Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
At that moment, the Captain, without noticing my presence, opened the
piece of furniture, a sort of strong box, which held a great many
ingots.
They were ingots of gold. From whence came this precious metal, which
represented an enormous sum? Where did the Captain gather this gold
from? and what was he going to do with it?
I did not say one word. I looked. Captain Nemo took the ingots one by
one, and arranged them methodically in the chest, which he filled
entirely. I estimated the contents at more than 4,000 lbs. weight of
gold, that is to say, nearly £200,000.
The chest was securely fastened, and the Captain wrote an address on
the lid, in characters which must have belonged to Modern Greece.
This done, Captain Nemo pressed a knob, the wire of which communicated
with the quarters of the crew. Four men appeared, and, not without some
trouble, pushed the chest out of the saloon. Then I heard them hoisting
it up the iron staircase by means of pulleys.
At that moment, Captain Nemo turned to me.
“And you were saying, sir?” said he.
“I was saying nothing, Captain.”
“Then, sir, if you will allow me, I will wish you good night.”
Whereupon he turned and left the saloon.
I returned to my room much troubled, as one may believe. I vainly tried
to sleep—I sought the connecting link between the apparition of the
diver and the chest filled with gold. Soon, I felt by certain movements
of pitching and tossing that the _Nautilus_ was leaving the depths and
returning to the surface.
Then I heard steps upon the platform; and I knew they were unfastening
the pinnace and launching it upon the waves. For one instant it struck
the side of the _Nautilus_, then all noise ceased.
Two hours after, the same noise, the same going and coming was renewed;
the boat was hoisted on board, replaced in its socket, and the
_Nautilus_ again plunged under the waves.
So these millions had been transported to their address. To what point
of the continent? Who was Captain Nemo’s correspondent?
The next day I related to Conseil and the Canadian the events of the
night, which had excited my curiosity to the highest degree. My
companions were not less surprised than myself.
“But where does he take his millions to?” asked Ned Land.
To that there was no possible answer. I returned to the saloon after
having breakfast and set to work. Till five o’clock in the evening I
employed myself in arranging my notes. At that moment—(ought I to
attribute it to some peculiar idiosyncrasy)—I felt so great a heat that
I was obliged to take off my coat. It was strange, for we were under
low latitudes; and even then the _Nautilus_, submerged as it was, ought
to experience no change of temperature. I looked at the manometer; it
showed a depth of sixty feet, to which atmospheric heat could never
attain.
I continued my work, but the temperature rose to such a pitch as to be
intolerable.
“Could there be fire on board?” I asked myself.
I was leaving the saloon, when Captain Nemo entered; he approached the
thermometer, consulted it, and, turning to me, said:
“Forty-two degrees.”
“I have noticed it, Captain,” I replied; “and if it gets much hotter we
cannot bear it.”
“Oh, sir, it will not get hotter if we do not wish it.”
“You can reduce it as you please, then?”
“No; but I can go farther from the stove which produces it.”
“It is outward, then!”
“Certainly; we are floating in a current of boiling water.”
“Is it possible!” I exclaimed.
“Look.”
The panels opened, and I saw the sea entirely white all round. A
sulphurous smoke was curling amid the waves, which boiled like water in
a copper. I placed my hand on one of the panes of glass, but the heat
was so great that I quickly took it off again.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Near the Island of Santorin, sir,” replied the Captain. “I wished to
give you a sight of the curious spectacle of a submarine eruption.”
“I thought,” said I, “that the formation of these new islands was
ended.”
“Nothing is ever ended in the volcanic parts of the sea,” replied
Captain Nemo; “and the globe is always being worked by subterranean
fires. Already, in the nineteenth year of our era, according to
Cassiodorus and Pliny, a new island, Theia (the divine), appeared in
the very place where these islets have recently been formed. Then they
sank under the waves, to rise again in the year 69, when they again
subsided. Since that time to our days the Plutonian work has been
suspended. But on the 3rd of February, 1866, a new island, which they
named George Island, emerged from the midst of the sulphurous vapour
near Nea Kamenni, and settled again the 6th of the same month. Seven
days after, the 13th of February, the Island of Aphroessa appeared,
leaving between Nea Kamenni and itself a canal ten yards broad. I was
in these seas when the phenomenon occurred, and I was able therefore to
observe all the different phases. The Island of Aphroessa, of round
form, measured 300 feet in diameter, and 30 feet in height. It was
composed of black and vitreous lava, mixed with fragments of felspar.
And lately, on the 10th of March, a smaller island, called Reka, showed
itself near Nea Kamenni, and since then these three have joined
together, forming but one and the same island.”
“And the canal in which we are at this moment?” I asked.
“Here it is,” replied Captain Nemo, showing me a map of the
Archipelago. “You see, I have marked the new islands.”
I returned to the glass. The _Nautilus_ was no longer moving, the heat
was becoming unbearable. The sea, which till now had been white, was
red, owing to the presence of salts of iron. In spite of the ship’s
being hermetically sealed, an insupportable smell of sulphur filled the
saloon, and the brilliancy of the electricity was entirely extinguished
by bright scarlet flames. I was in a bath, I was choking, I was
broiled.
