CHAPTER 9

A Lost Continent

THE NEXT MORNING, February 19, I beheld the Canadian entering my

stateroom. I was expecting this visit. He wore an expression of great

disappointment.

“Well, sir?” he said to me.

“Well, Ned, the fates were against us yesterday.”

“Yes! That damned captain had to call a halt just as we were going to

escape from his boat.”

“Yes, Ned, he had business with his bankers.”

“His bankers?”

“Or rather his bank vaults. By which I mean this ocean, where his

wealth is safer than in any national treasury.”

I then related the evening’s incidents to the Canadian, secretly

hoping he would come around to the idea of not deserting the captain;

but my narrative had no result other than Ned’s voicing deep regret

that he hadn’t strolled across the Vigo battlefield on his own behalf.

“Anyhow,” he said, “it’s not over yet! My first harpoon missed, that’s

all! We’ll succeed the next time, and as soon as this evening, if need

be . . .”

“What’s the Nautilus’s heading?” I asked.

“I’ve no idea,” Ned replied.

“All right, at noon we’ll find out what our position is!”

The Canadian returned to Conseil’s side. As soon as I was dressed, I

went into the lounge. The compass wasn’t encouraging. The Nautilus’s

course was south-southwest. We were turning our backs on Europe.

I could hardly wait until our position was reported on the chart. Near

11:30 the ballast tanks emptied, and the submersible rose to the

surface of the ocean. I leaped onto the platform. Ned Land was already

there.

No more shore in sight. Nothing but the immenseness of the sea. A few

sails were on the horizon, no doubt ships going as far as Cape São

Roque to find favorable winds for doubling the Cape of Good Hope. The

sky was overcast. A squall was on the way.

Furious, Ned tried to see through the mists on the horizon. He still

hoped that behind all that fog there lay those shores he longed for.

At noon the sun made a momentary appearance. Taking advantage of this

rift in the clouds, the chief officer took the orb’s altitude. Then

the sea grew turbulent, we went below again, and the hatch closed once

more.

When I consulted the chart an hour later, I saw that the Nautilus’s

position was marked at longitude 16 degrees 17′ and latitude 33

degrees 22′, a good 150 leagues from the nearest coast. It wouldn’t do

to even dream of escaping, and I’ll let the reader decide how promptly

the Canadian threw a tantrum when I ventured to tell him our

situation.

As for me, I wasn’t exactly grief-stricken. I felt as if a heavy

weight had been lifted from me, and I was able to resume my regular

tasks in a state of comparative calm.

Near eleven o’clock in the evening, I received a most unexpected visit

from Captain Nemo. He asked me very graciously if I felt exhausted

from our vigil the night before. I said no.

“Then, Professor Aronnax, I propose an unusual excursion.”

“Propose away, captain.”

“So far you’ve visited the ocean depths only by day and under

sunlight. Would you like to see these depths on a dark night?”

“Very much.”

“I warn you, this will be an exhausting stroll. We’ll need to walk

long hours and scale a mountain. The roads aren’t terribly well kept

up.”

“Everything you say, captain, just increases my curiosity. I’m ready

to go with you.”

“Then come along, professor, and we’ll go put on our diving suits.”

Arriving at the wardrobe, I saw that neither my companions nor any

crewmen would be coming with us on this excursion. Captain Nemo hadn’t

even suggested my fetching Ned or Conseil.

In a few moments we had put on our equipment. Air tanks, abundantly

charged, were placed on our backs, but the electric lamps were not in

readiness. I commented on this to the captain.

“They’ll be useless to us,” he replied.

I thought I hadn’t heard him right, but I couldn’t repeat my comment

because the captain’s head had already disappeared into its metal

covering. I finished harnessing myself, I felt an alpenstock being

placed in my hand, and a few minutes later, after the usual

procedures, we set foot on the floor of the Atlantic, 300 meters down.

Midnight was approaching. The waters were profoundly dark, but Captain

Nemo pointed to a reddish spot in the distance, a sort of wide glow

shimmering about two miles from the Nautilus. What this fire was, what

substances fed it, how and why it kept burning in the liquid mass, I

couldn’t say. Anyhow it lit our way, although hazily, but I soon grew

accustomed to this unique gloom, and in these circumstances I

understood the uselessness of the Ruhmkorff device.

Side by side, Captain Nemo and I walked directly toward this

conspicuous flame. The level seafloor rose imperceptibly. We took long

strides, helped by our alpenstocks; but in general our progress was

slow, because our feet kept sinking into a kind of slimy mud mixed

with seaweed and assorted flat stones.

