the
construction work going on under these waves.”
I returned to the window. The Nautilus was no longer moving. The heat
had become unbearable. From the white it had recently been, the sea
was turning red, a coloration caused by the presence of iron
salts. Although the lounge was hermetically sealed, it was filling
with an intolerable stink of sulfur, and I could see scarlet flames of
such brightness, they overpowered our electric light.
I was swimming in perspiration, I was stifling, I was about to be
cooked. Yes, I felt myself cooking in actual fact!
“We can’t stay any longer in this boiling water,” I told the captain.
“No, it wouldn’t be advisable,” replied Nemo the Emotionless.
He gave an order. The Nautilus tacked about and retreated from this
furnace it couldn’t brave with impunity. A quarter of an hour later,
we were breathing fresh air on the surface of the waves.
It then occurred to me that if Ned had chosen these waterways for our
escape attempt, we wouldn’t have come out alive from this sea of fire.
The next day, February 16, we left this basin, which tallies depths of
3,000 meters between Rhodes and Alexandria, and passing well out from
Cerigo Island after doubling Cape Matapan, the Nautilus left the Greek
Islands behind.
CHAPTER 7
The Mediterranean in Forty-Eight Hours
THE MEDITERRANEAN, your ideal blue sea: to Greeks simply “the sea,” to
Hebrews “the great sea,” to Romans mare nostrum.* Bordered by orange
trees, aloes, cactus, and maritime pine trees, perfumed with the scent
of myrtle, framed by rugged mountains, saturated with clean,
transparent air but continuously under construction by fires in the
earth, this sea is a genuine battlefield where Neptune and Pluto still
struggle for world domination. Here on these beaches and waters, says
the French historian Michelet, a man is revived by one of the most
invigorating climates in the world.
*Latin: “our sea.” Ed.
But as beautiful as it was, I could get only a quick look at this
basin whose surface area comprises 2,000,000 square kilometers. Even
Captain Nemo’s personal insights were denied me, because that
mystifying individual didn’t appear one single time during our
high-speed crossing. I estimate that the Nautilus covered a track of
some 600 leagues under the waves of this sea, and this voyage was
accomplished in just twenty-four hours times two. Departing from the
waterways of Greece on the morning of February 16, we cleared the
Strait of Gibraltar by sunrise on the 18th.
It was obvious to me that this Mediterranean, pinned in the middle of
those shores he wanted to avoid, gave Captain Nemo no pleasure. Its
waves and breezes brought back too many memories, if not too many
regrets. Here he no longer had the ease of movement and freedom of
maneuver that the oceans allowed him, and his Nautilus felt cramped so
close to the coasts of both Africa and Europe.
Accordingly, our speed was twenty-five miles (that is, twelve
four-kilometer leagues) per hour. Needless to say, Ned Land had to
give up his escape plans, much to his distress. Swept along at the
rate of twelve to thirteen meters per second, he could hardly make use
of the skiff. Leaving the Nautilus under these conditions would have
been like jumping off a train racing at this speed, a rash move if
there ever was one. Moreover, to renew our air supply, the submersible
rose to the surface of the waves only at night, and relying solely on
compass and log, it steered by dead reckoning.
Inside the Mediterranean, then, I could catch no more of its
fast-passing scenery than a traveler might see from an express train;
in other words, I could view only the distant horizons because the
foregrounds flashed by like lightning. But Conseil and I were able to
observe those Mediterranean fish whose powerful fins kept pace for a
while in the Nautilus’s waters. We stayed on watch before the lounge
windows, and our notes enable me to reconstruct, in a few words, the
ichthyology of this sea.
Among the various fish inhabiting it, some I viewed, others I
glimpsed, and the rest I missed completely because of the Nautilus’s
speed. Kindly allow me to sort them out using this whimsical system of
classification. It will at least convey the quickness of my
observations.
In the midst of the watery mass, brightly lit by our electric beams,
there snaked past those one-meter lampreys that are common to nearly
every clime. A type of ray from the genus Oxyrhynchus, five feet wide,
had a white belly with a spotted, ash-gray back and was carried along
by the currents like a huge, wide-open shawl. Other rays passed by so
quickly I couldn’t tell if they deserved that name “eagle ray” coined
by the ancient Greeks, or those designations of “rat ray,” “bat ray,”
and “toad ray” that modern fishermen have inflicted on them. Dogfish
known as topes, twelve feet long and especially feared by divers, were
racing with each other. Looking like big bluish shadows, thresher
sharks went by, eight feet long and gifted with an extremely acute
sense of smell. Dorados from the genus Sparus, some measuring up to
thirteen decimeters, appeared in silver and azure costumes encircled
with ribbons, which contrasted with the dark color of their fins; fish
sacred to the goddess Venus, their eyes set in brows of gold; a
valuable species that patronizes all waters fresh or salt, equally at
home in rivers, lakes, and oceans, living in every clime, tolerating
any temperature, their line dating back to prehistoric times on this
earth yet preserving all its beauty from those far-off
days. Magnificent sturgeons, nine to ten meters long and extremely
fast, banged their powerful tails against the glass of our panels,
showing bluish backs with small brown spots; they resemble sharks,
without equaling their strength, and are encountered in every sea; in
the spring they delight in swimming up the great rivers, fighting the
currents of the Volga, Danube, Po, Rhine, Loire, and Oder, while
feeding on herring, mackerel, salmon, and codfish; although they
belong to the class of cartilaginous fish, they rate as a delicacy;
they’re eaten fresh, dried, marinated, or salt-preserved, and in olden
times they were borne in triumph to the table of the Roman epicure
Lucullus.
But whenever the Nautilus drew near the surface, those denizens of the
Mediterranean I could observe most productively belonged to the
sixty-third genus of bony fish. These were tuna from the genus
Scomber, blue-black on top, silver on the belly armor, their dorsal
stripes giving off a golden gleam. They are said to follow ships in
search of refreshing shade from the hot tropical sun, and they did
just that with the Nautilus, as they had once done with the vessels of
the Count de La Pérouse. For long hours they competed in speed with
our submersible. I couldn’t stop marveling at these animals so
perfectly cut out for racing, their heads small, their bodies sleek,
spindle-shaped, and in some cases over three meters long, their
pectoral fins gifted with remarkable strength, their caudal fins
forked. Like certain flocks of birds, whose speed they equal, these
tuna swim in triangle formation, which prompted the ancients to say
they’d boned up on geometry and military strategy. And yet they can’t
escape the Provençal fishermen, who prize them as highly as did the
ancient inhabitants of Turkey and Italy; and these valuable animals,
as oblivious as if they were deaf and blind, leap right into the
Marseilles tuna nets and perish by the thousands.
Just for the record, I’ll mention those Mediterranean fish that
Conseil and I barely glimpsed. There were whitish eels of the species
Gymnotus fasciatus that passed like elusive wisps of steam, conger
eels three to four meters long that were tricked out in green, blue,
and yellow, three-foot hake with a liver that makes a dainty morsel,
wormfish drifting like thin seaweed, sea robins that poets call
lyrefish and seamen pipers and whose snouts have two jagged triangular
plates shaped like old Homer’s lyre, swallowfish swimming as fast as
the bird they’re named after, redheaded groupers whose dorsal fins are
trimmed with filaments, some shad (spotted with black, gray, brown,
blue, yellow, and green) that actually respond to tinkling handbells,
splendid diamond-shaped turbot that were like aquatic pheasants with
yellowish fins stippled in brown and the left topside mostly marbled
in brown and yellow, finally schools of wonderful red mullet, real
oceanic birds of paradise that ancient Romans bought for as much as
10,000 sesterces apiece, and which they killed at the table, so they
could heartlessly watch it change color from cinnabar red when alive
to pallid white when dead.
And as for other fish common to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, I was
unable to observe miralets, triggerfish, puffers, seahorses,
jewelfish, trumpetfish, blennies, gray mullet, wrasse, smelt, flying
fish, anchovies, sea bream, porgies, garfish, or any of the chief
representatives of the order Pleuronecta, such as sole, flounder,
plaice, dab, and brill, simply because of the dizzying speed with
which the Nautilus hustled through these opulent waters.
As for marine mammals, on passing by the mouth of the Adriatic Sea, I
thought I recognized two or three sperm whales equipped with the
single dorsal fin denoting the genus Physeter, some pilot whales from
the genus Globicephalus exclusive to the Mediterranean, the forepart
of the head striped with small distinct lines, and also a dozen seals
with white bellies and black coats, known by the name monk seals and
just as solemn as if they were three-meter Dominicans.
For his part, Conseil thought he spotted a turtle six feet wide and
adorned with three protruding ridges that ran lengthwise. I was sorry
to miss this reptile, because from Conseil’s description, I believe I
recognized the leatherback turtle, a pretty rare species. For my part,
I noted only some loggerhead turtles with long carapaces.
As for zoophytes, for a few moments I was able to marvel at a
wonderful, orange-hued hydra from the genus Galeolaria that clung to
the glass of our port panel; it consisted of a long, lean filament
that spread out into countless branches and ended in the most delicate
lace ever spun by the followers of Arachne. Unfortunately I couldn’t
fish up this wonderful specimen, and surely no other Mediterranean
zoophytes would have been offered to my gaze, if, on the evening of
the 16th, the Nautilus hadn’t slowed down in an odd fashion. This was
the situation.
By then we were passing between Sicily and the coast of Tunisia. In
the cramped space between Cape Bon and the Strait of Messina, the sea
bottom rises almost all at once. It forms an actual ridge with only
seventeen meters of water remaining above it, while the depth on
either side is 170 meters. Consequently, the Nautilus had to maneuver
with caution so as not to bump into this underwater barrier.
I showed Conseil the position of this long reef on our chart of the
Mediterranean.
“But with all due respect to master,” Conseil ventured to observe,
“it’s like an actual isthmus connecting Europe to Africa.”
“Yes, my boy,” I replied, “it cuts across the whole Strait of Sicily,
and Smith’s soundings prove that in the past, these two continents
were genuinely connected between Cape Boeo and Cape Farina.”
“I can easily believe it,” Conseil said.
“I might add,” I went on, “that there’s a similar barrier between
Gibraltar and Ceuta, and in prehistoric times it closed off the
Mediterranean completely.”
“Gracious!” Conseil put in. “Suppose one day some volcanic upheaval
raises these two barriers back above the waves!”
