by Jules Verne
Next I thought about leaving the room. Was I free once again or still a prisoner? Entirely free. I opened the door, and went along the corridors, heading up the central stairwell. The hatches, closed the day before, were now open again. I arrived on the platform.
Ned and Conseil were waiting for me. I asked them a few questions. They knew nothing, having fallen into a deep sleep which left them with no recollection, and had been very surprised to find themselves in their cabin.
As for the Nautilus, it seemed as peaceful and mysterious to us as ever. It was moving over the surface of the waves at moderate speed. Nothing seemed changed on board.
Land examined the sea with his penetrating eyes. It was deserted. The Canadian could see nothing new on the horizon. Neither sails nor land. A westerly breeze was noisily blowing, and long waves, dishevelled by the wind, were making the vessel roll quite noticeably.
Once it had replenished its air, the Nautilus remained at an average depth of 15 metres, from where it could come quickly up again. Most unusually, this latter action was carried out several times on 19 January.* The first officer went up to the platform on each occasion, and the accustomed phrase rang out through the ship.
As for Captain Nemo, he did not appear. Of those serving on board, I only saw the impassive steward, who served me with his usual precision and silence.
At about two o’clock I was busy sorting through my notes in the salon, when the captain opened the door and appeared. I greeted him. He gave me an almost imperceptible nod, without saying a word. I went back to my work, hoping he would perhaps provide an explanation of the events of the previous night. He did nothing of the sort. I gazed at him. His red eyes looked unrefreshed by sleep, his face tired; it expressed a deep sadness, a real distress. He walked to and fro, then sat down then got up again. He took a book at random, but put it down immediately. He consulted his instruments without taking his usual notes, and seemed unable to remain on one spot for a single moment.
Finally he came up to me, and asked:
‘Monsieur, are you a doctor?’
I expected this question so little that I looked at him for a while without replying.
‘Are you a doctor?’ he repeated. ‘Several of your colleagues studied medicine: Gratiolet, Moquin-Tandon,* and others.’
‘Yes, I’m a doctor and a former hospital intern. I practised for several years before joining the Museum.’
‘Good.’
My reply had evidently satisfied Captain Nemo, but not knowing the point of the conversation, I waited for further questions, thus retaining the option of replying according to circumstances.
‘Dr Aronnax, would you consent to treating one of my men?’
‘One of your men is ill?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am ready.’
‘Please come this way.’
I will admit that my heart was pounding. For some reason, I could see a connection between this illness of a crewman and the events of the day before, and the mystery absorbed me at least as much as the sick man himself.
Captain Nemo took me to the stern of the Nautilus, and invited me to enter a cabin situated near the crew room.
On a bed lay a man of about forty years, with an energetic face, a typical Anglo-Saxon.
I leaned over him. He was not only ill, but wounded. His head, resting on two pillows, was swathed in blood-stained dressings. I removed the bandages: the injured man, staring with wide eyes, allowed me without uttering a single complaint.
The wound was horrible. The cranium had been shattered by a blunt instrument, the brain lay exposed, and the cerebral matter had undergone a deep abrasion. Blood clots had formed in the diffluent matter, which had turned maroon. There had been both contusion and concussion of the brain. The man’s breathing was laboured, and a few spasms worked the muscles of his face. The cerebral phlegmasia was complete, and had produced a paralysis of sensation and movement.
I took the wounded man’s pulse. It was intermittent. The extremities of the body were already becoming cold, and I could see that death was approaching, without it appearing possible to slow it down. Having seen to the poor man’s wounds, I reapplied the dressings to his head; and turned to Captain Nemo.
‘How did he get his wound?’
‘What difference does it make!’ the captain evasively replied. Then: ‘A jolt from the Nautilus broke one of the levers of the engine, which struck this man.* What is your diagnosis of his condition?’
I hesitated to give my view.
‘You can speak freely. This man does not understand French.’
