XXXIII

XXXIII

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15.—THE sea remains monotonously uniform. No land is in sight. The horizon seems excessively far removed.

My head is still weighted down by the vividness of my dream.

My uncle has had no dreams, but he is in a bad mood. He examines all directions with his telescope and folds his arms with a vexed look.

I notice that Professor Lidenbrock is becoming the impatient man of the past again and note this fact in my log. It took my danger and suffering to strike a spark of human feeling in him; but now that I am cured, his nature has once again gained the upper hand. And yet, why lose one’s temper? Is not the journey progressing under the most favorable circumstances? Is not the raft gliding along with marvelous speed?

“You seem anxious, Uncle,” I say, seeing him lift the telescope frequently to his eye.

“Anxious? No.”

“Impatient, then?”

“There’s reason to be!”

“Yet we’re going very fast...”

“What does that matter? It’s not the speed that’s too slow, it’s the ocean that’s too large!”

I then remember that the professor, before our departure, had estimated the width of this underground ocean at thirty leagues. Now we have already covered three times this distance, and still the southern coast has not emerged.

“We’re not going down!” the professor resumes. “All this is a waste of time, and after all, I’ve not come this far to take a little boat trip on a pond!”

He calls this passage a little boat trip, and this ocean a pond!

“But,” I say, “since we’ve followed the route that Saknussemm indicated ...”

“That’s exactly the question. Have we followed that route? Did Saknussemm find this expanse of water? Did he cross it? Hasn’t this stream that we took as our guide led us completely astray?”

“At any rate, we can’t regret having come this far. This spectacle is magnificent, and ...”

“This isn’t about seeing spectacles. I had set myself an objective, and I want to attain it! So don’t talk to me about admiring spectacles!”

I take the point and let the professor gnaw his lips with impatience. At six in the evening, Hans asks for his wages, and his three rix-dollars are counted out to him.

Sunday, August 16.—Nothing new. Weather unchanged. The wind is becoming a little colder. When I wake up, my first concern is to determine the intensity of the light. I always fear that the electric phenomenon might grow dim, then disappear altogether. Nothing of the sort. The shadow of the raft is clearly outlined on the surface of the waves.

Really this ocean is unending! It must be as large as the Mediterranean or even the Atlantic. Why not?

My uncle probes the depth several times. He ties the heaviest of our pickaxes to a long rope which he lets run down to two hundred fathoms. No bottom. We have a lot of difficulty in bringing our probe back up.

But when the pickaxe is back on board, Hans points out to me two deep imprints on its surface. It looks as if this piece of iron had been vigorously gripped between two hard objects.

I look at the hunter.

“Tänder,” he says.

I do not understand. I turn to my uncle, who is completely absorbed in his reflections. I do not bother to disturb him. I return to the Icelander. Opening and closing his mouth several times, he makes me understand his idea.

“Teeth!” I say with amazement, examining the iron bar more attentively.

Yes! These are indeed teeth marks imprinted on the metal! The jaws that are equipped with these must have prodigious strength! Is it a monster of some long-lost species that moves about in the depths of the water, more voracious than the shark, more formidable than the whale? I cannot take my eyes off this half-gnawed bar! Will my dream of last night turn into reality?

These thoughts trouble me all day, and my imagination hardly calms down during a few hours’ sleep.

Monday, August 17.—I try to recall the particular instincts of those prehistoric animals in the Secondary period that succeeded mollusks, crustaceans and fishes and preceded the appearance of mammals on the earth. The world then belonged to reptiles. Those monsters ruled as masters over the Jurassic oceans.bi Nature had bestowed on them a perfect structure. What a gigantic framework! What prodigious strength! The saurians of our day, alligators and crocodiles, are only weaker, smaller reproductions of their forefathers in the primitive ages!

I shudder as I imagine those monsters. No human eye has ever seen them alive. They appeared on this earth a thousand ages before man, but their fossil remains, found in the argillaceous limestone called lias by the English,bj have made it possible to reconstruct their anatomy and to discover their colossal frames.

At the Hamburg Museum, I saw the skeleton of one of these saurians that measured thirty feet in length. Am I then destined—me, an inhabitant of earth—to find myself face to face with these representatives of a prehistoric family? No! It’s impossible. Yet the mark of powerful teeth is engraved on the iron bar, and by their imprint, I realize that they are cone-shaped like the crocodile’s.

My eyes stare at the sea with dread. I fear seeing one of those inhabitants of submarine caverns rushing out.

I assume that Professor Lidenbrock shares my thoughts, if not my fears, for after having examined the pickaxe, his eyes roam across the ocean.

“To Hell with that idea of sounding the depth!” I say to myself. “He’s probably disturbed some animal in its shelter, and if we’re not attacked on our route ... !”

