by Marie Sexton
“But Ned my friend,” Conseil answered, “if it weren’t an underwater passageway, the Nautilus couldn’t enter it.”
“And I might add, Mr Land,” I said, “that the waters wouldn’t have rushed under the mountain, and the volcano would still be a volcano. So you have nothing to be sorry about.”
Our climb continued. The gradients got steeper and narrower. Sometimes they were cut across by deep pits that had to be cleared. Masses of overhanging rock had to be got around.
You slid on your knees, you crept on your belly. But helped by the Canadian’s strength and Conseil’s dexterity, we overcame every obstacle.
At an elevation of about thirty metres, the nature of the terrain changed without becoming any easier. Pudding stones and trachyte gave way to black basaltic rock—here, lying in slabs all swollen with blisters, there, shaped like actual prisms and arranged into a series of columns that supported the springings of this immense vault, a wonderful sample of natural architecture. Then, among this basaltic rock, there snaked long, hardened lava flows inlaid with veins of bituminous coal and in places covered by wide carpets of sulphur.
The sunshine coming through the crater had grown stronger, shedding a hazy light over all the volcanic waste forever buried in the heart of this extinct mountain.
But when we had ascended to an elevation of about two-hundred and fifty feet, we were stopped by insurmountable obstacles. The converging inside walls changed into overhangs, and our climb into a circular stroll. At this topmost level the vegetable kingdom began to challenge the mineral kingdom. Shrubs, and even a few trees, emerged from crevices in the walls. I recognised some spurges that let their caustic, purgative sap trickle out. There were heliotropes, very remiss at living up to their sun-worshipping reputations since no sunlight ever reached them. Their clusters of flowers drooped sadly, their colours and scents were faded. Here and there chrysanthemums sprouted timidly at the feet of aloes with long, sad, sickly leaves. But between these lava flows I spotted little violets that still gave off a subtle fragrance, and I confess that I inhaled it with delight. The soul of a flower is its scent, and those splendid water plants, flowers of the sea, have no souls.
We had arrived at the foot of a sturdy clump of dragon trees, which were splitting the rocks with exertions of their muscular roots, when Ned Land exclaimed, “Oh, sir, a hive.”
“A hive?” I answered, with a gesture of utter disbelief.
“Yes, a hive,” the Canadian repeated, “with bees buzzing around.”
I went closer and was forced to recognise the obvious. At the mouth of a hole cut in the trunk of a dragon tree, there swarmed thousands of these ingenious insects so common to all the Canary Islands, where their output is especially prized.
Naturally enough, the Canadian wanted to lay in a supply of honey, and it would have been ill-mannered of me to say no. He mixed sulphur with some dry leaves, set them on fire with a spark from his tinderbox, and proceeded to smoke the bees out. Little by little the buzzing died down and the disembowelled hive yielded several pounds of sweet honey. Ned Land stuffed his haversack with it.
“When I’ve mixed this honey with our breadfruit batter,” he told us, “I’ll be ready to serve you a delectable piece of cake.”
“But of course,” Conseil put in, “it will be gingerbread.”
“I’m all for gingerbread,” I said, “but let’s resume this fascinating stroll.”
At certain turns in the trail we were going along, the lake appeared in its full expanse.
The ship’s beacon lit up that whole placid surface, which experienced neither ripples nor undulations. The Nautilus lay perfectly still. On its platform and on the embankment, crewmen were bustling around, black shadows that stood out clearly in the midst of the luminous air.
Just then we went around the highest ridge of these rocky foothills that supported the vault. Then I saw that bees weren’t the animal kingdom’s only representatives inside this volcano. Here and in the shadows, birds of prey soared and whirled, flying away from nests perched on tips of rock. There were sparrow hawks with white bellies, and screeching kestrels. With all the speed their stiltlike legs could muster, fine fat bustards scampered over the slopes. I’ll let the reader decide whether the Canadian’s appetite was aroused by the sight of this tasty game, and whether he regretted having no rifle in his hands. He tried to make stones do the work of bullets, and after several fruitless attempts, he managed to wound one of these magnificent bustards. To say he risked his life twenty times in order to capture this bird is simply the unadulterated truth, but he fared so well, the animal went into his sack to join the honeycombs.
