Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World, Verne [children's books read aloud .txt] 📗

“I wouldn’t bet on it!” I replied.

And in all honesty, I confess that this venturesome excursion was far from displeasing to me. I can’t express the intensity of my amazement at the beauties of these new regions. The ice struck superb poses. Here, its general effect suggested an oriental town with countless minarets and mosques. There, a city in ruins, flung to the ground by convulsions in the earth. These views were varied continuously by the sun’s oblique rays, or were completely swallowed up by gray mists in the middle of blizzards. Then explosions, cave-ins, and great iceberg somersaults would occur all around us, altering the scenery like the changing landscape in a diorama.

If the Nautilus was submerged during these losses of balance, we heard the resulting noises spread under the waters with frightful intensity, and the collapse of these masses created daunting eddies down to the ocean’s lower strata. The Nautilus then rolled and pitched like a ship left to the fury of the elements.

Often, no longer seeing any way out, I thought we were imprisoned for good, but Captain Nemo, guided by his instincts, discovered new passageways from the tiniest indications. He was never wrong when he observed slender threads of bluish water streaking through these ice fields. Accordingly, I was sure that he had already risked his Nautilus in the midst of the Antarctic seas.

However, during the day of March 16, these tracts of ice completely barred our path. It wasn’t the Ice Bank as yet, just huge ice fields cemented together by the cold. This obstacle couldn’t stop Captain Nemo, and he launched his ship against the ice fields with hideous violence. The Nautilus went into these brittle masses like a wedge, splitting them with dreadful cracklings. It was an old-fashioned battering ram propelled with infinite power. Hurled aloft, ice rubble fell back around us like hail. Through brute force alone, the submersible carved out a channel for itself. Carried away by its momentum, the ship sometimes mounted on top of these tracts of ice and crushed them with its weight, or at other times, when cooped up beneath the ice fields, it split them with simple pitching movements, creating wide punctures.

Violent squalls assaulted us during the daytime. Thanks to certain heavy mists, we couldn’t see from one end of the platform to the other. The wind shifted abruptly to every point on the compass. The snow was piling up in such packed layers, it had to be chipped loose with blows from picks. Even in a temperature of merely -5 degrees centigrade, every outside part of the Nautilus was covered with ice. A ship’s rigging would have been unusable, because all its tackle would have jammed in the grooves of the pulleys. Only a craft without sails, driven by an electric motor that needed no coal, could face such high latitudes.

Under these conditions the barometer generally stayed quite low. It fell as far as 73.5 centimeters. Our compass indications no longer offered any guarantees. The deranged needles would mark contradictory directions as we approached the southern magnetic pole, which doesn’t coincide with the South Pole proper. In fact, according to the astronomer Hansteen, this magnetic pole is located fairly close to latitude 70 degrees and longitude 130 degrees, or abiding by the observations of Louis-Isidore Duperrey, in longitude 135 degrees and latitude 70 degrees 30’. Hence we had to transport compasses to different parts of the ship, take many readings, and strike an average. Often we could chart our course only by guesswork, a less than satisfactory method in the midst of these winding passageways whose landmarks change continuously.

At last on March 18, after twenty futile assaults, the Nautilus was decisively held in check. No longer was it an ice stream, patch, or field—it was an endless, immovable barrier formed by ice mountains fused to each other.

“The Ice Bank!” the Canadian told me.

For Ned Land, as well as for every navigator before us, I knew that this was the great insurmountable obstacle. When the sun appeared for an instant near noon, Captain Nemo took a reasonably accurate sight that gave our position as longitude 51 degrees 30’ and latitude 67 degrees 39’ south. This was a position already well along in these Antarctic regions.

As for the liquid surface of the sea, there was no longer any semblance of it before our eyes. Before the Nautilus’s spur there lay vast broken plains, a tangle of confused chunks with all the helter-skelter unpredictability typical of a river’s surface a short while before its ice breakup; but in this case the proportions were gigantic. Here and there stood sharp peaks, lean spires that rose as high as 200 feet; farther off, a succession of steeply cut cliffs sporting a grayish tint, huge mirrors that reflected the sparse rays of a sun half drowned in mist. Beyond, a stark silence reigned in this desolate natural setting, a silence barely broken by the flapping wings of petrels or puffins. By this point everything was frozen, even sound.

So the Nautilus had to halt in its venturesome course among these tracts of ice.

“Sir,” Ned Land told me that day, “if your captain goes any farther . . .”

“Yes?”

“He’ll be a superman.”

“How so, Ned?”

“Because nobody can clear the Ice Bank. Your captain’s a powerful man, but damnation, he isn’t more powerful than nature. If she draws a boundary line, there you stop, like it or not!”

“Correct, Ned Land, but I still want to know what’s behind this Ice Bank! Behold my greatest source of irritation—a wall!”

“Master is right,” Conseil said. “Walls were invented simply to frustrate scientists. All walls should be banned.”

“Fine!” the Canadian put in. “But we already know what’s behind this Ice Bank.”

“What?” I asked.

“Ice, ice, and more ice.”

“You may be sure of that, Ned,” I answered, “but I’m not. That’s why I want to see for myself.”