I glance at our weapons and make sure that they are in good shape. My uncle notices it and approves with a gesture.

Already big commotions at the surface of the water point to some upheaval in the deeper layers. Danger is near. We must be vigilant.

Tuesday, August 18.—Evening comes, or rather the time when sleep weighs down our eyelids, for this ocean knows no night, and the relentless light tires our eyes continually, as if we were sailing under an arctic sun. Hans is at the helm. During his watch I fall asleep.

Two hours later a terrible jolt wakes me up. The raft has been lifted up outside the water with indescribable force and thrown back again twenty fathoms away.

“What’s the matter?” shouts my uncle. “Have we struck land?”

Hans points with his finger at a blackish mass two hundred fathoms away, which rises and falls again and again. I look and exclaim:

“It’s an enormous porpoise!”

“Yes,” replies my uncle, “and now there’s a sea lizard of extraordinary size.”

“And farther on a monstrous crocodile! Look at its huge jaw and the rows of teeth it’s equipped with! Ah! It’s disappearing!”

“A whale! A whale!” then exclaims the professor. “I can see its enormous fins! Look at the air and the water it blows out through its blow-holes!”

Indeed, two water columns rise up to a considerable height above the sea. We stand surprised, thunderstruck, frightened in the presence of this herd of marine monsters. They are of supernatural size, and the smallest among them could break our raft with one snap of its teeth. Hans wants to tack before the wind to get away from this dangerous neighborhood; but he discovers no less fearsome enemies on the other side: a forty-foot turtle and a thirty-foot snake that shoots its enormous head above the flood.

Impossible to get away. The reptiles approach; they wheel around our little raft at a speed that express trains could not match; they swim concentric circles around it. I’ve gripped my rifle. But what can a bullet do against the scales that cover the bodies of these animals?

We are speechless with fear. They come closer! On one side the crocodile, on the other the snake. The rest of the marine herd has disappeared. I prepare to fire. Hans stops me with a gesture. The two monsters pass within fifty fathoms of the raft, and hurl themselves at each other with a fury that prevents them from seeing us.

The battle is fought a hundred fathoms from the raft. We can clearly see the two monsters in mortal combat.

But now it seems to me as if the other animals were participating in the battle—the porpoise, the whale, the lizard, the turtle. Every instant I catch sight of one of them. I point them out to the Icelander. He shakes his head in negation.

“Tva,” says he.

“What! Two? He claims only two animals...”

“He’s right,” exclaims my uncle, whose telescope has never left his eye.

“It can’t be!”

“Yes! One of these monsters has the snout of a porpoise, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile, that’s what deceived us. It’s the most formidable of the prehistoric reptiles, the ichthyosaurus!”bk

“And the other one?”

“The other one’s a snake hidden in the shell of a turtle, a plesiosaurus, bl the terrible enemy of the first one!”

Hans has spoken the truth. Only two monsters disrupt the surface of the ocean, and I have two reptiles of the primitive oceans before my eyes. I can distinguish the bloody eye of the ichthyosaurus, large as a man’s head. Nature has endowed it with an extremely powerful optical device that can withstand the water pressure at the depths it inhabits. It has rightly been called a saurian whale, because it has both the latter’s speed and its size. This one is no less than a hundred feet long, and I can judge its size when it raises the vertical fins on its tail above the water. Its jaw is enormous, and according to the naturalists it has no less than one hundred and eighty-two teeth.

The plesiosaurus, a snake with a cylindrical body and a short tail, has four paws shaped like oars. Its body is entirely covered by a shell, and its neck, as flexible as a swan’s, rises thirty feet above the waves.

These animals attack each other with indescribable rage. They heave up liquid mountains that roll back to our raft. Twenty times we are about to capsize. Prodigiously loud hisses can be heard. The two beasts are locked together. I cannot distinguish one from the other. We must fear the fury of the winner.

One hour, two hours pass. The struggle continues with the same ferocity. The combatants alternately move toward and away from our raft. We remain motionless, ready to fire.

Two monsters disrupt the surface of the ocean.

Suddenly the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus disappear, creating a genuine maelstrom in the water. Several minutes pass. Will the battle end in the depths of the ocean?

Suddenly an enormous head shoots up, the head of the plesiosaurus. The monster is fatally injured. I no longer see his enormous shell. Only his long neck shoots up, drops, rises up again, droops, lashes the waters like a gigantic whip, and writhes like a worm cut in two. The water splashes to a considerable distance. It blinds us. But soon the reptile’s agony draws to an end, its movements diminish, its contortions decrease, and the long serpentine shape extends like a lifeless mass on the calm waters.

As for the ichthyosaurus, has he returned to his submarine cavern, or will he reappear at the surface of the ocean?