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Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Chapter 15. A WALK ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
This room was, to be exact, the arsenal and wardrobe of the Nautilus.
A dozen diving suits hung on the wall, waiting for us to use them.
Ned Land, when he saw them, clearly showed that he didn't want to put one on.
"But, my good Ned, the forests of the Island of Crespo are only underwater forests."
"Great!" said the disappointed harpooner, who saw his dreams of fresh meat disappear.
"And you, Professor Aronnax, are you going to put on those clothes?"
"There's no other choice, Master Ned."
"As you wish, sir," replied the harpooner, shrugging his shoulders.
"But as for me, unless I'm forced, I'll never get into one."
"No one will force you, Master Ned," said Captain Nemo.
"Is Conseil going to risk it?" asked Ned.
"I follow my master wherever he goes," replied Conseil.
At the Captain's call, two of the crew came to help us put on these heavy, waterproof clothes.
They were made of seamless rubber and built to resist great pressure.
You could have thought they were suits of armor, both flexible and strong.
Each suit had trousers and a jacket.
The trousers ended in thick boots with heavy lead soles.
The jacket was held together by copper bands across the chest, which protected it from the water's pressure and let the lungs work freely.
The sleeves ended in gloves that didn't restrict hand movement at all.
There was a huge difference between these perfect suits and the old cork breastplates, jackets, and other devices used in the eighteenth century.
Captain Nemo, one of his companions, a sort of Hercules who must have been very strong, Conseil.
And I were soon dressed in the suits.
The only thing left was to put our heads into the metal helmets.
But before we did that, I asked the Captain's permission to examine the guns we'd carry.
One of the Nautilus men gave me a simple gun.
Its butt end was made of steel, hollow in the center, and quite large.
It served as a container for compressed air, which a valve, worked by a spring, let escape into a metal tube.
A box of projectiles in a groove inside the butt end held about twenty electric balls.
A spring pushed them into the gun's barrel.
As soon as one shot was fired, another was ready.
"Captain Nemo," I said, "this weapon is perfect and easy to use. I only ask to try it. But how will we reach the bottom of the sea?"
"Right now, Professor, the Nautilus is stuck in five fathoms of water. We just have to start."
"But how will we get out?"
"You'll see."
Captain Nemo put his head into his helmet.
Conseil and I did the same, not without hearing an ironic "Good luck!" from the Canadian.
The top of our suits ended in a copper collar, onto which the metal helmet was screwed.
Three holes, protected by thick glass, let us see in all directions by simply turning our heads inside the helmet.
As soon as it was in place, the Rouquayrol device on our backs started working.
For my part, I could breathe easily.
With the Ruhmkorff lamp hanging from my belt and the gun in my hand, I was ready to set out.
But to tell the truth, trapped in these heavy clothes and stuck to the deck by my lead soles, I couldn't take a single step.
But this problem had been planned for.
I felt myself being pushed into a small room next to the wardrobe.
My companions followed, pulled along the same way.
I heard a watertight door, with stopper plates, close behind us, and we were wrapped in complete darkness.
After a few minutes, I heard a loud hissing sound.
I felt cold rise from my feet to my chest.
Clearly, from some part of the ship, they had opened a tap to let water in.
It filled the room, then a second door in the side of the Nautilus opened.
We saw a faint light, a moment later, our feet touched the bottom of the sea.
And now, how can I describe the impression that walk under the waters left on me?
Words can't express such wonders! Captain Nemo walked in front.
His companion followed a few steps behind.
Conseil and I stayed close to each other, as if we could exchange words through our metal helmets.
I no longer felt the weight of my clothes, shoes, air tank, or thick helmet, in which my head rattled like an almond.
The light, which lit the ground thirty feet below the ocean's surface, amazed me with its strength.
The sun's rays shone through the water easily and removed all color.
I could clearly see objects at a distance of a hundred and fifty yards.
Beyond that, the colors darkened into fine shades of deep blue and faded into vague darkness.
Truly, this water around me was just another kind of air, denser than the earth's atmosphere but almost as clear.
Above me was the calm surface of the sea.
We were walking on fine, even sand.
