Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. English

by Jules Verne

  What was irritating this mollusk? No doubt the presenceof the Nautilus, even more fearsome than itself, and which itcouldn't grip with its mandibles or the suckers on its arms.And yet what monsters these devilfish are, what vitality our Creatorhas given them, what vigor in their movements, thanks to their owninga triple heart!

  Sheer chance had placed us in the presence of this squid, and Ididn't want to lose this opportunity to meticulously study sucha cephalopod specimen. I overcame the horror that its appearanceinspired in me, picked up a pencil, and began to sketch it.

  "Perhaps this is the same as the Alecto's," Conseil said.

  "Can't be," the Canadian replied, "because this one's completewhile the other one lost its tail!"

  "That doesn't necessarily follow," I said. "The arms and tailsof these animals grow back through regeneration, and in seven yearsthe tail on Bouguer's Squid has surely had time to sprout again."

  "Anyhow," Ned shot back, "if it isn't this fellow, maybe it'sone of those!"

  Indeed, other devilfish had appeared at the starboard window.I counted seven of them. They provided the Nautilus with an escort,and I could hear their beaks gnashing on the sheet-iron hull.We couldn't have asked for a more devoted following.

  I continued sketching. These monsters kept pace in our waterswith such precision, they seemed to be standing still, and Icould have traced their outlines in miniature on the window.But we were moving at a moderate speed.

  All at once the Nautilus stopped. A jolt made it tremble throughits entire framework.

  "Did we strike bottom?" I asked.

  "In any event we're already clear," the Canadian replied,"because we're afloat."

  The Nautilus was certainly afloat, but it was no longer in motion.The blades of its propeller weren't churning the waves. A minute passed.Followed by his chief officer, Captain Nemo entered the lounge.

  I hadn't seen him for a good while. He looked gloomy to me.Without speaking to us, without even seeing us perhaps, he wentto the panel, stared at the devilfish, and said a few wordsto his chief officer.

  The latter went out. Soon the panels closed. The ceiling lit up.

  I went over to the captain.

  "An unusual assortment of devilfish," I told him, as carefreeas a collector in front of an aquarium.

  "Correct, Mr. Naturalist," he answered me, "and we're going to fightthem at close quarters."

  I gaped at the captain. I thought my hearing had gone bad.

  "At close quarters?" I repeated.

  "Yes, sir. Our propeller is jammed. I think the horn-coveredmandibles of one of these squid are entangled in the blades.That's why we aren't moving."

  "And what are you going to do?"

  "Rise to the surface and slaughter the vermin."

  "A difficult undertaking."

  "Correct. Our electric bullets are ineffective against suchsoft flesh, where they don't meet enough resistance to go off.But we'll attack the beasts with axes."

  "And harpoons, sir," the Canadian said, "if you don't turndown my help."

  "I accept it, Mr. Land."

  "We'll go with you," I said. And we followed Captain Nemo,heading to the central companionway.

  There some ten men were standing by for the assault,armed with boarding axes. Conseil and I picked up two more axes.Ned Land seized a harpoon.

  By then the Nautilus had returned to the surface of the waves.Stationed on the top steps, one of the seamen undid the boltsof the hatch. But he had scarcely unscrewed the nuts when the hatchflew up with tremendous violence, obviously pulled open by the suckerson a devilfish's arm.

  Instantly one of those long arms glided like a snake into the opening,and twenty others were quivering above. With a sweep of the ax,Captain Nemo chopped off this fearsome tentacle, which slid writhingdown the steps.

  Just as we were crowding each other to reach the platform, two more armslashed the air, swooped on the seaman stationed in front of Captain Nemo,and carried the fellow away with irresistible violence.

  Captain Nemo gave a shout and leaped outside. We rushed after him.

  What a scene! Seized by the tentacle and glued to its suckers,the unfortunate man was swinging in the air at the mercyof this enormous appendage. He gasped, he choked, he yelled:"Help! Help!" These words, pronounced in French, left me deeply stunned!So I had a fellow countryman on board, perhaps several!I'll hear his harrowing plea the rest of my life!

