Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. English

by Jules Verne

  I was not mistaken. Unlocking noises became audible, a door opened,and two men appeared.

  One was short and stocky, powerfully muscled, broad shouldered,robust of limbs, the head squat, the hair black and luxuriant,the mustache heavy, the eyes bright and penetrating, and hiswhole personality stamped with that southern-blooded zest that,in France, typifies the people of Provence. The philosopherDiderot has very aptly claimed that a man's bearing is the clueto his character, and this stocky little man was certainlya living proof of this claim. You could sense that his everydayconversation must have been packed with such vivid figures ofspeech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers.But I was never in a position to verify this because, around me,he used only an odd and utterly incomprehensible dialect.

  The second stranger deserves a more detailed description.A disciple of such character-judging anatomists as Gratioletor Engel could have read this man's features like an open book.Without hesitation, I identified his dominant qualities--self-confidence, since his head reared like a nobleman's above the arcformed by the lines of his shoulders, and his black eyes gazedwith icy assurance; calmness, since his skin, pale rather than ruddy,indicated tranquility of blood; energy, shown by the swiftly knittingmuscles of his brow; and finally courage, since his deep breathingdenoted tremendous reserves of vitality.

  I might add that this was a man of great pride, that his calm,firm gaze seemed to reflect thinking on an elevated plane,and that the harmony of his facial expressions and bodilymovements resulted in an overall effect of unquestionable candor--according to the findings of physiognomists, those analystsof facial character.

  I felt "involuntarily reassured" in his presence, and this bodedwell for our interview.

  Whether this individual was thirty-five or fifty years of age,I could not precisely state. He was tall, his forehead broad,his nose straight, his mouth clearly etched, his teeth magnificent,his hands refined, tapered, and to use a word from palmistry,highly "psychic," in other words, worthy of serving a loftyand passionate spirit. This man was certainly the most wonderfulphysical specimen I had ever encountered. One unusual detail:his eyes were spaced a little far from each other and couldinstantly take in nearly a quarter of the horizon. This ability--as I later verified--was strengthened by a range of vision even greaterthan Ned Land's. When this stranger focused his gaze on an object,his eyebrow lines gathered into a frown, his heavy eyelids closedaround his pupils to contract his huge field of vision, and he looked!What a look--as if he could magnify objects shrinking into the distance;as if he could probe your very soul; as if he could pierce those sheetsof water so opaque to our eyes and scan the deepest seas . . . !

  Wearing caps made of sea-otter fur, and shod in sealskin fishing boots,these two strangers were dressed in clothing made from some uniquefabric that flattered the figure and allowed great freedom of movement.

  The taller of the two--apparently the leader on board--examined uswith the greatest care but without pronouncing a word. Then, turning tohis companion, he conversed with him in a language I didn't recognize.It was a sonorous, harmonious, flexible dialect whose vowels seemedto undergo a highly varied accentuation.

  The other replied with a shake of the head and added two or threeutterly incomprehensible words. Then he seemed to question medirectly with a long stare.

  I replied in clear French that I wasn't familiar with his language;but he didn't seem to understand me, and the situationgrew rather baffling.

  "Still, master should tell our story," Conseil said to me."Perhaps these gentlemen will grasp a few words of it!"

  I tried again, telling the tale of our adventures, clearly articulatingmy every syllable, and not leaving out a single detail. I statedour names and titles; then, in order, I introduced Professor Aronnax,his manservant Conseil, and Mr. Ned Land, harpooner.

  The man with calm, gentle eyes listened to me serenely,even courteously, and paid remarkable attention. But nothingin his facial expression indicated that he understood my story.When I finished, he didn't pronounce a single word.

  One resource still left was to speak English. Perhaps they wouldbe familiar with this nearly universal language. But I only knew it,as I did the German language, well enough to read it fluently,not well enough to speak it correctly. Here, however, our overridingneed was to make ourselves understood.

  "Come on, it's your turn," I told the harpooner. "Over to you,Mr. Land. Pull out of your bag of tricks the best English ever spokenby an Anglo-Saxon, and try for a more favorable result than mine."

