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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
By JULES VERNE Condensation by JAMES B. CONNOLLY I WAS leaning forward on the starboard bulwark, my servant Conseil beside me, when the voice of Ned Land, the big harpooner, broke the silence. "Look! There is the thing we are looking for!" he cried.
We all saw the sea monster, or whatever it was, which we had been hunting for months. It made off as we charged. We gave chase. Throughout all that night and next day we pursued. We stopped. It stopped. Once it allowed us to creep close to it; and as we crept it rammed us.
The shock of the collision threw me into the sea. I would have drowned but for my faithful Conseil. He supported me to the hard metallic back of the monster. Here we were joined by Ned Land. As we were resting there, eight masked men came through a hatch and drew us down into the bowels of what we now saw was not a monster, but a strange kind of sea-craft. Thus began the strange voyage with that remarkable character who called himself Captain Nemo, and in that strange wonderful ship which he called the Nautilus. The Nautilus was a cigar-shaped steel ship of 232 feet in length, 26 feet beam, and 1,500 tons dead weight. There were two hulls, one inside the other, joined by T-shaped irons, which rendered them of almost uncrushable strength. She was driven by electric engines of tremendous power. Tanks which could be filled or emptied at will enabled her to cruise on the surface or under the water as she pleased.
She was fitted with all kinds of working and lounging quarters. In a library were books on the sciences, morals, and literature of almost every language. There was a drawing-room with a luminous ceiling which served also as a museum and into which an intelligent hand had gathered submarine treasures of the world--the rarest shells, pearls of all colors and beyond price, every variety of under-sea vegetation; also paintings of the masters, admirable statues in marble and bronze, a great organ piano.
From the inside of her a staircase led to a platform or deck from which rose two cages, partly inclosed by thick glasses. One cage was for the helmsman, the other contained an electric search-light to light the course of the ship in dark waters. On this platform also was a place wherein was stored a long-boat.
Captain Nemo was tall and robustly built, with pale skin, lofty brow, and the fine taper hands of a highly nervous temperament. He spoke French, English, German, Latin, all equally well. He may have been thirty-five, he may have been fifty years of age.
It was on November 6, 1866, with the coast of Japan in view, that this strange captain told us we were prisoners for him to do with as he pleased. "And now," he added, "our course is E.N.E. and our cruising depth twenty-six fathoms. I leave you to the resources of these quarters and your own reflections." We remained mute, not knowing what surprise awaited us. Suddenly a dazzling light broke in on us. We saw that only glass panels separated us from a sea which was illuminated far to either side by the powerful electric gleams from the ship. What a spectacle! An army of undersea creatures escorted us. They were various and beautiful in the clear water, many known, but hundreds unknown, to us.
We heard and saw nothing of the captain for several days; then came a note inviting us to a hunt on the bottom of the sea. We donned diving-suits, then fastened on a sort of knapsack which furnished us not only with air to breathe, but with the light to see our way. We carried air-guns which fired glass bullets heavily charged with electricity, which had only to touch the most powerful animal to kill him. A connecting compartment filled with water let us into the sea. And thus equipped, wading on the bottom of the clear ocean, we killed our game with ease and without danger. That hunt was but the first of the wonders of the cruise. Onward we rushed, sometimes on the surface, sometimes under the sea. There was our fight with the immense devilfish which once in a huge school enmeshed the Nautilus. There was the visit to a wonderful pearl-fishery, where Captain Nemo showed us a mollusc within whose jaws was a pearl weighing perhaps 500 pounds. Some day he would return and pluck that treasure, but not yet--every year was adding to its value. We visited the skeletons of long-sunken ships, the corpses of the drowned crew still clinging to the hulls of some. We hunted in the Papuan Islands, where the Nautilus was attacked by the native savages. An electric current turned them back shocked and howling ere they could climb aboard. When one of the crew died Captain Nemo had him buried in a coral glade in the South Pacific, where was a cross of red coral that looked like petrified blood. It was a wonderful, solemn sight to see the pall-bearers with the dead body on their shoulders, and all treading so reverentially the way from the ship to the coral cemetery, where at the foot of the cross the body was interred and covered up. All knelt in prayer. Captain Nemo was the last to leave. "Your dead sleep quietly out of the reach of sharks," I said, when we were back on the Nautilus. "Of sharks and men," he replied.
We voyaged under colossal icebergs to the South Pole and all but perished there, escaping from an icy tomb only as our last breath of storage air was exhausted. Wonderful was our passage from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean by means of a subterranean tunnel under the isthmus. (This was before the digging of the Suez canal.) There we witnessed the transfer of a million dollars' worth of gold ingots from the Nautilus to the vessel of a Greek diver.
Whence came this store of gold? Later we learned.