Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

by Jules Verne

  I could certainly feel the difference made by the great density of the water when I scaled the inclines of impracticable slopes, despite my heavy clothing, copper head, and metal soles, when I climbed with the agility of a wild goat or chamois!

  As I speak of this underwater expedition, I fully realize how unbelievable it all sounds! I am the recorder of things which may sound impossible but which are real and incontestable. I did not dream them. I felt and I saw them.

  Two hours after leaving the Nautilus we crossed the tree-line; the mountain peak towered 100 feet above our heads, its dazzling radiation projecting a shadow on the slope below. A few petrified shrubs ran here and there in grimacing zigzags. Fish rose as one before our feet like birds surprised in tall grass. The rocky massif was hollowed out with impenetrable burrows, deep caverns, and pits at the bottom of which I could hear frightening things moving about. I blanched when I spotted an enormous antenna blocking my route, or terrifying claws clattering shut in the darkness of a cavity! Thousands of luminous points shone in the darkness. They were the eyes of huge crustaceans lurking in their dens, of gigantic lobsters standing to attention like halberdiers and waving their legs with metallic clanks, of titanic crabs set like cannon on their mounts, and of awe-inspiring squid* twisting their tentacles into a living brush of snakes.

  What was this outrageous world where I still felt such an outsider? These articulates for whom the rocks seemed like a second carapace — to which order did they belong? Where had nature developed the secret of their brutish life, and for how many centuries had they been living in these furthermost recesses of the ocean?

  But I could not stop. Captain Nemo, familiar with these terrifying animals, was no longer paying attention to them. We had arrived at a first plateau, where further surprises awaited me. Here picturesque ruins stood up, bearing the marks of man’s hand and not those of the Creator.* They were vast accumulations, massed piles of stones where one could make out the vague forms of castles and temples, carpeted with a world of flowering zoophytes and over which, instead of ivy, seaweed and algae formed a thick vegetable cloak.

  But what was this land sunk by cataclysms? Who had laid out these rocks and stones like the dolmens of prehistoric times? Where was I — to what place had Captain Nemo chosen to bring me?

  I would have liked to ask him. Not able to, I stopped him. I seized hold of his arm. But he shook his head and pointed to the last summit of the mountain, seeming to say to me:

  ‘Come on! Further! Come with me!’*

  I followed him in a last surge, and a few minutes later had reached the summit, about ten metres above the rest of the rocky massif.

  I looked in the direction we had just come from. The mountain rose only about 700 or 800 feet above the plain; but on the other side there was twice this drop to the bottom of the Atlantic. My eyes wandered into the distance, encompassing a vast space dazzlingly lit by the burning light. The mountain was a volcano. Fifty feet below the peak, in a rain of stones and volcanic slag, a large crater was vomiting torrents of lava, which spread out in a cascade of fire through the water. Like an enormous torch, the volcano lit up the plain below to the furthest points of the horizon.

  I have said that the submarine crater was throwing out lava, not flames. Flames need oxygen from the air, and cannot be produced underwater; but flows of lava, which already contain their own incandescence, can be heated to white-hot, acting successfully against the liquid element and vaporizing it on contact. Quick-flowing currents carried away all the resulting half-dissolved gases as the lava torrents slid to the bottom of the mountain, like the ejecta of Vesuvius in another Torre del Greco.*

  Right there in front of my eyes — ruined, broken, collapsed — appeared a city destroyed, its roofs fallen, its temples flattened, its arches broken, its columns lying on the ground, but with the solid proportions from a type of Tuscan architecture still discernible. Further on lay a few remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here, the silted bulge of an acropolis, with the floating forms of a Parthenon; there a few traces of a quayside, as if some antique port had once sheltered the merchant vessels and war triremes on the shores of a long-lost ocean; further still, long lines of crumbling walls and broad deserted streets: a whole Pompeii sunk beneath the waters,* that Captain Nemo was bringing back to life before my very eyes!

