XXXII

XXXII

ON AUGUST 13 WE awoke early. We planned to inaugurate a new mode of fast and easy transportation.

The rigging of the raft consisted of a mast made from two poles tied together, a yard made of a third, a sail from our blankets. There was no lack of rope. The whole thing was solid.

At six o’clock, the professor gave the signal to embark. The food supplies, the baggage, the instruments, the guns, and a good quantity of fresh water gathered from the rocks were all put in their place.

Hans had installed a rudder so as to be able to steer his floating vessel. He took the tiller. I detached the rope that moored us to the shore. The sail was set, and we rapidly left the land behind.

At the moment of leaving the little harbor, my uncle, who insisted on his geographical nomenclature, wanted to give it a name, proposing mine among others.

“Really,” I said, “I have another proposal.”

“Which one?”

“Graüben. Port Graüben, that’ll look very good on the map.”

“Let it be Port Graüben then.”

In this way, the memory of my beloved Virland girl connected with our adventurous expedition.

The wind blew from the northwest. We sailed at great speed with the wind from behind. The very dense layers of the atmosphere had considerable force and acted on the sail like a powerful fan.

After an hour, my uncle was able to estimate our speed with a good deal of precision.

“At this rate,” he said, “we’ll travel at least thirty leagues in twenty-four hours, and we’ll soon come in sight of the opposite shore.”

I made no answer, but went and sat at the front of the raft. The northern shore was already beginning to dip under the horizon. The eastern and western strands spread wide as if to make our departure easier. An immense ocean stretched out before my eyes. The grayish shadows of great clouds glided over its surface, which seemed to weigh down this somber water. The silvery rays of the electric light, here and there reflected by the spray, shot out little points of light from our wake. Soon we lost sight of land entirely, all points of orientation disappeared, and without the foamy wake of the raft, I might have thought that it was perfectly motionless.

Toward noon, immense algae could be seen floating at the surface of the water. I was aware of the vital power of these plants, which grow at a depth of over twelve thousand feet under the sea, reproduce under a pressure of four hundred atmospheres, and sometimes form barriers strong enough to impede the course of a ship; but there were never, I think, more gigantic algae than those in the Lidenbrock Sea.

Our raft passed along fucus that were three or four thousand feet long, immense serpents that continued beyond the reach of sight; I entertained myself in tracing these endless ribbons, always thinking that I had reached the end, and for hours my patience competed with my surprise.

What natural force could produce such plants, and what must the earth have looked like in the first centuries of its formation, when under the impact of heat and humidity, the vegetable kingdom alone developed on its surface!

Evening came and, as I had noted on the previous day, the luminosity of the air did not diminish. It was a constant phenomenon whose permanence could be relied on.

After dinner I lay down at the foot of the mast, and immediately fell asleep in the midst of carefree reveries.

Hans, motionless at the helm, let the raft run, which at any rate did not even need steering, with the wind blowing from behind.

Since our departure from Port Graüben, Professor Lidenbrock had charged me with keeping the “ship log,” writing down even the smallest observation, recording interesting phenomena, the direction of the wind, the speed, the route we had taken—in a word, all the details of our strange sea voyage.

I will therefore limit myself here to reproducing these daily notes, written, so to speak, as events directed, so as to provide a more exact account of our passage.

Friday, August 14.—Steady breeze from the northwest. The raft makes rapid progress in a straight line. The coast is thirty leagues behind us in the direction of the wind. Nothing on the horizon.

Intensity of light remains the same. Good weather, that is, the clouds are high up, not very dense, and bathed in a white atmosphere that looks like molten silver. Thermometer: +32°C.

At noon Hans fastens a hook to the end of a line. He baits it with a small piece of meat and throws it into the sea. For two hours he catches nothing. Are these waters uninhabited, then? No. A pull on the line. Hans draws it in and lifts up a fish that struggles vigorously.

“A fish!” exclaims my uncle.

“That’s a sturgeon!” I exclaimed in turn. “A small sturgeon!”

The professor looks carefully at the animal and does not share my opinion. The fish has a flat, round head, and the front of its body is covered with bony plates; its mouth has no teeth; large, well-developed pectoral fins are attached to a body without tail. This animal does belong to the same order where naturalists place the sturgeon, but it differs from it in many essential aspects.

My uncle makes no mistake about this, and after a rather brief examination, he says:

“This fish belongs to a family that has been extinct for centuries, of which only fossil traces are found in the Devonian formations.”

“How could we have taken one of those inhabitants of the primitive oceans alive?”