“That’s most unlikely, Conseil.”
“If master will allow me to finish, I mean that if this phenomenon
occurs, it might prove distressing to Mr. de Lesseps, who has gone to
such pains to cut through his isthmus!”
“Agreed, but I repeat, Conseil: such a phenomenon won’t occur. The
intensity of these underground forces continues to diminish. Volcanoes
were quite numerous in the world’s early days, but they’re going
extinct one by one; the heat inside the earth is growing weaker, the
temperature in the globe’s lower strata is cooling appreciably every
century, and to our globe’s detriment, because its heat is its life.”
“But the sun—”
“The sun isn’t enough, Conseil. Can it restore heat to a corpse?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
“Well, my friend, someday the earth will be just such a cold
corpse. Like the moon, which long ago lost its vital heat, our globe
will become lifeless and unlivable.”
“In how many centuries?” Conseil asked.
“In hundreds of thousands of years, my boy.”
“Then we have ample time to finish our voyage,” Conseil replied, “if
Ned Land doesn’t mess things up!”
Thus reassured, Conseil went back to studying the shallows that the
Nautilus was skimming at moderate speed.
On the rocky, volcanic seafloor, there bloomed quite a collection of
moving flora: sponges, sea cucumbers, jellyfish called sea
gooseberries that were adorned with reddish tendrils and gave off a
subtle phosphorescence, members of the genus Beroe that are commonly
known by the name melon jellyfish and are bathed in the shimmer of the
whole solar spectrum, free-swimming crinoids one meter wide that
reddened the waters with their crimson hue, treelike basket stars of
the greatest beauty, sea fans from the genus Pavonacea with long
stems, numerous edible sea urchins of various species, plus green sea
anemones with a grayish trunk and a brown disk lost beneath the
olive-colored tresses of their tentacles.
Conseil kept especially busy observing mollusks and articulates, and
although his catalog is a little dry, I wouldn’t want to wrong the
gallant lad by leaving out his personal observations.
From the branch Mollusca, he mentions numerous comb-shaped scallops,
hooflike spiny oysters piled on top of each other, triangular coquina,
three-pronged glass snails with yellow fins and transparent shells,
orange snails from the genus Pleurobranchus that looked like eggs
spotted or speckled with greenish dots, members of the genus Aplysia
also known by the name sea hares, other sea hares from the genus
Dolabella, plump paper-bubble shells, umbrella shells exclusive to the
Mediterranean, abalone whose shell produces a mother-of-pearl much in
demand, pilgrim scallops, saddle shells that diners in the French
province of Languedoc are said to like better than oysters, some of
those cockleshells so dear to the citizens of Marseilles, fat white
venus shells that are among the clams so abundant off the coasts of
North America and eaten in such quantities by New Yorkers, variously
colored comb shells with gill covers, burrowing date mussels with a
peppery flavor I relish, furrowed heart cockles whose shells have
riblike ridges on their arching summits, triton shells pocked with
scarlet bumps, carniaira snails with backward-curving tips that make
them resemble flimsy gondolas, crowned ferola snails, atlanta snails
with spiral shells, gray nudibranchs from the genus Tethys that were
spotted with white and covered by fringed mantles, nudibranchs from
the suborder Eolidea that looked like small slugs, sea butterflies
crawling on their backs, seashells from the genus Auricula including
the oval-shaped Auricula myosotis, tan wentletrap snails, common
periwinkles, violet snails, cineraira snails, rock borers, ear shells,
cabochon snails, pandora shells, etc.
As for the articulates, in his notes Conseil has very appropriately
divided them into six classes, three of which belong to the marine
world. These classes are the Crustacea, Cirripedia, and Annelida.
Crustaceans are subdivided into nine orders, and the first of these
consists of the decapods, in other words, animals whose head and
thorax are usually fused, whose cheek-and-mouth mechanism is made up
of several pairs of appendages, and whose thorax has four, five, or
six pairs of walking legs. Conseil used the methods of our mentor
Professor Milne-Edwards, who puts the decapods in three divisions:
Brachyura, Macrura, and Anomura. These names may look a tad fierce,
but they’re accurate and appropriate. Among the Brachyura, Conseil
mentions some amanthia crabs whose fronts were armed with two big
diverging tips, those inachus scorpions that—lord knows why—symbolized
wisdom to the ancient Greeks, spider crabs of the massena and
spinimane varieties that had probably gone astray in these shallows
because they usually live in the lower depths, xanthid crabs, pilumna
crabs, rhomboid crabs, granular box crabs (easy on the digestion, as
Conseil ventured to observe), toothless masked crabs, ebalia crabs,
cymopolia crabs, woolly-handed crabs, etc. Among the Macrura (which
are subdivided into five families: hardshells, burrowers, crayfish,
prawns, and ghost crabs) Conseil mentions some common spiny lobsters
whose females supply a meat highly prized, slipper lobsters or common
shrimp, waterside gebia shrimp, and all sorts of edible species, but
he says nothing of the crayfish subdivision that includes the true
lobster, because spiny lobsters are the only type in the
Mediterranean. Finally, among the Anomura, he saw common drocina crabs
dwelling inside whatever abandoned seashells they could take over,
homola crabs with spiny fronts, hermit crabs, hairy porcelain crabs,
etc.
There Conseil’s work came to a halt. He didn’t have time to finish off
the class Crustacea through an examination of its stomatopods,
amphipods, homopods, isopods, trilobites, branchiopods, ostracods, and
entomostraceans. And in order to complete his study of marine
articulates, he needed to mention the class Cirripedia, which contains
water fleas and carp lice, plus the class Annelida, which he would
have divided without fail into tubifex worms and dorsibranchian
worms. But having gone past the shallows of the Strait of Sicily, the
Nautilus resumed its usual deep-water speed. From then on, no more
mollusks, no more zoophytes, no more articulates. Just a few large
fish sweeping by like shadows.
During the night of February 16-17, we entered the second
Mediterranean basin, whose maximum depth we found at 3,000 meters. The
Nautilus, driven downward by its propeller and slanting fins,
descended to the lowest strata of this sea.
There, in place of natural wonders, the watery mass offered some
thrilling and dreadful scenes to my eyes. In essence, we were then
crossing that part of the whole Mediterranean so fertile in
casualties. From the coast of Algiers to the beaches of Provence, how
many ships have wrecked, how many vessels have vanished! Compared to
the vast liquid plains of the Pacific, the Mediterranean is a mere
lake, but it’s an unpredictable lake with fickle waves, today kindly
and affectionate to those frail single-masters drifting between a
double ultramarine of sky and water, tomorrow bad-tempered and
turbulent, agitated by the winds, demolishing the strongest ships
beneath sudden waves that smash down with a headlong wallop.
So, in our swift cruise through these deep strata, how many vessels I
saw lying on the seafloor, some already caked with coral, others clad
only in a layer of rust, plus anchors, cannons, shells, iron fittings,
propeller blades, parts of engines, cracked cylinders, staved-in
boilers, then hulls floating in midwater, here upright, there
overturned.
Some of these wrecked ships had perished in collisions, others from
hitting granite reefs. I saw a few that had sunk straight down, their
masting still upright, their rigging stiffened by the water. They
looked like they were at anchor by some immense, open, offshore
mooring where they were waiting for their departure time. When the
Nautilus passed between them, covering them with sheets of
electricity, they seemed ready to salute us with their colors and send
us their serial numbers! But no, nothing but silence and death filled
this field of catastrophes!
I observed that these Mediterranean depths became more and more
cluttered with such gruesome wreckage as the Nautilus drew nearer to
the Strait of Gibraltar. By then the shores of Africa and Europe were
converging, and in this narrow space collisions were
commonplace. There I saw numerous iron undersides, the phantasmagoric
ruins of steamers, some lying down, others rearing up like fearsome
animals. One of these boats made a dreadful first impression: sides
torn open, funnel bent, paddle wheels stripped to the mountings,
rudder separated from the sternpost and still hanging from an iron
chain, the board on its stern eaten away by marine salts! How many
lives were dashed in this shipwreck! How many victims were swept under
the waves! Had some sailor on board lived to tell the story of this
dreadful disaster, or do the waves still keep this casualty a secret?
It occurred to me, lord knows why, that this boat buried under the sea
might have been the Atlas, lost with all hands some twenty years ago
and never heard from again! Oh, what a gruesome tale these
Mediterranean depths could tell, this huge boneyard where so much
wealth has been lost, where so many victims have met their deaths!
Meanwhile, briskly unconcerned, the Nautilus ran at full propeller
through the midst of these ruins. On February 18, near three o’clock
in the morning, it hove before the entrance to the Strait of
Gibraltar.
There are two currents here: an upper current, long known to exist,
that carries the ocean’s waters into the Mediterranean basin; then a
lower countercurrent, the only present-day proof of its existence
being logic. In essence, the Mediterranean receives a continual influx
of water not only from the Atlantic but from rivers emptying into it;
since local evaporation isn’t enough to restore the balance, the total
amount of added water should make this sea’s level higher every
year. Yet this isn’t the case, and we’re naturally forced to believe
in the existence of some lower current that carries the
Mediterranean’s surplus through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the
Atlantic basin.
And so it turned out. The Nautilus took full advantage of this
countercurrent. It advanced swiftly through this narrow
passageway. For an instant I could glimpse the wonderful ruins of the
Temple of Hercules, buried undersea, as Pliny and Avianus have
mentioned, together with the flat island they stand on; and a few
minutes later, we were floating on the waves of the Atlantic.
CHAPTER 8
The Bay of Vigo
THE ATLANTIC! A vast expanse of water whose surface area is 25,000,000
square miles, with a length of 9,000 miles and an average width of
2,700. A major sea nearly unknown to the ancients, except perhaps the
Carthaginians, those Dutchmen of antiquity who went along the west
coasts of Europe and Africa on their commercial junkets! An ocean
whose parallel winding shores form an immense perimeter fed by the
world’s greatest rivers: the St. Lawrence, Mississippi, Amazon, Plata,
Orinoco, Niger, Senegal, Elbe, Loire, and Rhine, which bring it waters
from the most civilized countries as well as the most undeveloped
areas! A magnificent plain of waves plowed continuously by ships of
every nation, shaded by every flag in the world, and ending in those
two dreadful headlands so feared by navigators, Cape Horn and the Cape
of Tempests!