  The poor fellow was done for. Who could tear him from sucha powerful grip? Even so, Captain Nemo rushed at the devilfishand with a sweep of the ax hewed one more of its arms.His chief officer struggled furiously with other monsters crawlingup the Nautilus's sides. The crew battled with flailing axes.The Canadian, Conseil, and I sank our weapons into these fleshy masses.An intense, musky odor filled the air. It was horrible.

  For an instant I thought the poor man entwined by the devilfishmight be torn loose from its powerful suction. Seven arms out ofeight had been chopped off. Brandishing its victim like a feather,one lone tentacle was writhing in the air. But just as Captain Nemoand his chief officer rushed at it, the animal shot off a spoutof blackish liquid, secreted by a pouch located in its abdomen.It blinded us. When this cloud had dispersed, the squid was gone,and so was my poor fellow countryman!

  What rage then drove us against these monsters! We lost all self-control.Ten or twelve devilfish had overrun the Nautilus's platform and sides.We piled helter-skelter into the thick of these sawed-off snakes,which darted over the platform amid waves of blood and sepia ink.It seemed as if these viscous tentacles grew back like the many headsof Hydra. At every thrust Ned Land's harpoon would plunge intoa squid's sea-green eye and burst it. But my daring companion wassuddenly toppled by the tentacles of a monster he could not avoid.

  Oh, my heart nearly exploded with excitement and horror!The squid's fearsome beak was wide open over Ned Land. The poorman was about to be cut in half. I ran to his rescue.But Captain Nemo got there first. His ax disappeared between the twoenormous mandibles, and the Canadian, miraculously saved, stood andplunged his harpoon all the way into the devilfish's triple heart.

  "Tit for tat," Captain Nemo told the Canadian. "I owed it to myself!"

  Ned bowed without answering him.

  This struggle had lasted a quarter of an hour. Defeated, mutilated,battered to death, the monsters finally yielded to us and disappearedbeneath the waves.

  Red with blood, motionless by the beacon, Captain Nemo stared atthe sea that had swallowed one of his companions, and large tearsstreamed from his eyes.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Gulf Stream

  THIS DREADFUL SCENE on April 20 none of us will ever be able to forget.I wrote it up in a state of intense excitement. Later I reviewedmy narrative. I read it to Conseil and the Canadian. They found itaccurate in detail but deficient in impact. To convey such sights,it would take the pen of our most famous poet, Victor Hugo,author of The Toilers of the Sea.

  As I said, Captain Nemo wept while staring at the waves.His grief was immense. This was the second companion he hadlost since we had come aboard. And what a way to die!Smashed, strangled, crushed by the fearsome arms of a devilfish,ground between its iron mandibles, this friend would never restwith his companions in the placid waters of their coral cemetery!

  As for me, what had harrowed my heart in the thick of thisstruggle was the despairing yell given by this unfortunate man.Forgetting his regulation language, this poor Frenchman had revertedto speaking his own mother tongue to fling out one supreme plea!Among the Nautilus's crew, allied body and soul with Captain Nemo andlikewise fleeing from human contact, I had found a fellow countryman!Was he the only representative of France in this mysterious alliance,obviously made up of individuals from different nationalities?This was just one more of those insoluble problems that kept wellingup in my mind!

  Captain Nemo reentered his stateroom, and I saw no more of himfor a good while. But how sad, despairing, and irresolute he musthave felt,
to judge from this ship whose soul he was, which reflectedhis every mood! The Nautilus no longer kept to a fixed heading.It drifted back and forth, riding with the waves like a corpse.Its propeller had been disentangled but was barely put to use.It was navigating at random. It couldn't tear itself away fromthe setting of this last struggle, from this sea that had devouredone of its own!

  Ten days went by in this way. It was only on May 1 that the Nautilusopenly resumed its northbound course, after raising the Bahamas atthe mouth of Old Bahama Channel. We then went with the current of thesea's greatest river, which has its own banks, fish, and temperature.I mean the Gulf Stream.

  It is indeed a river that runs independently through the middleof the Atlantic, its waters never mixing with the ocean's waters.It's a salty river, saltier than the sea surrounding it.Its average depth is 3,000 feet, its average width sixty miles.In certain localities its current moves at a speed of four kilometersper hour. The unchanging volume of its waters is greater thanthat of all the world's rivers combined.

  As discovered by Commander Maury, the true source of the Gulf Stream,its starting point, if you prefer, is located in the Bayof Biscay. There its waters, still weak in temperature and color,begin to form. It goes down south, skirts equatorial Africa,warms its waves in the rays of the Torrid Zone, crosses the Atlantic,reaches Cape S?o Roque on the coast of Brazil, and forks intotwo branches, one going to the Caribbean Sea for further saturationwith heat particles. Then, entrusted with restoring the balancebetween hot and cold temperatures and with mixing tropical andnorthern waters, the Gulf Stream begins to play its stabilizing role.Attaining a white heat in the Gulf of Mexico, it heads north upthe American coast, advances as far as Newfoundland, swerves awayunder the thrust of a cold current from the Davis Strait,and resumes its ocean course by going along a great circleof the earth on a rhumb line; it then divides into two arms nearthe 43rd parallel; one, helped by the northeast trade winds,returns to the Bay of Biscay and the Azores; the other washes the shoresof Ireland and Norway with lukewarm water, goes beyond Spitzbergen,where its temperature falls to 4 degrees centigrade, and fashionsthe open sea at the pole.

  It was on this oceanic river that the Nautilus was then navigating.Leaving Old Bahama Channel, which is fourteen leagues wide by 350 metersdeep, the Gulf Stream moves at the rate of eight kilometers per hour.Its speed steadily decreases as it advances northward, and we mustpray that this steadiness continues, because, as experts agree,if its speed and direction were to change, the climates of Europewould undergo disturbances whose consequences are incalculable.

  Near noon I was on the platform with Conseil. I shared with himthe relevant details on the Gulf Stream. When my explanation was over,I invited him to dip his hands into its current.

  Conseil did so, and he was quite astonished to experience no sensationof either hot or cold.

  "That comes," I told him, "from the water temperature of the Gulf Stream,which, as it leaves the Gulf of Mexico, is barely different fromyour blood temperature. This Gulf Stream is a huge heat generatorthat enables the coasts of Europe to be decked in eternal greenery.And if Commander Maury is correct, were one to harness the fullwarmth of this current, it would supply enough heat to keep moltena river of iron solder as big as the Amazon or the Missouri."

  Just then the Gulf Stream's speed was 2.25 meters per second.So distinct is its current from the surrounding sea, its confinedwaters stand out against the ocean and operate on a different levelfrom the colder waters. Murky as well, and very rich in saline material,their pure indigo contrasts with the green waves surrounding them.Moreover, their line of demarcation is so clear that abreast ofthe Carolinas, the Nautilus's spur cut the waves of the Gulf Streamwhile its propeller was still churning those belonging to the ocean.

  This current swept along with it a whole host of moving creatures.Argonauts, so common in the Mediterranean, voyaged here in schoolsof large numbers. Among cartilaginous fish, the most remarkable wererays whose ultra slender tails made up nearly a third of the body,which was shaped like a huge diamond twenty-five feet long;then little one-meter sharks, the head large, the snout shortand rounded, the teeth sharp and arranged in several rows,the body seemingly covered with scales.

  Among bony fish, I noted grizzled wrasse unique to these seas,deep-water gilthead whose iris has a fiery gleam, one-meter croakerswhose large mouths bristle with small teeth and which let outthin cries, black rudderfish like those I've already discussed,blue dorados accented with gold and silver, rainbow-hued parrotfishthat can rival the loveliest tropical birds in coloring,banded blennies with triangular heads, bluish flounder without scales,toadfish covered with a crosswise yellow band in the shape of a Greek t,swarms of little freckled gobies stippled with brown spots,lungfish with silver heads and yellow tails, various specimensof salmon, mullet with slim figures and a softly glowing radiancethat Lac?p?de dedicated to the memory of his wife, and finallythe American cavalla, a handsome fish decorated by every honorary order,bedizened with their every ribbon, frequenting the shores of thisgreat nation where ribbons and orders are held in such low esteem.

  I might add that during the night, the Gulf Stream's phosphorescentwaters rivaled the electric glow of our beacon, especially inthe stormy weather that frequently threatened us.

  On May 8, while abreast of North Carolina, we were across fromCape Hatteras once more. There the Gulf Stream is seventy-fivemiles wide and 210 meters deep. The Nautilus continued to wanderat random. Seemingly, all supervision had been jettisoned.Under these conditions I admit that we could easily have gotten away.In fact, the populous shores offered ready refuge everywhere.The sea was plowed continuously by the many steamers providingservice between the Gulf of Mexico and New York or Boston,and it was crossed night and day by little schooners engagedin coastal trade over various points on the American shore.We could hope to be picked up. So it was a promising opportunity,despite the thirty miles that separated the Nautilus fromthese Union coasts.

  But one distressing circumstance totally thwarted the Canadian's plans.The weather was thoroughly foul. We were approaching waterwayswhere storms are commonplace, the very homeland of tornadoesand cyclones specifically engendered by the Gulf Stream's current.To face a frequently raging sea in a frail skiff was a raceto certain disaster. Ned Land conceded this himself.So he champed at the bit, in the grip of an intense homesicknessthat could be cured only by our escape.

  "Sir," he told me that day, "it's got to stop. I want to get tothe bottom of this. Your Nemo's veering away from shore and headingup north. But believe you me, I had my fill at the South Poleand I'm not going with him to the North Pole."

  "What can we do, Ned, since it isn't feasible to escape right now?"

  "I keep coming back to my idea. We've got to talk to the captain.When we were in your own country's seas, you didn't say a word.Now that we're in mine, I intend to speak up. Before a few daysare out, I figure the Nautilus will lie abreast of Nova Scotia,and from there to Newfoundland is the mouth of a large gulf,and the St. Lawrence empties into that gulf, and the St. Lawrenceis my own river, the river running by Quebec, my hometown--and when I think about all this, my gorge rises and my hairstands on end! Honestly, sir, I'd rather jump overboard!I can't stay here any longer! I'm suffocating!"

  The Canadian was obviously at the end of his patience.His vigorous nature couldn't adapt to this protracted imprisonment.His facial appearance was changing by the day. His moods grew gloomierand gloomier. I had a sense of what he was suffering because I also wasgripped by homesickness. Nearly seven months had gone by without ourhaving any news from shore. Moreover, Captain Nemo's reclusiveness,his changed disposition, and especially his total silence since the battlewith the devilfish all made me see things in a different light.I no longer felt the enthusiasm of our first days on board.You needed to be Flemish like Conseil to accept these circumstances,living in a habitat designed for cetaceans and other denizensof the deep. Truly, if that gallant lad had owned gills insteadof lungs, I think
he would have made an outstanding fish!

  "Well, sir?" Ned Land went on, seeing that I hadn't replied.

  "Well, Ned, you want me to ask Captain Nemo what he intendsto do with us?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Even though he has already made that clear?"

  "Yes. I want it settled once and for all. Speak just for me,strictly on my behalf, if you want."

  "But I rarely encounter him. He positively avoids me."

  "All the more reason you should go look him up."

  "I'll confer with him, Ned."

  "When?" the Canadian asked insistently.

  "When I encounter him."

  "Professor Aronnax, would you like me to go find him myself?"

  "No, let me do it. Tomorrow--"