  Where was I? Where? I wanted to know at any cost, I wanted to speak, I wanted to tear off the copper sphere imprisoning my head.

  But Captain Nemo came close and stopped me with a sign. Then, picking up a chalky piece of stone, he approached a rock of black basalt and wrote a single word:

  ATLANTIS

  What a flash crossed my mind! Atlantis, that ancient Meropis of Theopompus, the Atlantis of Plato, the continent denied by Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d’Anville, Malte-Brun, and Humboldt, who all classified its disappearance as a legendary tale, but accepted by Posidonius, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus, Tertullian, Engel, Scherer, Tournefort, Buffon, and d’Avezac;* it was there in front of my eyes, still bearing the irrefutable signs of the catastrophe that had struck it! So this was the sunken region that had existed outside Europe, Asia, and Libya and beyond the pillars of Hercules, the land of the powerful Atlanteans* against whom ancient Greece had fought its first wars!

  The historian who recorded the main events of those heroic times was Plato himself. His dialogues of Timaeus and Critias were, so to speak, dictated under the inspiration of Solon, poet and legislator.*

  One day, Solon was talking with a few wise old men from Sais, a town already 800 years old,* as shown by the annals engraved on the sacred walls of its temples. One of these old men recounted the story of another town a thousand years more ancient. This first Athenian city, nine hundred centuries old, had been invaded and partly destroyed by the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans, he said, occupied an immense continent greater than Africa and Asia combined and covering an area between the twelfth and the fortieth degrees north. Their domination stretched as far as Egypt. They wished to extend it even to Greece, but had had to retreat before the indomitable resistance of the Hellenes. The centuries went by. A cataclysm struck in the shape of floods and earthquakes. A night and a day were sufficient to destroy Atlantis, whose highest summits still emerge at Madeira, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands.

  These were the historic memories that Captain Nemo’s inscription brought to life in my mind. Led by the strangest of destinies, I was treading one of the mountains of that continent, my hands were touching ruins hundreds of thousands of years old, contemporary with the early geological periods! I was walking on the same spot where the coevals of the first man had walked! I was crushing under my heavy soles skeletons of animals from those fabulous times, which the now mineralized trees formerly covered with their shade!

  Oh, why did I not have enough time? I longed to climb down the steep slopes of this mountain, cover every point of this immense continent which had doubtless connected Africa and America, and visit the great cities from before the Flood. There in front of my eyes, perhaps, stretched Machimos the warlike and Eusebia the holy,* whose gigantic inhabitants lived entire centuries and were strong enough to pile up these blocks which still resisted the movements of the water. One day, perhaps, some eruptive phenomenon would bring these sunken ruins back up to the surface! Submarine volcanoes have often been recorded in this portion of the ocean, and ships have frequently felt extraordinary earthquakes while passing over the tormented deeps. Some vessels have registered dull sounds signalling turmoil between the elements in the deep; others have gathered volcanic cinders sent up from the sea. All this ground, as far as the equator, is still worked by plutonic forces. And who knows if in some far-off period, the summits of fire-breathing mountains will not one day be built up by the volcanic ejecta and successive strata of lava, and appear at the surface of the Atlantic!

  While I was dreaming in this way, wishing to engrave in my memory every detail of this grandiose landscape, Captain Nemo, leani
ng on a mossy stele, remained motionless as if turned to stone in a silent ecstasy. Was he dreaming of the lost generations, was he asking them the secret of human destiny? Was it here that this strange being came to commune with history, to relive ancient life — he who wanted nothing to do with modern times? What I would have given then to know his thoughts, to share them, to understand them!

  We remained at this place for an entire hour, contemplating the vast plain in the bright light from the lava which sometimes took on a surprising intensity. At times the interior boiling sent quick shivers through the crust of the mountain. Deep sounds, transmitted clearly in the liquid environment, reverberated with majestic amplitude.

