by Jules Verne
I had a look at our guns to make sure they were in good condition. My uncle noticed what I was doing and gave an approving nod.
Already the surface of the water has begun moving over a wide area, indicating some disturbance down below. Danger is near. We must keep a sharp lookout.
Tuesday, 18 August. Evening came, or rather the moment when sleep weights down our eyelids, for there is no night on this ocean, and the implacable light tires our eyes with its persistency, as if we were sailing under the Arctic sun. Hans was at the tiller. During his watch I fell asleep.
Two hours later a violent shock awoke me. The raft had been lifted up above the water with indescribable force and hurled a hundred feet or more.
‘What’s the matter?’ cried my uncle. ‘Have we run aground?’
Hans pointed to a dark mass rising and falling about a quarter of a mile away. I looked and cried:
‘It’s a colossal porpoise!’
‘Yes,’ replied my uncle, ‘and there there’s an enormous sea-lizard.’
‘And farther on a monstrous crocodile! Look at its huge jaws and its rows of teeth! Oh, it’s disappearing!’
‘A whale! A whale!’ cried the Professor. ‘I can see its enormous fins. Look at the air and the water it’s throwing out through its blowers!’
Sure enough, two liquid columns were rising to a considerable height above the sea. We stood there surprised, stupefied, horrified by this herd of marine monsters. They were of supernatural dimensions, and the smallest of them could have broken the raft with one snap of its jaws. Hans wanted to put the helm up to get away from this dangerous region; but in the other direction he saw some more enemies which were just as terrifying – a turtle forty feet long, and a serpent thirty feet long, darting its enormous head to and fro above the waves.
Flight was out of the question. The reptiles came nearer and moved around the raft at a speed greater than that of any express train, in gradually narrowing circles. I picked up my rifle. But what effect could a bullet have on the scales with which these animals were covered?
We were speechless with fright. They drew closer -the crocodile on one side, the serpent on the other. The rest of the herd had disappeared. I got ready to fire, but Hans motioned me to stop. The two monsters passed within a hundred yards of the raft and hurled themselves on one another with a fury which prevented them from seeing us.
The battle began two hundred yards away. We could distinctly see the two monsters at grips with each other. But then it seemed to me that the other animals were coming and joining in the struggle – the porpoise, the whale, the lizard, and the turtle. Every moment I caught a glimpse of one or other of them. I pointed them out to the Icelander, but he shook his head.
‘Iva,’ he said.
‘What, two? He says there are only two animals …’
‘He’s right,’ cried my uncle, whose telescope had not left his eye.
‘He can’t be!’
‘Yes, he is. The first of those monsters has the snout of a porpoise, the head of a lizard and the teeth of a crocodile: that is what put us out. It’s the most formidable of the antediluvian reptiles, the ichthyosaurus!’
‘And the other?’
‘The other is a serpent with a turtle’s shell, the mortal enemy of the first – the plesiosaurus!’
Hans had been right. Only two monsters were disturbing the surface of the sea, and before my eyes I had two reptiles of primitive oceans. I made out the bloodshot eye of the ichthyosaurus, as big as a man’s head. Nature has endowed it with an extremely powerful optical apparatus capable of withstanding the pressure of the water in the depth at which it lives. It has appropriately been called the saurian whale, for it has the whale’s speed and size. This one measured not less than a hundred feet, and I could gauge its size when it raised its vertical tail-fins above the waves. Its jaws were enormous, and according to the naturalists they contain not less than 182 teeth.
The plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical body and a short tail, had four flappers spread out like oars. Its body was entirely covered with a carapace, and its neck, which was flexible as a swan’s, rose thirty feet above the water.
Those two animals attacked each other with in describable fury. They raised mountainous waves which rolled as far as the raft, so that a score of times we were on the point of capsizing. Hissing noises of tremendous intensity reached our ears. The two monsters were locked together, and could no longer be distinguished from one another. We realized that we had everything to fear from the victor’s rage.
