CHAPTER 24

The Coral Realm

THE NEXT DAY I woke up with my head unusually clear. Much to my

surprise, I was in my stateroom. No doubt my companions had been put

back in their cabin without noticing it any more than I had. Like me,

they would have no idea what took place during the night, and to

unravel this mystery I could count only on some future happenstance.

I then considered leaving my stateroom. Was I free or still a

prisoner? Perfectly free. I opened my door, headed down the gangways,

and climbed the central companionway. Hatches that had been closed the

day before were now open. I arrived on the platform.

Ned Land and Conseil were there waiting for me. I questioned

them. They knew nothing. Lost in a heavy sleep of which they had no

memory, they were quite startled to be back in their cabin.

As for the Nautilus, it seemed as tranquil and mysterious as ever. It

was cruising on the surface of the waves at a moderate speed. Nothing

seemed to have changed on board.

Ned Land observed the sea with his penetrating eyes. It was

deserted. The Canadian sighted nothing new on the horizon, neither

sail nor shore. A breeze was blowing noisily from the west, and

disheveled by the wind, long billows made the submersible roll very

noticeably.

After renewing its air, the Nautilus stayed at an average depth of

fifteen meters, enabling it to return quickly to the surface of the

waves. And, contrary to custom, it executed such a maneuver several

times during that day of January 19. The chief officer would then

climb onto the platform, and his usual phrase would ring through the

ship’s interior.

As for Captain Nemo, he didn’t appear. Of the other men on board, I

saw only my emotionless steward, who served me with his usual mute

efficiency.

Near two o’clock I was busy organizing my notes in the lounge, when

the captain opened the door and appeared. I bowed to him. He gave me

an almost imperceptible bow in return, without saying a word to me. I

resumed my work, hoping he might give me some explanation of the

previous afternoon’s events. He did nothing of the sort. I stared at

him. His face looked exhausted; his reddened eyes hadn’t been

refreshed by sleep; his facial features expressed profound sadness,

real chagrin. He walked up and down, sat and stood, picked up a book

at random, discarded it immediately, consulted his instruments without

taking his customary notes, and seemed unable to rest easy for an

instant.

Finally he came over to me and said:

“Are you a physician, Professor Aronnax?”

This inquiry was so unexpected that I stared at him a good while

without replying.

“Are you a physician?” he repeated. “Several of your scientific

colleagues took their degrees in medicine, such as Gratiolet,

Moquin-Tandon, and others.”

“That’s right,” I said, “I am a doctor, I used to be on call at the

hospitals. I was in practice for several years before joining the

museum.”

“Excellent, sir.”

My reply obviously pleased Captain Nemo. But not knowing what he was

driving at, I waited for further questions, ready to reply as

circumstances dictated.

“Professor Aronnax,” the captain said to me, “would you consent to

give your medical attentions to one of my men?”

“Someone is sick?”

“Yes.”

“I’m ready to go with you.”

“Come.”

I admit that my heart was pounding. Lord knows why, but I saw a

definite connection between this sick crewman and yesterday’s

happenings, and the mystery of those events concerned me at least as

much as the man’s sickness.

Captain Nemo led me to the Nautilus’s stern and invited me into a

cabin located next to the sailors’ quarters.

On a bed there lay a man some forty years old, with strongly molded

features, the very image of an Anglo-Saxon.

I bent over him. Not only was he sick, he was wounded. Swathed in

blood-soaked linen, his head was resting on a folded pillow. I undid

the linen bandages, while the wounded man gazed with great staring

eyes and let me proceed without making a single complaint.

It was a horrible wound. The cranium had been smashed open by some

blunt instrument, leaving the naked brains exposed, and the cerebral

matter had suffered deep abrasions. Blood clots had formed in this

dissolving mass, taking on the color of wine dregs. Both contusion and

concussion of the brain had occurred. The sick man’s breathing was

labored, and muscle spasms quivered in his face. Cerebral inflammation

was complete and had brought on a paralysis of movement and sensation.

I took the wounded man’s pulse. It was intermittent. The body’s

extremities were already growing cold, and I saw that death was

approaching without any possibility of my holding it in check. After

dressing the poor man’s wound, I redid the linen bandages around his

head, and I turned to Captain Nemo.

“How did he get this wound?” I asked him.

“That’s not important,” the captain replied evasively. “The Nautilus

suffered a collision that cracked one of the engine levers, and it

struck this man. My chief officer was standing beside him. This man

leaped forward to intercept the blow. A brother lays down his life for

his brother, a friend for his friend, what could be simpler? That’s

the law for everyone on board the Nautilus. But what’s your diagnosis

of his condition?”

I hesitated to speak my mind.

“You may talk freely,” the captain told me. “This man doesn’t

understand French.”

I took a last look at the wounded man, then I replied:

“This man will be dead in two hours.”

“Nothing can save him?”

