by Marie Sexton
Our visit to this opulent giant clam came to an end. Captain Nemo left the cave, and we climbed back up the bank of shellfish in the midst of these clear waters not yet disturbed by divers at work.
We walked by ourselves, genuine loiterers stopping or straying as our fancies dictated.
For my part, I was no longer worried about those dangers my imagination had so ridiculously exaggerated. The shallows drew noticeably closer to the surface of the sea, and soon, walking in only a metre of water, my head passed well above the level of the ocean.
Conseil rejoined me, and gluing his huge copper capsule to mine, his eyes gave me a friendly greeting. But this lofty plateau measured only a few fathoms, and soon we re-entered Our Element. I think I’ve now earned the right to dub it that.
Ten minutes later, Captain Nemo stopped suddenly. I thought he’d called a halt so that we could turn and start back. No. With a gesture he ordered us to crouch beside him at the foot of a wide crevice. His hand motioned towards a spot within the liquid mass, and I looked carefully.
Five metres away a shadow appeared and dropped to the seafloor. The alarming idea of sharks crossed my mind. But I was mistaken, and once again we didn’t have to deal with monsters of the deep.
It was a man, a living man, a black Indian fisherman, a poor devil who no doubt had come to gather what he could before harvest time. I saw the bottom of his dinghy, moored a few feet above his head. He would dive and go back up in quick succession. A stone cut in the shape of a sugar loaf, which he gripped between his feet while a rope connected it to his boat, served to lower him more quickly to the ocean floor. This was the extent of his equipment. Arriving on the seafloor at a depth of about five metres, he fell to his knees and stuffed his sack with shellfish gathered at random. Then he went back up, emptied his sack, pulled up his stone, and started all over again, the whole process lasting only thirty seconds.
This diver didn’t see us. A shadow cast by our crag hid us from his view. And besides, how could this poor Indian ever have guessed that human beings, creatures like himself, were near him under the waters, eavesdropping on his movements, not missing a single detail of his fishing.
So he went up and down several times. He gathered only about ten shellfish per dive, because he had to tear them from the banks where each clung with its tough mass of filaments. And how many of these oysters for which he risked his life would have no pearl in them?
I observed him with great care. His movements were systematically executed, and for half an hour no danger seemed to threaten him. So I had got used to the sight of this fascinating fishing when all at once, just as the Indian was kneeling on the seafloor, I saw him make a frightened gesture, stand, and gather himself to spring back to the surface of the waves.
I understood his fear. A gigantic shadow appeared above the poor diver. It was a shark of huge size, moving in diagonally, eyes ablaze, jaws wide open.
I was speechless with horror, unable to make a single movement.
With one vigorous stroke of its fins, the voracious animal shot towards the Indian, who jumped aside and avoided the shark’s bite but not the thrashing of its tail, because that tail struck him across the chest and stretched him out on the seafloor.
This scene lasted barely a few seconds. The shark returned, rolled over on its back, and was getting ready to cut the Indian in half, when Captain Nemo, who was stationed beside me, suddenly stood up. Then he strode right towards the monster, dagger in hand, ready to fight it at close quarters.
Just as it was about to snap up the poor fisherman, the man-eater saw its new adversary, repositioned itself on its belly, and headed swiftly towards him.
I can see Captain Nemo’s bearing to this day. Bracing himself, he waited for the fearsome man-eater with wonderful composure, and when the latter rushed at him, the captain leapt aside with prodigious quickness, avoided a collision, and sank his dagger into its belly. But that wasn’t the end of the story. A dreadful battle was joined.
The shark bellowed, so to speak. Blood was pouring into the waves from its wounds.
The sea was dyed red, and through this opaque liquid I could see nothing else.
Nothing else until the moment when, through a rift in the clouds, I saw the daring captain clinging to one of the animal’s fins, fighting the monster at close quarters, belabouring his enemy’s belly with stabs of the dagger yet unable to deliver the deciding thrust—in other words, a direct hit to the heart. In its struggles the man-eater churned the watery mass so furiously, its eddies threatened to knock me over.
