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Home -> Jules Verne -> A Journey to the Center of the Earth -> Chapter 33

A Journey to the Center of the Earth - Chapter 33

1. Preface

2. Chapter 1

3. Chapter 2

4. Chapter 3

5. Chapter 4

6. Chapter 5

7. Chapter 6

8. Chapter 7

9. Chapter 8

10. Chapter 9

11. Chapter 10

12. Chapter 11

13. Chapter 12

14. Chapter 13

15. Chapter 14

16. Chapter 15

17. Chapter 16

18. Chapter 17

19. Chapter 18

20. Chapter 19

21. Chapter 20

22. Chapter 21

23. Chapter 22

24. Chapter 23

25. Chapter 24

26. Chapter 25

27. Chapter 26

28. Chapter 27

29. Chapter 28

30. Chapter 29

31. Chapter 30

32. Chapter 31

33. Chapter 32

34. Chapter 33

35. Chapter 34

36. Chapter 35

37. Chapter 36

38. Chapter 37

39. Chapter 38

40. Chapter 39

41. Chapter 40

42. Chapter 41

43. Chapter 42

44. Chapter 43

45. Chapter 44

46. Chapter 45







CHAPTER XXXIII.

A BATTLE OF MONSTERS

SATURDAY, AUGUST 15.--The sea unbroken all round. No land in
sight. The horizon seems extremely distant.

My head is still stupefied with the vivid reality of my dream.

My uncle has had no dreams, but he is out of temper. He examines the
horizon all round with his glass, and folds his arms with the air of
an injured man.

I remark that Professor Liedenbrock has a tendency to relapse into an
impatient mood, and I make a note of it in my log. All my danger and
sufferings were needed to strike a spark of human. feeling out of
him; but now that I am well his nature has resumed its sway. And yet,
what cause was there for anger? Is not the voyage prospering as
favourably as possible under the circumstances? Is not the raft
spinning along with marvellous speed?

"-You seem anxious, my uncle," I said, seeing him continually with
his glass to his eye.

"Anxious! No, not at all."

"Impatient, then?"

"One might be, with less reason than now."

"Yet we are going very fast."

"What does that signify? I am not complaining that the rate is slow,
but that the sea is so wide."

I then remembered that the Professor, before starting, had estimated
the length of this underground sea at thirty leagues. Now we had made
three times the distance, yet still the southern coast was not in
sight.

"We are not descending as we ought to be," the Professor declares.
"We are losing time, and the fact is, I have not come all this way to
take a little sail upon a pond on a raft."

He called this sea a pond, and our long voyage, taking a little sail!

"But," I remarked, "since we have followed the road that Saknussemm
has shown us--"

"That is just the question. Have we followed that road? Did
Saknussemm meet this sheet of water? Did he cross it? Has not the
stream that we followed led us altogether astray?"

"At any rate we cannot feel sorry to have come so far. This prospect
is magnificent, and--"

"But I don't care for prospects. I came with an object, and I mean to
attain it. Therefore don't talk to me about views and prospects."

I take this as my answer, and I leave the Professor to bite his lips
with impatience. At six in the evening Hans asks for his wages, and
his three rix dollars are counted out to him.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 16. Nothing new. Weather unchanged. The wind
freshens. On awaking, my first thought was to observe the intensity
of the light. I was possessed with an apprehension lest the electric
light should grow dim, or fail altogether. But there seemed no reason
to fear. The shadow of the raft was clearly outlined upon the surface
of the waves.

Truly this sea is of infinite width. It must be as wide as the
Mediterranean or the Atlantic--and why not?

My uncle took soundings several times. He tied the heaviest of our
pickaxes to a long rope which he let down two hundred fathoms. No
bottom yet; and we had some difficulty in hauling up our plummet.

But when the pick was shipped again, Hans pointed out on its surface
deep prints as if it had been violently compressed between two hard
bodies.

I looked at the hunter.

"TANDER," said he.

I could not understand him, and turned to my uncle who was entirely
absorbed in his calculations. I had rather not disturb him while he
is quiet. I return to the Icelander. He by a snapping motion of his
jaws conveys his ideas to me.

"Teeth!" I cried, considering the iron bar with more attention.

Yes, indeed, those are the marks of teeth imprinted upon the metal!
The jaws which they arm must be possessed of amazing strength. Is
there some monster beneath us belonging to the extinct races, more
voracious than the shark, more fearful in vastness than the whale? I
could not take my eyes off this indented iron bar. Surely will my
last night's dream be realised?

These thoughts agitated me all day, and my imagination scarcely
calmed down after several hours' sleep.

MONDAY, AUGUST 17. I am trying to recall the peculiar instincts
of the monsters of the preadamite world, who, coming next in
succession after the molluscs, the crustaceans and le fishes,
preceded the animals of mammalian race upon the earth. The world then
belonged to reptiles. Those monsters held the mastery in the seas of
the secondary period. They possessed a perfect organisation, gigantic
proportions, prodigious strength. The saurians of our day, the
alligators and the crocodiles, are but feeble reproductions of their
forefathers of primitive ages.

I shudder as I recall these monsters to my remembrance. No human eye
has ever beheld them living. They burdened this earth a thousand ages
before man appeared, but their fossil remains, found in the
argillaceous limestone called by the English the lias, have enabled
their colossal structure to be perfectly built up again and
anatomically ascertained.

I saw at the Hamburg museum the skeleton of one of these creatures
thirty feet in length. Am I then fated--I, a denizen of earth--to
be placed face to face with these representatives of long extinct
families? No; surely it cannot be! Yet the deep marks of conical
teeth upon the iron pick are certainly those of the crocodile.

My eyes are fearfully bent upon the sea. I dread to see one of these
monsters darting forth from its submarine caverns. I suppose
Professor Liedenbrock was of my opinion too, and even shared my
fears, for after having examined the pick, his eyes traversed the
ocean from side to side. What a very bad notion that was of his, I
thought to myself, to take soundings just here! He has disturbed some
monstrous beast in its remote den, and if we are not attacked on our
voyage--

I look at our guns and see that they are all right. My uncle notices
it, and looks on approvingly.

Already widely disturbed regions on the surface of the water indicate
some commotion below. The danger is approaching. We must be on the
look out.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 18. Evening came, or rather the time came when
sleep weighs down the weary eyelids, for there is no night here, and
the ceaseless light wearies the eyes with its persistency just as if
we were sailing under an arctic sun. Hans was at the helm. During his
watch I slept.

Two hours afterwards a terrible shock awoke me. The raft was heaved
up on a watery mountain and pitched down again, at a distance of
twenty fathoms.

"What is the matter?" shouted my uncle. "Have we struck land?"

Hans pointed with his finger at a dark mass six hundred yards away,
rising and falling alternately with heavy plunges. I looked and cried:

"It is an enormous porpoise."

"Yes," replied my uncle, "and there is a sea lizard of vast size."

"And farther on a monstrous crocodile. Look at its vast jaws and its
rows of teeth! It is diving down!"

"There's a whale, a whale!" cried the Professor. "I can see its great
fins. See how he is throwing out air and water through his blowers."

And in fact two liquid columns were rising to a considerable height
above the sea. We stood amazed, thunderstruck, at the presence of
such a herd of marine monsters. They were of supernatural dimensions;
the smallest of them would have crunched our raft, crew and all, at
one snap of its huge jaws.

Hans wants to tack to get away from this dangerous neighbourhood; but
he sees on the other hand enemies not less terrible; a tortoise forty
feet long, and a serpent of thirty, lifting its fearful head and
gleaming eyes above the flood.

Flight was out of the question now. The reptiles rose; they wheeled
around our little raft with a rapidity greater than that of express
trains. They described around us gradually narrowing circles. I took
up my rifle. But what could a ball do against the scaly armour with
which these enormous beasts were clad?

We stood dumb with fear. They approach us close: on one side the
crocodile, on the other the serpent. The remainder of the sea
monsters have disappeared. I prepare to fire. Hans stops me by a
gesture. The two monsters pass within a hundred and fifty yards of
the raft, and hurl themselves the one upon the other, with a fury
which prevents them from seeing us.

At three hundred yards from us the battle was fought. We could
distinctly observe the two monsters engaged in deadly conflict. But
it now seems to me as if the other animals were taking part in the
fray--the porpoise, the whale, the lizard, the tortoise. Every
moment I seem to see one or other of them. I point them to the
Icelander. He shakes his head negatively.

"TVA," says he.

"What two? Does he mean that there are only two animals?"

"He is right," said my uncle, whose glass has never left his eye.

"Surely you must be mistaken," I cried.

"No: the first of those monsters has a porpoise's snout, a lizard's
head, a crocodile's teeth; and hence our mistake. It is the
ichthyosaurus (the fish lizard), the most terrible of the ancient
monsters of the deep."

"And the other?"

"The other is a plesiosaurus (almost lizard), a serpent, armoured
with the carapace and the paddles of a turtle; he is the dreadful
enemy of the other."

Hans had spoken truly. Two monsters only were creating all this
commotion; and before my eyes are two reptiles of the primitive
world. I can distinguish the eye of the ichthyosaurus glowing like a
red-hot coal, and as large as a man's head. Nature has endowed it
with an optical apparatus of extreme power, and capable of resisting
the pressure of the great volume of water in the depths it inhabits.
It has been appropriately called the saurian whale, for it has both
the swiftness and the rapid movements of this monster of our own day.
This one is not less than a hundred feet long, and I can judge of its
size when it sweeps over the waters the vertical coils of its tail.
Its jaw is enormous, and according to naturalists it is armed with no
less than one hundred and eighty-two teeth.

The plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical body and a short tail,
has four flappers or paddles to act like oars. Its body is entirely
covered with a thick armour of scales, and its neck, as flexible as a
swan's, rises thirty feet above the waves.

Those huge creatures attacked each other with the greatest animosity.
They heaved around them liquid mountains, which rolled even to our
raft and rocked it perilously. Twenty times we were near capsizing.
Hissings of prodigious force are heard. The two beasts are fast
locked together; I cannot distinguish the one from the other. The
probable rage of the conqueror inspires us with intense fear.

One hour, two hours, pass away. The struggle continues with unabated
ferocity. The combatants alternately approach and recede from our
raft. We remain motionless, ready to fire. Suddenly the ichthyosaurus
and the plesiosaurus disappear below, leaving a whirlpool eddying in
the water. Several minutes pass by while the fight goes on under
water.

All at once an enormous head is darted up, the head of the
plesiosaurus. The monster is wounded to death. I no longer see his
scaly armour. Only his long neck shoots up, drops again, coils and
uncoils, droops, lashes the waters like a gigantic whip, and writhes
like a worm that you tread on. The water is splashed for a long way
around. The spray almost blinds us. But soon the reptile's agony
draws to an end; its movements become fainter, its contortions cease
to be so violent, and the long serpentine form lies a lifeless log on
the labouring deep.

As for the ichthyosaurus--has he returned to his submarine cavern?
or will he reappear on the surface of the sea?




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