“Yes,” replies the professor as he continues his examination, “and you can see that these fossil fishes are not at all identical with the contemporary species. So having one of these creatures alive in one’s hand is a real joy for a naturalist.”

“But to what family does it belong?”

“Order ganoids, family cephalaspidae, species . . .”

“Well?”

“Species pterichthys, I’d swear! But this one has a peculiarity which is apparently found in fish that inhabit subterranean waters.”

“Which one?”

“It’s blind!”

“Blind!”

“Not just blind, but it has no organ of sight at all.”

I look. It’s true. But this could be a special case. So the fish line is baited once again, and thrown again into the ocean. This ocean is most certainly full of fish, for in two hours, we catch a large quantity of pterichthys, as well as fish belonging to another extinct family, the dipterides,bg whose species my uncle is unable to identify. None of them have any organ of sight. This unexpected catch nicely restocks our food supplies.

So it seems certain that this ocean contains only fossil species, among which the fish as well as the reptiles are the more perfect the more ancient they are in their creation.

Perhaps we will find some of those saurians that science has reconstructed out of a bit of bone or cartilage?

I take up the telescope and scan the ocean. It is deserted. Undoubtedly we are still too close to the shores.

I gaze upward in the air. Why should not some of the birds restored by the immortal Cuvierbh again flap their wings in these heavy atmospheric layers? The fish would provide them with sufficient food. I survey the whole space, but the air is as uninhabited as the shore.

Still my imagination carries me away into those wonderful speculations of paleontology. Wide awake, I dream. I think I see enormous chelonians on the surface of the water, antediluvian turtles that resemble floating islands. Across the dimly lit beach walk the huge mammals of the first ages of the world, the leptotherium found in the caverns of Brazil, the mericotherium7 from the icy regions of Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous lophiodon, a giant tapir, hides behind the rocks, ready to fight for its prey with the anoplotherium, a strange animal that resembles the rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus and the camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a hurry in the first hours of the world, had combined several animals into one. The giant mastodon curls his trunk, and smashes rocks on the shore with his tusks, while the megatherium, resting on its enormous paws, digs through the soil, its roars echoing sonorously off the granite rocks. Higher up, the protopithecus—the first monkey that appeared on the globe—climbs up the steep summits. Higher yet, the pterodactyl with its winged hand glides on the dense air like a large bat. In the uppermost layers, finally, immense birds, more powerful than the cassowary and larger than the ostrich, spread their vast wings and are about to strike their heads against the granite vault.

All this fossil world is born again in my imagination. I travel back to the biblical age of the world, long before the advent of man, when the unfinished world was as yet insufficient to sustain him. My dream then goes back farther to the ages before the advent of living beings. The mammals disappear, then the birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary period, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, mollusks, and articulated beings. The zoophytes of the Transition period also return to nothingness. All the world’s life is concentrated in me, and my heart is the only one that beats in this depopulated world. There are no more seasons; climates are no more; the heat of the globe continually increases and neutralizes that of the radiant star. Vegetation grows excessively. I glide like a shade amongst arborescent ferns, treading with unsteady feet the iridescent clay and the multicolored sand; I lean against the trunks of immense conifers; I lie in the shade of sphenophylla, asterophylla, and lycopods, a hundred feet tall.

Centuries pass by like days! I move back through the series of terrestrial transformations. Plants disappear; granite rocks lose their purity; solids give way to liquids under the impact of increasing heat; water covers the surface of the globe; it boils, evaporates; steam envelops the earth, which gradually dissolves into a gaseous mass, white-hot, as large and radiant as the sun!

In the midst of this nebula, fourteen hundred thousand times more voluminous than this globe that it will one day become, I am carried into planetary spaces! My body subtilizes, sublimates itself in its turn and, like an imponderable atom, mingles with these immense vapors that follow their flaming orbits through infinite space.

What a dream! Where is it carrying me? My feverish hand sketches the strange details out on paper! I have forgotten everything, the professor, the guide, and the raft! A hallucination possesses my spirit ...

“What’s the matter?” my uncle says.

My eyes, wide open, gaze at him without seeing him.

“Take care, Axel, or you’ll fall overboard!”

At the same moment, I feel the vigorous grip of Hans’ hand.

Without him, I would have thrown myself into the sea under the influence of my dream.

“Is he going crazy?” exclaims the professor.

“What’s going on?” I finally say, returning to myself.

“Are you sick?”

“No, I had a momentary hallucination, but it’s over now. Is everything alright?”

“Yes! Nice wind and beautiful sea! We’re making good progress, and if I’m not wrong in my calculation, we’ll soon land.”

At these words I rise up, I look at the horizon; but the water line still blurs into the line of clouds.