By then we were forced to go back down to the beach because the ridge had become impossible. Above us, the yawning crater looked like the wide mouth of a well. From where we stood, the sky was pretty easy to see, and I watched clouds race by, dishevelled by the west wind, letting tatters of mist trail over the mountain’s summit. Proof positive that those clouds kept at a moderate altitude, because this volcano didn’t rise more than one-thousand, eight-hundred feet above the level of the ocean.
Half an hour after the Canadian’s latest exploits, we were back on the inner beach.
There the local flora was represented by a wide carpet of samphire, a small umbelliferous plant that keeps quite nicely, which also boasts the names glasswort, saxifrage, and sea fennel.
Conseil picked a couple of bunches. As for the local fauna, it included thousands of crustaceans of every type—lobsters, hermit crabs, prawns, mysid shrimps, daddy longlegs, rock crabs, and a prodigious number of seashells, such as cowries, murex snails, and limpets.
In this locality there gaped the mouth of a magnificent cave. My companions and I took great pleasure in stretching out on its fine-grained sand. Fire had polished the sparkling enamel of its inner walls, sprinkled all over with mica-rich dust. Ned Land tapped these walls and tried to probe their thickness. His mood was much improved. His gaze, when it landed on me, was full of fondness. I couldn’t help smiling.
Our conversation then turned to his everlasting escape plans, and without going too far, I felt I could offer him this hope. Captain Nemo had gone down south only to replenish his sodium supplies. So I hoped he would now hug the coasts of Europe and America, which would allow the Canadian to try again with a greater chance of success.
We were stretched out in this delightful cave for an hour. Our conversation, lively at the outset, then languished. A definite drowsiness overcame us. Conseil was soon snoring.
Ned pulled me into his arms. “I thought he’d never fall asleep,” he joked as he kissed me. It was more than a simple kiss. I immediately recognised the urgency of his touch, the way he suddenly seemed determined to consume me. But Conseil was only a metre or two away.
“What if he wakes?” I whispered.
Ned shook his head, smiling at me. “He won’t.”
“You can’t be sure.”
“Trust me. I’ve been sharing a cabin with him for much of this journey. He’s a sound sleeper. We’ll be quiet.”
He reached down to undo my trousers, and my cock sprang to attention. I was nervous at having Conseil hear us, but something about the situation heightened my lust. Our need for silence made it that much more exciting. I was soon as desperate as my lover, and as impatient.
“Hurry!” I gasped as arched against him. “God Ned, hurry!”
He chuckled at my insistence, but then he slid his strong, calloused hand into my breeches. He gripped my erection, and I had to bite my lip to hold back my cry. I fumbled frantically to undo his fastening, moaning in frustration at my own clumsiness until I felt his thick hard cock in my hand.
It was so perfect, exactly as it had been in our first days together aboard the Abraham Lincoln—nothing but our hands on each other’s cocks, and our kisses to muffle our cries. We clung to each other, stroking and panting and straining for silence. It was as if the world had ceased to exist. It was only us, in this beautiful, surreal, un
earthly place, sharing the best gift we had to give. I would not have traded that moment for anything.
When it was over, I settled back against his stout body with a sigh, comfortable and content. Ned was soon snoring softly in my ear, and since I saw no good reason to resist the call of sleep, I fell into a heavy doze. I dreamed—one doesn’t choose his dreams—that my life had been reduced to the vegetating existence of a simple mollusc. It seemed to me that this cave made up my double-valved shell…
Suddenly Conseil’s voice startled me awake.
“Get up! Get up!” shouted the fine lad.
“What is it?” I asked, in a sitting position.
“The water’s coming up to us.”
I got back on my feet. Like a torrent the sea was rushing into our retreat, and since we definitely were not molluscs, we had to clear out.
In a few seconds we were safe on top of the cave.
“What happened?” Conseil asked. “Some new phenomenon?”