  Ned needed no persuading and started our story all over again,most of which I could follow. Its content was the same,but the form differed. Carried away by his volatile temperament,the Canadian put great animation into it. He complainedvehemently about being imprisoned in defiance of his civil rights,asked by virtue of which law he was hereby detained, invoked writsof habeas corpus, threatened to press charges against anyone holdinghim in illegal custody, ranted, gesticulated, shouted, and finallyconveyed by an expressive gesture that we were dying of hunger.

  This was perfectly true, but we had nearly forgotten the fact.

  Much to his amazement, the harpooner seemed no more intelligiblethan I had been. Our visitors didn't bat an eye. Apparently theywere engineers who understood the languages of neither the Frenchphysicist Arago nor the English physicist Faraday.

  Thoroughly baffled after vainly exhausting our philological resources,I no longer knew what tactic to pursue, when Conseil told me:

  "If master will authorize me, I'll tell the whole business in German."

  "What! You know German?" I exclaimed.

  "Like most Flemish people, with all due respect to master."

  "On the contrary, my respect is due you. Go to it, my boy."

  And Conseil, in his serene voice, described for the third timethe various vicissitudes of our story. But despite our narrator'sfine accent and stylish turns of phrase, the German language metwith no success.

  Finally, as a last resort, I hauled out everything I couldremember from my early schooldays, and I tried to narrate ouradventures in Latin. Cicero would have plugged his ears and sentme to the scullery, but somehow I managed to pull through.With the same negative result.

  This last attempt ultimately misfiring, the two strangers exchangeda few words in their incomprehensible language and withdrew,not even favoring us with one of those encouraging gestures that areused in every country in the world. The door closed again.

  "This is outrageous!" Ned Land shouted, exploding for thetwentieth time. "I ask you! We speak French, English, German,and Latin to these rogues, and neither of them has the decencyto even answer back!"

  "Calm down, Ned," I told the seething harpooner. "Anger won'tget us anywhere."

  "But professor," our irascible companion went on, "can't you seethat we could die of hunger in this iron cage?"

  "Bah!" Conseil put in philosophically. "We can hold out agood while yet!"

  "My friends," I said, "we mustn't despair. We've gotten out oftighter spots. So please do me the favor of waiting a bit beforeyou form your views on the commander and crew of this boat."

  "My views are fully formed," Ned Land shot back. "They're rogues!"

  "Oh good! And from what country?"

  "Roguedom!"

  "My gallant Ned, as yet that country isn't clearly marked on maps ofthe world, but I admit that the nationality of these two strangers is hardto make out! Neither English, French, nor German, that's all we can say.But I'm tempted to think that the commander and his chief officerwere born in the low latitudes. There must be southern blood in them.But as to whether they're Spaniards, Turks, Arabs, or East Indians,their physical characteristics don't give me enough to go on.And as for their speech, it's utterly incomprehensible."

  "That's the nuisance in not knowing every language," Conseil replied,"or the drawback in not having one universal language!"

  "Which would all go out the window!" Ned Land replied
."Don't you see, these people have a language all to themselves,a language they've invented just to cause despair in decent peoplewho ask for a little dinner! Why, in every country on earth,when you open your mouth, snap your jaws, smack your lips and teeth,isn't that the world's most understandable message? From Quebecto the Tuamotu Islands, from Paris to the Antipodes, doesn't it mean:I'm hungry, give me a bite to eat!"

  "Oh," Conseil put in, "there are some people so unintelligentby nature . . ."

  As he was saying these words, the door opened. A stewardentered.* He brought us some clothes, jackets and sailor's pants,made out of a fabric whose nature I didn't recognize.I hurried to change into them, and my companions followed suit.

  *Author's Note: A steward is a waiter on board a steamer.

  Meanwhile our silent steward, perhaps a deaf-mute, set the tableand laid three place settings.

  "There's something serious afoot," Conseil said, "and it bodes well."

