by Marie Sexton
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 realised 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.
“Well, Professor Aronnax,” he said to me, “we’re actually in that Bay of Vigo, and all that’s left is for you to probe the mysteries of the place.”
Before I could respond to this shocking statement, he stood up and invited me to follow him. 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 disembowelled 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 two-million 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 organisation.”
“What organisation?”
“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 five-hundred million francs.”
“It was five-hundred million 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 Nine
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.”
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 leapt 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 favourable 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 one-hundred and fifty 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 situa
tion. He was in quite a fury when he left me, and I resigned myself to several days without my lover while he sulked.
As for me, I wasn’t exactly grief-stricken. I was sorry for Ned’s distress, but I also felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted from me. 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, three-hundred metres 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 towards 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 realised 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 eight-hundred 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 travelled 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 marvelled 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 leapt 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 marvelling 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 authorised.
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 one-hundred 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.
