CHAPTER 11

The Nautilus

CAPTAIN NEMO stood up. I followed him. Contrived at the rear of the

dining room, a double door opened, and I entered a room whose

dimensions equaled the one I had just left.

It was a library. Tall, black-rosewood bookcases, inlaid with

copperwork, held on their wide shelves a large number of uniformly

bound books. These furnishings followed the contours of the room,

their lower parts leading to huge couches upholstered in maroon

leather and curved for maximum comfort. Light, movable reading stands,

which could be pushed away or pulled near as desired, allowed books to

be positioned on them for easy study. In the center stood a huge table

covered with pamphlets, among which some newspapers, long out of date,

were visible. Electric light flooded this whole harmonious totality,

falling from four frosted half globes set in the scrollwork of the

ceiling. I stared in genuine wonderment at this room so ingeniously

laid out, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

“Captain Nemo,” I told my host, who had just stretched out on a couch,

“this is a library that would do credit to more than one continental

palace, and I truly marvel to think it can go with you into the

deepest seas.”

“Where could one find greater silence or solitude, professor?” Captain

Nemo replied. “Did your study at the museum afford you such a perfect

retreat?”

“No, sir, and I might add that it’s quite a humble one next to

yours. You own 6,000 or 7,000 volumes here . . .”

“12,000, Professor Aronnax. They’re my sole remaining ties with dry

land. But I was done with the shore the day my Nautilus submerged for

the first time under the waters. That day I purchased my last volumes,

my last pamphlets, my last newspapers, and ever since I’ve chosen to

believe that humanity no longer thinks or writes. In any event,

professor, these books are at your disposal, and you may use them

freely.”

I thanked Captain Nemo and approached the shelves of this

library. Written in every language, books on science, ethics, and

literature were there in abundance, but I didn’t see a single work on

economics—they seemed to be strictly banned on board. One odd detail:

all these books were shelved indiscriminately without regard to the

language in which they were written, and this jumble proved that the

Nautilus’s captain could read fluently whatever volumes he chanced to

pick up.

Among these books I noted masterpieces by the greats of ancient and

modern times, in other words, all of humanity’s finest achievements in

history, poetry, fiction, and science, from Homer to Victor Hugo, from

Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame George Sand. But

science, in particular, represented the major investment of this

library: books on mechanics, ballistics, hydrography, meteorology,

geography, geology, etc., held a place there no less important than

works on natural history, and I realized that they made up the

captain’s chief reading. There I saw the complete works of Humboldt,

the complete Arago, as well as works by Foucault, Henri Sainte-Claire

Deville, Chasles, Milne-Edwards, Quatrefages, John Tyndall, Faraday,

Berthelot, Father Secchi, Petermann, Commander Maury, Louis Agassiz,

etc., plus the transactions of France’s Academy of Sciences, bulletins

from the various geographical societies, etc., and in a prime

location, those two volumes on the great ocean depths that had perhaps

earned me this comparatively charitable welcome from Captain

Nemo. Among the works of Joseph Bertrand, his book entitled The

Founders of Astronomy even gave me a definite date; and since I knew

it had appeared in the course of 1865, I concluded that the fitting

out of the Nautilus hadn’t taken place before then. Accordingly, three

years ago at the most, Captain Nemo had begun his underwater

existence. Moreover, I hoped some books even more recent would permit

me to pinpoint the date precisely; but I had plenty of time to look

for them, and I didn’t want to put off any longer our stroll through

the wonders of the Nautilus.

“Sir,” I told the captain, “thank you for placing this library at my

disposal. There are scientific treasures here, and I’ll take advantage

of them.”

“This room isn’t only a library,” Captain Nemo said, “it’s also a

smoking room.”

“A smoking room?” I exclaimed. “Then one may smoke on board?”

“Surely.”

“In that case, sir, I’m forced to believe that you’ve kept up

relations with Havana.”

“None whatever,” the captain replied. “Try this cigar, Professor

Aronnax, and even though it doesn’t come from Havana, it will satisfy

you if you’re a connoisseur.”

I took the cigar offered me, whose shape recalled those from Cuba; but

it seemed to be made of gold leaf. I lit it at a small brazier

supported by an elegant bronze stand, and I inhaled my first whiffs

with the relish of a smoker who hasn’t had a puff in days.

“It’s excellent,” I said, “but it’s not from the tobacco plant.”

“Right,” the captain replied, “this tobacco comes from neither Havana

nor the Orient. It’s a kind of nicotine-rich seaweed that the ocean

supplies me, albeit sparingly. Do you still miss your Cubans, sir?”

“Captain, I scorn them from this day forward.”

“Then smoke these cigars whenever you like, without debating their

origin. They bear no government seal of approval, but I imagine

they’re none the worse for it.”

“On the contrary.”