“We can remain no longer in this boiling water,” said I to the Captain.
“It would not be prudent,” replied the impassive Captain Nemo.
An order was given; the _Nautilus_ tacked about and left the furnace it
could not brave with impunity. A quarter of an hour after we were
breathing fresh air on the surface. The thought then struck me that, if
Ned Land had chosen this part of the sea for our flight, we should
never have come alive out of this sea of fire.
The next day, the 16th of February, we left the basin which, between
Rhodes and Alexandria, is reckoned about 1,500 fathoms in depth, and
the _Nautilus_, passing some distance from Cerigo, quitted the Grecian
Archipelago after having doubled Cape Matapan.
CHAPTER VII
THE MEDITERRANEAN IN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS
The Mediterranean, the blue sea par excellence, “the great sea” of the
Hebrews, “the sea” of the Greeks, the “mare nostrum” of the Romans,
bordered by orange-trees, aloes, cacti, and sea-pines; embalmed with
the perfume of the myrtle, surrounded by rude mountains, saturated with
pure and transparent air, but incessantly worked by underground fires;
a perfect battlefield in which Neptune and Pluto still dispute the
empire of the world!
It is upon these banks, and on these waters, says Michelet, that man is
renewed in one of the most powerful climates of the globe. But,
beautiful as it was, I could only take a rapid glance at the basin
whose superficial area is two million of square yards. Even Captain
Nemo’s knowledge was lost to me, for this puzzling person did not
appear once during our passage at full speed. I estimated the course
which the _Nautilus_ took under the waves of the sea at about six
hundred leagues, and it was accomplished in forty-eight hours. Starting
on the morning of the 16th of February from the shores of Greece, we
had crossed the Straits of Gibraltar by sunrise on the 18th.
It was plain to me that this Mediterranean, enclosed in the midst of
those countries which he wished to avoid, was distasteful to Captain
Nemo. Those waves and those breezes brought back too many remembrances,
if not too many regrets. Here he had no longer that independence and
that liberty of gait which he had when in the open seas, and his
_Nautilus_ felt itself cramped between the close shores of Africa and
Europe.
Our speed was now twenty-five miles an hour. It may be well understood
that Ned Land, to his great disgust, was obliged to renounce his
intended flight. He could not launch the pinnace, going at the rate of
twelve or thirteen yards every second. To quit the _Nautilus_ under
such conditions would be as bad as jumping from a train going at full
speed—an imprudent thing, to say the least of it. Besides, our vessel
only mounted to the surface of the waves at night to renew its stock of
air; it was steered entirely by the compass and the log.
I saw no more of the interior of this Mediterranean than a traveller by
express train perceives of the landscape which flies before his eyes;
that is to say, the distant horizon, and not the nearer objects which
pass like a flash of lightning.
We were then passing between Sicily and the coast of Tunis. In the
narrow space between Cape Bon and the Straits of Messina the bottom of
the sea rose almost suddenly. There was a perfect bank, on which there
was not more than nine fathoms of water, whilst on either side the
depth was ninety fathoms.
The _Nautilus_ had to manœuvre very carefully so as not to strike
against this submarine barrier.
I showed Conseil, on the map of the Mediterranean, the spot occupied by
this reef.
“But if you please, sir,” observed Conseil, “it is like a real isthmus
joining Europe to Africa.”
“Yes, my boy, it forms a perfect bar to the Straits of Lybia, and the
soundings of Smith have proved that in former times the continents
between Cape Boco and Cape Furina were joined.”
“I can well believe it,” said Conseil.
“I will add,” I continued, “that a similar barrier exists between
Gibraltar and Ceuta, which in geological times formed the entire
Mediterranean.”
“What if some volcanic burst should one day raise these two barriers
above the waves?”
“It is not probable, Conseil.”
“Well, but allow me to finish, please, sir; if this phenomenon should
take place, it will be troublesome for M. Lesseps, who has taken so
much pains to pierce the isthmus.”
“I agree with you; but I repeat, Conseil, this phenomenon will never
happen. The violence of subterranean force is ever diminishing.
Volcanoes, so plentiful in the first days of the world, are being
extinguished by degrees; the internal heat is weakened, the temperature
of the lower strata of the globe is lowered by a perceptible quantity
every century to the detriment of our globe, for its heat is its life.”
“But the sun?”
“The sun is not sufficient, Conseil. Can it give heat to a dead body?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, my friend, this earth will one day be that cold corpse; it will
become uninhabitable and uninhabited like the moon, which has long
since lost all its vital heat.”
“In how many centuries?”
“In some hundreds of thousands of years, my boy.”
“Then,” said Conseil, “we shall have time to finish our journey—that
is, if Ned Land does not interfere with it.”
And Conseil, reassured, returned to the study of the bank, which the
_Nautilus_ was skirting at a moderate speed.
During the night of the 16th and 17th February we had entered the
second Mediterranean basin, the greatest depth of which was 1,450
fathoms. The _Nautilus_, by the action of its screw, slid down the
inclined planes and buried itself in the lowest depths of the sea.
On the 18th of February, about three o’clock in the morning, we were at
the entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar. There once existed two
currents: an upper one, long since recognised, which conveys the waters