I wanted to run to the captain’s rescue. But I was transfixed with horror, unable to move.
I stared, wild-eyed. I saw the fight enter a new phase. The captain fell to the seafloor, toppled by the enormous mass weighing him down. Then the shark’s jaws opened astoundingly wide, like a pair of industrial shears, and that would have been the finish of Captain Nemo had not Ned Land, quick as thought, rushed forward with his harpoon and driven its dreadful point into the shark’s underside.
The waves were saturated with masses of blood. The waters shook with the movements of the man-eater, which thrashed about with indescribable fury. Ned Land hadn’t missed his target. This was the monster’s death rattle. Pierced to the heart, it was struggling with dreadful spasms whose aftershocks knocked Conseil off his feet.
Meanwhile Ned Land pulled the captain clear. Uninjured, the latter stood up, went right to the Indian, quickly cut the rope binding the man to his stone, took the fellow in his arms, and with a vigorous kick of the heel, rose to the surface of the sea.
The three of us followed him, and a few moments later, miraculously safe, we reached the fisherman’s longboat.
Captain Nemo’s first concern was to revive this unfortunate man. I wasn’t sure he would succeed. I hoped so, since the poor devil hadn’t been under very long. But that stroke from the shark’s tail could have been his deathblow.
Fortunately, after vigorous massaging by Conseil and the captain, I saw the nearly drowned man regain consciousness little by little. He opened his eyes. How startled he must have felt, how frightened even, at seeing four huge, copper craniums leaning over him.
And above all, what must he have thought when Captain Nemo pulled a bag of pearls from a pocket in his diving suit and placed it in the fisherman’s hands? This magnificent benefaction from the Man of the Waters to the poor Indian from Ceylon was accepted by the latter with trembling hands. His bewildered eyes indicated that he didn’t know to what superhuman creatures he owed both his life and his fortune.
At the captain’s signal we returned to the bank of shellfish, and retracing our steps, we walked for half an hour until we encountered the anchor connecting the seafloor with the Nautilus’s skiff.
Back on board, the sailors helped divest us of our heavy copper carapaces.
Captain Nemo’s first words were spoken to the Canadian.
“Thank you, Mr Land,” he told him.
“Tit for tat, Captain,” Ned Land replied. “I owed it to you.”
The ghost of a smile glided across the captain’s lips, and that was all.
“To the Nautilus,” he said.
The longboat flew over the waves. A few minutes later we encountered the shark’s corpse again, floating.
From the black markings on the tips of its fins, I recognised the dreadful Squalus melanopterus from the seas of the East Indies, a variety in the species of sharks proper. It was more than twenty-five feet long, its enormous mouth occupied a third of its body. It was an adult, as could be seen from the six rows of teeth forming an isosceles triangle in its upper jaw.
Conseil looked at it with purely scientific fascination, and I’m sure he placed it, not without good reason, in the class of cartilaginous fish, order Chondropterygia with fixed gills, family Selacia, genus Squalus.
While I was contemplating this inert mass, suddenly a dozen of these voracious melanoptera appeared around our longboat, but, paying no attention to us, they pounced
on the corpse and quarrelled over every scrap of it.
By 8:30 we were back on board the Nautilus.
There I fell to thinking about the incidents that marked our excursion over the Mannar oysterbank. Two impressions inevitably stood out. One concerned Captain Nemo’s matchless bravery, the other his devotion to a human being, a representative of that race from which he had fled beneath the seas. In spite of everything, this strange man hadn’t yet succeeded in completely stifling his heart.
When I shared these impressions with him, he answered me in a tone touched with emotion, “That Indian, Professor, lives in the land of the oppressed, and I am to this day, and will be until my last breath, a native of that same land.”
Chapter Four
The Red Sea
During the day of January 29, the island of Ceylon disappeared below the horizon, and at a speed of twenty miles per hour, the Nautilus glided into the labyrinthine channels that separate the Maldive and Laccadive Islands. It likewise hugged Kiltan Island, a shore of madreporic origin discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1499 and one of nineteen chief islands in the island group of the Laccadives, located between latitude 10 degrees and 14 degrees 30’
north, and between longitude 50 degrees 72’ and 69 degrees east.
