_ THE MEDITERRANEAN, your ideal blue sea: to Greeks simply "the sea,"
to Hebrews "the great sea," to Romans mare nostrum.* Bordered
by orange trees, aloes, cactus, and maritime pine trees,
perfumed with the scent of myrtle, framed by rugged mountains,
saturated with clean, transparent air but continuously under
construction by fires in the earth, this sea is a genuine battlefield
where Neptune and Pluto still struggle for world domination.
Here on these beaches and waters, says the French historian Michelet,
a man is revived by one of the most invigorating climates in the world.
*Latin: "our sea." Ed.
But as beautiful as it was, I could get only a quick look at this
basin whose surface area comprises 2,000,000 square kilometers.
Even Captain Nemo's personal insights were denied me,
because that mystifying individual didn't appear one single time
during our high-speed crossing. I estimate that the Nautilus
covered a track of some 600 leagues under the waves of this sea,
and this voyage was accomplished in just twenty-four hours times two.
Departing from the waterways of Greece on the morning of February 16,
we cleared the Strait of Gibraltar by sunrise on the 18th.
It was obvious to me that this Mediterranean, pinned in the middle
of those shores he wanted to avoid, gave Captain Nemo no pleasure.
Its waves and breezes brought back too many memories, if not too
many regrets. Here he no longer had the ease of movement and freedom
of maneuver that the oceans allowed him, and his Nautilus felt
cramped so close to the coasts of both Africa and Europe.
Accordingly, our speed was twenty-five miles (that is,
twelve four-kilometer leagues) per hour. Needless to say,
Ned Land had to give up his escape plans, much to his distress.
Swept along at the rate of twelve to thirteen meters per second,
he could hardly make use of the skiff. Leaving the Nautilus
under these conditions would have been like jumping off a train
racing at this speed, a rash move if there ever was one.
Moreover, to renew our air supply, the submersible rose to the surface
of the waves only at night, and relying solely on compass and log,
it steered by dead reckoning.
Inside the Mediterranean, then, I could catch no more of
its fast-passing scenery than a traveler might see from an
express train; in other words, I could view only the distant
horizons because the foregrounds flashed by like lightning.
But Conseil and I were able to observe those Mediterranean fish
whose powerful fins kept pace for a while in the Nautilus's waters.
We stayed on watch before the lounge windows, and our notes enable
me to reconstruct, in a few words, the ichthyology of this sea.
Among the various fish inhabiting it, some I viewed, others I glimpsed,
and the rest I missed completely because of the Nautilus's speed.
Kindly allow me to sort them out using this whimsical system
of classification. It will at least convey the quickness
of my observations.
In the midst of the watery mass, brightly lit by our electric beams,
there snaked past those one-meter lampreys that are common
to nearly every clime. A type of ray from the genus Oxyrhynchus,
five feet wide, had a white belly with a spotted, ash-gray back
and was carried along by the currents like a huge, wide-open shawl.
Other rays passed by so quickly I couldn't tell if they deserved that
name "eagle ray" coined by the ancient Greeks, or those designations
of "rat ray," "bat ray," and "toad ray" that modern fishermen
have inflicted on them. Dogfish known as topes, twelve feet long
and especially feared by divers, were racing with each other.
Looking like big bluish shadows, thresher sharks went by,
eight feet long and gifted with an extremely acute sense of smell.
Dorados from the genus Sparus, some measuring up to thirteen
decimeters, appeared in silver and azure costumes encircled
with ribbons, which contrasted with the dark color of their fins;
fish sacred to the goddess Venus, their eyes set in brows of gold;
a valuable species that patronizes all waters fresh or salt,
equally at home in rivers, lakes, and oceans, living in every clime,
tolerating any temperature, their line dating back to prehistoric times
on this earth yet preserving all its beauty from those far-off days.
Magnificent sturgeons, nine to ten meters long and extremely fast,
banged their powerful tails against the glass of our panels,
showing bluish backs with small brown spots; they resemble sharks,
without equaling their strength, and are encountered in every sea;
in the spring they delight in swimming up the great rivers,
fighting the currents of the Volga, Danube, Po, Rhine, Loire, and Oder,
while feeding on herring, mackerel, salmon, and codfish; although they
belong to the class of cartilaginous fish, they rate as a delicacy;
they're eaten fresh, dried, marinated, or salt-preserved,
and in olden times they were borne in triumph to the table of
the Roman epicure Lucullus.
