‘Uncle,’ I said, ‘what wood is this?’
‘It’s pine, fir, and birch, all the various northern conifers, mineralized by the action of the sea-water.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s what is known as surturbrand or fossil wood.’
‘But then, like lignite, it must be as hard as stone and too heavy to float?’
‘That sometimes happens; some of these woods have become real anthracites; but others, like these we have here, are only partially fossilized so far. Look,’ added my uncle, throwing one of these precious spars into the sea.
The piece of wood, after disappearing from sight, rose again to the surface and rocked up and down with the movement of the waves.
‘Are you convinced?’ asked my uncle.
‘I’m convinced that it’s incredible!’
The next evening, thanks to the guide’s skill, the raft was finished. It was ten feet long and five feet wide; the beams of surturbrand, bound together by strong ropes, formed a solid surface, and, once launched, this improvised vessel floated peacefully on the waters of the Lidenbrock Sea.
32
We Set Sail
On 13 August we awoke early in the morning, eager to adopt a new mode of travelling which was both rapid and easy.
The raft’s rigging consisted of a mast made of two staves lashed together, a yard made of a third, and a sail borrowed from our stock of rugs. There was no lack of ropes and the whole vessel was well made.
The provisions, baggage, instruments, arms, and a large amount of fresh water were put on board, and at six o’clock the Professor gave the order to embark.
Hans had fitted up a rudder which enabled him to steer his vessel, and he took the tiller. I cast off the rope mooring us to the shore, the sail was set, and we put off quickly.
Just as we were leaving the little harbour, my uncle, who liked naming places, suggested giving it a name, and proposed mine among others.
‘I’ve a better name to propose to you,’ I said.
‘And what’s that?’
‘Gräuben. Port Gräuben would look very well on the map.’
‘Port Gräuben it shall be.’
And that is how the memory of my dear Virlandaise was associated with our adventurous expedition.
The wind was blowing from the north-west. We sailed before it at a great speed. The dense atmosphere had tremendous force and acted on the sail like a powerful fan. After an hour my uncle had been able to calculate our speed.
‘If we go on at this rate,’ he said, ‘we shall cover at least seventy-five miles in twenty-four hours, and it won’t be long before we reach the opposite shore.’
I did not reply, but went and sat forward. Already the north shore was sinking on the horizon, and the shores to the east and west were opening outwards as if to facilitate our departure. Before my eyes there stretched a vast sea; the greyish shadows of great clouds swept across its surface, and seemed to weigh down on the gloomy waters. The silvery beams of the electric light, reflected here and there by drops of spray, produced luminous points in the eddies created by the raft. Soon all land was lost to view, no fixed object could be seen, and if it had not been for our foaming wake I might have thought that our raft was perfectly still.
About midday, some huge shoals of seaweed came in sight, floating on the surface of the waves. I was aware of the prolific nature of these plants, which grow at a depth of twelve thousand feet at the bottom of the sea, reproduce themselves under a pressure of four hundred atmospheres, and often form shoals big enough to impede the course of a ship; but never, I think, was there any seaweed as gigantic as that which we saw on the Lidenbrock Sea.
Our raft skirted fuci three or four thousand feet long, huge serpents stretching away out of sight; I amused myself by following with my eyes these endless ribbons, constantly thinking that I had reached the end of them, but for hours on end my patience was exercised as much as my surprise.
What natural force could produce such plants, and what must the earth have looked like in the first periods of its formation, when, under the action of heat and moisture, the vegetable kingdom above was developing on its surface?
Evening came, but, as I had noticed the previous day, the luminosity of the air was in no way diminished. This was a constant phenomenon, the permanency of which could be relied on. After supper I stretched out at the foot of the mast, and it was not long before I fell into a sleep full of pleasant dreams.
Hans, motionless at the tiller, let the raft run on; with the wind blowing aft, there was no need for steering.
As soon as we had left Port Gräuben, my uncle had instructed me to keep the log, noting down every observation and recording interesting phenomena; the direction of the wind, the speed of our raft, the distance covered, in fact every particular of our strange voyage.
I shall therefore confine myself to reproducing here these daily notes, written down, so to speak, at the dictation of events, in order to furnish an exact record of our passage.
Friday, 14 August. Steady NW wind. Raft sailing fast and straight. Coast seventy-five miles to leeward. Nothing on the horizon. Intensity of light constant. Weather fine, in other words the clouds are high up, fleecy, and bathed in a white atmosphere like melting silver. Thermometer at 32° Centigrade.
At midday Hans fastened a hook at the end of a line, baited it with a small piece of meat, and threw it into the sea. For two hours he caught nothing, and we began to think that these waters were uninhabited. But then there was a pull at the line. Hans drew it in and brought a struggling fish out of the water.
‘A fish!’ cried my uncle.
‘It’s a sturgeon!’ I cried in my turn. ‘A small sturgeon!’
The Professor examined the creature carefully and came to a different conclusion. This fish had a flat, rounded head, and the front part of its body was covered with bony scales; it had fairly well-developed pectoral fins but no teeth or tail. It certainly belonged to the family in which naturalists have classed the sturgeon, but differed from that fish in some essential details.
