A Journey To The Center Of The Earth Part 17

"A fis.h.!.+" exclaims my uncle.

"That's a sturgeon!" I exclaimed in turn. "A small sturgeon!"

The professor looks carefully at the animal and does not share my opinion. The fish has a flat, round head, and the front of its body is covered with bony plates; its mouth has no teeth; large, well-developed pectoral fins are attached to a body without tail. This animal does belong to the same order where naturalists place the sturgeon, but it differs from it in many essential aspects.

My uncle makes no mistake about this, and after a rather brief examination, he says: "This fish belongs to a family that has been extinct for centuries, of which only fossil traces are found in the Devonian formations."

"How could we have taken one of those inhabitants of the primitive oceans alive?"

"Yes," replies the professor as he continues his examination, "and you can see that these fossil fishes are not at all identical with the contemporary species. So having one of these creatures alive in one's hand is a real joy for a naturalist."

"But to what family does it belong?"

"Order ganoids, family cephalaspidae, species . . ."

"Well?"

"Species pterichthys, I'd swear! But this one has a peculiarity which is apparently found in fish that inhabit subterranean waters."

"Which one?"

"It's blind!"

"Blind!"

"Not just blind, but it has no organ of sight at all."

I look. It's true. But this could be a special case. So the fish line is baited once again, and thrown again into the ocean. This ocean is most certainly full of fish, for in two hours, we catch a large quant.i.ty of pterichthys, as well as fish belonging to another extinct family, the dipterides,bg whose species my uncle is unable to identify. None of them have any organ of sight. This unexpected catch nicely restocks our food supplies. whose species my uncle is unable to identify. None of them have any organ of sight. This unexpected catch nicely restocks our food supplies.

So it seems certain that this ocean contains only fossil species, among which the fish as well as the reptiles are the more perfect the more ancient they are in their creation.

Perhaps we will find some of those saurians that science has reconstructed out of a bit of bone or cartilage?

I take up the telescope and scan the ocean. It is deserted. Undoubtedly we are still too close to the sh.o.r.es.

I gaze upward in the air. Why should not some of the birds restored by the immortal Cuvierbh again flap their wings in these heavy atmospheric layers? The fish would provide them with sufficient food. I survey the whole s.p.a.ce, but the air is as uninhabited as the sh.o.r.e. again flap their wings in these heavy atmospheric layers? The fish would provide them with sufficient food. I survey the whole s.p.a.ce, but the air is as uninhabited as the sh.o.r.e.

Still my imagination carries me away into those wonderful speculations of paleontology. Wide awake, I dream. I think I see enormous chelonians on the surface of the water, antediluvian turtles that resemble floating islands. Across the dimly lit beach walk the huge mammals of the first ages of the world, the leptotherium found in the caverns of Brazil, the mericotherium7 from the icy regions of Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous lophiodon, a giant tapir, hides behind the rocks, ready to fight for its prey with the anoplotherium, a strange animal that resembles the rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus and the camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a hurry in the first hours of the world, had combined several animals into one. The giant mastodon curls his trunk, and smashes rocks on the sh.o.r.e with his tusks, while the megatherium, resting on its enormous paws, digs through the soil, its roars echoing sonorously off the granite rocks. Higher up, the protopithecus-the first monkey that appeared on the globe-climbs up the steep summits. Higher yet, the pterodactyl with its winged hand glides on the dense air like a large bat. In the uppermost layers, finally, immense birds, more powerful than the ca.s.sowary and larger than the ostrich, spread their vast wings and are about to strike their heads against the granite vault. from the icy regions of Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous lophiodon, a giant tapir, hides behind the rocks, ready to fight for its prey with the anoplotherium, a strange animal that resembles the rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus and the camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a hurry in the first hours of the world, had combined several animals into one. The giant mastodon curls his trunk, and smashes rocks on the sh.o.r.e with his tusks, while the megatherium, resting on its enormous paws, digs through the soil, its roars echoing sonorously off the granite rocks. Higher up, the protopithecus-the first monkey that appeared on the globe-climbs up the steep summits. Higher yet, the pterodactyl with its winged hand glides on the dense air like a large bat. In the uppermost layers, finally, immense birds, more powerful than the ca.s.sowary and larger than the ostrich, spread their vast wings and are about to strike their heads against the granite vault.

All this fossil world is born again in my imagination. I travel back to the biblical age of the world, long before the advent of man, when the unfinished world was as yet insufficient to sustain him. My dream then goes back farther to the ages before the advent of living beings. The mammals disappear, then the birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary period, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, mollusks, and articulated beings. The zoophytes of the Transition period also return to nothingness. All the world's life is concentrated in me, and my heart is the only one that beats in this depopulated world. There are no more seasons; climates are no more; the heat of the globe continually increases and neutralizes that of the radiant star. Vegetation grows excessively. I glide like a shade amongst arborescent ferns, treading with unsteady feet the iridescent clay and the multicolored sand; I lean against the trunks of immense conifers; I lie in the shade of sphenophylla, asterophylla, and lycopods, a hundred feet tall.

Centuries pa.s.s by like days! I move back through the series of terrestrial transformations. Plants disappear; granite rocks lose their purity; solids give way to liquids under the impact of increasing heat; water covers the surface of the globe; it boils, evaporates; steam envelops the earth, which gradually dissolves into a gaseous ma.s.s, white-hot, as large and radiant as the sun!

In the midst of this nebula, fourteen hundred thousand times more voluminous than this globe that it will one day become, I am carried into planetary s.p.a.ces! My body subtilizes, sublimates itself in its turn and, like an imponderable atom, mingles with these immense vapors that follow their flaming orbits through infinite s.p.a.ce.

What a dream! Where is it carrying me? My feverish hand sketches the strange details out on paper! I have forgotten everything, the professor, the guide, and the raft! A hallucination possesses my spirit ...

"What's the matter?" my uncle says.

My eyes, wide open, gaze at him without seeing him.

"Take care, Axel, or you'll fall overboard!"

At the same moment, I feel the vigorous grip of Hans' hand.

Without him, I would have thrown myself into the sea under the influence of my dream.

"Is he going crazy?" exclaims the professor.

"What's going on?" I finally say, returning to myself.

"Are you sick?"

"No, I had a momentary hallucination, but it's over now. Is everything alright?"

"Yes! Nice wind and beautiful sea! We're making good progress, and if I'm not wrong in my calculation, we'll soon land."

At these words I rise up, I look at the horizon; but the water line still blurs into the line of clouds.

x.x.xIII.

SAt.u.r.dAY, 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 circ.u.mstances? 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 pa.s.sage 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.

"Tander," 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 Jura.s.sic 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! 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. 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 rus.h.i.+ng out.

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

"To h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 partic.i.p.ating 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 sh.e.l.l of a turtle, a plesiosaurus, bl bl the terrible enemy of the first one!" 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.s. 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.