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A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH - 29

A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH

By Jules Verne

CHAPTER 29

ON THE WATERS--A RAFT VOYAGE

On the thirteenth of August we were up betimes. There was no time to be

lost. We now had to inaugurate a new kind of locomotion, which would

have the advantage of being rapid and not fatiguing.

A mast, made of two pieces of wood fastened together, to give additional

strength, a yard made from another one, the sail a linen sheet from our

bed. We were fortunately in no want of cordage, and the whole on trial

appeared solid and seaworthy.

At six o'clock in the morning, when the eager and enthusiastic Professor

gave the signal to embark, the victuals, the luggage, all our

instruments, our weapons, and a goodly supply of sweet water, which we

had collected from springs in the rocks, were placed on the raft.

Hans had, with considerable ingenuity, contrived a rudder, which enabled

him to guide the floating apparatus with ease. He took the tiller, as a

matter of course. The worthy man was as good a sailor as he was a guide

and duck hunter. I then let go the painter which held us to the shore,

the sail was brought to the wind, and we made a rapid offing.

Our sea voyage had at length commenced; and once more we were making for

distant and unknown regions.

Just as we were about to leave the little port where the raft had been

constructed, my uncle, who was very strong as to geographic

nomenclature, wanted to give it a name, and among others, suggested

mine.

"Well," said I, "before you decide I have another to propose."

"Well; out with it."

"I should like to call it Gretchen. Port Gretchen will sound very well

on our future map."

"Well then, Port Gretchen let it be," said the Professor.

And thus it was that the memory of my dear girl was attached to our

adventurous and memorable expedition.

When we left the shore the wind was blowing from the northward and

eastward. We went directly before the wind at a much greater speed than

might have been expected from a raft. The dense layers of atmosphere at

that depth had great propelling power and acted upon the sail with

considerable force.

At the end of an hour, my uncle, who had been taking careful

observations, was enabled to judge of the rapidity with which we moved.

It was far beyond anything seen in the upper world.

"If," he said, "we continue to advance at our present rate, we shall

have traveled at least thirty leagues in twenty-four hours. With a mere

raft this is an almost incredible velocity."

I certainly was surprised, and without making any reply went forward

upon the raft. Already the northern shore was fading away on the edge of

the horizon. The two shores appeared to separate more and more, leaving

a wide and open space for our departure. Before me I could see nothing

but the vast and apparently limitless sea--upon which we floated--the

only living objects in sight.

Huge and dark clouds cast their grey shadows below--shadows which seemed

to crush that colorless and sullen water by their weight. Anything more

suggestive of gloom and of regions of nether darkness I never beheld.

Silvery rays of electric light, reflected here and there upon some small

spots of water, brought up luminous sparkles in the long wake of our

cumbrous bark. Presently we were wholly out of sight of land; not a

vestige could be seen, nor any indication of where we were going. So

still and motionless did we seem without any distant point to fix our

eyes on that but for the phosphoric light at the wake of the raft I

should have fancied that we were still and motionless.

But I knew that we were advancing at a very rapid rate.

About twelve o'clock in the day, vast collections of seaweed were

discovered surrounding us on all sides. I was aware of the extraordinary

vegetative power of these plants, which have been known to creep along

the bottom of the great ocean, and stop the advance of large ships. But

never were seaweeds ever seen, so gigantic and wonderful as those of the

Central Sea. I could well imagine how, seen at a distance, tossing and

heaving on the summit of the billows, the long lines of algae have been

taken for living things, and thus have been fertile sources of the

belief in sea serpents.

Our raft swept past great specimens of fucus or seawrack, from three to

four thousand feet in length, immense, incredibly long, looking like

snakes that stretched out far beyond our horizon. It afforded me great

amusement to gaze on their variegated ribbon-like endless lengths. Hour

after hour passed without our coming to the termination of these

floating weeds. If my astonishment increased, my patience was well-nigh

exhausted.

What natural force could possibly have produced such abnormal and

extraordinary plants? What must have been the aspect of the globe,

during the first centuries of its formation, when under the combined

action of heat and humidity, the vegetable kingdom occupied its vast

surface to the exclusion of everything else?

These were considerations of never-ending interest for the geologist and

the philosopher.

All this while we were advancing on our journey; and at length night

came; but as I had remarked the evening before, the luminous state of

the atmosphere was in nothing diminished. Whatever was the cause, it was

a phenomenon upon the duration of which we could calculate with

certainty.

As soon as our supper had been disposed of, and some little speculative

conversation indulged in, I stretched myself at the foot of the mast,

and presently went to sleep.

Hans remained motionless at the tiller, allowing the raft to rise and

fall on the waves. The wind being aft, and the sail square, all he had

to do was to keep his oar in the centre.

Ever since we had taken our departure from the newly named Port

Gretchen, my worthy uncle had directed me to keep a regular log of our

day's navigation, with instructions to put down even the most minute

particulars, every interesting and curious phenomenon, the direction of

the wind, our rate of sailing, the distance we went; in a word, every

incident of our extraordinary voyage.

From our log, therefore, I tell the story of our voyage on the Central

Sea.

Friday, August 14th. A steady breeze from the northwest. Raft

progressing with extreme rapidity, and going perfectly straight. Coast

still dimly visible about thirty leagues to leeward. Nothing to be seen

beyond the horizon in front. The extraordinary intensity of the light

neither increases nor diminishes. It is singularly stationary. The

weather remarkably fine; that is to say, the clouds have ascended very

high, and are light and fleecy, and surrounded by an atmosphere

resembling silver in fusion.

Thermometer, +32 degrees centigrade.

About twelve o'clock in the day our guide Hans having prepared and

baited a hook, cast his line into the subterranean waters. The bait he

used was a small piece of meat, by means of which he concealed his hook.

Anxious as I was, I was for a long time doomed to disappointment. Were

these waters supplied with fish or not? That was the important question.

No--was my decided answer. Then there came a sudden and rather hard tug.

Hans coolly drew it in, and with it a fish, which struggled violently to

escape.

"A fish!" cried my uncle.

"It is a sturgeon!" I cried, "certainly a small sturgeon."

The Professor examined the fish carefully, noting every characteristic;

and he did not coincide in my opinion. The fish had a flat head, round

body, and the lower extremities covered with bony scales; its mouth was

wholly without teeth, the pectoral fins, which were highly developed,

sprouted direct from the body, which properly speaking had no tail. The

animal certainly belonged to the order in which naturalists class the

sturgeon, but it differed from that fish in many essential particulars.

My uncle, after all, was not mistaken. After a long and patient

examination, he said:

"This fish, my dear boy, belongs to a family which has been extinct for

ages, and of which no trace has ever been found on earth, except fossil

remains in the Devonian strata."

"You do not mean to say," I cried, "that we have captured a live

specimen of a fish belonging to the primitive stock that existed before

the deluge?"

"We have," said the Professor, who all this time was continuing his

observations, "and you may see by careful examination that these fossil

fish have no identity with existing species. To hold in one's hand,

therefore, a living specimen of the order, is enough to make a

naturalist happy for life."

"But," cried I, "to what family does it belong?"

"To the order of Ganoides--an order of fish having angular scales,

covered with bright enamel--forming one of the family of the

Cephalaspides, of the genus--"

"Well, sir," I remarked, as I noticed my uncle hesitated to conclude.

"To the genus Pterychtis--yes, I am certain of it. Still, though I am

confident of the correctness of my surmise, this fish offers to our

notice a remarkable peculiarity, never known to exist in any other fish

but those which are the natives of subterranean waters, wells, lakes, in

caverns, and suchlike hidden pools."

"And what may that be?"

"It is blind."

"Blind!" I cried, much surprised.

"Not only blind," continued the Professor, "but absolutely without

organs of sight."

I now examined our discovery for myself. It was singular, to be sure,

but it was really a fact. This, however, might be a solitary instance, I

suggested. The hook was baited again and once more thrown into the

water. This subterranean ocean must have been tolerably well supplied

with fish, for in two hours we took a large number of Pterychtis, as

well as other fish belonging to another supposed extinct family--the

Dipterides (a genus of fish, furnished with two fins only, whence the

name), though my uncle could not class it exactly. All, without

exception, however, were blind. This unexpected capture enabled us to

renew our stock of provisions in a very satisfactory way.

We were now convinced that this subterranean sea contained only fish

known to us as fossil specimens--and fish and reptiles alike were all

the more perfect the farther back they dated their origin.

We began to hope that we should find some of those saurians which

science has succeeded in reconstructing from bits of bone or cartilage.

I took up the telescope and carefully examined the horizon--looked over

the whole sea; it was utterly and entirely deserted. Doubtless we were

still too near the coast.

After an examination of the ocean, I looked upward, towards the strange

and mysterious sky. Why should not one of the birds reconstructed by the

immortal Cuvier flap his stupendous wings aloft in the dull strata of

subterranean air? It would, of course, find quite sufficient food from

the fish in the sea. I gazed for some time upon the void above. It was

as silent and as deserted as the shores we had but lately left.

