Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas Part 83

A circ.u.mstance less than encouraging.

Several times that day, the Nautilus repeated the same experiment and always it b.u.mped against this surface that formed a ceiling above it.

At certain moments the ship encountered ice at a depth of 900 meters, denoting a thickness of 1,200 meters, of which 300 meters rose above the level of the ocean. This height had tripled since the moment the Nautilus had dived beneath the waves.

I meticulously noted these different depths, obtaining the underwater profile of this upside-down mountain chain that stretched beneath the sea.

By evening there was still no improvement in our situation.

The ice stayed between 400 and 500 meters deep. It was obviously shrinking, but what a barrier still lay between us and the surface of the ocean!

By then it was eight o'clock. The air inside the Nautilus should have been renewed four hours earlier, following daily practice on board.

But I didn't suffer very much, although Captain Nemo hadn't yet made demands on the supplementary oxygen in his air tanks.

That night my sleep was fitful. Hope and fear besieged me by turns.

I got up several times. The Nautilus continued groping.

Near three o'clock in the morning, I observed that we encountered the Ice Bank's underbelly at a depth of only fifty meters.

So only 150 feet separated us from the surface of the water.

Little by little the Ice Bank was turning into an ice field again.

The mountains were changing back into plains.

My eyes didn't leave the pressure gauge. We kept rising on a diagonal, going along this shiny surface that sparkled beneath our electric rays.

Above and below, the Ice Bank was subsiding in long gradients.

Mile after mile it was growing thinner.

Finally, at six o'clock in the morning on that memorable day of March 19, the lounge door opened. Captain Nemo appeared.

"Open sea!" he told me.

CHAPTER 14

The South Pole

I RUSHED UP onto the platform. Yes, open sea! Barely a few spa.r.s.e floes, some moving

icebergs; a sea stretching into the distance; hosts of birds in the air and myriads of fish under the waters, which varied from intense blue to olive green depending on the depth.

The thermometer marked 3 degrees centigrade. It was as if a comparative springtime had been locked up behind that Ice Bank, whose distant ma.s.ses were outlined on the northern horizon.

"Are we at the pole?" I asked the captain, my heart pounding.

"I've no idea," he answered me. "At noon we'll fix our position."

"But will the sun show through this mist?" I said, staring at the grayish sky.

"No matter how faintly it shines, it will be enough for me,"

the captain replied.

To the south, ten miles from the Nautilus, a solitary islet rose to a height of 200 meters. We proceeded toward it, but cautiously, because this sea could have been strewn with reefs.

In an hour we had reached the islet. Two hours later we had completed a full circle around it. It measured four to five miles in circ.u.mference.

A narrow channel separated it from a considerable sh.o.r.e, perhaps a continent whose limits we couldn't see. The existence of this sh.o.r.e seemed to bear out Commander Maury's hypotheses.

In essence, this ingenious American has noted that between the South Pole and the 60th parallel, the sea is covered with floating ice of dimensions much greater than any found in the north Atlantic. From this fact he drew the conclusion that the Antarctic Circle must contain considerable sh.o.r.es, since icebergs can't form on the high seas but only along coastlines.

According to his calculations, this frozen ma.s.s enclosing the southernmost pole forms a vast ice cap whose width must reach 4,000 kilometers.

Meanwhile, to avoid running aground, the Nautilus halted three cable lengths from a strand crowned by superb piles of rocks.

The skiff was launched to sea. Two crewmen carrying instruments, the captain, Conseil, and I were on board. It was ten o'clock in the morning. I hadn't seen Ned Land. No doubt, in the presence of the South Pole, the Canadian hated having to eat his words.

A few strokes of the oar brought the skiff to the sand, where it ran aground. Just as Conseil was about to jump ash.o.r.e, I held him back.

"Sir," I told Captain Nemo, "to you belongs the honor of first setting foot on this sh.o.r.e."

"Yes, sir," the captain replied, "and if I have no hesitation in treading this polar soil, it's because no human being until now has left a footprint here."

So saying, he leaped lightly onto the sand. His heart must have been throbbing with intense excitement. He scaled an overhanging rock that ended in a small promontory and there, mute and motionless, with crossed arms and blazing eyes, he seemed to be laying claim to these southernmost regions.

After spending five minutes in this trance, he turned to us.

"Whenever you're ready, sir," he called to me.

I got out, Conseil at my heels, leaving the two men in the skiff.

Over an extensive area, the soil consisted of that igneous gravel called "tuff," reddish in color as if made from crushed bricks.

The ground was covered with slag, lava flows, and pumice stones.

Its volcanic origin was unmistakable. In certain localities thin smoke holes gave off a sulfurous odor, showing that the inner fires still kept their wide-ranging power. Nevertheless, when I scaled a high escarpment, I could see no volcanoes within a radius of several miles.

In these Antarctic districts, as is well known, Sir James Clark Ross had found the craters of Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror in fully active condition on the 167th meridian at lat.i.tude 77 degrees 32'.

The vegetation on this desolate continent struck me as quite limited.

A few lichens of the species Usnea melanoxanthra sprawled over the black rocks. The whole meager flora of this region consisted of certain microscopic buds, rudimentary diatoms made up of a type of cell positioned between two quartz-rich sh.e.l.ls, plus long purple and crimson fucus plants, buoyed by small air bladders and washed up on the coast by the surf.

The beach was strewn with mollusks: small mussels, limpets, smooth heart-shaped c.o.c.kles, and especially some sea b.u.t.terflies with oblong, membrane-filled bodies whose heads are formed from two rounded lobes.

I also saw myriads of those northernmost sea b.u.t.terflies three centimeters long, which a baleen whale can swallow by the thousands in one gulp. The open waters at the sh.o.r.eline were alive with these delightful pteropods, true b.u.t.terflies of the sea.

Among other zoophytes present in these shallows, there were a few coral tree forms that, according to Sir James Clark Ross, live in these Antarctic seas at depths as great as 1,000 meters; then small alcyon coral belonging to the species Procellaria pelagica, also a large number of starfish unique to these climes, plus some feather stars spangling the sand.

But it was in the air that life was superabundant.

There various species of birds flew and fluttered by the thousands, deafening us with their calls. Crowding the rocks, other fowl watched without fear as we pa.s.sed and pressed familiarly against our feet.

These were auks, as agile and supple in water, where they are sometimes mistaken for fast bonito, as they are clumsy and heavy on land.

They uttered outlandish calls and partic.i.p.ated in numerous public a.s.semblies that featured much noise but little action.

Among other fowl I noted some sheathbills from the wading-bird family, the size of pigeons, white in color, the beak short and conical, the eyes framed by red circles. Conseil laid in a supply of them, because when they're properly cooked, these winged creatures make a pleasant dish.

In the air there pa.s.sed sooty albatross with four-meter wingspans, birds aptly dubbed "vultures of the ocean," also gigantic petrels including several with arching wings, enthusiastic eaters of seal that are known as quebrantahuesos,* and cape pigeons, a sort of small duck, the tops of their bodies black and white--in short, a whole series of petrels, some whitish with wings trimmed in brown, others blue and exclusive to these Antarctic seas, the former "so oily,"

I told Conseil, "that inhabitants of the Faroe Islands simply fit the bird with a wick, then light it up."

*Spanish: "ospreys." Ed.