As we moved forward, I heard a kind of pitter-patter above my

head. Sometimes this noise increased and became a continuous

crackle. I soon realized the cause. It was a heavy rainfall rattling

on the surface of the waves. Instinctively I worried that I might get

soaked! By water in the midst of water! I couldn’t help smiling at

this outlandish notion. But to tell the truth, wearing these heavy

diving suits, you no longer feel the liquid element, you simply think

you’re in the midst of air a little denser than air on land, that’s

all.

After half an hour of walking, the seafloor grew rocky. Jellyfish,

microscopic crustaceans, and sea-pen coral lit it faintly with their

phosphorescent glimmers. I glimpsed piles of stones covered by a

couple million zoophytes and tangles of algae. My feet often slipped

on this viscous seaweed carpet, and without my alpenstock I would have

fallen more than once. When I turned around, I could still see the

Nautilus’s whitish beacon, which was starting to grow pale in the

distance.

Those piles of stones just mentioned were laid out on the ocean floor

with a distinct but inexplicable symmetry. I spotted gigantic furrows

trailing off into the distant darkness, their length

incalculable. There also were other peculiarities I couldn’t make

sense of. It seemed to me that my heavy lead soles were crushing a

litter of bones that made a dry crackling noise. So what were these

vast plains we were now crossing? I wanted to ask the captain, but I

still didn’t grasp that sign language that allowed him to chat with

his companions when they went with him on his underwater excursions.

Meanwhile the reddish light guiding us had expanded and inflamed the

horizon. The presence of this furnace under the waters had me

extremely puzzled. Was it some sort of electrical discharge? Was I

approaching some natural phenomenon still unknown to scientists on

shore? Or, rather (and this thought did cross my mind), had the hand

of man intervened in that blaze? Had human beings fanned those flames?

In these deep strata would I meet up with more of Captain Nemo’s

companions, friends he was about to visit who led lives as strange as

his own? Would I find a whole colony of exiles down here, men tired of

the world’s woes, men who had sought and found independence in the

ocean’s lower depths? All these insane, inadmissible ideas dogged me,

and in this frame of mind, continually excited by the series of

wonders passing before my eyes, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find

on this sea bottom one of those underwater towns Captain Nemo dreamed

about!

Our path was getting brighter and brighter. The red glow had turned

white and was radiating from a mountain peak about 800 feet high. But

what I saw was simply a reflection produced by the crystal waters of

these strata. The furnace that was the source of this inexplicable

light occupied the far side of the mountain.

In the midst of the stone mazes furrowing this Atlantic seafloor,

Captain Nemo moved forward without hesitation. He knew this dark

path. No doubt he had often traveled it and was incapable of losing

his way. I followed him with unshakeable confidence. He seemed like

some Spirit of the Sea, and as he walked ahead of me, I marveled at

his tall figure, which stood out in black against the glowing

background of the horizon.

It was one o’clock in the morning. We arrived at the mountain’s lower

gradients. But in grappling with them, we had to venture up difficult

trails through a huge thicket.

Yes, a thicket of dead trees! Trees without leaves, without sap,

turned to stone by the action of the waters, and crowned here and

there by gigantic pines. It was like a still-erect coalfield, its

roots clutching broken soil, its boughs clearly outlined against the

ceiling of the waters like thin, black, paper cutouts. Picture a

forest clinging to the sides of a peak in the Harz Mountains, but a

submerged forest. The trails were cluttered with algae and fucus

plants, hosts of crustaceans swarming among them. I plunged on,

scaling rocks, straddling fallen tree trunks, snapping marine creepers

that swayed from one tree to another, startling the fish that flitted

from branch to branch. Carried away, I didn’t feel exhausted any

more. I followed a guide who was immune to exhaustion.

What a sight! How can I describe it! How can I portray these woods and

rocks in this liquid setting, their lower parts dark and sullen, their

upper parts tinted red in this light whose intensity was doubled by

the reflecting power of the waters! We scaled rocks that crumbled

behind us, collapsing in enormous sections with the hollow rumble of

an avalanche. To our right and left there were carved gloomy galleries

where the eye lost its way. Huge glades opened up, seemingly cleared

by the hand of man, and I sometimes wondered whether some residents of

these underwater regions would suddenly appear before me.

But Captain Nemo kept climbing. I didn’t want to fall behind. I

followed him boldly. My alpenstock was a great help. One wrong step

would have been disastrous on the narrow paths cut into the sides of

these chasms, but I walked along with a firm tread and without the

slightest feeling of dizziness. Sometimes I leaped over a crevasse

whose depth would have made me recoil had I been in the midst of

glaciers on shore; sometimes I ventured out on a wobbling tree trunk

fallen across a gorge, without looking down, having eyes only for

marveling at the wild scenery of this region. There, leaning on

erratically cut foundations, monumental rocks seemed to defy the laws

of balance. From between their stony knees, trees sprang up like jets

under fearsome pressure, supporting other trees that supported them in

turn. Next, natural towers with wide, steeply carved battlements

leaned at angles that, on dry land, the laws of gravity would never

have authorized.