By then we had fared sixteen-thousand, two-hundred and twenty miles, or seven-thousand, five-hundred leagues, from our starting point in the seas of Japan.
The next day, January 30, when the Nautilus rose to the surface of the ocean, there was no more land in sight. Setting its course to the north-northwest, the ship headed towards the Gulf of Oman, carved out between Arabia and the Indian peninsula and providing access to the Persian Gulf.
This was obviously a blind alley with no possible outlet. So where was Captain Nemo taking us? I was unable to say. Which didn’t satisfy the Canadian, who that day asked me where we were going.
“We’re going, Mr Ned, where the Captain’s fancy takes us.”
“His fancy,” the Canadian replied, “won’t take us very far. The Persian Gulf has no outlet, and if we enter those waters, it won’t be long before we return in our tracks.”
“All right, we’ll return, Mr Land, and after the Persian Gulf, if the Nautilus wants to visit the Red Sea, the Strait of Bab el Mandeb is still there to let us in.”
“I don’t have to tell you, sir,” Ned Land replied, “that the Red Sea is just as landlocked as the gulf, since the Isthmus of Suez hasn’t been cut all the way through yet, and even if it was, a boat as secretive as ours wouldn’t risk a canal intersected with locks. So the Red Sea won’t be our way back to Europe either.”
“But I didn’t say we’d return to Europe.”
“What do you figure, then?”
“I figure that after visiting these unusual waterways of Arabia and Egypt, the Nautilus will go back down to the Indian Ocean, perhaps through Mozambique Channel, perhaps off the Mascarene Islands, and then make for the Cape of Good Hope.”
“And once we’re at the Cape of Good Hope?” the Canadian asked with typical persistence.
“Well then, we’ll enter that Atlantic Ocean with which we aren’t yet familiar. What’s wrong, Ned my love?”
“What’s wrong? Is it not obvious, Professor? I’m not as ready as you to accept a lifetime sentence aboard this vessel.”
“Are you tired of this voyage under the seas? Are you bored with the constantly changing sight of these underwater wonders?”
“It’s not a matter of boredom. It’s a matter of being free men.”
“I disagree. Speaking for myself, I’ll be extremely distressed to see the end of a voyage so few men will ever have a chance to make.”
This angered him far more than I had anticipated. “But don’t you realise, Professor Aronnax,” the Canadian replied, “that soon we’ll have been imprisoned for three whole months aboard this Nautilus?”
“No, Ned, I didn’t realise it. I don’t want to realise it, and I don’t keep track of every day and every hour.”
“Well, I do.”
“In doing so, you only aggravate yourself. There’s nothing to be gained. Why can’t you enjoy our time here?”
“I’ve enjoyed it enough. But when will it be over?”
“In its appointed time. Are you so anxious to escape me?”
“Not you, Professor, but this wretched prison. Are you so blinded by your admiration of our captain that you no longer wish to escape?”
“The captain has nothing to do with this. You’re confusing the issue.”
“Am I? You’re so in awe of him, you would forsake me—”
“Never, Ned. This is your jealousy speaking and nothing else.”
“It’s not just my jealousy. It’s my humanity. My love of liberty. I tell you, Professor, I will not stay here. I will not resign myself to a lifetime in captivity.”
“Ned, please. Let’s not fight. We are in agreement on this. If you come and tell me, ‘A chance to escape is available to us,’ then I’ll discuss it with you. But until that time, there’s nothing we can do about it, and our discussions are futile. In all honesty, I don’t think Captain Nemo ever ventures into European seas.”
This short dialogue reveals that in my mania for the Nautilus, I was turning into the spitting image of its commander.
As for Ned Land, he ended our talk in his best speechifying style, “That’s all fine and dandy. But in my humble opinion, a life in jail is a life without joy.”