My uncle noted this, for after a brief examination he said:
‘This fish belongs to a family which has long been extinct and which is to be found only in a fossil state in the Devonian strata.’
‘What!’ I cried. ‘You mean we’ve taken alive one of the inhabitants of those primitive seas?’
‘Yes,’ replied the Professor, continuing his observations, ‘and you can see that these fossil fishes are quite unlike the present-day species. Finding one of these creatures alive is sheer bliss for a naturalist.’
‘But to what family does it belong?’
‘To the order of the ganoids, the family of the cephalisphides, the genus …’
‘Well?’
‘The genus of the pterychtis, I’d swear to that! But this displays a peculiarity common, so they say, to the fishes that inhabit subterranean waters.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s blind!’
‘Blind?’
‘It’s not only blind, but it has no eyes at all.’
I looked at the fish. What my uncle had said was perfectly true. But this might be an exceptional case, so the hook was baited again and thrown back into the sea. This ocean is certainly well stocked, for in two hours we caught a considerable quantity of pterychtis, as well as some fish belonging to another extinct family, the dipterides, but of a genus which my uncle could not identify. None of them had eyes. This unexpected haul was extremely beneficial to our food stocks.
Thus it seems clear that this sea contains nothing but fossil species, in which fishes like reptiles are all the more completely developed the farther back they were created. Perhaps we may yet come across some of those saurians which scientists have reconstructed on the basis of a bit of bone or cartilage.
I took the telescope and examined the sea. It was deserted. No doubt we are still too near the shore.
I looked up in the air. Why should not some of those b
irds reconstructed by the immortal Cuvier be beating their wings in this dense atmosphere? The fish would provide them with sufficient food. I searched the space above me, but the air was as uninhabited as the shore.
Now, however, my imagination carried me away among the wonderful hypotheses of palaeontology, and I had a prehistoric daydream. I fancied I could see floating on the water some huge chersites, antediluvian tortoises like floating islands. Along the dark shore there passed the great mammals of early times, the leptotherium, found in the caves of Brazil, and the merycotherium, found in the icy regions of Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous lophiodon, a gigantic tapir, was hiding behind the rocks, ready to dispute its prey with the anoplotherium, a strange animal which looked like an amalgam of rhinoceros, horse, hippopotamus, and camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a hurry during the first hours of the world, had combined several animals in one. The giant mastodon waved its trunk and pounded the rocks on the shore with its tusks, while the megatherium, buttressed on its enormous legs, burrowed in the earth, rousing the echoes of the granite rocks with its roars. Higher up, the protopitheca, the first monkey to appear on earth, was climbing on the steep peaks. Higher still, the pterodactyl, with its winged claws, glided like a huge bat through the dense air. And finally, in the upper strata of the atmosphere, some enormous birds, more powerful than the cassowary and bigger than the ostrich, spread their vast wings and soared upwards to touch with their heads the ceiling of the granite vault.
The whole of this fossil world came to life again in my imagination. I went back to the scriptural periods of creation, long before the birth of man, when the unfinished world was not yet ready for him. Then my dream took me even farther back into the ages before the appearance of living creatures. The mammals disappeared, then the birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary Period, and finally the fishes, crustaceans, molluscs, and articulated creatures. The zoophytes of the transitional period returned to nothingness in their turn. The whole of life was concentrated in me, and my heart was the only one beating in that depopulated world. There were no more seasons or climates; the heat of the globe steadily increased and neutralized that of the sun. The vegetation grew to gigantic proportions, and I passed like a ghost among arborescent ferns, treading uncertainly on iridescent marl and mottled stone; I leaned against the trunks of huge conifers; I lay down in the shade of sphenophyllas, asterophyllas, and lycopods a hundred feet high.
Centuries passed by like days. I went back through the long series of terrestrial changes. The plants disappeared; the granite rocks softened; solid matter turned to liquid under the action of intense heat; water covered the surface of the globe, boiling and volatilizing; steam enveloped the earth, which gradually turned into a gaseous mass, white-hot, as big and bright as the sun.
In the centre of this nebula, which was fourteen hundred thousand times as large as the globe it would one day form, I was carried through interplanetary space. My body was volatilized in its turn and mingled like an imponderable atom with these vast vapours tracing their flaming orbits through infinity.
What a dream this was! Where was it taking me? My feverish hand noted down on paper the strange details of my journey. I had forgotten everything else – the Professor, the guide, and the raft. A hallucination had taken hold of me.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked my uncle.
My staring eyes looked at him without seeing him.
‘Take care, Axel, or you’ll fall overboard!’
At the same time I felt Hans seizing me. But for him, I would have thrown myself into the sea, under the influence of my dream.
‘Has he gone mad?’ cried the Professor.
‘What is it?’ I said at last, coming to.
‘Are you ill?’
‘No. I’ve had a brief hallucination, but it is over now. Is everything all right?’