Just then Captain Nemo opened a door facing the one by which I had

entered the library, and I passed into an immense, splendidly lit

lounge.

It was a huge quadrilateral with canted corners, ten meters long, six

wide, five high. A luminous ceiling, decorated with delicate

arabesques, distributed a soft, clear daylight over all the wonders

gathered in this museum. For a museum it truly was, in which clever

hands had spared no expense to amass every natural and artistic

treasure, displaying them with the helter-skelter picturesqueness that

distinguishes a painter’s studio.

Some thirty pictures by the masters, uniformly framed and separated by

gleaming panoplies of arms, adorned walls on which were stretched

tapestries of austere design. There I saw canvases of the highest

value, the likes of which I had marveled at in private European

collections and art exhibitions. The various schools of the old

masters were represented by a Raphael Madonna, a Virgin by Leonardo da

Vinci, a nymph by Correggio, a woman by Titian, an adoration of the

Magi by Veronese, an assumption of the Virgin by Murillo, a Holbein

portrait, a monk by Velazquez, a martyr by Ribera, a village fair by

Rubens, two Flemish landscapes by Teniers, three little genre

paintings by Gerard Dow, Metsu, and Paul Potter, two canvases by

Gericault and Prud’hon, plus seascapes by Backhuysen and Vernet. Among

the works of modern art were pictures signed by Delacroix, Ingres,

Decamps, Troyon, Meissonier, Daubigny, etc., and some wonderful

miniature statues in marble or bronze, modeled after antiquity’s

finest originals, stood on their pedestals in the corners of this

magnificent museum. As the Nautilus’s commander had predicted, my mind

was already starting to fall into that promised state of stunned

amazement.

“Professor,” this strange man then said, “you must excuse the

informality with which I receive you, and the disorder reigning in

this lounge.”

“Sir,” I replied, “without prying into who you are, might I venture to

identify you as an artist?”

“A collector, sir, nothing more. Formerly I loved acquiring these

beautiful works created by the hand of man. I sought them greedily,

ferreted them out tirelessly, and I’ve been able to gather some

objects of great value. They’re my last mementos of those shores that

are now dead for me. In my eyes, your modern artists are already as

old as the ancients. They’ve existed for 2,000 or 3,000 years, and I

mix them up in my mind. The masters are ageless.”

“What about these composers?” I said, pointing to sheet music by

Weber, Rossini, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Meyerbeer, Hérold, Wagner,

Auber, Gounod, Victor Massé, and a number of others scattered over a

full size piano-organ, which occupied one of the wall panels in this

lounge.

“These composers,” Captain Nemo answered me, “are the contemporaries

of Orpheus, because in the annals of the dead, all chronological

differences fade; and I’m dead, professor, quite as dead as those

friends of yours sleeping six feet under!”

Captain Nemo fell silent and seemed lost in reverie. I regarded him

with intense excitement, silently analyzing his strange facial

expression. Leaning his elbow on the corner of a valuable mosaic

table, he no longer saw me, he had forgotten my very presence.

I didn’t disturb his meditations but continued to pass in review the

curiosities that enriched this lounge.

After the works of art, natural rarities predominated. They consisted

chiefly of plants, shells, and other exhibits from the ocean that must

have been Captain Nemo’s own personal finds. In the middle of the

lounge, a jet of water, electrically lit, fell back into a basin made

from a single giant clam. The delicately festooned rim of this shell,

supplied by the biggest mollusk in the class Acephala, measured about

six meters in circumference; so it was even bigger than those fine

giant clams given to King François I by the Republic of Venice, and

which the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris has made into two gigantic

holy-water fonts.

Around this basin, inside elegant glass cases fastened with copper

bands, there were classified and labeled the most valuable marine

exhibits ever put before the eyes of a naturalist. My professorial

glee may easily be imagined.

The zoophyte branch offered some very unusual specimens from its two

groups, the polyps and the echinoderms. In the first group: organ-pipe

coral, gorgonian coral arranged into fan shapes, soft sponges from

Syria, isis coral from the Molucca Islands, sea-pen coral, wonderful

coral of the genus Virgularia from the waters of Norway, various coral

of the genus Umbellularia, alcyonarian coral, then a whole series of

those madrepores that my mentor Professor Milne-Edwards has so

shrewdly classified into divisions and among which I noted the

wonderful genus Flabellina as well as the genus Oculina from Réunion

Island, plus a “Neptune’s chariot” from the Caribbean Sea—every superb

variety of coral, and in short, every species of these unusual

polyparies that congregate to form entire islands that will one day

turn into continents. Among the echinoderms, notable for being covered

with spines: starfish, feather stars, sea lilies, free-swimming

crinoids, brittle stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, etc., represented

a complete collection of the individuals in this group.