The Nautilus broke these waters with the edge of its spur after doing
nearly 10,000 leagues in three and a half months, a track longer than
a great circle of the earth. Where were we heading now, and what did
the future have in store for us?
Emerging from the Strait of Gibraltar, the Nautilus took to the high
seas. It returned to the surface of the waves, so our daily strolls on
the platform were restored to us.
I climbed onto it instantly, Ned Land and Conseil along with
me. Twelve miles away, Cape St. Vincent was hazily visible, the
southwestern tip of the Hispanic peninsula. The wind was blowing a
pretty strong gust from the south. The sea was swelling and
surging. Its waves made the Nautilus roll and jerk violently. It was
nearly impossible to stand up on the platform, which was continuously
buffeted by this enormously heavy sea. After inhaling a few breaths of
air, we went below once more.
I repaired to my stateroom. Conseil returned to his cabin; but the
Canadian, looking rather worried, followed me. Our quick trip through
the Mediterranean hadn’t allowed him to put his plans into execution,
and he could barely conceal his disappointment.
After the door to my stateroom was closed, he sat and stared at me
silently.
“Ned my friend,” I told him, “I know how you feel, but you mustn’t
blame yourself. Given the way the Nautilus was navigating, it would
have been sheer insanity to think of escaping!”
Ned Land didn’t reply. His pursed lips and frowning brow indicated
that he was in the grip of his monomania.
“Look here,” I went on, “as yet there’s no cause for despair. We’re
going up the coast of Portugal. France and England aren’t far off, and
there we’ll easily find refuge. Oh, I grant you, if the Nautilus had
emerged from the Strait of Gibraltar and made for that cape in the
south, if it were taking us toward those regions that have no
continents, then I’d share your alarm. But we now know that Captain
Nemo doesn’t avoid the seas of civilization, and in a few days I think
we can safely take action.”
Ned Land stared at me still more intently and finally unpursed his
lips:
“We’ll do it this evening,” he said.
I straightened suddenly. I admit that I was less than ready for this
announcement. I wanted to reply to the Canadian, but words failed me.
“We agreed to wait for the right circumstances,” Ned Land went
on. “Now we’ve got those circumstances. This evening we’ll be just a
few miles off the coast of Spain. It’ll be cloudy tonight. The wind’s
blowing toward shore. You gave me your promise, Professor Aronnax, and
I’m counting on you.”
Since I didn’t say anything, the Canadian stood up and approached me:
“We’ll do it this evening at nine o’clock,” he said. “I’ve alerted
Conseil. By that time Captain Nemo will be locked in his room and
probably in bed. Neither the mechanics or the crewmen will be able to
see us. Conseil and I will go to the central companionway. As for you,
Professor Aronnax, you’ll stay in the library two steps away and wait
for my signal. The oars, mast, and sail are in the skiff. I’ve even
managed to stow some provisions inside. I’ve gotten hold of a monkey
wrench to unscrew the nuts bolting the skiff to the Nautilus’s
hull. So everything’s ready. I’ll see you this evening.”
“The sea is rough,” I said.
“Admitted,” the Canadian replied, “but we’ve got to risk it. Freedom
is worth paying for. Besides, the longboat’s solidly built, and a few
miles with the wind behind us is no big deal. By tomorrow, who knows
if this ship won’t be 100 leagues out to sea? If circumstances are in
our favor, between ten and eleven this evening we’ll be landing on
some piece of solid ground, or we’ll be dead. So we’re in God’s hands,
and I’ll see you this evening!”
This said, the Canadian withdrew, leaving me close to dumbfounded. I
had imagined that if it came to this, I would have time to think about
it, to talk it over. My stubborn companion hadn’t granted me this
courtesy. But after all, what would I have said to him? Ned Land was
right a hundred times over. These were near-ideal circumstances, and
he was taking full advantage of them. In my selfish personal
interests, could I go back on my word and be responsible for ruining
the future lives of my companions? Tomorrow, might not Captain Nemo
take us far away from any shore?
Just then a fairly loud hissing told me that the ballast tanks were
filling, and the Nautilus sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
I stayed in my stateroom. I wanted to avoid the captain, to hide from
his eyes the agitation overwhelming me. What an agonizing day I spent,
torn between my desire to regain my free will and my regret at
abandoning this marvelous Nautilus, leaving my underwater research
incomplete! How could I relinquish this ocean—“my own Atlantic,” as I
liked to call it—without observing its lower strata, without wresting
from it the kinds of secrets that had been revealed to me by the seas
of the East Indies and the Pacific! I was putting down my novel half
read, I was waking up as my dream neared its climax! How painfully the
hours passed, as I sometimes envisioned myself safe on shore with my
companions, or, despite my better judgment, as I sometimes wished that
some unforeseen circumstances would prevent Ned Land from carrying out
his plans.
Twice I went to the lounge. I wanted to consult the compass. I wanted
to see if the Nautilus’s heading was actually taking us closer to the
coast or spiriting us farther away. But no. The Nautilus was still in
Portuguese waters. Heading north, it was cruising along the ocean’s
beaches.
So I had to resign myself to my fate and get ready to escape. My
baggage wasn’t heavy. My notes, nothing more.
As for Captain Nemo, I wondered what he would make of our escaping,
what concern or perhaps what distress it might cause him, and what he
would do in the twofold event of our attempt either failing or being
found out! Certainly I had no complaints to register with him, on the
contrary. Never was hospitality more wholehearted than his. Yet in
leaving him I couldn’t be accused of ingratitude. No solemn promises
bound us to him. In order to keep us captive, he had counted only on
the force of circumstances and not on our word of honor. But his
avowed intention to imprison us forever on his ship justified our
every effort.
I hadn’t seen the captain since our visit to the island of
Santorini. Would fate bring me into his presence before our departure?
I both desired and dreaded it. I listened for footsteps in the
stateroom adjoining mine. Not a sound reached my ear. His stateroom
had to be deserted.
Then I began to wonder if this eccentric individual was even on
board. Since that night when the skiff had left the Nautilus on some
mysterious mission, my ideas about him had subtly changed. In spite of
everything, I thought that Captain Nemo must have kept up some type of
relationship with the shore. Did he himself never leave the Nautilus?
Whole weeks had often gone by without my encountering him. What was he
doing all the while? During all those times I’d thought he was
convalescing in the grip of some misanthropic fit, was he instead far
away from the ship, involved in some secret activity whose nature
still eluded me?
All these ideas and a thousand others assaulted me at the same
time. In these strange circumstances the scope for conjecture was
unlimited. I felt an unbearable queasiness. This day of waiting seemed
endless. The hours struck too slowly to keep up with my impatience.
As usual, dinner was served me in my stateroom. Full of anxiety, I ate
little. I left the table at seven o’clock. 120 minutes—I was keeping
track of them—still separated me from the moment I was to rejoin Ned
Land. My agitation increased. My pulse was throbbing violently. I
couldn’t stand still. I walked up and down, hoping to calm my troubled
mind with movement. The possibility of perishing in our reckless
undertaking was the least of my worries; my heart was pounding at the
thought that our plans might be discovered before we had left the
Nautilus, at the thought of being hauled in front of Captain Nemo and
finding him angered, or worse, saddened by my deserting him.
I wanted to see the lounge one last time. I went down the gangways and
arrived at the museum where I had spent so many pleasant and
productive hours. I stared at all its wealth, all its treasures, like
a man on the eve of his eternal exile, a man departing to return no
more. For so many days now, these natural wonders and artistic
masterworks had been central to my life, and I was about to leave them
behind forever. I wanted to plunge my eyes through the lounge window
and into these Atlantic waters; but the panels were hermetically
sealed, and a mantle of sheet iron separated me from this ocean with
which I was still unfamiliar.
Crossing through the lounge, I arrived at the door, contrived in one
of the canted corners, that opened into the captain’s stateroom. Much
to my astonishment, this door was ajar. I instinctively recoiled. If
Captain Nemo was in his stateroom, he might see me. But, not hearing
any sounds, I approached. The stateroom was deserted. I pushed the
door open. I took a few steps inside. Still the same austere, monastic
appearance.
Just then my eye was caught by some etchings hanging on the wall,
which I hadn’t noticed during my first visit. They were portraits of
great men of history who had spent their lives in perpetual devotion
to a great human ideal: Thaddeus Kosciusko, the hero whose dying words
had been Finis Poloniae;* Markos Botzaris, for modern Greece the
reincarnation of Sparta’s King Leonidas; Daniel O’Connell, Ireland’s
defender; George Washington, founder of the American Union; Daniele
Manin, the Italian patriot; Abraham Lincoln, dead from the bullet of a
believer in slavery; and finally, that martyr for the redemption of
the black race, John Brown, hanging from his gallows as Victor Hugo’s
pencil has so terrifyingly depicted.
*Latin: “Save Poland’s borders.” Ed.
What was the bond between these heroic souls and the soul of Captain
Nemo? From this collection of portraits could I finally unravel the
mystery of his existence? Was he a fighter for oppressed peoples, a
liberator of enslaved races? Had he figured in the recent political or
social upheavals of this century? Was he a hero of that dreadful civil
war in America, a war lamentable yet forever glorious . . . ?
Suddenly the clock struck eight. The first stroke of its hammer on the
chime snapped me out of my musings. I shuddered as if some invisible
eye had plunged into my innermost thoughts, and I rushed outside the
stateroom.
There my eyes fell on the compass. Our heading was still
northerly. The log indicated a moderate speed, the pressure gauge a
depth of about sixty feet. So circumstances were in favor of the
Canadian’s plans.
I stayed in my stateroom. I dressed warmly: fishing boots, otter cap,
coat of fan-mussel fabric lined with sealskin. I was ready. I was
waiting. Only the propeller’s vibrations disturbed the deep silence
reigning on board. I cocked an ear and listened. Would a sudden
outburst of voices tell me that Ned Land’s escape plans had just been
detected? A ghastly uneasiness stole through me. I tried in vain to
recover my composure.
A few minutes before nine o’clock, I glued my ear to the captain’s
door. Not a sound. I left my stateroom and returned to the lounge,
which was deserted and plunged in near darkness.
I opened the door leading to the library. The same inadequate light,
the same solitude. I went to man my post near the door opening into
the well of the central companionway. I waited for Ned Land’s signal.