“Not quite, my friends,” I replied. “It was the tide, merely the tide, which well-nigh caught us by surprise just as it did Sir Walter Scott’s hero. The ocean outside is rising, and by a perfectly natural law of balance, the level of this lake is also rising. We’ve got off with a mild dunking. Let’s go change clothes on the Nautilus.”
Three-quarters of an hour later, we had completed our circular stroll and were back on board. Just then the crewmen finished loading the sodium supplies, and the Nautilus could have departed immediately.
But Captain Nemo gave no orders. Would he wait for nightfall and exit through his underwater passageway in secrecy? Perhaps.
But by the next day the Nautilus had left its home port and was navigating well out from any shore, a few metres beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
Chapter Eleven
The Sargasso Sea
The Nautilus didn’t change direction. For the time being, then, we had to set aside any hope of returning to European seas. Captain Nemo kept his prow pointing south. Where was he taking us? I was afraid to guess.
That day the Nautilus crossed an odd part of the Atlantic Ocean. I was able to study the phenomenon in this exclusive setting where ships rarely go. Above us, huddled among the brown weeds, there floated objects originating from all over, tree trunks ripped from the Rocky Mountains or the Andes and sent floating down the Amazon or the Mississippi, numerous pieces of wreckage, remnants of keels or undersides, bulwarks staved in and so weighed down with seashells and barnacles, they couldn’t rise to the surface of the ocean.
And the passing years will someday bear out Maury’s other view that by collecting in this way over the centuries, these substances will be turned to stone by the action of the waters and will then form inexhaustible coalfields. Valuable reserves prepared by farseeing nature for that time when man will have exhausted his mines on the continents.
In the midst of this hopelessly tangled fabric of weeds and fucus plants, I noted some delightful pink-coloured, star-shaped alcyon coral, sea anemone trailing the long tresses of their tentacles, some green, red, and blue jellyfish, and especially those big rhizostome jellyfish that Cuvier described, whose bluish parasols are trimmed with violet festoons.
We spent the whole day of February 22 in the Sargasso Sea, where fish that dote on marine plants and crustaceans find plenty to eat. The next day the ocean resumed its usual appearance.
From this moment on, for nineteen days from February 23 to March 12, the Nautilus stayed in the middle of the Atlantic, hustling us along at a constant speed of one-hundred leagues every twenty-four hours. It was obvious that Captain Nemo wanted to carry out his underwater programme, and I had no doubt that he intended, after doubling Cape Horn, to return to the Pacific South Seas.
So Ned Land had good reason to worry. In these wide seas empty of islands, it was no longer feasible to jump ship. Nor did we have any way to counter Captain Nemo’s whims.
We had no choice but to acquiesce, but if we couldn’t attain our end through force or cunning, I liked to think we might achieve it through persuasion. Once this voyage was over, might not Captain Nemo consent to set us free in return for our promise never to reveal his existence? Our word of honour, which we sincerely would have kept. However, this delicate question would have to be negotiated with the captain. But how would he receive our demands for freedom? At the very outset and in no uncertain terms, hadn’t he declared that the secret of his life required that we be permanently imprisoned on board the Nautilus?
Wouldn’t he see my four-month silence as a tacit acceptance of this situation? Would my returning to this subject arouse suspicions that could jeopardise our escape plans, if we had promising circumstances for trying again later on? I weighed all these considerations, turned them over in my mind, submitted them to Conseil, but he was as baffled as I was. In short, although I’m not easily discouraged, I realised that my chances of ever seeing my fellow men again were shrinking by the day, especially at a time when Captain Nemo was recklessly racing towards the south Atlantic.
During those nineteen days just mentioned, no unique incidents distinguished our voyage. I saw little of the captain. He was at work. In the library I often found books he had left open, especially books on natural history. He had thumbed through my work on the great ocean depths, and the margins were covered with his notes, which sometimes contradicted my theories and formulations. But the captain remained content with this method of refining my work, and he rarely discussed it with me. Sometimes I heard melancholy sounds reverberating from the organ, which he played very expressively, but only at night in the midst of the most secretive darkness, while the Nautilus slumbered in the wilderness of the ocean.
During this part of our voyage, we navigated on the surface of the waves for entire days. The sea was nearly deserted. A few sailing ships, laden for the East Indies, were heading towards the Cape of Good Hope. One day we were chased by the longboats of a whaling vessel, which undoubtedly viewed us as some enormous baleen whale of great value. But Captain Nemo didn’t want these gallant gentlemen wasting their time and energy, so he ended the hunt by diving beneath the waters. This incident seemed to fascinate Ned Land intensely. I’m sure the Canadian was sorry that these fishermen couldn’t harpoon our sheet-iron cetacean and mortally wound it.
During this period the fish Conseil and I observed differed little from those we had already studied in other latitudes. Chief among them were specimens of that dreadful cartilaginous genus that’s divided into three subgenera numbering at least thirty-two species, striped sharks five metres long, the head squat and wider than the body, the caudal fin curved, the back with seven big, black, parallel lines running lengthwise, then perlon sharks, ash grey, pierced with seven gill openings, furnished with a single dorsal fin placed almost exactly in the middle of the body.
Some big dogfish also passed by, a voracious species of shark if there ever was one.
With some justice, fishermen’s yarns aren’t to be trusted, but here’s what a few of them relate. Inside the corpse of one of these animals there were found a buffalo head and a whole calf, in another, two tuna and a sailor in uniform, in yet another, a soldier with his sabre, in another, finally, a horse with its rider. In candour, none of these sounds like divinely inspired truth. But the fact remains that not a single dogfish let itself get caught in the Nautilus’s nets, so I can’t vouch for their voracity.
Schools of elegant, playful dolphin swam alongside for entire days. They went in groups of five or six, hunting in packs like wolves over the countryside—moreover, they’re just as voracious as dogfish, if I can believe a certain Copenhagen professor who says that from one dolphin’s stomach, he removed thirteen porpoises and fifteen seals. True, it was a killer whale, belonging to the biggest known species, whose length sometimes exceeds twenty-four feet. The family Delphinia numbers ten genera, and the dolphins I saw were akin to the genus Delphinorhynchus, remarkable for an extremely narrow muzzle four times as long as the cranium. Measuring three metre
s, their bodies were black on top, underneath a pinkish white strewn with small, very scattered spots.
From these seas I’ll also mention some unusual specimens of croakers, fish from the order Acanthopterygia, family Scienidea. Some authors—more artistic than scientific—claim that these fish are melodious singers, that their voices in unison put on concerts unmatched by human choristers. I don’t say nay, but to my regret these croakers didn’t serenade us as we passed.
Finally, to conclude, Conseil classified a large number of flying fish. Nothing could have made a more unusual sight than the marvellous timing with which dolphins hunt these fish. Whatever the range of its flight, however evasive its trajectory—even up and over the Nautilus—the hapless flying fish always found a dolphin to welcome it with an open mouth.
These were either flying gurnards or kite like sea robins, whose lips glowed in the dark, at night scrawling fiery streaks in the air before plunging into the murky waters like so many shooting stars.
Our navigating continued under these conditions until March 13. That day the Nautilus was put to work in some depth-sounding experiments that fascinated me deeply.
By then we had fared nearly thirteen-thousand leagues from our starting point in the Pacific high seas. Our position fix placed us in latitude 45 degrees 37’ south and longitude 37
degrees 53’ west. These were the same waterways where Captain Denham, aboard the Herald, payed out fourteen-thousand metres of sounding line without finding bottom. It was here too that Lieutenant Parker, aboard the American frigate Congress, was unable to reach the underwater soil at fifteen-thousand, one-hundred and forty-nine metres.
Captain Nemo decided to take his Nautilus down to the lowest depths in order to double-check these different soundings. I got ready to record the results of this experiment.
The panels in the lounge opened, and manoeuvres began for reaching those strata so prodigiously far removed.
It was apparently considered out of the question to dive by filling the ballast tanks.