  "Bah!" replied the rancorous harpooner. "What the devil do you supposethey eat around here? Turtle livers, loin of shark, dogfish steaks?"

  "We'll soon find out!" Conseil said.

  Overlaid with silver dish covers, various platters had beenneatly positioned on the table cloth, and we sat down to eat.Assuredly, we were dealing with civilized people, and if it hadn'tbeen for this electric light flooding over us, I would have thoughtwe were in the dining room of the Hotel Adelphi in Liverpool,or the Grand Hotel in Paris. However, I feel compelled to mentionthat bread and wine were totally absent. The water was fresh and clear,but it was still water--which wasn't what Ned Land had in mind.Among the foods we were served, I was able to identify variousdaintily dressed fish; but I couldn't make up my mind about certainotherwise excellent dishes, and I couldn't even tell whethertheir contents belonged to the vegetable or the animal kingdom.As for the tableware, it was elegant and in perfect taste.Each utensil, spoon, fork, knife, and plate, bore on its reversea letter encircled by a Latin motto, and here is its exact duplicate:

  MOBILIS IN MOBILI

  N

  Moving within the moving element! It was a highly appropriatemotto for this underwater machine, so long as the prepositionin is translated as within and not upon. The letter N was no doubtthe initial of the name of that mystifying individual in commandbeneath the seas!

  Ned and Conseil had no time for such musings. They were wolfingdown their food, and without further ado I did the same.By now I felt reassured about our fate, and it seemed obviousthat our hosts didn't intend to let us die of starvation.

  But all earthly things come to an end, all things must pass,even the hunger of people who haven't eaten for fifteen hours.Our appetites appeased, we felt an urgent need for sleep.A natural reaction after that interminable night of fightingfor our lives.

  "Ye gods, I'll sleep soundly," Conseil said.

  "Me, I'm out like a light!" Ned Land replied.

  My two companions lay down on the cabin's carpeting and were soondeep in slumber.

  As for me, I gave in less readily to this intense need for sleep.Too many thoughts had piled up in my mind, too many insolublequestions had arisen, too many images were keeping my eyelids open!Where were we? What strange power was carrying us along?I felt--or at least I thought I did--the submersible sinkingtoward the sea's lower strata. Intense nightmares besieged me.In these mysterious marine sanctuaries, I envisioned hostsof unknown animals, and this underwater boat seemed to be a bloodrelation of theirs: living, breathing, just as fearsome . . . !Then my mind grew calmer, my imagination melted into hazy drowsiness,and I soon fell into an uneasy slumber.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Tantrums of Ned Land

  I HAVE NO IDEA how long this slumber lasted; but it must have beena good while, since we were

  completely over our exhaustion. I was the first one to wake up.My companions weren't yet stirring and still lay in their cornerslike inanimate objects.

  I had barely gotten up from my passably hard mattress when I feltmy mind clear, my brain go on the alert. So I began a carefulreexamination of our cell.

  Nothing had changed in its interior arrangements.The prison was still a prison and its prisoners still prisoners.But, taking advantage of our slumber, the steward had cleared the table.Consequently, nothing indicated any forthcoming improvement inour situation, and I seriously wondered if we were doomed to spendthe rest of our lives in this cage.

  This prospect seemed increasingly painful to me because, even thoughmy brain was clear of its obsessions from the night before,I was feeling an odd short-windedness in my chest. It was becominghard for me to breathe. The heavy air was no longer sufficientfor the full play of my lungs. Although our cell was large,we obviously had used up most of the oxygen it contained.In essence, over an hour's time a single human being consumesall the oxygen found in 100 liters of air, at which point that airhas become charged with a nearly equal amount of carbon dioxideand is no longer fit for breathing.

  So it was now urgent to renew the air in our prison, and no doubtthe air in this whole underwater boat as well.

