One was short, very muscular, broad-shouldered, with robust limbs, strong head, an abundance of black hair, thick mustache, a quick, penetrating look, and the vivacity which characterizes the population of Southern France. Yes, captain, although by this time I ought to have accustomed myself to be surprised at nothing since I have been on board your boat. Half an hour had already passed without our situation being bettered, when the dense darkness suddenly gave way to extreme light. Our prison was suddenly lighted-that is to say, it became filled with a luminous matter, so strong that I could not bear it at first. In its whiteness and intensity I recognized the electric light which played round the submarine boat like a magnificent phenomenon of phosphorescence. After shutting my eyes involuntarily, I opened them and saw that this luminous agent came from a half-globe, unpolished, placed in the roof of the cabin.
That is evident, I replied; and for the sake of arch?ologists let us hope that these excavations will be made sooner or later, when new towns are established on the isthmus, after the construction of the Suez Canal; a canal, however, very useless to a vessel like the Nautilus. For six months war was waged with various fortune in the leading articles of the Geographical Institution of Brazil, the Royal Academy of Science of Berlin, the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, in the discussions of the Indian Archipelago, of the Cosmos of the Abbe Moigno, in the Mittheilungen of Petermann, in the scientific chronicles of the great journals of France and other countries. The cheaper journals replied keenly and with inexhaustible zest. These satirical writers parodied a remark of Linn?us, quoted by the adversaries of the monster, maintaining that nature did not make fools, and adjured their contemporaries not to give the lie to nature, by admitting the existence of krakens, sea-serpents, Moby Dicks, and other lucubrations of delirious sailors. At length an article in a well-known satirical journal by a favorite contributor, the chief of the staff, settled the monster, like Hippolytus, giving it the death-blow amid a universal burst of laughter. Wit had conquered science. Yes, confound it! Yes, answered Ned Land, it is superb! I am mad at being obliged to admit it. No one has ever seen anything like it; but the sight may cost us dear. And if I must say all, I think we are seeing here things which God never intended man to see.
And indeed the table was laid. Evidently Captain Nemo had given this order at the same time that he had hastened the speed of the Nautilus. On the 15th of May we were at the extreme south of the Bank of Newfoundland. This bank consists of alluvia, or large heaps of organic matter, brought either from the equator by the Gulf Stream, or from the North Pole by the counter-current of cold water which skirts the American coast. There also are heaped up those erratic blocks which are carried along by the broken ice; and close by, a vast charnel-house of mollusks or zoophytes, which perish here by millions. The depth of the sea is not great at Newfoundland-not more than some hundreds of fathoms; but toward the south is a depression of 1,500 fathoms. There the Gulf Stream widens. It loses some of its speed and some of its temperature, but it becomes a sea. Let us try it, I said resolutely.