It wasn't wrinkled like on a flat shore that keeps the marks of waves.
This bright carpet, really a reflector, pushed back the sun's rays with amazing power, which explained the vibration that went through every drop of water.
Will you believe me when I say that, at a depth of thirty feet, I could see as if I were in broad daylight?
For a quarter of an hour, I walked on this sand, covered with the invisible dust of shells.
The hull of the Nautilus, like a long sandbank, slowly disappeared.
But its lantern, when darkness overtook us in the water, would help guide us back to the ship with its clear rays.
Soon I could see shapes in the distance.
I recognized magnificent rocks, covered with a tapestry of the most beautiful kinds of sea creatures.
I was first struck by the strange effect of this environment.
It was then ten in the morning.
The sun's rays hit the surface of the waves at a rather slanted angle.
At their touch, broken by refraction through a prism, flowers, rocks, plants, shells, and sea creatures were edged with seven colors.
It was wonderful, a feast for the eyes, this mix of colored shades, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue.
In one word, the whole palette of an excited painter!
Why couldn't I share with Conseil the lively feelings that rose in my mind and match him in expressions of wonder?
For all I knew, Captain Nemo and his companion might be able to exchange thoughts using signs they had agreed on before.
So, for lack of anything better, I talked to myself.
I spoke inside the copper box that covered my head, using up more air in useless words than was probably wise.
Various kinds of coral, clusters of pure tuft-coral, prickly fungi, and sea anemones formed a brilliant garden of flowers.
It was decorated with porphitae with collars of blue tentacles, sea stars dotting the sand, and asterophytons like lace embroidered by water nymphs.
Their festoons were waved by the gentle movements caused by our walk.
It was a real pain for me to crush under my feet the brilliant shellfish that covered the ground by the thousands.
There were hammer-heads, donaciae, real bouncing shells, staircases, red helmet-shells, angel-wings, and many others produced by this endless ocean.
But we had to walk, so we went on.
Above our heads waved groups of physalides, leaving their tentacles to float behind them.
Medusae, with their umbrellas of opal or rose-pink, edged with a band of blue, sheltered us from the sun's rays.
And fiery pelagiae, which in the darkness would have lit our path with phosphorescent light.
I saw all these wonders in the space of a quarter of a mile, hardly stopping, following Captain Nemo, who waved me on with signs.
Soon the nature of the ground changed.
The sandy plain was followed by an area of sticky mud, which Americans call "ooze," made of equal parts of silicious and calcareous shells.
Then we traveled over a plain of seaweed with wild and rich growth.
This ground was thick and soft underfoot, as good as the softest carpet made by human hands.
But while green plants spread at our feet, they didn't leave our heads bare.
A light network of sea plants, from that endless family of seaweeds of which more than two thousand kinds are known, grew on the water's surface.
I saw long ribbons of fucus floating, some round, others lumpy.
There were laurenciae and cladostephi with the most delicate leaves, and some rhodomeniae palmatae, like the fan of a cactus.
I noticed that the green plants stayed closer to the top of the sea.
The red ones were at a greater depth.
The black or brown water plants formed gardens and flowerbeds in the far beds of the ocean.
We had left the Nautilus about an hour and a half earlier.
It was near noon, I knew this because the sun's rays were straight above and no longer bent.
The magical colors disappeared little by little, and the shades of emerald and sapphire faded.
We walked with a steady step, which hit the ground with amazing loudness.
The slightest noise traveled with a speed that the ear isn't used to on earth.
In fact, water carries sound better than air, in a ratio of four to one.
At this point, the ground sloped downward, the light became a single shade.
We were at a depth of a hundred and five yards and twenty inches, under a pressure of six atmospheres.
At this depth, I could still see the sun's rays, though weakly.
Their intense brightness had been replaced by a reddish twilight, the lowest state between day and night.
But we could still see well enough.
We didn't need to use the Ruhmkorff device yet, At this moment, Captain Nemo stopped.
He waited until I joined him, then pointed to a dark mass, appearing in the shadow, a short distance away.
"It's the forest of the Island of Crespo," I thought.
And I wasn't wrong, the forest truly lay there, dark and near.