“Nothing.”

Captain Nemo clenched his fists, and tears slid from his eyes, which I

had thought incapable of weeping.

For a few moments more I observed the dying man, whose life was ebbing

little by little. He grew still more pale under the electric light

that bathed his deathbed. I looked at his intelligent head, furrowed

with premature wrinkles that misfortune, perhaps misery, had etched

long before. I was hoping to detect the secret of his life in the last

words that might escape from his lips!

“You may go, Professor Aronnax,” Captain Nemo told me.

I left the captain in the dying man’s cabin and I repaired to my

stateroom, very moved by this scene. All day long I was aquiver with

gruesome forebodings. That night I slept poorly, and between my fitful

dreams, I thought I heard a distant moaning, like a funeral dirge. Was

it a prayer for the dead, murmured in that language I couldn’t

understand?

The next morning I climbed on deck. Captain Nemo was already there. As

soon as he saw me, he came over.

“Professor,” he said to me, “would it be convenient for you to make an

underwater excursion today?”

“With my companions?” I asked.

“If they’re agreeable.”

“We’re yours to command, captain.”

“Then kindly put on your diving suits.”

As for the dead or dying man, he hadn’t come into the picture. I

rejoined Ned Land and Conseil. I informed them of Captain Nemo’s

proposition. Conseil was eager to accept, and this time the Canadian

proved perfectly amenable to going with us.

It was eight o’clock in the morning. By 8:30 we were suited up for

this new stroll and equipped with our two devices for lighting and

breathing. The double door opened, and accompanied by Captain Nemo

with a dozen crewmen following, we set foot on the firm seafloor where

the Nautilus was resting, ten meters down.

A gentle slope gravitated to an uneven bottom whose depth was about

fifteen fathoms. This bottom was completely different from the one I

had visited during my first excursion under the waters of the Pacific

Ocean. Here I saw no fine-grained sand, no underwater prairies, not

one open-sea forest. I immediately recognized the wondrous region in

which Captain Nemo did the honors that day. It was the coral realm.

In the zoophyte branch, class Alcyonaria, one finds the order

Gorgonaria, which contains three groups: sea fans, isidian polyps, and

coral polyps. It’s in this last that precious coral belongs, an

unusual substance that, at different times, has been classified in the

mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. Medicine to the ancients,

jewelry to the moderns, it wasn’t decisively placed in the animal

kingdom until 1694, by Peysonnel of Marseilles.

A coral is a unit of tiny animals assembled over a polypary that’s

brittle and stony in nature. These polyps have a unique generating

mechanism that reproduces them via the budding process, and they have

an individual existence while also participating in a communal

life. Hence they embody a sort of natural socialism. I was familiar

with the latest research on this bizarre zoophyte—which turns to stone

while taking on a tree form, as some naturalists have very aptly

observed—and nothing could have been more fascinating to me than to

visit one of these petrified forests that nature has planted on the

bottom of the sea.

We turned on our Ruhmkorff devices and went along a coral shoal in the

process of forming, which, given time, will someday close off this

whole part of the Indian Ocean. Our path was bordered by hopelessly

tangled bushes, formed from snarls of shrubs all covered with little

star-shaped, white-streaked flowers. Only, contrary to plants on

shore, these tree forms become attached to rocks on the seafloor by

heading from top to bottom.

Our lights produced a thousand delightful effects while playing over

these brightly colored boughs. I fancied I saw these cylindrical,

membrane-filled tubes trembling beneath the water’s undulations. I was

tempted to gather their fresh petals, which were adorned with delicate

tentacles, some newly in bloom, others barely opened, while nimble

fish with fluttering fins brushed past them like flocks of birds. But

if my hands came near the moving flowers of these sensitive, lively

creatures, an alarm would instantly sound throughout the colony. The

white petals retracted into their red sheaths, the flowers vanished

before my eyes, and the bush changed into a chunk of stony nipples.

Sheer chance had placed me in the presence of the most valuable

specimens of this zoophyte. This coral was the equal of those fished

up from the Mediterranean off the Barbary Coast or the shores of

France and Italy. With its bright colors, it lived up to those poetic

names of blood flower and blood foam that the industry confers on its

finest exhibits. Coral sells for as much as 500 francs per kilogram,

and in this locality the liquid strata hid enough to make the fortunes

of a whole host of coral fishermen. This valuable substance often

merges with other polyparies, forming compact, hopelessly tangled

units known as “macciota,” and I noted some wonderful pink samples of

this coral.