At this point the propeller’s vibrations slowed down appreciably, then
they died out altogether. Why was the Nautilus stopping? Whether this
layover would help or hinder Ned Land’s schemes I couldn’t have said.
The silence was further disturbed only by the pounding of my heart.
Suddenly I felt a mild jolt. I realized the Nautilus had come to rest
on the ocean floor. My alarm increased. The Canadian’s signal hadn’t
reached me. I longed to rejoin Ned Land and urge him to postpone his
attempt. I sensed that we were no longer navigating under normal
conditions.
Just then the door to the main lounge opened and Captain Nemo
appeared. He saw me, and without further preamble:
“Ah, professor,” he said in an affable tone, “I’ve been looking for
you. Do you know your Spanish history?”
Even if he knew it by heart, a man in my disturbed, befuddled
condition couldn’t have quoted a syllable of his own country’s
history.
“Well?” Captain Nemo went on. “Did you hear my question? Do you know
the history of Spain?”
“Very little of it,” I replied.
“The most learned men,” the captain said, “still have much to
learn. Have a seat,” he added, “and I’ll tell you about an unusual
episode in this body of history.”
The captain stretched out on a couch, and I mechanically took a seat
near him, but half in the shadows.
“Professor,” he said, “listen carefully. This piece of history
concerns you in one definite respect, because it will answer a
question you’ve no doubt been unable to resolve.”
“I’m listening, captain,” I said, not knowing what my partner in this
dialogue was driving at, and wondering if this incident related to our
escape plans.
“Professor,” Captain Nemo went on, “if you’re amenable, we’ll go back
in time to 1702. You’re aware of the fact that in those days your King
Louis XIV thought an imperial gesture would suffice to humble the
Pyrenees in the dust, so he inflicted his grandson, the Duke of Anjou,
on the Spaniards. Reigning more or less poorly under the name King
Philip V, this aristocrat had to deal with mighty opponents abroad.
“In essence, the year before, the royal houses of Holland, Austria,
and England had signed a treaty of alliance at The Hague, aiming to
wrest the Spanish crown from King Philip V and to place it on the head
of an archduke whom they prematurely dubbed King Charles III.
“Spain had to withstand these allies. But the country had practically
no army or navy. Yet it wasn’t short of money, provided that its
galleons, laden with gold and silver from America, could enter its
ports. Now then, late in 1702 Spain was expecting a rich convoy, which
France ventured to escort with a fleet of twenty-three vessels under
the command of Admiral de Chateau-Renault, because by that time the
allied navies were roving the Atlantic.
“This convoy was supposed to put into Cadiz, but after learning that
the English fleet lay across those waterways, the admiral decided to
make for a French port.
“The Spanish commanders in the convoy objected to this decision. They
wanted to be taken to a Spanish port, if not to Cadiz, then to the Bay
of Vigo, located on Spain’s northwest coast and not blockaded.
“Admiral de Chateau-Renault was so indecisive as to obey this
directive, and the galleons entered the Bay of Vigo.
“Unfortunately this bay forms an open, offshore mooring that’s
impossible to defend. So it was essential to hurry and empty the
galleons before the allied fleets arrived, and there would have been
ample time for this unloading, if a wretched question of trade
agreements hadn’t suddenly come up.
“Are you clear on the chain of events?” Captain Nemo asked me.
“Perfectly clear,” I said, not yet knowing why I was being given this
history lesson.
“Then I’ll continue. Here’s what came to pass. The tradesmen of Cadiz
had negotiated a charter whereby they were to receive all merchandise
coming from the West Indies. Now then, unloading the ingots from those
galleons at the port of Vigo would have been a violation of their
rights. So they lodged a complaint in Madrid, and they obtained an
order from the indecisive King Philip V: without unloading, the convoy
would stay in custody at the offshore mooring of Vigo until the enemy
fleets had retreated.
“Now then, just as this decision was being handed down, English
vessels arrived in the Bay of Vigo on October 22, 1702. Despite his
inferior forces, Admiral de Chateau-Renault fought courageously. But
when he saw that the convoy’s wealth was about to fall into enemy
hands, he burned and scuttled the galleons, which went to the bottom
with their immense treasures.”
Captain Nemo stopped. I admit it: I still couldn’t see how this piece
of history concerned me.
“Well?” I asked him.
“Well, Professor Aronnax,” Captain Nemo answered me, “we’re actually
in that Bay of Vigo, and all that’s left is for you to probe the
mysteries of the place.”
The captain stood up and invited me to follow him. I’d had time to
collect myself. I did so. The lounge was dark, but the sea’s waves
sparkled through the transparent windows. I stared.
Around the Nautilus for a half-mile radius, the waters seemed
saturated with electric light. The sandy bottom was clear and
bright. Dressed in diving suits, crewmen were busy clearing away
half-rotted barrels and disemboweled trunks in the midst of the dingy
hulks of ships. Out of these trunks and kegs spilled ingots of gold
and silver, cascades of jewels, pieces of eight. The sand was heaped
with them. Then, laden with these valuable spoils, the men returned to
the Nautilus, dropped off their burdens inside, and went to resume
this inexhaustible fishing for silver and gold.
I understood. This was the setting of that battle on October 22,
1702. Here, in this very place, those galleons carrying treasure to
the Spanish government had gone to the bottom. Here, whenever he
needed, Captain Nemo came to withdraw these millions to ballast his
Nautilus. It was for him, for him alone, that America had yielded up
its precious metals. He was the direct, sole heir to these treasures
wrested from the Incas and those peoples conquered by Hernando Cortez!
“Did you know, professor,” he asked me with a smile, “that the sea
contained such wealth?”
“I know it’s estimated,” I replied, “that there are 2,000,000 metric
tons of silver held in suspension in seawater.”
“Surely, but in extracting that silver, your expenses would outweigh
your profits. Here, by contrast, I have only to pick up what other men
have lost, and not only in this Bay of Vigo but at a thousand other
sites where ships have gone down, whose positions are marked on my
underwater chart. Do you understand now that I’m rich to the tune of
billions?”
“I understand, captain. Nevertheless, allow me to inform you that by
harvesting this very Bay of Vigo, you’re simply forestalling the
efforts of a rival organization.”
“What organization?”
“A company chartered by the Spanish government to search for these
sunken galleons. The company’s investors were lured by the bait of
enormous gains, because this scuttled treasure is estimated to be
worth 500,000,000 francs.”
“It was 500,000,000 francs,” Captain Nemo replied, “but no more!”
“Right,” I said. “Hence a timely warning to those investors would be
an act of charity. Yet who knows if it would be well received? Usually
what gamblers regret the most isn’t the loss of their money so much as
the loss of their insane hopes. But ultimately I feel less sorry for
them than for the thousands of unfortunate people who would have
benefited from a fair distribution of this wealth, whereas now it will
be of no help to them!”
No sooner had I voiced this regret than I felt it must have wounded
Captain Nemo.
“No help!” he replied with growing animation. “Sir, what makes you
assume this wealth goes to waste when I’m the one amassing it? Do you
think I toil to gather this treasure out of selfishness? Who says I
don’t put it to good use? Do you think I’m unaware of the suffering
beings and oppressed races living on this earth, poor people to
comfort, victims to avenge? Don’t you understand . . . ?”
Captain Nemo stopped on these last words, perhaps sorry that he had
said too much. But I had guessed. Whatever motives had driven him to
seek independence under the seas, he remained a human being before all
else! His heart still throbbed for suffering humanity, and his immense
philanthropy went out both to downtrodden races and to individuals!
And now I knew where Captain Nemo had delivered those millions, when
the Nautilus navigated the waters where Crete was in rebellion against
the Ottoman Empire!
CHAPTER 9
A Lost Continent
THE NEXT MORNING, February 19, I beheld the Canadian entering my
stateroom. I was expecting this visit. He wore an expression of great
disappointment.
“Well, sir?” he said to me.
“Well, Ned, the fates were against us yesterday.”
“Yes! That damned captain had to call a halt just as we were going to
escape from his boat.”
“Yes, Ned, he had business with his bankers.”
“His bankers?”
“Or rather his bank vaults. By which I mean this ocean, where his
wealth is safer than in any national treasury.”
I then related the evening’s incidents to the Canadian, secretly
hoping he would come around to the idea of not deserting the captain;
but my narrative had no result other than Ned’s voicing deep regret
that he hadn’t strolled across the Vigo battlefield on his own behalf.
“Anyhow,” he said, “it’s not over yet! My first harpoon missed, that’s
all! We’ll succeed the next time, and as soon as this evening, if need
be . . .”
“What’s the Nautilus’s heading?” I asked.
“I’ve no idea,” Ned replied.
“All right, at noon we’ll find out what our position is!”
The Canadian returned to Conseil’s side. As soon as I was dressed, I
went into the lounge. The compass wasn’t encouraging. The Nautilus’s
course was south-southwest. We were turning our backs on Europe.
I could hardly wait until our position was reported on the chart. Near
11:30 the ballast tanks emptied, and the submersible rose to the
surface of the ocean. I leaped onto the platform. Ned Land was already
there.
No more shore in sight. Nothing but the immenseness of the sea. A few
sails were on the horizon, no doubt ships going as far as Cape São
Roque to find favorable winds for doubling the Cape of Good Hope. The
sky was overcast. A squall was on the way.
Furious, Ned tried to see through the mists on the horizon. He still
hoped that behind all that fog there lay those shores he longed for.
At noon the sun made a momentary appearance. Taking advantage of this
rift in the clouds, the chief officer took the orb’s altitude. Then
the sea grew turbulent, we went below again, and the hatch closed once
more.
When I consulted the chart an hour later, I saw that the Nautilus’s
position was marked at longitude 16 degrees 17′ and latitude 33
degrees 22′, a good 150 leagues from the nearest coast. It wouldn’t do
to even dream of escaping, and I’ll let the reader decide how promptly
the Canadian threw a tantrum when I ventured to tell him our
situation.
As for me, I wasn’t exactly grief-stricken. I felt as if a heavy
weight had been lifted from me, and I was able to resume my regular
tasks in a state of comparative calm.
Near eleven o’clock in the evening, I received a most unexpected visit
from Captain Nemo. He asked me very graciously if I felt exhausted
from our vigil the night before. I said no.
“Then, Professor Aronnax, I propose an unusual excursion.”
“Propose away, captain.”
