________________________________________________
_ 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. _
Read next: SECOND PART: Chapter 10. The Underwater Coalfields
Read previous: SECOND PART: Chapter 8. The Bay of Vigo
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