One hour, two hours went by, and the fight went on with unabated fury, the combatants alternately nearing the raft and moving away. We remained motionless, ready to open fire.
Suddenly the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus disappeared, creating a positive whirlpool in the water. Several minutes passed. Was the fight going to end in the depths of the sea?
All of a sudden an enormous head shot out of the water, the head of the plesiosaurus. The monster was mortally wounded. I could no longer see its huge shell, but just its long neck rising, falling, coiling, and uncoiling, lashing the waves like a gigantic whip and writhing like a worm cut in two. The water spurted all around and almost blinded us. But soon the reptile’s death-agony drew to an end, its movements grew less violent, its contortions became feebler, and the long serpentine form stretched out in an inert mass on the calm waves.
As for the ichthyosaurus, has it returned to its submarine cave, or will it reappear on the surface of the sea?
34
The Great Geyser
Wednesday, 19 August. Fortunately the wind, which is blowing hard, has enabled us to get away quickly from the scene of the battle. Hans is still at the tiller, and my uncle, whom the fight had distracted from his all-absorbing thoughts, has returned to his impatient examination of the sea.
The voyage has resumed its uniform tenor, which I have no desire to see disturbed by dangers such as we underwent yesterday.
Thursday, 20 August. Wind N.N.E., variable. Temperature high. Speed about nine knots.
Towards midday we heard a very distant noise, a continuous roar which I could not identify.
‘There must be some rock or islet in the distance,’ said the Professor, ‘against which the sea is breaking.’
Hans climbed to the top of the mast but could not make out any reef. The ocean stretched away unbroken to the skyline.
Three hours went by. The roar seemed to be coming from a distant waterfall. I said as much to my uncle, who shook his head. All the same I felt sure that I was right, and wondered whether we might not be sailing towards some cataract which would hurl us into the abyss. I had no doubt that this method of descent would please the Professor, because it would be nearly vertical, but for my part …
At any rate there was definitely a very noisy phenomenon a good few miles to leeward, for now the roaring noise was clearly audible. Did it come from the sky or the sea?
I looked up at the vapours hanging in the atmosphere and tried to penetrate their depths. The sky was calm; the clouds, as high up in the vault as they could go, seemed motionless and almost invisible in the bright glare of the light. It was therefore necessary to look elsewhere for the explanation of the phenomenon.
I then examined the horizon, which was unbroken and free from mist. Its appearance had not changed in any way. But if the noise came from a waterfall, a cataract, if the whole sea was flowing into a lower basin, if that roar was produced by a mass of falling water, then there was bound to be a current, and its increasing speed would give me the measure of the danger threatening us. I consulted the current: it was nil. I threw an empty bottle into the sea: it lay still.
About four o’clock Hans stood up, clutched hold of the mast, and climbed up to the top again. From that position his eyes swept the horizon in front of the raft and stopped at a certain point. His face showed no surprise, but his eyes remained motionless.
‘He has seen something,’ said my uncle.
; ‘Yes, I do believe he has.’
Hans came down and stretched his arm out to the south, saying:
‘Der nere!’
‘Over there?’ repeated my uncle.
Seizing his telescope, he gazed hard for a minute which seemed an age to me.
‘Yes, yes!’ he cried.
‘What can you see?’
‘A huge jet of water rising above the waves.’
‘Another sea monster?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Then let us steer more to the west, because we know now how dangerous those antediluvian monsters are!’
‘No, let us go straight ahead,’ replied my uncle.
I turned to Hans, but he held his tiller with inflexible determination.
Yet if at the distance which separated us from the animal – a distance I estimated at thirty miles at least – we could see the column of water expelled by its blowers, then it must be of supernatural dimensions. The most ordinary prudence would dictate immediate flight, but we had not come so far to be prudent.
We therefore pressed on. The nearer we got to the jet, the bigger it seemed. What monster, we wondered, could take in such a quantity of water and shoot it out without a moment’s interruption?
At eight o’clock in the evening we were less than five miles from it. Its huge, dark, hillocky body lay in the sea like an island. Illusion or fear gave me the impression that it was over a mile long. What could this cetacean be, which neither Cuvier nor Blumenbach knew anything about? It was motionless and apparently asleep; the sea seemed to be incapable of moving it, and it was the waves that lapped against its sides. The column of water, thrown up to a height of five hundred feet, was falling in the form of rain with a deafening roar. And there we were, speeding like lunatics towards that powerful monster which a hundred whales a day would be insufficient to satisfy.
Terror seized me. I refused to go any farther and swore that I would cut the halyards if necessary. I expressed my mutinous feelings to the Professor, but he made no reply.
All of a sudden Hans stood up, pointed at the menacing object, and said:
‘Holme.’
‘An island!’ cried my uncle.
‘An island?’ I said with a sceptical shrug of the shoulders.
‘Why, yes!’ replied the Professor, roaring with laughter.
‘But that column of water?’
‘Geyser,’ said Hans.
‘Yes, of course, it must be a geyser,’ said my uncle, ‘a geyser like those in Iceland.’
At first I refused to believe that I had been so grossly mistaken as to take an islet for a sea monster. But the proof was there before me, and finally I had to admit my error. What we could see was just a natural phenomenon.
As we drew nearer the dimensions of the liquid column were revealed as truly magnificent. The islet looked exactly like a huge cetacean whose head was sixty feet above the waves. The geyser – a word which means ‘fury’ – rose majestically at one end. Now and then we could hear muffled explosions, and the enormous jet, seized with a more violent rage, shook its vaporous plume and shot up as far as the lowest stratum of clouds. It was all alone. There were no wreaths of steam, no hot springs around it, and all the volcanic power of the island was concentrated in its jet. The rays of electric light mingled with that dazzling sheaf of liquid, every drop of which took on all the colours of the spectrum.
‘Let us land,’ said the Professor.
We had to be careful to avoid the waterspout, which could have sunk the raft in a moment. Steering skilfully, Hans brought us to the end of the islet.
I jumped on to the rock, and my uncle followed nimbly, while the guide remained at his post, like a man above curiosity.
We found ourselves walking on granite mingled with siliceous tufa. The ground was trembling under our feet like the sides of an overheated boiler full of steam; it was burning hot. We came in sight of a little central basin from which the geyser rose. I plunged a thermometer into the boiling water; it registered 163°C.
This water was coming from a blazing furnace, and this was in complete contradiction with Professor Lidenbrock’s theories. I could not refrain from pointing this out to him.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what does that prove against my theory?’
‘Nothing,’ I said curtly, seeing that I was faced with absolute stubbornness.
All the same I was forced to admit that we had been singularly favoured so far, and that for some reason which escaped me we had travelled in perfectly tolerable conditions of temperature. But it struck me as obvious and certain that some day or other we would reach regions where the central heat attained the highest limits and went beyond the temperature registered by any thermometer.
‘We shall see.’
That was all the Professor would say; and after naming the volcanic islet after his nephew, he gave the signal to re-embark.
I went on looking at the geyser for a few minutes. I noticed that its jet varied in height, sometimes diminishing in force, then shooting up again, a fact I attributed to variations in the pressure of the vapours accumulated in its reservoir.
At last we set sail again, skirting the sheer rocks at the southern end of the island. Hans had taken advantage of our absence to put the raft in order.
Before putting off, I made a few observations to calculate the distance we had come, and I now note these down in my journal. We have sailed 675 miles from Port Gräuben, and we are 1,550 miles from Iceland, under England.
35
The Storm
Friday, 21 August. Today the magnificent geyser had disappeared. The wind had freshened and had rapidly carried us away from Axel Island, while the roar of the geyser had gradually grown fainter.