“So far you’ve visited the ocean depths only by day and under
sunlight. Would you like to see these depths on a dark night?”
“Very much.”
“I warn you, this will be an exhausting stroll. We’ll need to walk
long hours and scale a mountain. The roads aren’t terribly well kept
up.”
“Everything you say, captain, just increases my curiosity. I’m ready
to go with you.”
“Then come along, professor, and we’ll go put on our diving suits.”
Arriving at the wardrobe, I saw that neither my companions nor any
crewmen would be coming with us on this excursion. Captain Nemo hadn’t
even suggested my fetching Ned or Conseil.
In a few moments we had put on our equipment. Air tanks, abundantly
charged, were placed on our backs, but the electric lamps were not in
readiness. I commented on this to the captain.
“They’ll be useless to us,” he replied.
I thought I hadn’t heard him right, but I couldn’t repeat my comment
because the captain’s head had already disappeared into its metal
covering. I finished harnessing myself, I felt an alpenstock being
placed in my hand, and a few minutes later, after the usual
procedures, we set foot on the floor of the Atlantic, 300 meters down.
Midnight was approaching. The waters were profoundly dark, but Captain
Nemo pointed to a reddish spot in the distance, a sort of wide glow
shimmering about two miles from the Nautilus. What this fire was, what
substances fed it, how and why it kept burning in the liquid mass, I
couldn’t say. Anyhow it lit our way, although hazily, but I soon grew
accustomed to this unique gloom, and in these circumstances I
understood the uselessness of the Ruhmkorff device.
Side by side, Captain Nemo and I walked directly toward this
conspicuous flame. The level seafloor rose imperceptibly. We took long
strides, helped by our alpenstocks; but in general our progress was
slow, because our feet kept sinking into a kind of slimy mud mixed
with seaweed and assorted flat stones.
As we moved forward, I heard a kind of pitter-patter above my
head. Sometimes this noise increased and became a continuous
crackle. I soon realized the cause. It was a heavy rainfall rattling
on the surface of the waves. Instinctively I worried that I might get
soaked! By water in the midst of water! I couldn’t help smiling at
this outlandish notion. But to tell the truth, wearing these heavy
diving suits, you no longer feel the liquid element, you simply think
you’re in the midst of air a little denser than air on land, that’s
all.
After half an hour of walking, the seafloor grew rocky. Jellyfish,
microscopic crustaceans, and sea-pen coral lit it faintly with their
phosphorescent glimmers. I glimpsed piles of stones covered by a
couple million zoophytes and tangles of algae. My feet often slipped
on this viscous seaweed carpet, and without my alpenstock I would have
fallen more than once. When I turned around, I could still see the
Nautilus’s whitish beacon, which was starting to grow pale in the
distance.
Those piles of stones just mentioned were laid out on the ocean floor
with a distinct but inexplicable symmetry. I spotted gigantic furrows
trailing off into the distant darkness, their length
incalculable. There also were other peculiarities I couldn’t make
sense of. It seemed to me that my heavy lead soles were crushing a
litter of bones that made a dry crackling noise. So what were these
vast plains we were now crossing? I wanted to ask the captain, but I
still didn’t grasp that sign language that allowed him to chat with
his companions when they went with him on his underwater excursions.
Meanwhile the reddish light guiding us had expanded and inflamed the
horizon. The presence of this furnace under the waters had me
extremely puzzled. Was it some sort of electrical discharge? Was I
approaching some natural phenomenon still unknown to scientists on
shore? Or, rather (and this thought did cross my mind), had the hand
of man intervened in that blaze? Had human beings fanned those flames?
In these deep strata would I meet up with more of Captain Nemo’s
companions, friends he was about to visit who led lives as strange as
his own? Would I find a whole colony of exiles down here, men tired of
the world’s woes, men who had sought and found independence in the
ocean’s lower depths? All these insane, inadmissible ideas dogged me,
and in this frame of mind, continually excited by the series of
wonders passing before my eyes, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find
on this sea bottom one of those underwater towns Captain Nemo dreamed
about!
Our path was getting brighter and brighter. The red glow had turned
white and was radiating from a mountain peak about 800 feet high. But
what I saw was simply a reflection produced by the crystal waters of
these strata. The furnace that was the source of this inexplicable
light occupied the far side of the mountain.
In the midst of the stone mazes furrowing this Atlantic seafloor,
Captain Nemo moved forward without hesitation. He knew this dark
path. No doubt he had often traveled it and was incapable of losing
his way. I followed him with unshakeable confidence. He seemed like
some Spirit of the Sea, and as he walked ahead of me, I marveled at
his tall figure, which stood out in black against the glowing
background of the horizon.
It was one o’clock in the morning. We arrived at the mountain’s lower
gradients. But in grappling with them, we had to venture up difficult
trails through a huge thicket.
Yes, a thicket of dead trees! Trees without leaves, without sap,
turned to stone by the action of the waters, and crowned here and
there by gigantic pines. It was like a still-erect coalfield, its
roots clutching broken soil, its boughs clearly outlined against the
ceiling of the waters like thin, black, paper cutouts. Picture a
forest clinging to the sides of a peak in the Harz Mountains, but a
submerged forest. The trails were cluttered with algae and fucus
plants, hosts of crustaceans swarming among them. I plunged on,
scaling rocks, straddling fallen tree trunks, snapping marine creepers
that swayed from one tree to another, startling the fish that flitted
from branch to branch. Carried away, I didn’t feel exhausted any
more. I followed a guide who was immune to exhaustion.
What a sight! How can I describe it! How can I portray these woods and
rocks in this liquid setting, their lower parts dark and sullen, their
upper parts tinted red in this light whose intensity was doubled by
the reflecting power of the waters! We scaled rocks that crumbled
behind us, collapsing in enormous sections with the hollow rumble of
an avalanche. To our right and left there were carved gloomy galleries
where the eye lost its way. Huge glades opened up, seemingly cleared
by the hand of man, and I sometimes wondered whether some residents of
these underwater regions would suddenly appear before me.
But Captain Nemo kept climbing. I didn’t want to fall behind. I
followed him boldly. My alpenstock was a great help. One wrong step
would have been disastrous on the narrow paths cut into the sides of
these chasms, but I walked along with a firm tread and without the
slightest feeling of dizziness. Sometimes I leaped over a crevasse
whose depth would have made me recoil had I been in the midst of
glaciers on shore; sometimes I ventured out on a wobbling tree trunk
fallen across a gorge, without looking down, having eyes only for
marveling at the wild scenery of this region. There, leaning on
erratically cut foundations, monumental rocks seemed to defy the laws
of balance. From between their stony knees, trees sprang up like jets
under fearsome pressure, supporting other trees that supported them in
turn. Next, natural towers with wide, steeply carved battlements
leaned at angles that, on dry land, the laws of gravity would never
have authorized.
And I too could feel the difference created by the water’s powerful
density—despite my heavy clothing, copper headpiece, and metal soles,
I climbed the most impossibly steep gradients with all the nimbleness,
I swear it, of a chamois or a Pyrenees mountain goat!
As for my account of this excursion under the waters, I’m well aware
that it sounds incredible! I’m the chronicler of deeds seemingly
impossible and yet incontestably real. This was no fantasy. This was
what I saw and felt!
Two hours after leaving the Nautilus, we had cleared the timberline,
and 100 feet above our heads stood the mountain peak, forming a dark
silhouette against the brilliant glare that came from its far
slope. Petrified shrubs rambled here and there in sprawling
zigzags. Fish rose in a body at our feet like birds startled in tall
grass. The rocky mass was gouged with impenetrable crevices, deep
caves, unfathomable holes at whose far ends I could hear fearsome
things moving around. My blood would curdle as I watched some enormous
antenna bar my path, or saw some frightful pincer snap shut in the
shadow of some cavity! A thousand specks of light glittered in the
midst of the gloom. They were the eyes of gigantic crustaceans
crouching in their lairs, giant lobsters rearing up like spear
carriers and moving their claws with a scrap-iron clanking, titanic
crabs aiming their bodies like cannons on their carriages, and hideous
devilfish intertwining their tentacles like bushes of writhing snakes.
What was this astounding world that I didn’t yet know? In what order
did these articulates belong, these creatures for which the rocks
provided a second carapace? Where had nature learned the secret of
their vegetating existence, and for how many centuries had they lived
in the ocean’s lower strata?
But I couldn’t linger. Captain Nemo, on familiar terms with these
dreadful animals, no longer minded them. We arrived at a preliminary
plateau where still other surprises were waiting for me. There
picturesque ruins took shape, betraying the hand of man, not our
Creator. They were huge stacks of stones in which you could
distinguish the indistinct forms of palaces and temples, now arrayed
in hosts of blossoming zoophytes, and over it all, not ivy but a heavy
mantle of algae and fucus plants.
But what part of the globe could this be, this land swallowed by
cataclysms? Who had set up these rocks and stones like the dolmens of
prehistoric times? Where was I, where had Captain Nemo’s fancies taken
me?
I wanted to ask him. Unable to, I stopped him. I seized his arm. But
he shook his head, pointed to the mountain’s topmost peak, and seemed
to tell me:
“Come on! Come with me! Come higher!”
I followed him with one last burst of energy, and in a few minutes I
had scaled the peak, which crowned the whole rocky mass by some ten
meters.
I looked back down the side we had just cleared. There the mountain
rose only 700 to 800 feet above the plains; but on its far slope it
crowned the receding bottom of this part of the Atlantic by a height
twice that. My eyes scanned the distance and took in a vast area lit
by intense flashes of light. In essence, this mountain was a
volcano. Fifty feet below its peak, amid a shower of stones and slag,
a wide crater vomited torrents of lava that were dispersed in fiery
cascades into the heart of the liquid mass. So situated, this volcano
was an immense torch that lit up the lower plains all the way to the
horizon.
As I said, this underwater crater spewed lava, but not flames. Flames
need oxygen from the air and are unable to spread underwater; but a
lava flow, which contains in itself the principle of its
incandescence, can rise to a white heat, overpower the liquid element,
and turn it into steam on contact. Swift currents swept away all this
diffuse gas, and torrents of lava slid to the foot of the mountain,
like the disgorgings of a Mt. Vesuvius over the city limits of a
second Torre del Greco.
In fact, there beneath my eyes was a town in ruins, demolished,
overwhelmed, laid low, its roofs caved in, its temples pulled down,
its arches dislocated, its columns stretching over the earth; in these
ruins you could still detect the solid proportions of a sort of Tuscan
architecture; farther off, the remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here,
the caked heights of an acropolis along with the fluid forms of a
Parthenon; there, the remnants of a wharf, as if some bygone port had
long ago harbored merchant vessels and triple-tiered war galleys on
the shores of some lost ocean; still farther off, long rows of
collapsing walls, deserted thoroughfares, a whole Pompeii buried under
the waters, which Captain Nemo had resurrected before my eyes!
Where was I? Where was I? I had to find out at all cost, I wanted to
speak, I wanted to rip off the copper sphere imprisoning my head.
But Captain Nemo came over and stopped me with a gesture. Then,
picking up a piece of chalky stone, he advanced to a black basaltic
rock and scrawled this one word:
ATLANTIS
What lightning flashed through my mind! Atlantis, that ancient land of
Meropis mentioned by the historian Theopompus; Plato’s Atlantis; the
continent whose very existence has been denied by such philosophers
and scientists as Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d’Anville, Malte-Brun,
and Humboldt, who entered its disappearance in the ledger of myths and
folk tales; the country whose reality has nevertheless been accepted
by such other thinkers as Posidonius, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus,
Tertullian, Engel, Scherer, Tournefort, Buffon, and d’Avezac; I had
this land right under my eyes, furnishing its own unimpeachable
evidence of the catastrophe that had overtaken it! So this was the
submerged region that had existed outside Europe, Asia, and Libya,
beyond the Pillars of Hercules, home of those powerful Atlantean
people against whom ancient Greece had waged its earliest wars!
The writer whose narratives record the lofty deeds of those heroic
times is Plato himself. His dialogues Timaeus and Critias were drafted
with the poet and legislator Solon as their inspiration, as it were.
One day Solon was conversing with some elderly wise men in the Egyptian
capital of Sais, a town already 8,000 years of age, as documented
by the annals engraved on the sacred walls of its temples. One of
these elders related the history of another town 1,000 years older
still. This original city of Athens, ninety centuries old, had been
invaded and partly destroyed by the Atlanteans. These Atlanteans, he
said, resided on an immense continent greater than Africa and Asia
combined, taking in an area that lay between latitude 12 degrees and
40 degrees north. Their dominion extended even to Egypt. They tried to
enforce their rule as far as Greece, but they had to retreat before
the indomitable resistance of the Hellenic people. Centuries passed.
A cataclysm occurred—floods, earthquakes. A single night and day were
enough to obliterate this Atlantis, whose highest peaks (Madeira, the
Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands) still emerge above the
waves.
These were the historical memories that Captain Nemo’s scrawl sent
rushing through my mind. Thus, led by the strangest of fates, I was
treading underfoot one of the mountains of that continent! My hands
were touching ruins many thousands of years old, contemporary with
prehistoric times! I was walking in the very place where
contemporaries of early man had walked! My heavy soles were crushing
the skeletons of animals from the age of fable, animals that used to
take cover in the shade of these trees now turned to stone!
Oh, why was I so short of time! I would have gone down the steep
slopes of this mountain, crossed this entire immense continent, which
surely connects Africa with America, and visited its great prehistoric
cities. Under my eyes there perhaps lay the warlike town of Makhimos
or the pious village of Eusebes, whose gigantic inhabitants lived for
whole centuries and had the strength to raise blocks of stone that
still withstood the action of the waters. One day perhaps, some
volcanic phenomenon will bring these sunken ruins back to the surface
of the waves! Numerous underwater volcanoes have been sighted in this
part of the ocean, and many ships have felt terrific tremors when
passing over these turbulent depths. A few have heard hollow noises
that announced some struggle of the elements far below, others have
hauled in volcanic ash hurled above the waves. As far as the equator
this whole seafloor is still under construction by plutonic
forces. And in some remote epoch, built up by volcanic disgorgings and
successive layers of lava, who knows whether the peaks of these
fire-belching mountains may reappear above the surface of the
Atlantic!
As I mused in this way, trying to establish in my memory every detail
of this impressive landscape, Captain Nemo was leaning his elbows on a
moss-covered monument, motionless as if petrified in some mute
trance. Was he dreaming of those lost generations, asking them for the
secret of human destiny? Was it here that this strange man came to
revive himself, basking in historical memories, reliving that bygone
life, he who had no desire for our modern one? I would have given
anything to know his thoughts, to share them, understand them!
We stayed in this place an entire hour, contemplating its vast plains
in the lava’s glow, which sometimes took on a startling
intensity. Inner boilings sent quick shivers running through the
mountain’s crust. Noises from deep underneath, clearly transmitted by
the liquid medium, reverberated with majestic amplitude.
Just then the moon appeared for an instant through the watery mass,
casting a few pale rays over this submerged continent. It was only a
fleeting glimmer, but its effect was indescribable. The captain stood
up and took one last look at these immense plains; then his hand
signaled me to follow him.
We went swiftly down the mountain. Once past the petrified forest, I
could see the Nautilus’s beacon twinkling like a star. The captain
walked straight toward it, and we were back on board just as the first
glimmers of dawn were whitening the surface of the ocean.
CHAPTER 10
The Underwater Coalfields
THE NEXT DAY, February 20, I overslept. I was so exhausted from the
night before, I didn’t get up until eleven o’clock. I dressed
quickly. I hurried to find out the Nautilus’s heading. The instruments
indicated that it was running southward at a speed of twenty miles per
hour and a depth of 100 meters.
Conseil entered. I described our nocturnal excursion to him, and since
the panels were open, he could still catch a glimpse of this submerged
continent.
In fact, the Nautilus was skimming only ten meters over the soil of
these Atlantis plains. The ship scudded along like an air balloon
borne by the wind over some prairie on land; but it would be more
accurate to say that we sat in the lounge as if we were riding in a
coach on an express train. As for the foregrounds passing before our
eyes, they were fantastically carved rocks, forests of trees that had
crossed over from the vegetable kingdom into the mineral kingdom,
their motionless silhouettes sprawling beneath the waves. There also
were stony masses buried beneath carpets of axidia and sea anemone,
bristling with long, vertical water plants, then strangely contoured
blocks of lava that testified to all the fury of those plutonic
developments.
While this bizarre scenery was glittering under our electric beams, I
told Conseil the story of the Atlanteans, who had inspired the old
French scientist Jean Bailly to write so many entertaining—albeit
utterly fictitious—pages.* I told the lad about the wars of these
heroic people. I discussed the question of Atlantis with the fervor of
a man who no longer had any doubts. But Conseil was so distracted he
barely heard me, and his lack of interest in any commentary on this
historical topic was soon explained.
*Bailly believed that Atlantis was located at the North Pole! Ed.
In essence, numerous fish had caught his eye, and when fish pass by,
Conseil vanishes into his world of classifying and leaves real life
behind. In which case I could only tag along and resume our
ichthyological research.
Even so, these Atlantic fish were not noticeably different from those
we had observed earlier. There were rays of gigantic size, five meters
long and with muscles so powerful they could leap above the waves,
sharks of various species including a fifteen-foot glaucous shark with
sharp triangular teeth and so transparent it was almost invisible amid
the waters, brown lantern sharks, prism-shaped humantin sharks armored
with protuberant hides, sturgeons resembling their relatives in the
Mediterranean, trumpet-snouted pipefish a foot and a half long,
yellowish brown with small gray fins and no teeth or tongue, unreeling
like slim, supple snakes.
Among bony fish, Conseil noticed some blackish marlin three meters
long with a sharp sword jutting from the upper jaw, bright-colored
weevers known in Aristotle’s day as sea dragons and whose dorsal
stingers make them quite dangerous to pick up, then dolphinfish with
brown backs striped in blue and edged in gold, handsome dorados,
moonlike opahs that look like azure disks but which the sun’s rays
turn into spots of silver, finally eight-meter swordfish from the
genus Xiphias, swimming in schools, sporting yellowish sickle-shaped
fins and six-foot broadswords, stalwart animals, plant eaters rather
than fish eaters, obeying the tiniest signals from their females like
henpecked husbands.
But while observing these different specimens of marine fauna, I
didn’t stop examining the long plains of Atlantis. Sometimes an
unpredictable irregularity in the seafloor would force the Nautilus to
slow down, and then it would glide into the narrow channels between
the hills with a cetacean’s dexterity. If the labyrinth became
hopelessly tangled, the submersible would rise above it like an
airship, and after clearing the obstacle, it would resume its speedy
course just a few meters above the ocean floor. It was an enjoyable
and impressive way of navigating that did indeed recall the maneuvers
of an airship ride, with the major difference that the Nautilus
faithfully obeyed the hands of its helmsman.
The terrain consisted mostly of thick slime mixed with petrified
branches, but it changed little by little near four o’clock in the
afternoon; it grew rockier and seemed to be strewn with pudding stones
and a basaltic gravel called “tuff,” together with bits of lava and
sulfurous obsidian. I expected these long plains to change into
mountain regions, and in fact, as the Nautilus was executing certain
turns, I noticed that the southerly horizon was blocked by a high wall
that seemed to close off every exit. Its summit obviously poked above
the level of the ocean. It had to be a continent or at least an
island, either one of the Canaries or one of the Cape Verde
Islands. Our bearings hadn’t been marked on the chart—perhaps
deliberately—and I had no idea what our position was. In any case this
wall seemed to signal the end of Atlantis, of which, all in all, we
had crossed only a small part.
Nightfall didn’t interrupt my observations. I was left to
myself. Conseil had repaired to his cabin. The Nautilus slowed down,
hovering above the muddled masses on the seafloor, sometimes grazing
them as if wanting to come to rest, sometimes rising unpredictably to
the surface of the waves. Then I glimpsed a few bright constellations
through the crystal waters, specifically five or six of those zodiacal
stars trailing from the tail end of Orion.
I would have stayed longer at my window, marveling at these beauties
of sea and sky, but the panels closed. Just then the Nautilus had
arrived at the perpendicular face of that high wall. How the ship
would maneuver I hadn’t a guess. I repaired to my stateroom. The
Nautilus did not stir. I fell asleep with the firm intention of waking
up in just a few hours.
But it was eight o’clock the next day when I returned to the lounge. I
stared at the pressure gauge. It told me that the Nautilus was afloat
on the surface of the ocean. Furthermore, I heard the sound of
footsteps on the platform. Yet there were no rolling movements to
indicate the presence of waves undulating above me.