And I too could feel the difference created by the water’s powerful

density—despite my heavy clothing, copper headpiece, and metal soles,

I climbed the most impossibly steep gradients with all the nimbleness,

I swear it, of a chamois or a Pyrenees mountain goat!

As for my account of this excursion under the waters, I’m well aware

that it sounds incredible! I’m the chronicler of deeds seemingly

impossible and yet incontestably real. This was no fantasy. This was

what I saw and felt!

Two hours after leaving the Nautilus, we had cleared the timberline,

and 100 feet above our heads stood the mountain peak, forming a dark

silhouette against the brilliant glare that came from its far

slope. Petrified shrubs rambled here and there in sprawling

zigzags. Fish rose in a body at our feet like birds startled in tall

grass. The rocky mass was gouged with impenetrable crevices, deep

caves, unfathomable holes at whose far ends I could hear fearsome

things moving around. My blood would curdle as I watched some enormous

antenna bar my path, or saw some frightful pincer snap shut in the

shadow of some cavity! A thousand specks of light glittered in the

midst of the gloom. They were the eyes of gigantic crustaceans

crouching in their lairs, giant lobsters rearing up like spear

carriers and moving their claws with a scrap-iron clanking, titanic

crabs aiming their bodies like cannons on their carriages, and hideous

devilfish intertwining their tentacles like bushes of writhing snakes.

What was this astounding world that I didn’t yet know? In what order

did these articulates belong, these creatures for which the rocks

provided a second carapace? Where had nature learned the secret of

their vegetating existence, and for how many centuries had they lived

in the ocean’s lower strata?

But I couldn’t linger. Captain Nemo, on familiar terms with these

dreadful animals, no longer minded them. We arrived at a preliminary

plateau where still other surprises were waiting for me. There

picturesque ruins took shape, betraying the hand of man, not our

Creator. They were huge stacks of stones in which you could

distinguish the indistinct forms of palaces and temples, now arrayed

in hosts of blossoming zoophytes, and over it all, not ivy but a heavy

mantle of algae and fucus plants.

But what part of the globe could this be, this land swallowed by

cataclysms? Who had set up these rocks and stones like the dolmens of

prehistoric times? Where was I, where had Captain Nemo’s fancies taken

me?

I wanted to ask him. Unable to, I stopped him. I seized his arm. But

he shook his head, pointed to the mountain’s topmost peak, and seemed

to tell me:

“Come on! Come with me! Come higher!”

I followed him with one last burst of energy, and in a few minutes I

had scaled the peak, which crowned the whole rocky mass by some ten

meters.

I looked back down the side we had just cleared. There the mountain

rose only 700 to 800 feet above the plains; but on its far slope it

crowned the receding bottom of this part of the Atlantic by a height

twice that. My eyes scanned the distance and took in a vast area lit

by intense flashes of light. In essence, this mountain was a

volcano. Fifty feet below its peak, amid a shower of stones and slag,

a wide crater vomited torrents of lava that were dispersed in fiery

cascades into the heart of the liquid mass. So situated, this volcano

was an immense torch that lit up the lower plains all the way to the

horizon.

As I said, this underwater crater spewed lava, but not flames. Flames

need oxygen from the air and are unable to spread underwater; but a

lava flow, which contains in itself the principle of its

incandescence, can rise to a white heat, overpower the liquid element,

and turn it into steam on contact. Swift currents swept away all this

diffuse gas, and torrents of lava slid to the foot of the mountain,

like the disgorgings of a Mt. Vesuvius over the city limits of a

second Torre del Greco.

In fact, there beneath my eyes was a town in ruins, demolished,

overwhelmed, laid low, its roofs caved in, its temples pulled down,

its arches dislocated, its columns stretching over the earth; in these

ruins you could still detect the solid proportions of a sort of Tuscan

architecture; farther off, the remains of a gigantic aqueduct; here,

the caked heights of an acropolis along with the fluid forms of a

Parthenon; there, the remnants of a wharf, as if some bygone port had

long ago harbored merchant vessels and triple-tiered war galleys on

the shores of some lost ocean; still farther off, long rows of

collapsing walls, deserted thoroughfares, a whole Pompeii buried under

the waters, which Captain Nemo had resurrected before my eyes!

Where was I? Where was I? I had to find out at all cost, I wanted to

speak, I wanted to rip off the copper sphere imprisoning my head.