  Here a question popped into my head. How did the commander of thisaquatic residence go about it? Did he obtain air using chemical methods,releasing the oxygen contained in potassium chlorate by heating it,meanwhile absorbing the carbon dioxide with potassium hydroxide?If so, he would have to keep up some kind of relationship withthe shore, to come by the materials needed for such an operation.Did he simply limit himself to storing the air in high-pressuretanks and then dispense it according to his crew's needs?Perhaps. Or, proceeding in a more convenient, more economical,and consequently more probable fashion, was he satisfied with merelyreturning to breathe at the surface of the water like a cetacean,renewing his oxygen supply every twenty-four hours? In any event,whatever his method was, it seemed prudent to me that he use thismethod without delay.

  In fact, I had already resorted to speeding up my inhalations in orderto extract from the cell what little oxygen it contained, when suddenlyI was refreshed by a current of clean air, scented with a salty aroma.It had to be a sea breeze, life-giving and charged with iodine!I opened my mouth wide, and my lungs glutted themselveson the fresh particles. At the same time, I felt a swaying,a rolling of moderate magnitude but definitely noticeable.This boat, this sheet-iron monster, had obviously just risen tothe surface of the ocean, there to breathe in good whale fashion.So the ship's mode of ventilation was finally established.

  When I had absorbed a chestful of this clean air, I lookedfor the conduit--the "air carrier," if you prefer--that allowedthis beneficial influx to reach us, and I soon found it.Above the door opened an air vent that let in a fresh current of oxygen,renewing the thin air in our cell.

  I had gotten to this point in my observations when Ned and Conseilwoke up almost simultaneously, under the influence of this revivingair purification. They rubbed their eyes, stretched their arms,and sprang to their feet.

  "Did master sleep well?" Conseil asked me with his perennialgood manners.

  "Extremely well, my gallant lad," I replied. "And how about you,Mr. Ned Land?"

  "Like a log, professor. But I must be imagining things, because itseems like I'm breathing a sea breeze!"

  A seaman couldn't be wrong on this topic, and I told the Canadianwhat had gone on while he slept.

  "Good!" he said. "That explains perfectly all that bellowing we heard,when our so-called narwhale lay in sight of the Abraham Lincoln."

  "Perfectly, Mr. Land. It was catching its breath!"

  "Only I've no idea what time it is, Professor Aronnax,unless maybe it's dinnertime?"

  "Dinnertime, my fine harpooner? I'd say at least breakfast time,because we've certainly woken up to a new day."

  "Which indicates," Conseil replied, "that we've spent twenty-fourhours in slumber."

  "That's my assessment," I replied.

  "I won't argue with you," Ned Land answered. "But dinner or breakfast,that steward will be plenty welcome whether he brings the oneor
the other."

  "The one and the other," Conseil said.

  "Well put," the Canadian replied. "We deserve two meals,and speaking for myself, I'll do justice to them both."

  "All right, Ned, let's wait and see!" I replied. "It's clearthat these strangers don't intend to let us die of hunger,otherwise last evening's dinner wouldn't make any sense."

  "Unless they're fattening us up!" Ned shot back.

  "I object," I replied. "We have not fallen into the hands of cannibals."

  "Just because they don't make a habit of it," the Canadian repliedin all seriousness, "doesn't mean they don't indulge from time to time.Who knows? Maybe these people have gone without fresh meat for along while, and in that case three healthy, well-built specimenslike the professor, his manservant, and me ---"

  "Get rid of those ideas, Mr. Land," I answered the harpooner."And above all, don't let them lead you to flare up against our hosts,which would only make our situation worse."

  "Anyhow," the harpooner said, "I'm as hungry as all Hades,and dinner or breakfast, not one puny meal has arrived!"

  "Mr. Land," I answered, "we have to adapt to the schedule on board,and I imagine our stomachs are running ahead of the chiefcook's dinner bell."

  "Well then, we'll adjust our stomachs to the chef's timetable!"Conseil replied serenely.

  "There you go again, Conseil my friend!" the impatient Canadianshot back. "You never allow yourself any displays of bile or attacksof nerves! You're everlastingly calm! You'd say your after-mealgrace even if you didn't get any food for your before-meal blessing--and you'd starve to death rather than complain!"