But whenever the Nautilus drew near the surface, those denizens
of the Mediterranean I could observe most productively belonged
to the sixty-third genus of bony fish. These were tuna from
the genus Scomber, blue-black on top, silver on the belly armor,
their dorsal stripes giving off a golden gleam. They are said to
follow ships in search of refreshing shade from the hot tropical sun,
and they did just that with the Nautilus, as they had once done
with the vessels of the Count de La Pérouse. For long hours they
competed in speed with our submersible. I couldn't stop marveling
at these animals so perfectly cut out for racing, their heads small,
their bodies sleek, spindle-shaped, and in some cases over three
meters long, their pectoral fins gifted with remarkable strength,
their caudal fins forked. Like certain flocks of birds, whose speed
they equal, these tuna swim in triangle formation, which prompted
the ancients to say they'd boned up on geometry and military strategy.
And yet they can't escape the Provençal fishermen, who prize them
as highly as did the ancient inhabitants of Turkey and Italy;
and these valuable animals, as oblivious as if they were deaf
and blind, leap right into the Marseilles tuna nets and perish
by the thousands.
Just for the record, I'll mention those Mediterranean fish
that Conseil and I barely glimpsed. There were whitish eels
of the species Gymnotus fasciatus that passed like elusive wisps
of steam, conger eels three to four meters long that were tricked
out in green, blue, and yellow, three-foot hake with a liver
that makes a dainty morsel, wormfish drifting like thin seaweed,
sea robins that poets call lyrefish and seamen pipers and whose snouts
have two jagged triangular plates shaped like old Homer's lyre,
swallowfish swimming as fast as the bird they're named after,
redheaded groupers whose dorsal fins are trimmed with filaments,
some shad (spotted with black, gray, brown, blue, yellow, and green)
that actually respond to tinkling handbells, splendid diamond-shaped
turbot that were like aquatic pheasants with yellowish fins stippled
in brown and the left topside mostly marbled in brown and yellow,
finally schools of wonderful red mullet, real oceanic birds of paradise
that ancient Romans bought for as much as 10,000 sesterces apiece,
and which they killed at the table, so they could heartlessly watch it
change color from cinnabar red when alive to pallid white when dead.
And as for other fish common to the Atlantic and Mediterranean, I was
unable to observe miralets, triggerfish, puffers, seahorses,
jewelfish, trumpetfish, blennies, gray mullet, wrasse, smelt,
flying fish, anchovies, sea bream, porgies, garfish, or any of
the chief representatives of the order Pleuronecta, such as sole,
flounder, plaice, dab, and brill, simply because of the dizzying
speed with which the Nautilus hustled through these opulent waters.
As for marine mammals, on passing by the mouth of the Adriatic Sea, I
thought I recognized two or three sperm whales equipped with the single
dorsal fin denoting the genus Physeter, some pilot whales from
the genus Globicephalus exclusive to the Mediterranean, the forepart
of the head striped with small distinct lines, and also a dozen
seals with white bellies and black coats, known by the name monk
seals and just as solemn as if they were three-meter Dominicans.
For his part, Conseil thought he spotted a turtle six feet wide
and adorned with three protruding ridges that ran lengthwise.
I was sorry to miss this reptile, because from Conseil's description,
I believe I recognized the leatherback turtle, a pretty rare species.
For my part, I noted only some loggerhead turtles with long carapaces.
As for zoophytes, for a few moments I was able to marvel at a wonderful,
orange-hued hydra from the genus Galeolaria that clung to the glass
of our port panel; it consisted of a long, lean filament that spread
out into countless branches and ended in the most delicate lace
ever spun by the followers of Arachne. Unfortunately I couldn't
fish up this wonderful specimen, and surely no other Mediterranean
zoophytes would have been offered to my gaze, if, on the evening
of the 16th, the Nautilus hadn't slowed down in an odd fashion.
This was the situation.
By then we were passing between Sicily and the coast
of Tunisia. In the cramped space between Cape Bon and the
Strait of Messina, the sea bottom rises almost all at once.
It forms an actual ridge with only seventeen meters of water
remaining above it, while the depth on either side is 170 meters.
Consequently, the Nautilus had to maneuver with caution so as not
to bump into this underwater barrier.
I showed Conseil the position of this long reef on our chart
of the Mediterranean.
"But with all due respect to master," Conseil ventured to observe,
"it's like an actual isthmus connecting Europe to Africa."
"Yes, my boy," I replied, "it cuts across the whole Strait of Sicily,
and Smith's soundings prove that in the past, these two continents
were genuinely connected between Cape Boeo and Cape Farina."
"I can easily believe it," Conseil said.
"I might add," I went on, "that there's a similar barrier between
Gibraltar and Ceuta, and in prehistoric times it closed off
the Mediterranean completely."
"Gracious!" Conseil put in. "Suppose one day some volcanic upheaval
raises these two barriers back above the waves!"
"That's most unlikely, Conseil."
"If master will allow me to finish, I mean that if this phenomenon occurs,
it might prove distressing to Mr. de Lesseps, who has gone to such
pains to cut through his isthmus!"