  The moon suddenly appeared for a moment through the mass of waters, sending a few pale rays down to the sunken continent. It was only a gleam, but produced an indescribable effect. The captain got up, looked on the huge plain one last time, then signalled to me to follow him.

  We quickly descended the mountain. Once past the mineral forest, I saw the Nautilus’s searchlight shining like a star. The captain marched straight ahead; and we were back on board by the time the first tints of dawn came and whitened the surface of the ocean.

  10

  Underwater Coalmines

  The next day, 20 February, I woke up very late. The fatigue of the night had extended my sleep until eleven o’clock. I got up quickly. I was keen to know what direction the Nautilus was heading in. The instruments showed me that it was still sailing southwards at a speed of 20 knots and a depth of 100 metres.

  Conseil came in. I recounted our nocturnal excursion to him; since the panels were open, he could still glimpse part of the submerged continent.

  The Nautilus was skimming only ten metres from the floor of the Atlantean plain. It was flying like a balloon carried over the terrestrial prairies by the wind; but it would be more truthful to say that being in the salon was just like being in the compartment of an express train. The foreground before our eyes was made up of rocks cut into fantastic shapes and forests of trees that had changed from vegetable to animal, their motionless silhouettes grimacing under the waves. We saw masses of stones covered with carpets of axidias and anemones and bristling with long vertical hydrophytes, followed by blocks of strangely twisted lava bearing witness to the fury of the plutonic eruptions.

  While these bizarre objects shone in our electric light, I narrated the history of the Atlantean inhabitants to Conseil, which, in a purely imaginary vein, inspired Bailly* to write so many charming pages. I told him about the wars of those heroic peoples. I discussed the question of Atlantis from a believer’s point of view. But Conseil seemed distracted, and hardly listened to me; his indifference concerning historical questions was soon explained.

  Numbers of fish were drawing his eyes; when the fish passed, Conseil was carried off into the depths of classification, and left the real world. This being the case, my only choice was to follow him and to pursue again our ichthyological studies.

  In fact, the fish of the Atlantic were not much different from those we had observed until now. There were rays of gigantic dimensions, five metres long and with great muscular power that allows them to fly over the waves, plus sharks of various species. These included: a 15-foot glaucous shark with sharp triangular teeth whose transparency made it nearly invisible in the water, some brown sagrees, and some spine sharks shaped like prisms and reinforced with tubercular skin; as well as some sturgeons similar to their congeners in the Mediterranean and yellowish-brown 1½-foot pipefish with small grey fins but without teeth or tongues, swimming past like thin, lithe snakes.

  Amongst the osseous fish, Conseil noted some blackish Makairae, 3 metres long and with a piercing sword in their upper jaws, some brightly coloured stingfish, known in Aristotle’s time as sea dragons and very dangerous to touch because of the stings in their dorsals, then some dolphinfish with brown backs striped with blue lines framed in golden edging, some lovely sea bream, some moonfish, like discs with azure reflections which when illuminated by the sunlight above seemed to form silver patches, and finally some 8-metre xiphoid swordfish moving in packs and equipped with yellowish fins shaped like scythes and six-foot-long scimitars: these were intrepid animals, but herbivore rather than piscivore and, like well-trained husbands, obeyed the slightest signal from their females.

  But while observing the diverse specimens of the marine fauna, I continued to examine the wide plains of Atlantis. Sometimes capricious changes in the ground forced the Nautilus to slow down, and it slid with the skill of a cetacean through the narrow bottlenecks of the hills. If the labyrinth became inextricable, then the machine would rise like a balloon, go over the obstacle, and continue its swift progress a few metres above the seabed. A memorable and engrossing journey recalling the manoeuvres of an aerostatic flight, with the difference being that the Nautilus entirely obeyed its pilot’s hand.