I would be lying if I said this comment did not wound me. Was there really no joy for him here? Was he as bored of me as he was of the Nautilus? Was I not enough to keep him happy? Although Ned joined me that night in my chamber, we did not make love. The tension between us made my stateroom feel claustrophobic. He lay silently on his side of the bed and I on mine. I was in anguish, unsure how to bridge the rift that seemed to have suddenly sprung up between us.
The next night, I didn’t see him at all. It quickly became clear he was avoiding me.
“Do I apologise?” I asked Conseil on the second day without my lover. “And if so, for what exactly?”
“My master knows how deep Ned’s passions run. No doubt, it is this passion that draws my master to him.”
“But—”
“Give him time,” Conseil advised. “He cares too much for my master. He will not be angry forever.”
I resigned myself to wait, although it pained me to do so.
For four days until February 3, my lover evaded me. My enthusiasm for our adventure aboard the Nautilus was tempered by the knowledge that it might cost me his love. Each day I debated whether to track him down, but with each second that passed, my confidence waned. I missed him dreadfully, but I feared that when I faced him again, I would see nothing but anger in his eyes.
During this time, the Nautilus inspected the Gulf of Oman at various speeds and depths.
It seemed to be travelling at random, as if hesitating over which course to follow, but it never crossed the Tropic of Cancer.
After leaving this gulf we raised Muscat for an instant, the most important town in the country of Oman. I marvelled at its strange appearance in the midst of the black rocks surrounding it, against which the white of its houses and forts stood out sharply. I spotted the rounded domes of its mosques, the elegant tips of its minarets, and its fresh, leafy terraces. But it was only a fleeting vision, and the Nautilus soon sank beneath the dark waves of these waterways.
Then our ship went along at a distance of six miles from the Arabic coasts of Mahra and Hadhramaut, their undulating lines of mountains relieved by a few ancient ruins. On February 5 we finally put into the Gulf of Aden, a genuine funnel stuck into the neck of Bab el Mandeb and bottling these Indian waters in the Red Sea.
On February 6 the Nautilus cruised in sight of the city of Aden, perched on a promontory connected to the continent by a narrow isthmus, a sort of inaccessible Gibraltar whose fortifications the English rebuilt after capturing it in 1839. I glimpsed the octagonal minarets of this town, whi
ch used to be one of the wealthiest, busiest commercial centres along this coast, as the Arab historian Idrisi tells it.
I was convinced that when Captain Nemo reached this point, he would back out again, but I was mistaken, and much to my surprise, he did nothing of the sort.
The next day, February 7, we entered the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, whose name means
“Gate of Tears” in the Arabic language. Twenty miles wide, it’s only fifty-two kilometres long, and with the Nautilus launched at full speed, clearing it was the work of barely an hour.
But I didn’t see a thing, not even Perim Island where the British government built fortifications to strengthen Aden’s position. There were many English and French steamers ploughing this narrow passageway, liners going from Suez to Bombay, Calcutta, Melbourne, Réunion Island, and Mauritius, far too much traffic for the Nautilus to make an appearance on the surface. So it wisely stayed in midwater.
Finally, at noon, we were ploughing the waves of the Red Sea. I would not even attempt to understand the whim that induced Captain Nemo to take us into this gulf, but I wholeheartedly approved of the Nautilus’s entering it. It adopted a medium pace, sometimes staying on the surface, sometimes diving to avoid some ship, and so I could observe both the inside and topside of this highly unusual sea. I wished every day that Ned would join me. I knew his enthusiasm for our adventure would never equal mine, but I missed his presence next to me. I missed hearing his voice and his deep, booming laughter. I even missed his sarcastic retorts. But after more than a week without a glimpse of him, without even a word from his lips, I was sure I had lost him.
On February 8, as early as the first hours of daylight, Mocha appeared before us, a town now in ruins, whose walls would collapse at the mere sound of a cannon, and which shelters a few leafy date trees here and there. This once-important city used to contain six public marketplaces plus twenty-six mosques, and its walls, protected by fourteen forts, fashioned a three-kilometre girdle around it.