An excitable conchologist would surely have fainted dead away before

other, more numerous glass cases in which were classified specimens

from the mollusk branch. There I saw a collection of incalculable

value that I haven’t time to describe completely. Among these exhibits

I’ll mention, just for the record: an elegant royal hammer shell from

the Indian Ocean, whose evenly spaced white spots stood out sharply

against a base of red and brown; an imperial spiny oyster, brightly

colored, bristling with thorns, a specimen rare to European museums,

whose value I estimated at 20,000 francs; a common hammer shell from

the seas near Queensland, very hard to come by; exotic cockles from

Senegal, fragile white bivalve shells that a single breath could pop

like a soap bubble; several varieties of watering-pot shell from Java,

a sort of limestone tube fringed with leafy folds and much fought over

by collectors; a whole series of top-shell snails—greenish yellow ones

fished up from American seas, others colored reddish brown that

patronize the waters off Queensland, the former coming from the Gulf

of Mexico and notable for their overlapping shells, the latter some

sun-carrier shells found in the southernmost seas, finally and rarest

of all, the magnificent spurred-star shell from New Zealand; then some

wonderful peppery-furrow shells; several valuable species of cythera

clams and venus clams; the trellis wentletrap snail from Tranquebar on

India’s eastern shore; a marbled turban snail gleaming with

mother-of-pearl; green parrot shells from the seas of China; the

virtually unknown cone snail from the genus Coenodullus; every variety

of cowry used as money in India and Africa; a “glory-of-the-seas,” the

most valuable shell in the East Indies; finally, common periwinkles,

delphinula snails, turret snails, violet snails, European cowries,

volute snails, olive shells, miter shells, helmet shells, murex

snails, whelks, harp shells, spiky periwinkles, triton snails, horn

shells, spindle shells, conch shells, spider conchs, limpets, glass

snails, sea butterflies—every kind of delicate, fragile seashell that

science has baptized with its most delightful names.

Aside and in special compartments, strings of supremely beautiful

pearls were spread out, the electric light flecking them with little

fiery sparks: pink pearls pulled from saltwater fan shells in the Red

Sea; green pearls from the rainbow abalone; yellow, blue, and black

pearls, the unusual handiwork of various mollusks from every ocean and

of certain mussels from rivers up north; in short, several specimens

of incalculable worth that had been oozed by the rarest of

shellfish. Some of these pearls were bigger than a pigeon egg; they

more than equaled the one that the explorer Tavernier sold the Shah of

Persia for 3,000,000 francs, and they surpassed that other pearl owned

by the Imam of Muscat, which I had believed to be unrivaled in the

entire world.

Consequently, to calculate the value of this collection was, I should

say, impossible. Captain Nemo must have spent millions in acquiring

these different specimens, and I was wondering what financial

resources he tapped to satisfy his collector’s fancies, when these

words interrupted me:

“You’re examining my shells, professor? They’re indeed able to

fascinate a naturalist; but for me they have an added charm, since

I’ve collected every one of them with my own two hands, and not a sea

on the globe has escaped my investigations.”

“I understand, captain, I understand your delight at strolling in the

midst of this wealth. You’re a man who gathers his treasure in

person. No museum in Europe owns such a collection of exhibits from

the ocean. But if I exhaust all my wonderment on them, I’ll have

nothing left for the ship that carries them! I have absolutely no wish

to probe those secrets of yours! But I confess that my curiosity is

aroused to the limit by this Nautilus, the motor power it contains,

the equipment enabling it to operate, the ultra powerful force that

brings it to life. I see some instruments hanging on the walls of this

lounge whose purposes are unknown to me. May I learn—”

“Professor Aronnax,” Captain Nemo answered me, “I’ve said you’d be

free aboard my vessel, so no part of the Nautilus is off-limits to

you. You may inspect it in detail, and I’ll be delighted to act as

your guide.”

“I don’t know how to thank you, sir, but I won’t abuse your good

nature. I would only ask you about the uses intended for these

instruments of physical measure—”

“Professor, these same instruments are found in my stateroom, where

I’ll have the pleasure of explaining their functions to you. But

beforehand, come inspect the cabin set aside for you. You need to

learn how you’ll be lodged aboard the Nautilus.”

I followed Captain Nemo, who, via one of the doors cut into the

lounge’s canted corners, led me back down the ship’s gangways. He took

me to the bow, and there I found not just a cabin but an elegant

stateroom with a bed, a washstand, and various other furnishings.

I could only thank my host.

“Your stateroom adjoins mine,” he told me, opening a door, “and mine

leads into that lounge we’ve just left.”

I entered the captain’s stateroom. It had an austere, almost monastic

appearance. An iron bedstead, a worktable, some washstand

fixtures. Subdued lighting. No luxuries. Just the bare necessities.

Captain Nemo showed me to a bench.

“Kindly be seated,” he told me.

I sat, and he began speaking as follows: