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Journey to the Center of the Earth
Chapter 30. TERRIFIC SAURIAN COMBAT
Saturday, August 15th, the sea still keeps the same dull sameness.
The same leaden color and the same constant glare from above.
There's no sign of land anywhere, the horizon seems to move back from us more and more as we go.
My head is still dull and heavy from the effects of my strange dream, which I can't yet get out of my mind.
The Professor, who hasn't dreamed, is however in one of his gloomy and odd moods.
He spends his time looking at the horizon in every direction.
He keeps his telescope to his eyes and, seeing nothing to guide us, adopts a military pose and paces anxiously.
I noticed that my uncle, the Professor, has a strong tendency to go back to his old impatient character.
And I couldn't help putting this unpleasant point in my journal.
I saw clearly that it had taken the danger and pain I went through to make him show a spark of human feeling.
Now that I was well again, his original nature had won and taken control.
And, after all, what had he to be angry about now more than at any other time?
Wasn't the journey being made in the best conditions?
Wasn't the raft moving at a most wonderful speed?
What, then, could be the matter? After a few short coughs, I decided to ask.
"You seem worried, Uncle," I said, when for about the hundredth time he put down his telescope and walked up and down, muttering to himself.
"No, I'm not worried," he replied in a dry harsh tone, "by no means."
"Maybe I should have said impatient," I replied, making my remark softer.
"Enough to make me so, I think."
"And yet we're moving at a speed seldom reached by a raft," I said.
"What does that matter?" cried my uncle.
"I'm not angry about the speed, but I'm annoyed to find the sea so much larger than I thought."
I then remembered that the Professor, before we left, had guessed the length of this underground ocean to be at most about thirty leagues.
Now we had traveled at least three times that distance without finding any trace of the distant shore.
I began to understand my uncle's anger.
"We aren't going down," suddenly cried the Professor.
"We aren't making our great discoveries."
"All this is a total waste of time."
"After all, I didn't come from home to start a pleasure trip."
"This voyage on a raft over a pond annoys and tires me."
He called this daring journey a pleasure trip, and this great inland sea a pond!
"But," I argued, "if we have followed the route shown by the great Saknussemm, we can't be going very wrong."
"'That's the question,' as the great, the immortal Shakespeare, says."
"Are we following the route shown by that wonderful sage?"
"Did Saknussemm ever find this great body of water?"
"If he did, did he cross it?"
"I begin to fear the small river we took as a guide has led us the wrong way."
"In any case, we can never regret having come this far. It's worth the whole trip to have seen this magnificent sight. It's something to have seen."
"I care nothing about seeing, nor about magnificent sights."
"I came down into the center of the earth with an aim, and I mean to reach that aim."
"Don't talk to me about admiring scenery, or any other sentimental rubbish."
After this I thought it best to keep quiet, and let the Professor bite his lips until they bled, without another word.
At six in the evening Hans asked for his week's pay and, after receiving his three rix-dollars, put them in his pocket.
He was perfectly content and satisfied, his face calm as he pocketed the coins.
Sunday, August 16th, Nothing new to write.
The same weather as before, the wind has a small tendency to get stronger, with signs of a coming storm.
When I woke, my first thought was about the strength of the light.
I keep fearing, day after day, that the strange electric light will first grow dim, and then go out completely, leaving us in total darkness.
Nothing like that happens, the shadow of the raft, its mast and sails, is clearly seen on the surface of the water.
This wonderful sea is, after all, endless in its reach.
It must be quite as wide as the Mediterranean, or perhaps even as wide as the great Atlantic Ocean.
Why, after all, shouldn't it be so?
My uncle has more than once tried deep-sea soundings.
He tied the cross of one of our heaviest crowbars to the end of a cord, which he let out to two hundred fathoms.
We had the greatest difficulty in pulling up our unusual kind of lead.
When the crowbar was finally drawn up, Hans called my attention to some strange marks on its surface.
The piece of iron looked as if it had been crushed between two very hard things.
I looked at our worthy guide with a questioning look.
"Tander," said he.
Of course I didn't understand, I turned to my uncle, lost in gloomy thoughts.
I didn't want to disturb him from his thinking.
So I turned again to our worthy Icelander.
Hans quietly opened his mouth a couple of times, as if biting, and thus made me understand his meaning.
"Teeth!" cried I, with astonishment, as I looked at the iron bar more closely.
Yes, there can be no doubt about it.
The marks on the bar of iron are marks of teeth.
What jaws must the owner of such molars have had!
Have we then come on a monster of unknown kind, which still lives in the great waste of waters?
A monster more greedy than a shark, more terrible and large than the whale?
I can't take my eyes off the bar of iron, which is actually half crushed.
Is my dream about to come true, then, as a dread and terrible reality?
All day my thoughts were on these ideas, and my imagination hardly found calm and the power to think clearly again until after a long sleep.
This day, as on other Sundays, we observed as a day of rest and quiet thought.
Monday, August 17th. The day dawned grey and cool, with the sea strangely calm.
I have been trying to remember the habits of those ancient animals of the secondary period.
These animals lived after the molluscs, the crustaceans, and the fish, but before the appearance of mammals.
The generation of reptiles then ruled the earth.
These horrible monsters controlled everything in the seas of the secondary period, which formed the layers of rock that make up the Jura mountains.
Nature had given them perfect bodies, What a giant form they had and what vast and amazing strength they showed.
The living saurians include animals like lizards, crocodiles, and alligators, even the biggest and most fearsome of their kind.
They are only weak copies of their mighty ancestors, the animals of long ago.
If there were giants in ancient days, there were also giant animals.
I shivered as I brought back to my mind the idea and memory of these awful monsters.
No human eye had seen them alive.
They walked on the face of the earth thousands of ages before man existed.
Their fossil bones, found in the limestone, have let us rebuild their forms and so gain some faint idea of their colossal shape.
I remember once seeing in the great Museum of Hamburg the skeleton of one of these amazing saurians.
It measured no less than thirty feet from nose to tail.
Am I then a person of the present day, likely to find myself face to face with a member of this ancient family?
I can hardly believe it possible, I can hardly believe it true.
And yet these marks of powerful teeth on the iron bar.
Can there be any doubt from their shape that the bite is the bite of a crocodile?
My eyes stare wildly and with terror at the underground sea.
Every moment I expect one of these monsters to rise from its enormous deep.
I think the worthy Professor shares my thoughts, if not my fears.
After a careful look at the crowbar, he quickly swept his eyes over the vast, mysterious ocean.
"What could have made him leave the land,"
I thought, "as if the depth of this water mattered to us."
"I thought, "No doubt he has disturbed some terrible monster in its water home, and perhaps we'll pay dearly for our boldness.
Anxious to be ready for the worst, I checked our weapons, and saw they were fit for use.
My uncle watched me and nodded his head in approval.
He too has noticed what we might fear.
Already the rising of the water on the surface shows that something is moving below.
The danger is coming, it comes nearer and nearer, we must be on the watch.
Tuesday, August 18th, Evening came at last, the time when the desire for sleep makes our eyelids heavy.
There isn't really night in this place any more than there's in summer in the arctic regions.
Hans, however, stays fixed at the rudder.
When he takes a moment of rest I can't say.
I use his watchfulness to get some sleep.
But two hours later I was woken from a deep sleep by a terrible shock.
The raft seemed to have struck a sunken rock.
It was lifted out of the water by some strange and powerful force, and then thrown twenty fathoms away.
"Hey, what's it?" cried my uncle, starting up.
"Are we shipwrecked, or what?"
Hans raised his hand and pointed to where, about two hundred yards off, a large black mass was moving up and down.
I looked with fear, My worst thoughts were true.
"It's a colossal monster!" I cried, clasping my hands.
"Yes," cried the excited Professor, "and there yonder is a huge sea lizard of terrible size and shape."
"And farther on behold a prodigious crocodile. Look at his horrible jaws, and that row of monstrous teeth. Ha! he has gone."
"A whale! a whale!" shouted the Professor, "I can see her enormous fins. See, see, how she blows air and water!"
Two liquid columns rose to a great height above the sea, into which they fell with a terrible crash, waking the echoes of that awful place.
We stood still surprised, stunned, and terror-struck at the sight of this group of fearful sea monsters, more horrible in real life than in my dream.
They were of unnatural size, the smallest of them could easily have crushed our raft and us with one bite.
Hans, seizing the rudder which had flown from his hand, put it hard aweather to get away from such dangerous near.
But no sooner did he do so than he found he was moving from Scylla to Charybdis.
To leeward was a turtle about forty feet wide, and a serpent quite as long, with an enormous and ugly head coming out of the water.
Look where we'll, it's impossible for us to escape.
The fearful reptiles moved toward us, they turned and twisted around the raft with terrible speed.
They formed around our doomed vessel a series of circles.
I picked up my rifle in desperation.
But what effect can a rifle ball have on the armor plates that cover the bodies of these horrible monsters?
