_ THIS BRUTALLY EXECUTED capture was carried out with lightning speed.
My companions and I had no time to collect ourselves. I don't
know how they felt about being shoved inside this aquatic prison,
but as for me, I was shivering all over. With whom were we dealing?
Surely with some new breed of pirates, exploiting the sea after
their own fashion.
The narrow hatch had barely closed over me when I was surrounded by
profound darkness. Saturated with the outside light, my eyes couldn't
make out a thing. I felt my naked feet clinging to the steps of an
iron ladder. Forcibly seized, Ned Land and Conseil were behind me.
At the foot of the ladder, a door opened and instantly closed behind
us with a loud clang.
We were alone. Where? I couldn't say, could barely even imagine.
All was darkness, but such utter darkness that after several minutes,
my eyes were still unable to catch a single one of those hazy gleams
that drift through even the blackest nights.
Meanwhile, furious at these goings on, Ned Land gave free rein
to his indignation.
"Damnation!" he exclaimed. "These people are about as hospitable
as the savages of New Caledonia! All that's lacking is for them
to be cannibals! I wouldn't be surprised if they were, but believe
you me, they won't eat me without my kicking up a protest!"
"Calm yourself, Ned my friend," Conseil replied serenely.
"Don't flare up so quickly! We aren't in a kettle yet!"
"In a kettle, no," the Canadian shot back, "but in an oven for sure.
It's dark enough for one. Luckily my Bowie knife hasn't left me,
and I can still see well enough to put it to use.* The first one
of these bandits who lays a hand on me--"
*Author's Note: A Bowie knife is a wide-bladed dagger that Americans
are forever carrying around.
"Don't be so irritable, Ned," I then told the harpooner,
"and don't ruin things for us with pointless violence.
Who knows whether they might be listening to us? Instead, let's try
to find out where we are!"
I started moving, groping my way. After five steps I encountered
an iron wall made of riveted boilerplate. Then, turning around,
I bumped into a wooden table next to which several stools had been set.
The floor of this prison lay hidden beneath thick, hempen matting
that deadened the sound of footsteps. Its naked walls didn't reveal
any trace of a door or window. Going around the opposite way,
Conseil met up with me, and we returned to the middle of this cabin,
which had to be twenty feet long by ten wide. As for its height,
not even Ned Land, with his great stature, was able to determine it.
Half an hour had already gone by without our situation changing,
when our eyes were suddenly spirited from utter darkness into
blinding light. Our prison lit up all at once; in other words,
it filled with luminescent matter so intense that at first I
couldn't stand the brightness of it. From its glare and whiteness,
I recognized the electric glow that had played around this
underwater boat like some magnificent phosphorescent phenomenon.
After involuntarily closing my eyes, I reopened them and saw
that this luminous force came from a frosted half globe curving
out of the cabin's ceiling.
"Finally! It's light enough to see!" Ned Land exclaimed, knife in hand,
staying on the defensive.
"Yes," I replied, then ventured the opposite view. "But as for
our situation, we're still in the dark."
"Master must learn patience," said the emotionless Conseil.
This sudden illumination of our cabin enabled me to examine its
tiniest details. It contained only a table and five stools.
Its invisible door must have been hermetically sealed.
Not a sound reached our ears. Everything seemed dead inside this boat.
Was it in motion, or stationary on the surface of the ocean,
or sinking into the depths? I couldn't tell.
But this luminous globe hadn't been turned on without good reason.
Consequently, I hoped that some crewmen would soon make an appearance.
If you want to consign people to oblivion, you don't light
up their dungeons.
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 his
whole personality stamped with that southern-blooded zest that,
in France, typifies the people of Provence. The philosopher
Diderot has very aptly claimed that a man's bearing is the clue
to his character, and this stocky little man was certainly
a living proof of this claim. You could sense that his everyday
conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of
speech 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 Gratiolet
or 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 arc
formed by the lines of his shoulders, and his black eyes gazed
with icy assurance; calmness, since his skin, pale rather than ruddy,
indicated tranquility of blood; energy, shown by the swiftly knitting
muscles of his brow; and finally courage, since his deep breathing
denoted 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 bodily
movements resulted in an overall effect of unquestionable candor--
according to the findings of physiognomists, those analysts
of facial character.