I looked at the wounded man one more time, and said: ‘He will be dead within two hours.’
‘Can nothing save him?’
‘Nothing.’
Captain Nemo’s hand tightened, and a few tears slipped from his eyes, which I had not believed capable of weeping.
For a few moments longer, I examined the dying man, as his life slowly ebbed away. He got paler and paler in the electric light bathing his deathbed. I looked at his intelligent head, furrowed with premature wrinkles, which unhappiness, perhaps poverty, had hollowed out long before. I wanted to guess the secret of his life from the last words to escape his lips.
‘You can retire now, Dr Aronnax,’ said Captain Nemo.
I left the captain in the dying man’s cabin and went back to my room, greatly moved by the scene. The whole day I was disturbed by sinister forebodings. That night I slept badly and, between my frequently interrupted dreams, I thought I could hear distant sighs and something like a funereal plain-chant. Was this the prayer for the dead,* murmured in that language I could not understand?
The following morning I went back on deck. Captain Nemo was already there. As soon as he saw me, he came up.
‘Dr Aronnax, would you like to go on an underwater excursion today?’
‘With my companions?’
‘If they wish.’
‘They are at your disposal, captain.’
‘Please put on your diving suits then.’
There was no discussion of the dying or dead man. I rejoined Ned Land and Conseil and told them of Captain Nemo’s invitation. Conseil quickly accepted, and this time the Canadian willingly agreed to accompany us.
It was eight in the morning. At 8.30 we were fitted out for our second excursion, equipped with lighting and breathing apparatus. The two doors opened one after the other, and accompanied by Captain Nemo, who was followed by about ten crewmen, we set foot on solid ground where the Nautilus was resting at a depth of 10 metres.
A slight slope led to an uneven floor at about 15 fathoms. The bottom looked completely different from the one I had visited on my first excursion under the Pacific Ocean. Here there lay no fine sand, no underwater prairie, no pelagic forest. I instantly recognized the marvellous region which Captain Nemo was presenting to us that day. It was the coral kingdom.*
In the branch of the zoophytes, and in the class of the alcyonarians, one can observe the order of Gorgonacea, which includes the three groups of Gorgon heads, isidia, and corallines. It is to this latter group that coral belongs, a strange substance which has been classified in turn in the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. A medication for the ancients, a jewel for the moderns, it was only in 1694 that the Marseillais Peyssonnel* definitively placed it in the animal kingdom.
Coral is a collection of animalculae amalgamated on a polypary of stony and brittle nature. These polyps have a unique begetter which produces them by means of budding; they have their own existence while at the same time participating in communal life. They thus live a sort of natural socialism. I was aware of the latest studies carried out on this strange zoophyte, which becomes mineralized while arborizing, as the apposite terms of the naturalists would have it; and nothing could be of greater interest for me than to visit one of the petrified forests that nature has planted on the ocean floor.
The Ruhmkorff lamps were switched on and we followed a coral reef which was still being formed and
which would, with the help of time, close off one day this portion of the Indian Ocean. The path was lined with labyrinthine bushes formed from the intermingling of small shrubs, covered with little starred flowers with white petals. But these arborescences fixed to the rocks on the ground were the opposite of plants on dry land, for all grew downwards.
The light produced a thousand charming effects playing through the brightly coloured branches. I thought I could see the membranous and cylindrical tubes trembling in the movement of the water. I was tempted to gather their fresh corollas, adorned with delicate tentacles: some of them had just bloomed, while others, which were hardly born, had small fish with swift fins grazing past them like flocks of birds. But if my hand approached these living flowers, these sensitive mimosae pudicae, the alert was immediately given throughout the colony. The white corollas moved back into their red sheaths, the flowers went out before my eyes, and the bush changed into a block of stony nipples.
Chance had placed me in the presence of the most valuable examples of this zoophyte. The coral was of similar quality to that collected on the Mediterranean coasts of France, Italy, and North Africa. Its brilliant shades justified its poetic names of ‘blood flower’ and ‘foam of blood’, the names the trade gives to its finest products. Coral sells at up to five hundred francs a kilogram, and the watery depths at this spot protected a fortune from all the coral fishermen in the world. This precious matter, often mixed with other polyparies, formed compact inextricable groups called ‘macciotta’, on which I noticed some admirable specimens of pink coral.
But soon the bushes grew smaller and the arborescences larger. True petrified woods and the long aisles of a fantastic architecture opened before our feet. Captain Nemo headed into a dark gallery, whose gentle slope led us to a depth of 100 metres. The light from our coils sometimes produced magical effects, clinging to the asperities of these natural arches and to pendentives hanging like chandeliers, where it picked out points of fire. Between the coral shrubs I noticed other polyps just as remarkable, mellites and irises with articulated ramifications, then tufts of corallines, some green and some red: real wracks encrusted in their limestone salts, that the naturalists, after long debate, have definitively placed in the vegetable kingdom. But as one thinker has remarked,* ‘Perhaps this is the real point where life dimly rises from a sleep of stone, without yet cutting itself off from that rude starting-point.’
After two hours’ march, we had finally reached a depth of about 300 metres, the furthest point where coral begins to form. But here there were no longer isolated bushes or modest copses of low trees. This was an enormous forest, with great mineral vegetation and enormous petrified trees linked together by garlands of elegant Plumularia, those sea creepers, all adorned with tones and glints. We passed freely under their high branches, lost in the shadow of the waves, whilst at our feet the tubipores, the meandrines, the astrea, the mushroom corals, and the caryophyllenes formed a flowery carpet strewn with dazzling gems.
Oh, what indescribable visions! Why could we not communicate our feelings? Why were we imprisoned behind these glass and metal masks? Why were words to each other not possible? Why could we not live the life of the fish populating the liquid element, or even that of amphibians who can move for long hours through the twin realms of land and water as the mood takes them?
Captain Nemo had stopped. My companions and I came to a halt, and when I turned round I saw that his men had formed a semicircle around their leader. Looking closer, I noticed that four of them were carrying a long object on their shoulders.
We were now standing at the centre of a vast clearing, surrounded by the soaring arborescences of the underwater forest. Our lamps projected a sort of dusky light over the space, inordinately lengthening the shadows on the ground. On the edge of the clearing, the darkness became immense, containing only the tiny sparks thrown up by the sharp edges of the coral.
Ned and Conseil were beside me. As we looked I understood that I was going to assist at a strange scene. When I examined the ground, I realized that it was swollen by slight extumescences encrusted with chalk deposits, laid out with a regularity that betrayed the hand of man.
In the midst of the clearing, on a pedestal of rocks roughly piled up, stood a coral cross, extending its long arms as if made of petrified blood.
On a sign from Captain Nemo, one of the men came forward, untied a pick from his belt, and began to dig a hole a few feet from the cross.
Suddenly everything became clear! The clearing was a cemetery,* the hole a grave, the long object the body of the man who had died during the night! Captain Nemo and his men had come to bury their companion in this communal resting place on the bed of the inaccessible ocean!
Never was my mind inflamed to such a point! Never was my brain invaded by more excited ideas! I did not want to see what my eyes could see!
Meanwhile the grave was slowly being dug out. From time to time the fish would flee their disturbed sanctuary. I could hear the iron pick resounding on the chalky ground, sometimes producing sparks when it hit some flint lost at the bottom of the waters. The hole got longer and wider, and soon it was deep enough to admit the body.
The bearers approached. The body, wrapped in a cloth of white byssus, was lowered into the watery grave. Captain Nemo, arms crossed on chest, and all the friends of that man who had loved them, knelt in an attitude of prayer. My two companions and I had devoutly lowered our heads.
The grave was then covered with the debris torn from the ground, forming a slight swelling.
When it was done, Captain Nemo and his men stood up. Approaching the grave, all knelt down again, and all stretched out their hands in a final farewell.
Then the funeral procession headed back to the Nautilus, passing once more under the arches of the forest, through the coppices, along the coral bushes, constantly climbing.
Finally the lights on board appeared. Their luminous trail guided us towards the Nautilus. At one o’clock we were back again.
As soon as I had changed my clothes, I went back up on the platform, and in the grip of a terrible obsession of ideas, I went to sit beside the searchlight.
Captain Nemo joined me. I got up and asked him:
‘So this man died during the night, as I expected?’
‘Yes, Dr Aronnax.’
‘And he is now resting beside his companions in that coral cemetery?’
‘Yes, forgotten by all, but not by us! We dig the graves and the polyps have the task of sealing the dead there for eternity!’
And in a sudden movement, hiding his face in clenched fists, the captain tried in vain to suppress a sob. Then he added:
‘It is our cemetery there, tranquil, hundreds of feet below the surface of the waves.’*
‘At least your dead slumber in peace, captain, out of the reach of sharks.’
‘Yes,’ Captain Nemo replied gravely, ‘sharks and men!’
Part Two*
1
The Indian Ocean
Here begins the second part of this voyage under the seas.* The first one ended with that moving scene in the coral cemetery, which left such a deep impression on me. So was Captain Nemo’s life spent completely in the bosom of the immense ocean, where everything, even his tomb, lay ready in the furthermost chasms? There, not a single sea creature would come to trouble the final sleep of the inhabitants of the Nautilus, friends welded to each other in death as they were in life! ‘Not a single man, either!’ the captain had added.
Always the same defiance of human society, wild and implacable.*
For my part, I was no longer content with the hypothesis that satisfied Conseil. The worthy fellow persisted in seeing in the captain of the Nautilus merely one of those unrecognized scientists, who return humanity’s indifference with mistrust. For him he was still a misunderstood genius, weary of the disappointments of the earth, who had had to take sanctuary in that inaccessible environment where he could give free play to his instincts. But in my view this theory exp
lained only one of Captain Nemo’s sides.
The mystery of the previous night, when we had been enchained in slumber and in prison; the captain’s violent safeguard of tearing from my eye the telescope I was preparing to use to scour the horizon; that man’s fatal wound, caused by an inexplicable collision involving the Nautilus: everything pushed me in a new direction. No, Captain Nemo was not content merely to flee from mankind! His formidable machinery served not only his passion for freedom, but perhaps the pursuit of some terrible but unknown sort of revenge.*
For the moment nothing is clear to me; I can only glimpse gleams in the dark, and must limit myself to writing, so to speak, at the dictation of events.*
But in any case nothing binds us to Captain Nemo. He knows that escape is impossible from the Nautilus. We are not even prisoners on our parole. No word of honour holds us back. We are merely captives, prisoners disguised by being called guests, in a semblance of courtesy. However, Ned Land has not given up hope of regaining his liberty. It is clear that he will take the first opportunity chance offers him. I will undoubtedly do the same, and yet it will be a wrench to carry away with me what the captain’s generosity has let us guess of the mysteries of the Nautilus. For is this man, all things considered, to be hated or admired? Is he the predator or the prey? Also, to be truthful, before leaving him for ever, I would like to complete this tour of the submarine world whose beginnings have been so magnificent. I would like to study the wonders strewn under the seas of the globe in their entirety! I would like to finish seeing what no man has yet seen, even if I have to pay with my life for this insatiable need to know! What have I discovered to date? Nothing, or almost nothing, since we have covered only 6,000 leagues of the Pacific!
However, I know full well that the Nautilus is approaching inhabited shores, and that if some chance of escaping is offered, it would be cruel to sacrifice my companions for my passion for the unknown. I will have to follow, perhaps even guide them. But will such an opportunity ever arise? Forcibly deprived of his free will, the human being longs for such an opportunity, but the scientist, the enquiring mind, fears it.