I climbed as far as the hatch. It was open. But instead of the broad
daylight I was expecting, I found that I was surrounded by total
darkness. Where were we? Had I been mistaken? Was it still night? No!
Not one star was twinkling, and nighttime is never so utterly black.
I wasn’t sure what to think, when a voice said to me:
“Is that you, professor?”
“Ah, Captain Nemo!” I replied. “Where are we?”
“Underground, professor.”
“Underground!” I exclaimed. “And the Nautilus is still floating?”
“It always floats.”
“But I don’t understand!”
“Wait a little while. Our beacon is about to go on, and if you want
some light on the subject, you’ll be satisfied.”
I set foot on the platform and waited. The darkness was so profound I
couldn’t see even Captain Nemo. However, looking at the zenith
directly overhead, I thought I caught sight of a feeble glimmer, a
sort of twilight filtering through a circular hole. Just then the
beacon suddenly went on, and its intense brightness made that hazy
light vanish.
This stream of electricity dazzled my eyes, and after momentarily
shutting them, I looked around. The Nautilus was stationary. It was
floating next to an embankment shaped like a wharf. As for the water
now buoying the ship, it was a lake completely encircled by an inner
wall about two miles in diameter, hence six miles around. Its level—as
indicated by the pressure gauge—would be the same as the outside
level, because some connection had to exist between this lake and the
sea. Slanting inward over their base, these high walls converged to
form a vault shaped like an immense upside-down funnel that measured
500 or 600 meters in height. At its summit there gaped the circular
opening through which I had detected that faint glimmer, obviously
daylight.
Before more carefully examining the interior features of this enormous
cavern, and before deciding if it was the work of nature or humankind,
I went over to Captain Nemo.
“Where are we?” I said.
“In the very heart of an extinct volcano,” the captain answered me, “a
volcano whose interior was invaded by the sea after some convulsion in
the earth. 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 our home port, secure, convenient,
secret, and sheltered against winds from any direction! Along the
coasts of your continents or islands, show me any offshore mooring
that can equal this safe refuge for withstanding the fury of
hurricanes.”
“Indeed,” I replied, “here you’re in perfect safety, Captain Nemo. Who
could reach you in the heart of a volcano? But don’t I see an opening
at its summit?”
“Yes, its crater, a crater formerly filled with lava, steam, and
flames, but which now lets in this life-giving air we’re breathing.”
“But which volcanic mountain is this?” I asked.
“It’s one of the many islets with which this sea is strewn. For ships
a mere reef, for us an immense cavern. I discovered it by chance, and
chance served me well.”
“But couldn’t someone enter through the mouth of its crater?”
“No more than I could exit through it. You can climb about 100 feet up
the inner base of this mountain, but then the walls overhang, they
lean too far in to be scaled.”
“I can see, captain, that nature is your obedient servant, any time or
any place. You’re safe on this lake, and nobody else can visit its
waters. But what’s the purpose of this refuge? The Nautilus doesn’t
need a harbor.”
“No, professor, but it needs electricity to run, batteries to generate
its electricity, sodium to feed its batteries, coal to make its
sodium, and coalfields from which to dig its coal. Now then, right at
this spot the sea covers entire forests that sank underwater in
prehistoric times; today, turned to stone, transformed into carbon
fuel, they offer me inexhaustible coal mines.”
“So, captain, your men practice the trade of miners here?”
“Precisely. These mines extend under the waves like the coalfields at
Newcastle. Here, dressed in diving suits, pick and mattock in hand, my
men go out and dig this carbon fuel for which I don’t need a single
mine on land. When I burn this combustible to produce sodium, the
smoke escaping from the mountain’s crater gives it the appearance of a
still-active volcano.”
“And will we see your companions at work?”
“No, at least not this time, because I’m eager to continue our
underwater tour of the world. Accordingly, I’ll rest content with
drawing on my reserve stock of sodium. We’ll stay here long enough to
load it on board, in other words, a single workday, then we’ll resume
our voyage. So, Professor Aronnax, if you’d like to explore this
cavern and circle its lagoon, seize the day.”
I thanked the captain and went to look for my two companions, who
hadn’t yet left their cabin. I invited them to follow me, not telling
them where we were.
They climbed onto the platform. Conseil, whom nothing could startle,
saw it as a perfectly natural thing to fall asleep under the waves and
wake up under a mountain. But Ned Land had no idea in his head other
than to see if this cavern offered some way out.
After breakfast near ten o’clock, we went down onto the embankment.
“So here we are, back on shore,” Conseil said.
“I’d hardly call this shore,” the Canadian replied. “And besides, we
aren’t on it but under it.”
A sandy beach unfolded before us, measuring 500 feet at its widest
point between the waters of the lake and the foot of the mountain’s
walls. Via this strand you could easily circle the lake. But the base
of these high walls consisted of broken soil over which there lay
picturesque piles of volcanic blocks and enormous pumice stones. All
these crumbling masses were covered with an enamel polished by the
action of underground fires, and they glistened under the stream of
electric light from our beacon. Stirred up by our footsteps, the
mica-rich dust on this beach flew into the air like a cloud of sparks.
The ground rose appreciably as it moved away from the sand flats by
the waves, and we soon arrived at some long, winding gradients,
genuinely steep paths that allowed us to climb little by little; but
we had to tread cautiously in the midst of pudding stones that weren’t
cemented together, and our feet kept skidding on glassy trachyte, made
of feldspar and quartz crystals.
The volcanic nature of this enormous pit was apparent all around us. I
ventured to comment on it to my companions.
“Can you picture,” I asked them, “what this funnel must have been like
when it was filled with boiling lava, and the level of that
incandescent liquid rose right to the mountain’s mouth, like cast iron
up the insides of a furnace?”
“I can picture it perfectly,” Conseil replied. “But will master tell
me why this huge smelter suspended operations, and how it is that an
oven was replaced by the tranquil waters of a lake?”
“In all likelihood, Conseil, because some convulsion created an
opening below the surface of the ocean, the opening that serves as a
passageway for the Nautilus. Then the waters of the Atlantic rushed
inside the mountain. There ensued a dreadful struggle between the
elements of fire and water, a struggle ending in King Neptune’s
favor. But many centuries have passed since then, and this submerged
volcano has changed into a peaceful cavern.”
“That’s fine,” Ned Land answered. “I accept the explanation, but in
our personal interests, I’m sorry this opening the professor mentions
wasn’t made above sea level.”
“But Ned my friend,” Conseil answered, “if it weren’t an underwater
passageway, the Nautilus couldn’t enter it!”
“And I might add, Mr. Land,” I said, “that the waters wouldn’t have
rushed under the mountain, and the volcano would still be a
volcano. So you have nothing to be sorry about.”
Our climb continued. The gradients got steeper and narrower. Sometimes
they were cut across by deep pits that had to be cleared. Masses of
overhanging rock had to be gotten around. You slid on your knees, you
crept on your belly. But helped by the Canadian’s strength and
Conseil’s dexterity, we overcame every obstacle.
At an elevation of about thirty meters, the nature of the terrain
changed without becoming any easier. Pudding stones and trachyte gave
way to black basaltic rock: here, lying in slabs all swollen with
blisters; there, shaped like actual prisms and arranged into a series
of columns that supported the springings of this immense vault, a
wonderful sample of natural architecture. Then, among this basaltic
rock, there snaked long, hardened lava flows inlaid with veins of
bituminous coal and in places covered by wide carpets of sulfur. The
sunshine coming through the crater had grown stronger, shedding a hazy
light over all the volcanic waste forever buried in the heart of this
extinct mountain.
But when we had ascended to an elevation of about 250 feet, we were
stopped by insurmountable obstacles. The converging inside walls
changed into overhangs, and our climb into a circular stroll. At this
topmost level the vegetable kingdom began to challenge the mineral
kingdom. Shrubs, and even a few trees, emerged from crevices in the
walls. I recognized some spurges that let their caustic, purgative sap
trickle out. There were heliotropes, very remiss at living up to their
sun-worshipping reputations since no sunlight ever reached them; their
clusters of flowers drooped sadly, their colors and scents were
faded. Here and there chrysanthemums sprouted timidly at the feet of
aloes with long, sad, sickly leaves. But between these lava flows I
spotted little violets that still gave off a subtle fragrance, and I
confess that I inhaled it with delight. The soul of a flower is its
scent, and those splendid water plants, flowers of the sea, have no
souls!
We had arrived at the foot of a sturdy clump of dragon trees, which
were splitting the rocks with exertions of their muscular roots, when
Ned Land exclaimed:
“Oh, sir, a hive!”
“A hive?” I answered, with a gesture of utter disbelief.
“Yes, a hive,” the Canadian repeated, “with bees buzzing around!”
I went closer and was forced to recognize the obvious. At the mouth of
a hole cut in the trunk of a dragon tree, there swarmed thousands of
these ingenious insects so common to all the Canary Islands, where
their output is especially prized.
Naturally enough, the Canadian wanted to lay in a supply of honey, and
it would have been ill-mannered of me to say no. He mixed sulfur with
some dry leaves, set them on fire with a spark from his tinderbox, and
proceeded to smoke the bees out. Little by little the buzzing died
down and the disemboweled hive yielded several pounds of sweet
honey. Ned Land stuffed his haversack with it.
“When I’ve mixed this honey with our breadfruit batter,” he told us,
“I’ll be ready to serve you a delectable piece of cake.”
“But of course,” Conseil put in, “it will be gingerbread!”
“I’m all for gingerbread,” I said, “but let’s resume this fascinating
stroll.”
At certain turns in the trail we were going along, the lake appeared
in its full expanse. The ship’s beacon lit up that whole placid
surface, which experienced neither ripples nor undulations. The
Nautilus lay perfectly still. On its platform and on the embankment,
crewmen were bustling around, black shadows that stood out clearly in
the midst of the luminous air.
