by Jules Verne
"It was 500,000,000 francs," Captain Nemo replied, "but no more!"
"Right," I said. "Hence a timely warning to those investors wouldbe 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 moneyso much as the loss of their insane hopes. But ultimately I feelless sorry for them than for the thousands of unfortunate peoplewho 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 havewounded Captain Nemo.
"No help!" he replied with growing animation. "Sir, what makes youassume 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 unawareof 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 saidtoo much. But I had guessed. Whatever motives had driven him to seekindependence under the seas, he remained a human being before all else!His heart still throbbed for suffering humanity, and his immensephilanthropy 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 rebellionagainst the Ottoman Empire!
CHAPTER 9
A Lost Continent
THE NEXT MORNING, February 19, I beheld the Canadian enteringmy stateroom. I was expecting this visit. He wore an expressionof 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 goingto 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 hiswealth is safer than in any national treasury."
I then related the evening's incidents to the Canadian, secretly hopinghe would come around to the idea of not deserting the captain;but my narrative had no result other than Ned's voicing deep regretthat 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!"
The Canadian returned to Conseil's side. 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 ourbacks on Europe.
I could hardly wait until our position was reported on the chart.Near 11:30 the ballast tanks emptied, and the submersible roseto the surface of the ocean. I leaped 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 faras Cape S?o Roque to find favorable winds for doubling the Capeof 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 shoreshe longed for.
At noon the sun made a momentary appearance. Taking advantage of thisrift in the clouds, the chief officer took the orb's altitude.Then the sea grew turbulent, we went below again, and the hatchclosed once more.
When I consulted the chart an hour later, I saw that the Nautilus'sposition was marked at longitude 16 degrees 17' and latitude33 degrees 22', a good 150 leagues from the nearest coast.It wouldn't do to even dream of escaping, and I'll let the readerdecide how promptly the Canadian threw a tantrum when I venturedto tell him our situation.
As for me, I wasn't exactly grief-stricken. I felt as if a heavyweight had been lifted from me, and I was able to resume my regulartasks in a state of comparative calm.
Near eleven o'clock in the evening, I received a most unexpectedvisit from Captain Nemo. He asked me very graciously if I feltexhausted 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 walklong hours and scale a mountain. The roads aren't terriblywell 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 companionsnor 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 lampswere 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 repeatmy comment because the captain's head had already disappearedinto its metal covering. I finished harnessing myself, I feltan alpenstock being placed in my hand, and a few minutes later,after the usual procedures, we set foot on the floor of the Atlantic,300 meters down.
Midnight was approaching. The waters were profoundly dark,but Captain Nemo pointed to a reddish spot in the distance, a sortof wide glow shimmering about two miles from the Nautilus. What thisfire was, what substances fed it, how and why it kept burningin 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 ofthe Ruhmkorff device.
Side by side, Captain Nemo and I walked directly toward thisconspicuous flame. The level seafloor rose imperceptibly.We took long strides, helped by our alpenstocks; but in generalour progress was slow, because our feet kept sinking into a kindof 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 realized the cause. It was a heavy rainfall rattlingon the surface of the waves. Instinctively I worried that Imight get soaked! By water in the midst of water! I couldn'thelp 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 airon land, that's all.
After half an hour of walking, the seafloor grew rocky.Jellyfish, microscopic crustaceans, and sea-pen coral lit it faintlywith their phosphorescent glimmers. I glimpsed piles of stonescovered 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 floorwith a distinct but inexplicable symmetry. I spotted gigantic furrowstrailing 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 litterof bones that made a dry crackling noise. So what were these vastplains we were now crossing? I wanted to ask the captain, but I stilldidn't grasp that sign language that allowed him to chat with hiscompanions when they went with him on his underwater excursions.
Meanwhile the reddish light guiding us had expanded and inflamedthe horizon. The presence of this furnace under the waters had meextremely puzzled. Was it some sort of electrical discharge?Was I approaching some natural phenomenon still unknownto scientists on
shore? Or, rather (and this thought didcross my mind), had the hand of man intervened in that blaze?Had human beings fanned those flames? In these deep strata wouldI meet up with more of Captain Nemo's companions, friends he wasabout to visit who led lives as strange as his own? Would I finda 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 frameof mind, continually excited by the series of wonders passingbefore my eyes, I wouldn't have been surprised to find on this seabottom one of those underwater towns Captain Nemo dreamed about!
Our path was getting brighter and brighter. The red glow had turnedwhite and was radiating from a mountain peak about 800 feet high.But what I saw was simply a reflection produced by the crystalwaters of these strata. The furnace that was the source of thisinexplicable 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 traveled it and was incapable of losing his way.I followed him with unshakeable confidence. He seemed like someSpirit of the Sea, and as he walked ahead of me, I marveled at histall figure, which stood out in black against the glowing backgroundof the horizon.
It was one o'clock in the morning. We arrived at the mountain'slower gradients. But in grappling with them, we had to venture updifficult 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 hereand there by gigantic pines. It was like a still-erect coalfield,its roots clutching broken soil, its boughs clearly outlinedagainst 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 algaeand 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 guidewho was immune to exhaustion.
