Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (31 page)

It was indeed the ancient abode of Proteus, the old shepherd of Neptune’s flocks, now the island of Scarpanto, situated between Rhodes and Crete. I saw nothing but the granite base through the glass panels of the saloon.

The next day, the 14th of February, I resolved to employ some hours in studying the fishes of the archipelago; but for some reason or other, the panels remained hermetically sealed. Upon taking the course of the
Nautilus
I found that we were going toward Candia, the ancient isle of Crete. At the time I embarked on the
Abraham Lincoln,
the whole of this island had risen in insurrection against the despotism of the Turks. But how the insurgents had fared since that time I was absolutely ignorant, and it was not Captain Nemo, deprived of all land communications, who could tell me.

I made no allusion to this event when that night I found myself alone with him in the saloon. Besides, he seemed to be taciturn and preoccupied. Then, contrary to his custom, he ordered both panels to be opened, and going from one to the other, observed the mass of waters attentively. To what end I could not guess; so, on my side, I employed my time in studying the fish passing before my eyes.

Among others, I remarked some gobies, mentioned by Aristotle, and commonly known by the name of sea-braches which are more particularly met with in the salt waters lying near the Delta of the Nile. Near them rolled some seabream, half-phosphorescent, a kind of sparus, which the Egyptians ranked among their sacred animals, whose arrival in the waters of their river announced a fertile overflow, and was celebrated by religious ceremonies. I also noticed some cheilines about nine inches long, a bony fish with transparent shell, whose livid color is mixed with red spots; they are great eaters of marine vegetation, which gives them an exquisite flavor. These cheilines were much sought after by the epicures of ancient Rome; the inside, dressed with the soft roe of the lamprey, peacocks’ brains, and tongues of the phenicoptera, composed that divine dish of which Vitellius was so enamored.

Another inhabitant of these seas drew my attention, and led my mind back to recollections of antiquity. It was the remora, that fastens on to the shark’s belly. This little fish, according to the ancients, hooking on to the ship’s bottom, could stop its movements; and one of them, by keeping back Antony’s ship during the battle of Actium,
³³
helped Augustus to gain the victory. On how little hangs the destiny of nations! I observed some fine anthiæ, which belong to the order of lutjans, a fish held sacred by the Greeks, who attributed to them the power of hunting the marine monsters from waters they frequented. Their name signifies
flower,
and they justify their appellation by their shaded colors, their shades comprising the whole gamut of reds, from the paleness of the rose to the brightness of the ruby, and the fugitive tints that clouded their dorsal fin. My eyes could not leave these wonders of the sea, when they were suddenly struck by an unexpected apparition.

In the midst of the waters a man appeared, a diver, carrying at his belt a leathern purse. It was not a body abandoned to the waves; it was a living man, swimming with a strong hand, disappearing occasionally to take breath at the surface.

I turned toward Captain Nemo, and in an agitated voice exclaimed:

“A man shipwrecked! He must be saved at any price!”

The captain did not answer me, but came and leaned against the panel.

The man had approached, and with his face flattened against the glass, was looking at us.

To my great amazement, Captain Nemo signed to him. The diver answered with his hand, mounted immediately to the surface of the water, and did not appear again.

“Do not be uncomfortable,” said Captain Nemo. “It is Nicholas of Cape Matapan; surnamed Pesca.
^bd
He is well known in all the Cyclades.
^be
A bold diver! Water is his element, and he lives more in it than on land, going continually from one island to another, even as far as Crete.”

“You know him, captain?”

“Why not, M. Aronnax?”

Saying which, Captain Nemo went toward a piece of furniture standing near the left panel of the saloon. Near this piece of furniture, I saw a chest bound with iron, on the cover of which was a copper plate, bearing the cipher of the
Nautilus
with its device.

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 apparitionof 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 of byssus! It was strange, for we were not 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 further 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,
^bf
sir,” replied the captain, “and just in the canal which separates Nea Kamenni from Pali Kamenni. 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 3d of February, 1866, a new island, which they named George Island, emerged from the midst of the sulphurous vapor 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 thirty feet in height. It was composed of black and vitreous lava, mixed with fragments of felspar. And lastly, 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.

THE MEDITERRANEAN, THE BLUE sea
par excellence,
^bg
“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
^bh
still dispute the empire of the world!

It is upon these banks, and on these waters, says Michelet,
³⁴
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 millions of square yards. Even Captain Nemo’s knowledge was lost to me, for this enigmatical 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, inclosed 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 traveler 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.

In the midst of the mass of waters brightly lit up by the electric light glided some of those lampreys, more than a yard long, common to almost every climate. Some of the oxyrhynchi, a kind of ray five feet broad, with white belly and gray spotted back, spread out like a large shawl carried along by the current. Other rays passed so quickly that I could not see if they deserved the name of eagles which was given to them by the ancient Greeks, or the qualification of rats, toads, and bats, with which modern fishermen have loaded them. A few milander sharks, twelve feet long, and much feared by divers, struggled among them. Sea foxes eight feet long, endowed with wonderful fineness of scent, appeared like large blue shadows. Some dorades of the shark kind, some of which measured seven feet and a half, showed themselves in their dress of blue and silver, encircled by small bands which struck sharply against the somber tints of their fins, a fish consecrated to Venus,
^bi
the eyes of which are incased in a socket of gold, a precious species, friend of all waters, fresh or salt, an inhabitant of rivers, lakes, and oceans, living in all climates, and bearing all temperatures; a race belonging to the geological era of the earth, and which has preserved all the beauty of its first days. Magnificent sturgeons, nine or ten yards long, creatures of great speed, striking the panes of glass with their strong tails, displayed their bluish backs with small brown spots; they resemble the sharks, but are not equal to them in strength, and are to be met with in all seas. But of all the diverse inhabitants of the Mediterranean, those I observed to the greatest advantage, when the Nautilus approached the surface, belonged to the sixty-third genus of bony fish. They were a kind of tunny, with bluish-black backs, and silvery breastplates, whose dorsal fins threw out sparkles of gold. They are said to follow in the wake of vessels, whose refreshing shade they seek from the fire of a tropical sky, and they did not belie the saying, for they accompanied the
Nautilus
as they did in former times the vessel of La Perouse. For many a long hour they struggled to keep up with our vessel. I was never tired of admiring these creatures really built for speed—their small heads, their bodies lithe and cigar-shaped, which in some were more than three yards long, their pectoral fins, and forked tail endowed with remarkable strength. They swam in a triangle, like certain flocks of birds, whose rapidity they equaled, and of which the ancients used to say that they understood geometry and strategy. But still they do not escape the pursuit of the provençals, who esteem them as highly as the inhabitants of the Propontis
^bj
and of Italy used to do; and these precious but blind and foolhardy creatures perish by millions in the nets of the Marseillaise.