Just then we went around the highest ridge of these rocky foothills
that supported the vault. Then I saw that bees weren’t the animal
kingdom’s only representatives inside this volcano. Here and in the
shadows, birds of prey soared and whirled, flying away from nests
perched on tips of rock. There were sparrow hawks with white bellies,
and screeching kestrels. With all the speed their stiltlike legs could
muster, fine fat bustards scampered over the slopes. I’ll let the
reader decide whether the Canadian’s appetite was aroused by the sight
of this tasty game, and whether he regretted having no rifle in his
hands. He tried to make stones do the work of bullets, and after
several fruitless attempts, he managed to wound one of these
magnificent bustards. To say he risked his life twenty times in order
to capture this bird is simply the unadulterated truth; but he fared
so well, the animal went into his sack to join the honeycombs.
By then we were forced to go back down to the beach because the ridge
had become impossible. Above us, the yawning crater looked like the
wide mouth of a well. From where we stood, the sky was pretty easy to
see, and I watched clouds race by, disheveled by the west wind,
letting tatters of mist trail over the mountain’s summit. Proof
positive that those clouds kept at a moderate altitude, because this
volcano didn’t rise more than 1,800 feet above the level of the ocean.
Half an hour after the Canadian’s latest exploits, we were back on the
inner beach. There the local flora was represented by a wide carpet of
samphire, a small umbelliferous plant that keeps quite nicely, which
also boasts the names glasswort, saxifrage, and sea fennel. Conseil
picked a couple bunches. As for the local fauna, it included thousands
of crustaceans of every type: lobsters, hermit crabs, prawns, mysid
shrimps, daddy longlegs, rock crabs, and a prodigious number of
seashells, such as cowries, murex snails, and limpets.
In this locality there gaped the mouth of a magnificent cave. My
companions and I took great pleasure in stretching out on its
fine-grained sand. Fire had polished the sparkling enamel of its inner
walls, sprinkled all over with mica-rich dust. Ned Land tapped these
walls and tried to probe their thickness. I couldn’t help smiling. Our
conversation then turned to his everlasting escape plans, and without
going too far, I felt I could offer him this hope: Captain Nemo had
gone down south only to replenish his sodium supplies. So I hoped he
would now hug the coasts of Europe and America, which would allow the
Canadian to try again with a greater chance of success.
We were stretched out in this delightful cave for an hour. Our
conversation, lively at the outset, then languished. A definite
drowsiness overcame us. Since I saw no good reason to resist the call
of sleep, I fell into a heavy doze. I dreamed—one doesn’t choose his
dreams—that my life had been reduced to the vegetating existence of a
simple mollusk. It seemed to me that this cave made up my
double-valved shell. . . .
Suddenly Conseil’s voice startled me awake.
“Get up! Get up!” shouted the fine lad.
“What is it?” I asked, in a sitting position.
“The water’s coming up to us!”
I got back on my feet. Like a torrent the sea was rushing into our
retreat, and since we definitely were not mollusks, we had to clear
out.
In a few seconds we were safe on top of the cave.
“What happened?” Conseil asked. “Some new phenomenon?”
“Not quite, my friends!” I replied. “It was the tide, merely the tide,
which wellnigh caught us by surprise just as it did Sir Walter Scott’s
hero! The ocean outside is rising, and by a perfectly natural law of
balance, the level of this lake is also rising. We’ve gotten off with
a mild dunking. Let’s go change clothes on the Nautilus.”
Three-quarters of an hour later, we had completed our circular stroll
and were back on board. Just then the crewmen finished loading the
sodium supplies, and the Nautilus could have departed immediately.
But Captain Nemo gave no orders. Would he wait for nightfall and exit
through his underwater passageway in secrecy? Perhaps.
Be that as it may, by the next day the Nautilus had left its home port
and was navigating well out from any shore, a few meters beneath the
waves of the Atlantic.
CHAPTER 11
The Sargasso Sea
THE NAUTILUS didn’t change direction. For the time being, then, we had
to set aside any hope of returning to European seas. Captain Nemo kept
his prow pointing south. Where was he taking us? I was afraid to
guess.
That day the Nautilus crossed an odd part of the Atlantic Ocean. No
one is unaware of the existence of that great warm-water current known
by name as the Gulf Stream. After emerging from channels off Florida,
it heads toward Spitzbergen. But before entering the Gulf of Mexico
near latitude 44 degrees north, this current divides into two arms;
its chief arm makes for the shores of Ireland and Norway while the
second flexes southward at the level of the Azores; then it hits the
coast of Africa, sweeps in a long oval, and returns to the Caribbean
Sea.
Now then, this second arm—more accurately, a collar—forms a ring of
warm water around a section of cool, tranquil, motionless ocean called
the Sargasso Sea. This is an actual lake in the open Atlantic, and the
great current’s waters take at least three years to circle it.
Properly speaking, the Sargasso Sea covers every submerged part of
Atlantis. Certain authors have even held that the many weeds strewn
over this sea were torn loose from the prairies of that ancient
continent. But it’s more likely that these grasses, algae, and fucus
plants were carried off from the beaches of Europe and America, then
taken as far as this zone by the Gulf Stream. This is one of the
reasons why Christopher Columbus assumed the existence of a New
World. When the ships of that bold investigator arrived in the
Sargasso Sea, they had great difficulty navigating in the midst of
these weeds, which, much to their crews’ dismay, slowed them down to a
halt; and they wasted three long weeks crossing this sector.
Such was the region our Nautilus was visiting just then: a genuine
prairie, a tightly woven carpet of algae, gulfweed, and bladder wrack
so dense and compact a craft’s stempost couldn’t tear through it
without difficulty. Accordingly, not wanting to entangle his propeller
in this weed-choked mass, Captain Nemo stayed at a depth some meters
below the surface of the waves.
The name Sargasso comes from the Spanish word “sargazo,” meaning
gulfweed. This gulfweed, the swimming gulfweed or berry carrier, is
the chief substance making up this immense shoal. And here’s why these
water plants collect in this placid Atlantic basin, according to the
expert on the subject, Commander Maury, author of The Physical
Geography of the Sea.
The explanation he gives seems to entail a set of conditions that
everybody knows: “Now,” Maury says, “if bits of cork or chaff, or any
floating substance, be put into a basin, and a circular motion be
given to the water, all the light substances will be found crowding
together near the center of the pool, where there is the least
motion. Just such a basin is the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf Stream,
and the Sargasso Sea is the center of the whirl.”
I share Maury’s view, and I was able to study the phenomenon in this
exclusive setting where ships rarely go. Above us, huddled among the
brown weeds, there floated objects originating from all over: tree
trunks ripped from the Rocky Mountains or the Andes and sent floating
down the Amazon or the Mississippi, numerous pieces of wreckage,
remnants of keels or undersides, bulwarks staved in and so weighed
down with seashells and barnacles, they couldn’t rise to the surface
of the ocean. And the passing years will someday bear out Maury’s
other view that by collecting in this way over the centuries, these
substances will be turned to stone by the action of the waters and
will then form inexhaustible coalfields. Valuable reserves prepared by
farseeing nature for that time when man will have exhausted his mines
on the continents.
In the midst of this hopelessly tangled fabric of weeds and fucus
plants, I noted some delightful pink-colored, star-shaped alcyon
coral, sea anemone trailing the long tresses of their tentacles, some
green, red, and blue jellyfish, and especially those big rhizostome
jellyfish that Cuvier described, whose bluish parasols are trimmed
with violet festoons.
We spent the whole day of February 22 in the Sargasso Sea, where fish
that dote on marine plants and crustaceans find plenty to eat. The
next day the ocean resumed its usual appearance.
From this moment on, for nineteen days from February 23 to March 12,
the Nautilus stayed in the middle of the Atlantic, hustling us along
at a constant speed of 100 leagues every twenty-four hours. It was
obvious that Captain Nemo wanted to carry out his underwater program,
and I had no doubt that he intended, after doubling Cape Horn, to
return to the Pacific South Seas.
So Ned Land had good reason to worry. In these wide seas empty of
islands, it was no longer feasible to jump ship. Nor did we have any
way to counter Captain Nemo’s whims. We had no choice but to
acquiesce; but if we couldn’t attain our end through force or cunning,
I liked to think we might achieve it through persuasion. Once this
voyage was over, might not Captain Nemo consent to set us free in
return for our promise never to reveal his existence? Our word of
honor, which we sincerely would have kept. However, this delicate
question would have to be negotiated with the captain. But how would
he receive our demands for freedom? At the very outset and in no
uncertain terms, hadn’t he declared that the secret of his life
required that we be permanently imprisoned on board the Nautilus?
Wouldn’t he see my four-month silence as a tacit acceptance of this
situation? Would my returning to this subject arouse suspicions that
could jeopardize our escape plans, if we had promising circumstances
for trying again later on? I weighed all these considerations, turned
them over in my mind, submitted them to Conseil, but he was as baffled
as I was. In short, although I’m not easily discouraged, I realized
that my chances of ever seeing my fellow men again were shrinking by
the day, especially at a time when Captain Nemo was recklessly racing
toward the south Atlantic!
During those nineteen days just mentioned, no unique incidents
distinguished our voyage. I saw little of the captain. He was at
work. In the library I often found books he had left open, especially
books on natural history. He had thumbed through my work on the great
ocean depths, and the margins were covered with his notes, which
sometimes contradicted my theories and formulations. But the captain
remained content with this method of refining my work, and he rarely
discussed it with me. Sometimes I heard melancholy sounds
reverberating from the organ, which he played very expressively, but
only at night in the midst of the most secretive darkness, while the
Nautilus slumbered in the wilderness of the ocean.
During this part of our voyage, we navigated on the surface of the
waves for entire days. The sea was nearly deserted. A few sailing
ships, laden for the East Indies, were heading toward the Cape of Good
Hope. One day we were chased by the longboats of a whaling vessel,
which undoubtedly viewed us as some enormous baleen whale of great
value. But Captain Nemo didn’t want these gallant gentlemen wasting
their time and energy, so he ended the hunt by diving beneath the
waters. This incident seemed to fascinate Ned Land intensely. I’m sure
the Canadian was sorry that these fishermen couldn’t harpoon our
sheet-iron cetacean and mortally wound it.
During this period the fish Conseil and I observed differed little
from those we had already studied in other latitudes. Chief among them
were specimens of that dreadful cartilaginous genus that’s divided
into three subgenera numbering at least thirty-two species: striped
sharks five meters long, the head squat and wider than the body, the
caudal fin curved, the back with seven big, black, parallel lines
running lengthwise; then perlon sharks, ash gray, pierced with seven
gill openings, furnished with a single dorsal fin placed almost
exactly in the middle of the body.