But as the bushes shrank, the tree forms magnified. Actual petrified

thickets and long alcoves from some fantastic school of architecture

kept opening up before our steps. Captain Nemo entered beneath a dark

gallery whose gentle slope took us to a depth of 100 meters. The light

from our glass coils produced magical effects at times, lingering on

the wrinkled roughness of some natural arch, or some overhang

suspended like a chandelier, which our lamps flecked with fiery

sparks. Amid these shrubs of precious coral, I observed other polyps

no less unusual: melita coral, rainbow coral with jointed outgrowths,

then a few tufts of genus Corallina, some green and others red,

actually a type of seaweed encrusted with limestone salts, which,

after long disputes, naturalists have finally placed in the vegetable

kingdom. But as one intellectual has remarked, “Here, perhaps, is the

actual point where life rises humbly out of slumbering stone, but

without breaking away from its crude starting point.”

Finally, after two hours of walking, we reached a depth of about 300

meters, in other words, the lowermost limit at which coral can begin

to form. But here it was no longer some isolated bush or a modest

grove of low timber. It was an immense forest, huge mineral

vegetation, enormous petrified trees linked by garlands of elegant

hydras from the genus Plumularia, those tropical creepers of the sea,

all decked out in shades and gleams. We passed freely under their

lofty boughs, lost up in the shadows of the waves, while at our feet

organ-pipe coral, stony coral, star coral, fungus coral, and sea

anemone from the genus Caryophylia formed a carpet of flowers all

strewn with dazzling gems.

What an indescribable sight! Oh, if only we could share our feelings!

Why were we imprisoned behind these masks of metal and glass! Why were

we forbidden to talk with each other! At least let us lead the lives

of the fish that populate this liquid element, or better yet, the

lives of amphibians, which can spend long hours either at sea or on

shore, traveling through their double domain as their whims dictate!

Meanwhile Captain Nemo had called a halt. My companions and I stopped

walking, and turning around, I saw the crewmen form a semicircle

around their leader. Looking with greater care, I observed that four

of them were carrying on their shoulders an object that was oblong in

shape.

At this locality we stood in the center of a huge clearing surrounded

by the tall tree forms of this underwater forest. Our lamps cast a

sort of brilliant twilight over the area, making inordinately long

shadows on the seafloor. Past the boundaries of the clearing, the

darkness deepened again, relieved only by little sparkles given off by

the sharp crests of coral.

Ned Land and Conseil stood next to me. We stared, and it dawned on me

that I was about to witness a strange scene. Observing the seafloor, I

saw that it swelled at certain points from low bulges that were

encrusted with limestone deposits and arranged with a symmetry that

betrayed the hand of man.

In the middle of the clearing, on a pedestal of roughly piled rocks,

there stood a cross of coral, extending long arms you would have

thought were made of petrified blood.

At a signal from Captain Nemo, one of his men stepped forward and, a

few feet from this cross, detached a mattock from his belt and began

to dig a hole.

I finally understood! This clearing was a cemetery, this hole a grave,

that oblong object the body of the man who must have died during the

night! Captain Nemo and his men had come to bury their companion in

this communal resting place on the inaccessible ocean floor!

No! My mind was reeling as never before! Never had ideas of such

impact raced through my brain! I didn’t want to see what my eyes saw!

Meanwhile the grave digging went slowly. Fish fled here and there as

their retreat was disturbed. I heard the pick ringing on the limestone

soil, its iron tip sometimes giving off sparks when it hit a stray

piece of flint on the sea bottom. The hole grew longer, wider, and

soon was deep enough to receive the body.

Then the pallbearers approached. Wrapped in white fabric made from

filaments of the fan mussel, the body was lowered into its watery

grave. Captain Nemo, arms crossed over his chest, knelt in a posture

of prayer, as did all the friends of him who had loved them. . . . My

two companions and I bowed reverently.

The grave was then covered over with the rubble dug from the seafloor,

and it formed a low mound.

When this was done, Captain Nemo and his men stood up; then they all

approached the grave, sank again on bended knee, and extended their

hands in a sign of final farewell. . . .

Then the funeral party went back up the path to the Nautilus,

returning beneath the arches of the forest, through the thickets,

along the coral bushes, going steadily higher.

Finally the ship’s rays appeared. Their luminous trail guided us to

the Nautilus. By one o’clock we had returned.

After changing clothes, I climbed onto the platform, and in the grip

of dreadfully obsessive thoughts, I sat next to the beacon.

Captain Nemo rejoined me. I stood up and said to him:

“So, as I predicted, that man died during the night?”

“Yes, Professor Aronnax,” Captain Nemo replied.

“And now he rests beside his companions in that coral cemetery?”

“Yes, forgotten by the world but not by us! We dig the graves, then

entrust the polyps with sealing away our dead for eternity!”

And with a sudden gesture, the captain hid his face in his clenched

fists, vainly trying to hold back a sob. Then he added:

“There lies our peaceful cemetery, hundreds of feet beneath the

surface of the waves!”

“At least, captain, your dead can sleep serenely there, out of the

reach of sharks!”

“Yes, sir,” Captain Nemo replied solemnly, “of sharks and men!”

END OF THE FIRST PART

SECOND PART