‘Yes, there’s a fair wind and a fine sea, we are making good headway, and unless my calculations are wrong, we shall soon make land.’
At these words I stood up and gazed at the horizon; but there was still nothing to be seen between water and clouds.
33
A Battle of Monsters
Saturday, 15 August. The sea retained its monotonous uniformity. There was no land in sight. The horizon seemed far away.
My head was still dazed by the vivid impression made by my dream.
My uncle had not been dreaming, but he was in a bad temper. He kept sweeping the horizon with his telescope and then folding his arms with a look of annoyance.
I find that Professor Lidenbrock is tending to revert to his old mood of impatience, and I note this observation in my log. It required my danger and sufferings to strike a spark of humanity out of him; but since I recovered, Nature had resumed its sway. And yet, what reason had he to feel annoyed? Our voyage was proceeding in the most favourable conditions that could be imagined, and the raft was moving wonderfully fast.
‘You seem anxious, Uncle,’ I said, seeing him repeatedly putting the telescope to his eye.
‘Anxious? No, not a bit of it.’
‘Impatient, then.’
‘I’ve good reason to be.’
‘But we are going very fast …’
‘What’s the good of that? It isn’t our speed that’s too small, but the sea that is too big!’
I then remembered that before we set sail the Professor had estimated the length of this subterranean sea at about seventy-five miles. Now we had covered three times that distance, yet there was still no sign of the south shore.
‘And we aren’t going down!’ the Professor went on. ‘All this is a waste of time, because, after all, I didn’t come all this way just to go for an outing on a pond!’
He called this voyage an outing, and this sea a pond!
‘But,’ I said, ‘seeing that we’ve followed the course indicated by Saknussemm …’
‘That’s just the question. Have we followed that route? Did Saknussemm meet this stretch of water? Did he cross it? Has that stream we took as a guide led us astray?’
‘In any case we can’t regret having come so far. The view here is magnificent, and …’
‘I don’t give a damn for views. I set myself an object, and I mean to attain it. So don’t talk to me about magnificent views …’
I took him at his word, and left the Professor to bite his lips with impatience. At six in the evening, Hans claimed his wages, and three rix-dollars were counted out to him.
Sunday, 16 August. Nothing new. The same weather. The wind freshened slightly. When I awoke, my first thought was to observe the intensity of the light. I lived in dread that the electric light might grow dim and then go out altogether, but there seemed to be no reason for fear. The shadow of the raft was clearly outlined on the surface of the waves.
This sea really seems infinite. It must be as wide as the Mediterranean or even the Atlantic – and why not?
My uncle took soundings several times, tying one of the heaviest pickaxes to the end of a cord which he let down two hundred fathoms. No bottom. We had some difficulty in hauling up our weight.
When the pickaxe was back on board, Hans showed me some deep imprints on its surface. It was as if that piece of iron had been squeezed between two hard bodies.
I looked at the guide.
‘Tänder,’ he said.
I did not understand and turned to my uncle, who was deep in his calculations. I decided not to disturb him and returned to the Icelander, who by opening and shutting his mouth several times conveyed his meaning to me.
‘Teeth!’ I said in amazement, looking more closely at the iron bar.
Yes, those were definitely the marks of teeth imprinted on the metal. The jaws which contained them must have been incredibly powerful. Were they the teeth of some monster of a prehistoric species which lived deep down under the surface, a monster more voracious than the shark, more formidable than the whale? I could not take my eyes off this bar which had been half gnawed away. Was my dream of the previous n
ight going to come true? These thoughts plagued me all day, and my imagination scarcely calmed down after a few hours’ sleep.
Monday, 17 August. Today I tried to remember the peculiar instincts of the antediluvian monsters of the Secondary Period, which, coming after the molluscs, the crustaceans, and the fishes, preceded the mammals on earth. The world belonged at that time to the reptiles. Those monsters held absolute sway over the Jurassic seas. Nature had endowed them with a perfect constitution, gigantic pro portions, and prodigious strength. The saurians of our days, the biggest and most terrible alligators and crocodiles, are only feeble, reduced copies of their ancestors of primitive times.
I shuddered at the evocation of those monsters. No human eye has ever seen them alive. They appeared on earth a thousand centuries before man, but their fossilized bones, found in the clayey limestone which the English call lias, have made it possible to reconstruct their anatomy and ascertain their colossal structure.
I had seen in the Hamburg museum the skeleton of one of these saurians which was thirty feet long. Was I destined – I, an inhabitant of this earth – to find myself face to face with these representatives of an antediluvian family? No, that was impossible. Yet the iron bar bore the mark of strong teeth, and I could see from the impression they had left that they were conical like those of the crocodile.
I gazed in terror at the sea, dreading to see one of those inhabitants of the underwater caves leap into sight. I imagine that the same idea, if not the same fear, had occurred to Professor Lidenbrock, for after examining the pickaxe he kept watching the ocean closely.
‘Why the devil,’ I said to myself, ‘did he have to go and take soundings? He has obviously disturbed some creature in its lair, and we may well be attacked on our way …’