I felt "involuntarily reassured" in his presence, and this boded
well 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 lofty
and passionate spirit. This man was certainly the most wonderful
physical specimen I had ever encountered. One unusual detail:
his eyes were spaced a little far from each other and could
instantly take in nearly a quarter of the horizon. This ability--
as I later verified--was strengthened by a range of vision even greater
than Ned Land's. When this stranger focused his gaze on an object,
his eyebrow lines gathered into a frown, his heavy eyelids closed
around 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 sheets
of 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 unique
fabric that flattered the figure and allowed great freedom of movement.
The taller of the two--apparently the leader on board--examined us
with the greatest care but without pronouncing a word. Then, turning to
his companion, he conversed with him in a language I didn't recognize.
It was a sonorous, harmonious, flexible dialect whose vowels seemed
to undergo a highly varied accentuation.
The other replied with a shake of the head and added two or three
utterly incomprehensible words. Then he seemed to question me
directly 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 situation
grew 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 articulating
my every syllable, and not leaving out a single detail. I stated
our 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 nothing
in 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 would
be 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 overriding
need 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 spoken
by 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 complained
vehemently about being imprisoned in defiance of his civil rights,
asked by virtue of which law he was hereby detained, invoked writs
of habeas corpus, threatened to press charges against anyone holding
him in illegal custody, ranted, gesticulated, shouted, and finally
conveyed 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 intelligible
than I had been. Our visitors didn't bat an eye. Apparently they
were engineers who understood the languages of neither the French
physicist 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 time
the various vicissitudes of our story. But despite our narrator's
fine accent and stylish turns of phrase, the German language met
with no success.
Finally, as a last resort, I hauled out everything I could
remember from my early schooldays, and I tried to narrate our
adventures in Latin. Cicero would have plugged his ears and sent
me to the scullery, but somehow I managed to pull through.
With the same negative result.
This last attempt ultimately misfiring, the two strangers exchanged
a few words in their incomprehensible language and withdrew,
not even favoring us with one of those encouraging gestures that are
used in every country in the world. The door closed again.
"This is outrageous!" Ned Land shouted, exploding for the
twentieth time. "I ask you! We speak French, English, German,
and Latin to these rogues, and neither of them has the decency
to even answer back!"
"Calm down, Ned," I told the seething harpooner. "Anger won't
get us anywhere."
"But professor," our irascible companion went on, "can't you see
that we could die of hunger in this iron cage?"
"Bah!" Conseil put in philosophically. "We can hold out a
good while yet!"
"My friends," I said, "we mustn't despair. We've gotten out of
tighter spots. So please do me the favor of waiting a bit before
you 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 of
the world, but I admit that the nationality of these two strangers is hard
to 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 officer
were 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 people
who 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 Quebec
to 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 unintelligent
by nature . . ."
As he was saying these words, the door opened. A steward
entered.* 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 table
and 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 suppose
they 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 been
neatly positioned on the table cloth, and we sat down to eat.
Assuredly, we were dealing with civilized people, and if it hadn't
been for this electric light flooding over us, I would have thought
we were in the dining room of the Hotel Adelphi in Liverpool,
or the Grand Hotel in Paris. However, I feel compelled to mention
that 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 various
daintily dressed fish; but I couldn't make up my mind about certain
otherwise excellent dishes, and I couldn't even tell whether
their 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 reverse
a 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 appropriate
motto for this underwater machine, so long as the preposition
in is translated as within and not upon. The letter N was no doubt
the initial of the name of that mystifying individual in command
beneath the seas!
Ned and Conseil had no time for such musings. They were wolfing
down their food, and without further ado I did the same.
By now I felt reassured about our fate, and it seemed obvious
that 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 fighting
for 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 soon
deep 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 insoluble
questions 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 sinking
toward the sea's lower strata. Intense nightmares besieged me.
In these mysterious marine sanctuaries, I envisioned hosts
of unknown animals, and this underwater boat seemed to be a blood
relation 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. _