"Agreed, but I repeat, Conseil: such a phenomenon won't occur.
The intensity of these underground forces continues to diminish.
Volcanoes were quite numerous in the world's early days, but they're
going extinct one by one; the heat inside the earth is growing weaker,
the temperature in the globe's lower strata is cooling appreciably
every century, and to our globe's detriment, because its heat
is its life."
"But the sun--"
"The sun isn't enough, Conseil. Can it restore heat to a corpse?"
"Not that I've heard."
"Well, my friend, someday the earth will be just such a cold corpse.
Like the moon, which long ago lost its vital heat, our globe will
become lifeless and unlivable."
"In how many centuries?" Conseil asked.
"In hundreds of thousands of years, my boy."
"Then we have ample time to finish our voyage," Conseil replied,
"if Ned Land doesn't mess things up!"
Thus reassured, Conseil went back to studying the shallows that
the Nautilus was skimming at moderate speed.
On the rocky, volcanic seafloor, there bloomed quite a collection
of moving flora: sponges, sea cucumbers, jellyfish called sea
gooseberries that were adorned with reddish tendrils and gave off
a subtle phosphorescence, members of the genus Beroe that are commonly
known by the name melon jellyfish and are bathed in the shimmer
of the whole solar spectrum, free-swimming crinoids one meter wide
that reddened the waters with their crimson hue, treelike basket
stars of the greatest beauty, sea fans from the genus Pavonacea
with long stems, numerous edible sea urchins of various species,
plus green sea anemones with a grayish trunk and a brown disk lost
beneath the olive-colored tresses of their tentacles.
Conseil kept especially busy observing mollusks and articulates,
and although his catalog is a little dry, I wouldn't want to wrong
the gallant lad by leaving out his personal observations.
From the branch Mollusca, he mentions numerous comb-shaped scallops,
hooflike spiny oysters piled on top of each other, triangular coquina,
three-pronged glass snails with yellow fins and transparent shells,
orange snails from the genus Pleurobranchus that looked like eggs spotted
or speckled with greenish dots, members of the genus Aplysia also known
by the name sea hares, other sea hares from the genus Dolabella,
plump paper-bubble shells, umbrella shells exclusive to the Mediterranean,
abalone whose shell produces a mother-of-pearl much in demand,
pilgrim scallops, saddle shells that diners in the French
province of Languedoc are said to like better than oysters,
some of those cockleshells so dear to the citizens of Marseilles,
fat white venus shells that are among the clams so abundant off
the coasts of North America and eaten in such quantities by New Yorkers,
variously colored comb shells with gill covers, burrowing date
mussels with a peppery flavor I relish, furrowed heart cockles whose
shells have riblike ridges on their arching summits, triton shells
pocked with scarlet bumps, carniaira snails with backward-curving
tips that make them resemble flimsy gondolas, crowned ferola snails,
atlanta snails with spiral shells, gray nudibranchs from the genus
Tethys that were spotted with white and covered by fringed mantles,
nudibranchs from the suborder Eolidea that looked like small slugs,
sea butterflies crawling on their backs, seashells from the genus Auricula
including the oval-shaped Auricula myosotis, tan wentletrap snails,
common periwinkles, violet snails, cineraira snails, rock borers,
ear shells, cabochon snails, pandora shells, etc.
As for the articulates, in his notes Conseil has very appropriately
divided them into six classes, three of which belong to the marine world.
These classes are the Crustacea, Cirripedia, and Annelida.
Crustaceans are subdivided into nine orders, and the first of
these consists of the decapods, in other words, animals whose head
and thorax are usually fused, whose cheek-and-mouth mechanism is
made up of several pairs of appendages, and whose thorax has four,
five, or six pairs of walking legs. Conseil used the methods
of our mentor Professor Milne-Edwards, who puts the decapods
in three divisions: Brachyura, Macrura, and Anomura. These names
may look a tad fierce, but they're accurate and appropriate.
Among the Brachyura, Conseil mentions some amanthia crabs whose fronts
were armed with two big diverging tips, those inachus scorpions that--
lord knows why--symbolized wisdom to the ancient Greeks, spider crabs
of the massena and spinimane varieties that had probably gone astray
in these shallows because they usually live in the lower depths,
xanthid crabs, pilumna crabs, rhomboid crabs, granular box crabs
(easy on the digestion, as Conseil ventured to observe), toothless
masked crabs, ebalia crabs, cymopolia crabs, woolly-handed crabs, etc.