“Well, professor,” the Canadian replied, “you can just drop that idea! You’ve made it to the Ice Bank, which is already far enough, but you won’t get any farther, neither your Captain Nemo or his Nautilus. And whether he wants to or not, we’ll head north again, in other words, to the land of sensible people.”

I had to agree that Ned Land was right, and until ships are built to navigate over tracts of ice, they’ll have to stop at the Ice Bank.

Indeed, despite its efforts, despite the powerful methods it used to split this ice, the Nautilus was reduced to immobility. Ordinarily, when someone can’t go any farther, he still has the option of returning in his tracks. But here it was just as impossible to turn back as to go forward, because every passageway had closed behind us, and if our submersible remained even slightly stationary, it would be frozen in without delay. Which is exactly what happened near two o’clock in the afternoon, and fresh ice kept forming over the ship’s sides with astonishing speed. I had to admit that Captain Nemo’s leadership had been most injudicious.

Just then I was on the platform. Observing the situation for some while, the captain said to me:

“Well, professor! What think you?”

“I think we’re trapped, captain.”

“Trapped! What do you mean?”

“I mean we can’t go forward, backward, or sideways. I think that’s the standard definition of ‘trapped,’ at least in the civilized world.”

“So, Professor Aronnax, you think the Nautilus won’t be able to float clear?”

“Only with the greatest difficulty, captain, since the season is already too advanced for you to depend on an ice breakup.”

“Oh, professor,” Captain Nemo replied in an ironic tone, “you never change! You see only impediments and obstacles! I promise you, not only will the Nautilus float clear, it will go farther still!”

“Farther south?” I asked, gaping at the captain.

“Yes, sir, it will go to the pole.”

“To the pole!” I exclaimed, unable to keep back a movement of disbelief.

“Yes,” the captain replied coolly, “the Antarctic pole, that unknown spot crossed by every meridian on the globe. As you know, I do whatever I like with my Nautilus.”

Yes, I did know that! I knew this man was daring to the point of being foolhardy. But to overcome all the obstacles around the South Pole—even more unattainable than the North Pole, which still hadn’t been reached by the boldest navigators—wasn’t this an absolutely insane undertaking, one that could occur only in the brain of a madman?

It then dawned on me to ask Captain Nemo if he had already discovered this pole, which no human being had ever trod underfoot.

“No, sir,” he answered me, “but we’ll discover it together. Where others have failed, I’ll succeed. Never before has my Nautilus cruised so far into these southernmost seas, but I repeat: it will go farther still.”

“I’d like to believe you, captain,” I went on in a tone of some sarcasm. “Oh I do believe you! Let’s forge ahead! There are no obstacles for us! Let’s shatter this Ice Bank! Let’s blow it up, and if it still resists, let’s put wings on the Nautilus and fly over it!”

“Over it, professor?” Captain Nemo replied serenely. “No, not over it, but under it.”

“Under it!” I exclaimed.

A sudden insight into Captain Nemo’s plans had just flashed through my mind. I understood. The marvelous talents of his Nautilus would be put to work once again in this superhuman undertaking!

“I can see we’re starting to understand each other, professor,” Captain Nemo told me with a half smile. “You already glimpse the potential—myself, I’d say the success—of this attempt. Maneuvers that aren’t feasible for an ordinary ship are easy for the Nautilus. If a continent emerges at the pole, we’ll stop at that continent. But on the other hand, if open sea washes the pole, we’ll go to that very place!”

“Right,” I said, carried away by the captain’s logic. “Even though the surface of the sea has solidified into ice, its lower strata are still open, thanks to that divine justice that puts the maximum density of salt water one degree above its freezing point. And if I’m not mistaken, the submerged part of this Ice Bank is in a four-to-one ratio to its emerging part.”

“Very nearly, professor. For each foot of iceberg above the sea, there are three more below. Now then, since these ice mountains don’t exceed a height of 100 meters, they sink only to a depth of 300 meters. And what are 300 meters to the Nautilus?”

“A mere nothing, sir.”

“We could even go to greater depths and find that temperature layer common to all ocean water, and there we’d brave with impunity the -30 degrees or -40 degrees cold on the surface.”

“True, sir, very true,” I replied with growing excitement.

“Our sole difficulty,” Captain Nemo went on, “lies in our staying submerged for several days without renewing our air supply.”

“That’s all?” I answered. “The Nautilus has huge air tanks; we’ll fill them up and they’ll supply all the oxygen we need.”

“Good thinking, Professor Aronnax,” the captain replied with a smile. “But since I don’t want to be accused of foolhardiness, I’m giving you all my objections in advance.”

“You have more?”

“Just one. If a sea exists at the South Pole, it’s possible this sea may be completely frozen over, so we couldn’t come up to the surface!”

“My dear sir, have you forgotten that the Nautilus is armed with a fearsome spur? Couldn’t it be launched diagonally against those tracts of ice, which would break open from the impact?”

“Ah, professor, you’re full of ideas today!”

“Besides, captain,” I added with still greater enthusiasm, “why wouldn’t we find open sea at the South Pole just as at the North Pole? The cold-temperature poles and the geographical poles don’t coincide in either the northern or southern hemispheres, and until proof to the contrary, we can assume these two spots on the earth feature either a continent or an ice-free ocean.”

“I think as you do, Professor Aronnax,” Captain Nemo replied. “I’ll only point out that after raising so many objections against my plan, you’re now crushing