What a sight! How can I describe it! How can I portray thesewoods and rocks in this liquid setting, their lower parts darkand sullen, their upper parts tinted red in this light whoseintensity was doubled by the reflecting power of the waters!We scaled rocks that crumbled behind us, collapsing in enormoussections with the hollow rumble of an avalanche. To our right and leftthere 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 underwaterregions 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 cutinto the sides of these chasms, but I walked along with a firmtread and without the slightest feeling of dizziness. Sometimes Ileaped over a crevasse whose depth would have made me recoil had Ibeen in the midst of glaciers on shore; sometimes I ventured out ona wobbling tree trunk fallen across a gorge, without looking down,having eyes only for marveling at the wild scenery of this region.There, leaning on erratically cut foundations, monumental rocksseemed to defy the laws of balance. From between their stony knees,trees sprang up like jets under fearsome pressure, supporting othertrees 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 authorized.
And I too could feel the difference created by the water'spowerful density--despite my heavy clothing, copper headpiece,and metal soles, I climbed the most impossibly steep gradients with allthe 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 awarethat it sounds incredible! I'm the chronicler of deeds seeminglyimpossible 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 100 feet above our heads stood the mountain peak, forming a darksilhouette against the brilliant glare that came from its far slope.Petrified shrubs rambled here and there in sprawling zigzags. Fish rosein a body at our feet like birds startled in tall grass. The rocky masswas gouged with impenetrable crevices, deep caves, unfathomable holesat 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 clawswith a scrap-iron clanking, titanic crabs aiming their bodieslike cannons on their carriages, and hideous devilfish intertwiningtheir 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 creaturesfor which the rocks provided a second carapace? Where had naturelearned the secret of their vegetating existence, and for how manycenturies had they lived in the ocean's lower strata?
But I couldn't linger. Captain Nemo, on familiar terms withthese dreadful animals, no longer minded them. We arrived at apreliminary 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 youcould 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.
But what part of the globe could this be, this land swallowedby cataclysms? Who had set up these rocks and stones like the dolmensof prehistoric times? Where was I, where had Captain Nemo'sfancies taken me?
I wanted to ask him. Unable to, I stopped him. I seized his arm.But he shook his head, pointed to the mountain's topmost peak,and seemed to tell me:
"Come on! Come with me! Come higher!"
I followed him with one last burst of energy, and in a fewminutes I had scaled the peak, which crowned the whole rocky massby some ten meters.
I looked back down the side we had just cleared. There the mountain roseonly 700 to 800 feet above the plains; but on its far slope it crownedthe receding bottom of this part of the Atlantic by a height twice that.My eyes scanned the distance and took in a vast area lit by intenseflashes of light. In essence, this mountain was a volcano.Fifty feet below its peak, amid a shower of stones and slag,a wide crater vomited torrents of lava that were dispersed infiery cascades into the heart of the liquid mass. So situated,this volcano was an immense torch that lit up the lower plainsall the way to the horizon.
As I said, this underwater crater spewed lava, but not flames.Flames need oxygen from the air and are unable to spread underwater;but a lava flow, which contains in itself the principle of itsincandescence, can rise to a white heat, overpower the liquid element,and turn it into steam on contact. Swift currents swept away all thisdiffuse gas, and torrents of lava slid to the foot of the mountain,like the disgorgings of a Mt. Vesuvius over the city limitsof a second Torre del Greco.
In fact, there beneath my eyes was a town in ruins, demolished,overwhelmed, laid low, its roofs caved in, its temples pulled down,its arches dislocated, its columns stretching over the earth;in these ruins you could still detect the solid proportionsof a sort of Tuscan architecture; farther off, the remains of agigantic aqueduct; here, the caked heights of an acropolis alongwith the fluid forms of a Parthenon; there, the remnants of a wharf,as if some bygone port had long ago harbored merchant vesselsand triple-tiered war galleys on the shores of some lost ocean;still farther off, long rows of collapsing walls, deserted thoroughfares,a whole Pompeii buried under the waters, which Captain Nemo hadresurrected before my eyes!
Where was I? Where was I? I had to find out at all cost,
I wantedto speak, I wanted to rip off the copper sphere imprisoning my head.
But Captain Nemo came over and stopped me with a gesture.Then, picking up a piece of chalky stone, he advanced to a blackbasaltic rock and scrawled this one word:
ATLANTIS
What lightning flashed through my mind! Atlantis, that ancient landof Meropis mentioned by the historian Theopompus; Plato's Atlantis;the continent whose very existence has been denied by such philosophersand scientists as Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d'Anville, Malte-Brun,and Humboldt, who entered its disappearance in the ledger of mythsand folk tales; the country whose reality has nevertheless been acceptedby such other thinkers as Posidonius, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus,Tertullian, Engel, Scherer, Tournefort, Buffon, and d'Avezac; I hadthis land right under my eyes, furnishing its own unimpeachableevidence of the catastrophe that had overtaken it! So this wasthe submerged region that had existed outside Europe, Asia, and Libya,beyond the Pillars of Hercules, home of those powerful Atlanteanpeople against whom ancient Greece had waged its earliest wars!
The writer whose narratives record the lofty deeds of those heroictimes is Plato himself. His dialogues Timaeus and Critias weredrafted with the poet and legislator Solon as their inspiration,as it were.
One day Solon was conversing with some elderly wise men in the Egyptiancapital of Sais, a town already 8,000 years of age, as documentedby the annals engraved on the sacred walls of its temples. One of theseelders related the history of another town 1,000 years older still.This original city of Athens, ninety centuries old, had been invadedand partly destroyed by the Atlanteans. These Atlanteans, he said,resided on an immense continent greater than Africa and