Nevertheless, though I could neither see nor discover anything, my

imagination carried me away into wild hypotheses. I was in a kind of

waking dream. I thought I saw on the surface of the water those enormous

antediluvian turtles as big as floating islands. Upon those dull and

somber shores passed a spectral row of the mammifers of early days, the

great Liptotherium found in the cavernous hollow of the Brazilian hills,

the Mesicotherium, a native of the glacial regions of Siberia.

Farther on, the pachydermatous Lophrodon, that gigantic tapir, which

concealed itself behind rocks, ready to do battle for its prey with the

Anoplotherium, a singular animal partaking of the nature of the

rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus and the camel.

There was the giant Mastodon, twisting and turning his horrid trunk,

with which he crushed the rocks of the shore to powder, while the

Megatherium--his back raised like a cat in a passion, his enormous claws

stretched out, dug into the earth for food, at the same time that he

awoke the sonorous echoes of the whole place with his terrible roar.

Higher up still, the first monkey ever seen on the face of the globe

clambered, gamboling and playing up the granite hills. Still farther

away, ran the Pterodactyl, with the winged hand, gliding or rather

sailing through the dense and compressed air like a huge bat.

Above all, near the leaden granitic sky, were immense birds, more

powerful than the cassowary and the ostrich, which spread their mighty

wings and fluttered against the huge stone vault of the inland sea.

I thought, such was the effect of my imagination, that I saw this whole

tribe of antediluvian creatures. I carried myself back to far ages, long

before man existed--when, in fact, the earth was in too imperfect a

state for him to live upon it.

My dream was of countless ages before the existence of man. The

mammifers first disappeared, then the mighty birds, then the reptiles of

the secondary period, presently the fish, the crustacea, the mollusks,

and finally the vertebrata. The zoophytes of the period of transition in

their turn sank into annihilation.

The whole panorama of the world's life before the historic period,

seemed to be born over again, and mine was the only human heart that

beat in this unpeopled world! There were no more seasons; there were no

more climates; the natural heat of the world increased unceasingly, and

neutralized that of the great radiant Sun.

Vegetation was exaggerated in an extraordinary manner. I passed like a

shadow in the midst of brushwood as lofty as the giant trees of

California, and trod underfoot the moist and humid soil, reeking with a

rank and varied vegetation.

I leaned against the huge column-like trunks of giant trees, to which

those of Canada were as ferns. Whole ages passed, hundreds upon hundreds

of years were concentrated into a single day.

Next, unrolled before me like a panorama, came the great and wondrous

series of terrestrial transformations. Plants disappeared; the granitic

rocks lost all trace of solidity; the liquid state was suddenly

substituted for that which had before existed. This was caused by

intense heat acting on the organic matter of the earth. The waters

flowed over the whole surface of the globe; they boiled; they were

volatilized, or turned into vapor; a kind of steam cloud wrapped the

whole earth, the globe itself becoming at last nothing but one huge

sphere of gas, indescribable in color, between white heat and red, as

big and as brilliant as the sun.

In the very centre of this prodigious mass, fourteen hundred thousand

times as large as our globe, I was whirled round in space, and brought

into close conjunction with the planets. My body was subtilized, or

rather became volatile, and commingled in a state of atomic vapor, with

the prodigious clouds, which rushed forward like a mighty comet into

infinite space!

What an extraordinary dream! Where would it finally take me? My feverish

hand began to write down the marvelous details--details more like the

imaginings of a lunatic than anything sober and real. I had during this

period of hallucination forgotten everything--the Professor, the guide,

and the raft on which we were floating. My mind was in a state of

semioblivion.

"What is the matter, Harry?" said my uncle suddenly.

My eyes, which were wide opened like those of a somnambulist, were fixed

upon him, but I did not see him, nor could I clearly make out anything

around me.

"Take care, my boy," again cried my uncle, "you will fall into the sea."

As he uttered these words, I felt myself seized on the other side by the

firm hand of our devoted guide. Had it not been for the presence of mind

of Hans, I must infallibly have fallen into the waves and been drowned.

"Have you gone mad?" cried my uncle, shaking me on the other side.

"What--what is the matter?" I said at last, coming to myself.

"Are you ill, Henry?" continued the Professor in an anxious tone.

"No--no; but I have had an extraordinary dream. It, however, has passed

away. All now seems well," I added, looking around me with strangely

puzzled eyes.

"All right," said my uncle; "a beautiful breeze, a splendid sea. We are

going along at a rapid rate, and if I am not out in my calculations we

shall soon see land. I shall not be sorry to exchange the narrow limits

of our raft for the mysterious strand of the subterranean ocean."

As my uncle uttered these words, I rose and carefully scanned the

horizon. But the line of water was still confounded with the lowering

clouds that hung aloft, and in the distance appeared to touch the edge

of the water.