The weather, if I may use that term, was to change before long. The atmosphere grew heavy with vapours charged with the electricity generated by the evaporation of the salt water; the clouds sank perceptibly and took on a uniformly olive hue; the electric light could scarcely pierce this opaque curtain lowered over the stage on which the drama of the elements was about to be performed.
I felt overawed, as most people do on earth at the approach of a cataclysm. The cumulus clouds piled up in the south had a sinister look – that pitiless appearance I had often noticed at the beginning of a storm. The air was heavy, the sea calm.
In the distance, the clouds looked like huge wool-packs heaped up in picturesque disorder; little by little they swelled up, gaining in size what they lost in number. They were so heavy that they seemed unable to rise above the horizon; but gradually, under the influence of the breezes, they merged together, growing darker all the time, until they soon formed a single menacing mass. Now and then a fleecy ball of mist, still illumined by the electric light, dropped on to this greyish carpet and soon lost itself in the opaque mass.
Naturally the atmosphere was full of electricity; my own body was saturated with it, and my hair was standing on end as if it were close to an electrical machine. It seemed to me that if my companions touched me they would receive a violent shock.
At ten in the morning the signs became more decisive; it was as if the wind were dropping only in order to draw breath, and the bank of cloud looked like a huge leather bottle in which hurricanes were accumulating.
I was reluctant to believe in the sky’s threats, but I could not help saying:
‘There’s bad weather on the way.’
The Professor made no answer. He was in a dreadful temper at seeing the ocean stretching away into infinity before his eyes. He simply shrugged his shoulders.
‘We’re going to have a storm,’ I said, pointing at the horizon. ‘Those clouds are weighing down on the sea as if they wanted to crush it.’
There was a general silence. The wind dropped completely. Nature seemed to have stopped breathing and to be utterly dead. On the mast, where a hint of St Elmo’s fire was already shining, the sail hung in heavy folds. The raft lay motionless on the sluggish, waveless sea. Why, I thought, if we had come to a standst
ill, did we keep up that sail, which could capsize us at the first impact of the storm?
‘Let us reef the sail and take down the mast,’ I said. ‘That would be the sensible thing to do.’
‘No, damnit, no!’ cried my uncle. ‘A hundred times no! Let the wind seize us! Let the storm carry us away! Provided I set eyes on a rocky shore, I don’t care if it smashes our raft to smithereens!’
These words were scarcely out of his mouth before a sudden change took place on the southern horizon. The accumulated vapours condensed into water, and the air, rushing from the farthest extremities of the cavern to fill the voids left by this condensation, blew with hurricane force. The darkness deepened until I could do no more than jot down a few hurried notes.
The raft rose into the air and bounded forward, flinging my uncle headlong. I crawled over to him, and found him clinging to a cable and apparently enjoying the sight of the elements unleashed.
Hans did not budge. His long hair, blown forward by the hurricane over his motionless features, gave him an odd appearance, for the end of every hair was tipped with little luminous plumes. This frightening mask reminded me of the face of antediluvian man, the contemporary of the ichthyosaurus and the megatherium.
Meanwhile the mast held firm, although the sail swelled out like a bubble on the point of bursting. The raft flew along at a speed I could not calculate, but not as fast as the water it displaced, which was thrown up in clean straight lines.
‘The sail! The sail!’ I cried, making as if to lower it.
‘No!’ replied my uncle.
‘Nej!’ repeated Hans, gently shaking his head.
By now the rain had formed a roaring cataract in front of that horizon towards which we were speeding madly. But before it could reach us the curtain of cloud was torn apart, the sea boiled, and a vast chemical action taking place in the upper regions brought electrical forces into play. Brilliant flashes of lightning mingled with the rolls of thunder, criss-crossing in the midst of the loud crashes; the vaporous mass became incandescent, and the hail stones striking the metal of our tools or guns flashed with light; while the heaving waves looked like miniature volcanoes, each hillock containing an inner fire, each crest plumed with a flame.