We stay still and silent from complete horror.
They move toward us nearer and nearer.
Our fate looks certain, dreadful and terrible.
On one side the mighty crocodile, on the other the great sea serpent.
The rest of the fearful group of sea wonders have dived under the salt waves and disappeared.
I'm about to fire at any cost and try a shot.
Hans, the guide, however, stopped me with a sign.
The two horrible and greedy monsters passed within fifty fathoms of the raft, and then rushed at one another.
Their fury and rage kept them from seeing us.
The fight began, we clearly saw every action of the two horrible creatures.
But in my excited imagination the other animals seemed about to join the fierce and deadly fight.
The monster, the whale, the lizard, and the turtle.
I clearly saw them every moment, I pointed them out to the Icelander, but he only shook his head.
"Tva," he said.
"What, two only does he say? Surely he's wrong," I cried in a tone of wonder.
"He's quite right," replied my uncle calmly and with reason, looking at the terrible duel with his telescope and speaking as if he were in a lecture room.
"How can that be?"
"Yes, it's so."
"The first of these horrible monsters has the snout of a porpoise, the head of a lizard, the teeth of a crocodile."
"It's this mix that has deceived us."
"It's the most fearful of all ancient reptiles, the world famous Ichthyosaurus or great fish lizard."
"And the other?"
"The other is a monstrous serpent, hidden under the hard domed shell of the turtle, the terrible enemy of its fierce rival, the Plesiosaurus or sea crocodile."
Hans was right, the two monsters only disturbed the surface of the sea.
At last have human eyes looked upon two reptiles of the great ancient ocean.
I see the burning red eyes of the Ichthyosaurus, each as big or bigger than a man's head.
Nature in its endless wisdom had given this wonderful sea animal an optical system of great power.
It was able to stand the pressure of the heavy layers of water that lay above him in the depths where he usually fed.
He has rightly been called the whale of the saurian race, for he's as large and quick in his moves as our king of the seas.
This one measures not less than a hundred feet in length.
And I can form some idea of his bulk when I see him lift his enormous tail out of the water.
His jaw is of awful size and strength and, according to the best informed naturalists, it holds not less than one hundred and eighty two teeth.
The other was the Plesiosaurus, a serpent with round trunk, stubby tail and fins like a bank of oars in a Roman galley.
Its whole body was covered by a carapace or shell.
Its neck, as flexible as a swan's, rose more than thirty feet above the waves, a tower of living flesh.
These animals attacked each other with a fury that's hard to imagine.
Such a fight had never been seen by human eyes, to us it seemed more like the unreal creation of a dream.
They lifted mountains of water, which dashed spray over the raft, already tossed by the waves.
Twenty times we seemed about to be overturned and thrown into the waves.
Hideous hisses seemed to shake the dark granite roof of that great cavern, hisses that filled us with terror.
The terrible fighters held each other in a tight grasp.
I couldn't tell one from the other.
Still the fight couldn't last forever, and woe to us whichever became the winner.
One hour, two hours, three hours passed without any clear result.
The struggle went on with the same deadly stubbornness, but without change.
The deadly foes now came near, now drew away from the raft.
Once or twice we thought they were going to leave us completely, but instead they came nearer and nearer.
We crouched on the raft ready to fire at a moment's notice, poor as the chance of hurting or frightening them was.
Still we were determined not to die without a fight.
Suddenly the Ichthyosaurus and the Plesiosaurus sank below the waves, leaving behind them a whirlpool in the middle of the sea.
We were nearly pulled down by the inward rush of the water.
Several minutes passed before anything was seen again.
Was this great fight to end in the depths of the ocean?
Was the last act of this terrible drama to take place without witnesses?
We couldn't say what would happen next, and stood there in anxious silence.
Suddenly, not far from us, an enormous mass rose out of the water, the head of the great Plesiosaurus.
The terrible monster is now wounded to death.
I can see nothing now of his huge body.
All that's seen is his serpent like neck which he twists and curls in the pains of death.
Now he strikes the water with it as if it were a giant whip, and then again wriggles like a worm cut into two.
The water is flung up a great distance in all directions.
Much of it swept over our raft and nearly blinded us.
But soon the end of the beast came nearer and nearer.
His movements slowed visibly and his struggles almost stopped.
At last the body of the mighty snake lay an inactive dead mass on the surface of the now calm and peaceful waters.
As for the Ichthyosaurus, has he gone down to his great cave under the sea to rest, or will he come up again to destroy us?
This question stayed without an answer, and we had a little time to breathe.