Among the Macrura (which are subdivided into five families:
hardshells, burrowers, crayfish, prawns, and ghost crabs)
Conseil mentions some common spiny lobsters whose females supply a meat
highly prized, slipper lobsters or common shrimp, waterside gebia shrimp,
and all sorts of edible species, but he says nothing of the crayfish
subdivision that includes the true lobster, because spiny lobsters
are the only type in the Mediterranean. Finally, among the Anomura,
he saw common drocina crabs dwelling inside whatever abandoned
seashells they could take over, homola crabs with spiny fronts,
hermit crabs, hairy porcelain crabs, etc.
There Conseil's work came to a halt. He didn't have time to finish
off the class Crustacea through an examination of its stomatopods,
amphipods, homopods, isopods, trilobites, branchiopods, ostracods,
and entomostraceans. And in order to complete his study of
marine articulates, he needed to mention the class Cirripedia,
which contains water fleas and carp lice, plus the class Annelida,
which he would have divided without fail into tubifex worms and
dorsibranchian worms. But having gone past the shallows of the Strait
of Sicily, the Nautilus resumed its usual deep-water speed.
From then on, no more mollusks, no more zoophytes, no more articulates.
Just a few large fish sweeping by like shadows.
During the night of February 16-17, we entered the second
Mediterranean basin, whose maximum depth we found at 3,000 meters.
The Nautilus, driven downward by its propeller and slanting fins,
descended to the lowest strata of this sea.
There, in place of natural wonders, the watery mass offered
some thrilling and dreadful scenes to my eyes. In essence,
we were then crossing that part of the whole Mediterranean so fertile
in casualties. From the coast of Algiers to the beaches of Provence,
how many ships have wrecked, how many vessels have vanished!
Compared to the vast liquid plains of the Pacific, the Mediterranean
is a mere lake, but it's an unpredictable lake with fickle waves,
today kindly and affectionate to those frail single-masters drifting
between a double ultramarine of sky and water, tomorrow bad-tempered
and turbulent, agitated by the winds, demolishing the strongest
ships beneath sudden waves that smash down with a headlong wallop.
So, in our swift cruise through these deep strata, how many vessels I
saw lying on the seafloor, some already caked with coral, others clad
only in a layer of rust, plus anchors, cannons, shells, iron fittings,
propeller blades, parts of engines, cracked cylinders, staved-in boilers,
then hulls floating in midwater, here upright, there overturned.
Some of these wrecked ships had perished in collisions, others from
hitting granite reefs. I saw a few that had sunk straight down,
their masting still upright, their rigging stiffened by the water.
They looked like they were at anchor by some immense, open,
offshore mooring where they were waiting for their departure time.
When the Nautilus passed between them, covering them with sheets
of electricity, they seemed ready to salute us with their colors
and send us their serial numbers! But no, nothing but silence
and death filled this field of catastrophes!
I observed that these Mediterranean depths became more and more
cluttered with such gruesome wreckage as the Nautilus drew nearer
to the Strait of Gibraltar. By then the shores of Africa and Europe
were converging, and in this narrow space collisions were commonplace.
There I saw numerous iron undersides, the phantasmagoric ruins
of steamers, some lying down, others rearing up like fearsome animals.
One of these boats made a dreadful first impression:
sides torn open, funnel bent, paddle wheels stripped to the mountings,
rudder separated from the sternpost and still hanging from an
iron chain, the board on its stern eaten away by marine salts!
How many lives were dashed in this shipwreck! How many victims
were swept under the waves! Had some sailor on board lived
to tell the story of this dreadful disaster, or do the waves still
keep this casualty a secret? It occurred to me, lord knows why,
that this boat buried under the sea might have been the Atlas,
lost with all hands some twenty years ago and never heard from again!
Oh, what a gruesome tale these Mediterranean depths could tell,
this huge boneyard where so much wealth has been lost, where so many
victims have met their deaths!
Meanwhile, briskly unconcerned, the Nautilus ran at full propeller
through the midst of these ruins. On February 18, near three o'clock
in the morning, it hove before the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar.
There are two currents here: an upper current, long known to exist,
that carries the ocean's waters into the Mediterranean basin;
then a lower countercurrent, the only present-day proof of its existence
being logic. In essence, the Mediterranean receives a continual influx
of water not only from the Atlantic but from rivers emptying into it;
since local evaporation isn't enough to restore the balance, the total
amount of added water should make this sea's level higher every year.
Yet this isn't the case, and we're naturally forced to believe in
the existence of some lower current that carries the Mediterranean's
surplus through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic basin.
And so it turned out. The Nautilus took full advantage of
this countercurrent. It advanced swiftly through this narrow passageway.
For an instant I could glimpse the wonderful ruins of the Temple
of Hercules, buried undersea, as Pliny and Avianus have mentioned,
together with the flat island they stand on; and a few minutes later,
we were floating on the waves of the Atlantic. _