But Captain Nemo came over and stopped me with a gesture. Then,

picking up a piece of chalky stone, he advanced to a black basaltic

rock and scrawled this one word:

ATLANTIS

What lightning flashed through my mind! Atlantis, that ancient land of

Meropis mentioned by the historian Theopompus; Plato’s Atlantis; the

continent whose very existence has been denied by such philosophers

and scientists as Origen, Porphyry, Iamblichus, d’Anville, Malte-Brun,

and Humboldt, who entered its disappearance in the ledger of myths and

folk tales; the country whose reality has nevertheless been accepted

by such other thinkers as Posidonius, Pliny, Ammianus Marcellinus,

Tertullian, Engel, Scherer, Tournefort, Buffon, and d’Avezac; I had

this land right under my eyes, furnishing its own unimpeachable

evidence of the catastrophe that had overtaken it! So this was the

submerged region that had existed outside Europe, Asia, and Libya,

beyond the Pillars of Hercules, home of those powerful Atlantean

people against whom ancient Greece had waged its earliest wars!

The writer whose narratives record the lofty deeds of those heroic

times is Plato himself. His dialogues Timaeus and Critias were drafted

with the poet and legislator Solon as their inspiration, as it were.

One day Solon was conversing with some elderly wise men in the Egyptian

capital of Sais, a town already 8,000 years of age, as documented

by the annals engraved on the sacred walls of its temples. One of

these elders related the history of another town 1,000 years older

still. This original city of Athens, ninety centuries old, had been

invaded and partly destroyed by the Atlanteans. These Atlanteans, he

said, resided on an immense continent greater than Africa and Asia

combined, taking in an area that lay between latitude 12 degrees and

40 degrees north. Their dominion extended even to Egypt. They tried to

enforce their rule as far as Greece, but they had to retreat before

the indomitable resistance of the Hellenic people. Centuries passed.

A cataclysm occurred—floods, earthquakes. A single night and day were

enough to obliterate this Atlantis, whose highest peaks (Madeira, the

Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands) still emerge above the

waves.

These were the historical memories that Captain Nemo’s scrawl sent

rushing through my mind. Thus, led by the strangest of fates, I was

treading underfoot one of the mountains of that continent! My hands

were touching ruins many thousands of years old, contemporary with

prehistoric times! I was walking in the very place where

contemporaries of early man had walked! My heavy soles were crushing

the skeletons of animals from the age of fable, animals that used to

take cover in the shade of these trees now turned to stone!

Oh, why was I so short of time! I would have gone down the steep

slopes of this mountain, crossed this entire immense continent, which

surely connects Africa with America, and visited its great prehistoric

cities. Under my eyes there perhaps lay the warlike town of Makhimos

or the pious village of Eusebes, whose gigantic inhabitants lived for

whole centuries and had the strength to raise blocks of stone that

still withstood the action of the waters. One day perhaps, some

volcanic phenomenon will bring these sunken ruins back to the surface

of the waves! Numerous underwater volcanoes have been sighted in this

part of the ocean, and many ships have felt terrific tremors when

passing over these turbulent depths. A few have heard hollow noises

that announced some struggle of the elements far below, others have

hauled in volcanic ash hurled above the waves. As far as the equator

this whole seafloor is still under construction by plutonic

forces. And in some remote epoch, built up by volcanic disgorgings and

successive layers of lava, who knows whether the peaks of these

fire-belching mountains may reappear above the surface of the

Atlantic!

As I mused in this way, trying to establish in my memory every detail

of this impressive landscape, Captain Nemo was leaning his elbows on a

moss-covered monument, motionless as if petrified in some mute

trance. Was he dreaming of those lost generations, asking them for the

secret of human destiny? Was it here that this strange man came to

revive himself, basking in historical memories, reliving that bygone

life, he who had no desire for our modern one? I would have given

anything to know his thoughts, to share them, understand them!

We stayed in this place an entire hour, contemplating its vast plains

in the lava’s glow, which sometimes took on a startling

intensity. Inner boilings sent quick shivers running through the

mountain’s crust. Noises from deep underneath, clearly transmitted by

the liquid medium, reverberated with majestic amplitude.

Just then the moon appeared for an instant through the watery mass,

casting a few pale rays over this submerged continent. It was only a

fleeting glimmer, but its effect was indescribable. The captain stood

up and took one last look at these immense plains; then his hand

signaled me to follow him.

We went swiftly down the mountain. Once past the petrified forest, I

could see the Nautilus’s beacon twinkling like a star. The captain

walked straight toward it, and we were back on board just as the first

glimmers of dawn were whitening the surface of the ocean.