  At about four in the afternoon the terrain, generally composed of thick mud mixed with mineralized branches, began to change: it became rockier and seemed strewn with conglomerates and basaltic tuffs, with a few sprinklings of lava and sulphurous obsidian. I thought that a mountain region would soon interrupt the broad plains and, indeed, during some of the Nautilus’s manoeuvres, I caught a glimpse of the southern horizon blocked by a high wall apparently closing the way out. Its top part was clearly above water level. This had to be a large landmass or at the very least an island, perhaps one of the islands of the Canaries or Cape Verde. Since the position had not been taken — on purpose perhaps — I did not know where we were.* But in any case such a wall seemed to mark the end of Atlantis, of which we had actually only covered a tiny part.

  Night did not interrupt my observations. I remained alone, Conseil having gone back to his cabin. The Nautilus slowed down and cruised over the confused shapes on the sea-floor, sometimes pushing down past them as if it wished to land there, sometimes capriciously surfacing. I caught glimpses then of a few bright constellations through the crystal of the waters, and particularly five or six stars which trail behind Orion’s tail.

  I would have stayed at my glass for a long time yet, admiring the beauties of the sea and the sky, but the panels suddenly closed. At this moment the Nautilus had just arrived at the high vertical wall. How it would manoeuvre I could not guess. I went back to my room. The Nautilus was no longer moving. I fell asleep with the firm intention of waking up after a few hours.

  But the following day it was eight o’clock before I returned to the living-room. I looked at the pressure-gauge. It told me that the Nautilus was afloat on the surface. I could also hear footsteps on the platform. But there was no rolling to indicate the waves.

  I headed up to the hatch. It was open. But instead of the daylight I expected, I found myself in total darkness. Where were we? Had I made a mistake? Was it still night? No, not a star shone, and the night is never of such absolute blackness!

  I did not know what to think, when a voice said:

  ‘Is that you, Dr Aronnax?’

  ‘Ah! Captain Nemo,’ I replied; ‘where are we?’

  ‘Underground, monsieur.’

  ‘Underground! And the Nautilus is still afloat?’

  ‘It is still afloat.’

  ‘But I don’t understand?’

  ‘Wait a moment. Our searchlight is going to be switched on, and if you like clear situations, you’ll be pleased.’

  I stepped on to the platform and waited. The darkness was so complete that I could not see Captain Nemo at all. However, looking at the zenith exactly over my head, I thought I could detect an indeterminate gleam, like faint daylight through a circular aperture. But the searchlight suddenly came on, and its brilliance washed away the vague light.

  For a moment my eyes were blinded by the dazzling electric jet, but then I looked again. The Nautilus was stationary. It was floating beside a shore converted to a quayside. The sea bearing it formed a lake imprisoned in a circle of walls measuring two miles in diameter, or about six miles ri
ght round. The water level — as indicated by the pressure-gauge — had to be the same as the outside level, for there necessarily existed some means of communication between the lake and the ocean. The high walls were inclined at their bases, but then converged to form a vault like an immense upside-down funnel 500 or 600 metres high. At the summit was the circular orifice where I had detected the pale gleam, evidently coming from the sun.

  Before examining the internal shape of the enormous cavern more attentively, and deciding if it was the work of nature or man, I went straight up to Captain Nemo.

  ‘Where are we?’ I said.

  ‘In the very centre of an extinct volcano, a volcano invaded by the sea following some convulsion of the earth. While you were sleeping the Nautilus entered this lagoon via a natural channel ten metres below the surface of the ocean. This is its home port, its safe haven: convenient, secret, and sheltered from the wind in every direction! Find me a harbour on the coasts of your landmasses or islands which is as good as this refuge, guaranteed to be safe from the fury of hurricanes!’

  ‘You’re certainly safe here, Captain Nemo. Who could ever reach you at the centre of a volcano? But didn’t I notice an opening at the top?’

  ‘Yes, the crater; formerly filled with lava, steam, and flames, it now gives passage to this invigorating air we are breathing.’