The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne (best fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

opening rose eight feet above the water, like the arch of a bridge.

Looking in, the engineer saw a black object floating on the surface. He drew it toward him. It was a canoe made of sheet-iron bolted together. It was tied to a projecting rock inside the cavern wall. A pair of oars were under the seats.

“Get in,” said Smith.

The colonists entered the boat, Neb and Ayrton took the oars, Pencroff the tiller, and Smith, in the bows holding the lantern, lit the way.

The vault, at first very low, rose suddenly; but the darkness was too great for them to recognize the size of this cavern, its heighth and depth. An imposing silence reigned throughout this granite chamber. No sound, not even the pealing of the thunder penetrated its massive walls.

In certain parts of the world there are immense caves, a sort of natural crypts which date back to the geologic epoch. Some are invaded by the sea; others contain large lakes within their walls. Such is Fingal’s Cave, in the Island of Staffa; such are the caves of Morgat on the Bay of Douarnenez in Brittany; the caves of Bonifacio, in Corsica; those of Lyse-Fjord, in Norway; such is that immense cavern, the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, which is 500 feet high and more than twenty miles long!

As to this cavern which the colonists were exploring, did it not reach to the very centre of the island? For a quarter of an hour the canoe advanced under the directions of the engineer. At a certain moment he said:——

“Go over to the right.”

The canoe, taking this direction, brought up beside the wall. The engineer wished to observe whether the wire continued along this side.

It was there fastened to the rock.

“Forward!” said Smith.

The canoe kept on a quarter of an hour longer, and it must have been half a mile from the entrance, when Smith’s voice was heard again.

“Halt!” he exclaimed.

The canoe stopped, and the colonists saw a brilliant light illuminating the enormous crypt, so profoundly hidden in the bowels of the earth.

They were now enabled to examine this cavern of whose existence they had had no suspicion.

A vault, supported on basaltic shafts, which might all have been cast in the same mould, rose to a height of 100 feet. Fantastic arches sprung at irregular intervals from these columns, which Nature had placed here by thousands. They rose to a height of forty or fifty feet, and the water, in despite of the tumult without, quietly lapped their base. The light noticed by the engineer seized upon each prismatic point and tipped it with fire; penetrated, so to speak, the walls as if they had been diaphanous, and changed into sparkling jewels the least projections of the cavern.

Following a phenomenon of reflection, the water reproduced these different lights upon its surface, so that the canoe seemed to float between two sparkling zones.

They had not yet thought of the nature of irradiation projected by the luminous centre whose rays, straight and clear, were broken on all the angles and mouldings of the crypt. The white color of this light betrayed its origin. It was electric. It was the sun of this cavern.

On a sign from Smith, the oars fell again into the water, and the canoe proceeded towards the luminous fire, which was half a cable’s length distant.

In this place, the sheet of water measured some 300 feet across, and an enormous basaltic wall, closing all that side, was visible beyond the luminous centre. The cavern had become much enlarged, and the sea here formed a little lake. But the vault, the side walls, and those of the apsis, all the prisms, cylinders, cones, were bathed in the electric fluid.

In the centre of the lake a long fusiform object floated on the surface of the water, silent, motionless. The light escaped from its sides as from two ovens heated to a white heat. This machine, looking like the body of an enormous cetacea, was 250 feet long, and rose ten to twelve feet above the water.

The canoe approached softly. In the bows stood Smith. He was greatly excited. Suddenly he seized the arm of the reporter.

“It is he! It can be no other than he.” he cried. “He!——”

Then he fell back upon the seat murmuring a name which Spilett alone heard.

Doubtless the reporter knew this name, for it affected him strangely, and he answered in a hoarse voice:——

“He! a man outlawed!”

“The same!” said Smith.

Under the engineer’s direction the canoe approached this singular floating machine, and came up to it on its left side, from which escaped a gleam of light through a thick glass.

Smith and his companions stepped on to the platform. An open hatchway was there, down which all descended.

At the bottom of the ladder appeared the waist of the vessel lit up by electric light. At the end of the waist was a door, which Smith pushed open.

A richly ornamented library, flooded with light, was rapidly crossed by the colonists. Beyond, a large door, also closed, was pushed open by the engineer.

A vast saloon, a sort of museum, in which were arranged all the treasures of the mineral world, works of art, marvels of industry, appeared before the eyes of the colonists, who seemed to be transported to the land of dreams.

Extended upon a rich divan they saw a man, who seemed unaware of their presence.

Then Smith raised his voice, and, to the extreme surprise of his companions, pronounced these words:——

“Captain Nemo, you have called us. Here we are.’

 

CHAPTER LVIII.

 

CAPTAIN NEMO—HIS FIRST WORDS—HISTORY OF A HERO OF LIBERTY—HATRED OF THE INVADERS—HIS COMPANIONS—THE LIFE UNDER WATER—ALONE—THE LAST REFUGE OF THE NAUTILUS—THE MYSTERIOUS GENIUS OF THE ISLAND.

At these words the man arose, and the light shone full upon his face: a magnificent head, with abundance of hair thrown back from a high forehead, a white beard, and an expression of haughtiness.

This man stood, resting one hand upon the divan, from which he had risen. One could see that a slow disease had broken him down, but his voice was still powerful, when he said in English, and in a tone of extreme surprise:——

“I have no name, sir!”

“I know you!” answered Smith.

Captain Nemo looked at the engineer as if he would have annihilated him. Then, falling back upon the cushions, he murmured:——

“After all, what does it matter; I am dying!”

Smith approached Captain Nemo, and Spilett took his hand, which was hot with fever. The others stood respectfully in a corner of the superb saloon, which was flooded with light.

Captain Nemo withdrew his hand, and signed to Smith and the reporter to be seated.

All looked at him with lively emotion. Here was the being whom they had called the “genius of the island,” the being whose intervention had been so efficacious, the benefactor to whom they owed so much. Before their eyes, here where Pencroff and Neb had expected to find some godlike creature, was only a man-a dying man!

But how did Smith know Captain Nemo? Why had the latter sprung up on hearing that name pronounced?

The Captain had taken his seat upon the divan, and, leaning upon his arm, he regarded the engineer, who was seated near him.

“You know the name I bore?” he asked.

“I know it as well as I know the name of this admirable submarine apparatus.”

“The Nautilus,” said the Captain, with a half smile.

“The Nautilus.”

“But do you know-do you know, who I am?”

“I do.”

“For thirty years I have had no communication with the inhabited world, for thirty years have I lived in the depths of the sea, the only place where I have found freedom! Who, now, has betrayed my secret?”

“A man who never pledged you his word, Captain Nemo, one who, therefore, cannot be accused of betraying you.”

“The Frenchman whom chance threw in my way?”

“The same.”

“Then this man and his companions did not perish in the maelstrom into which the Nautilus had been drawn?”

“They did not, and there has appeared under the title of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a work which contains your history.”

“The history of but a few months of my life, sir,” answered the Captain, quickly.

“True,” replied Smith, “but a few months of that strange life sufficed to make you known—”

“As a great criminal, doubtless,” said Captain Nemo, smiling disdainfully. “Yes, a revolutionist, a scourge to humanity.”

The engineer did not answer.

“Well, sir?”

“I am unable to judge Captain Nemo,” said Smith, “at least in what concerns his past life. I, like the world at large, am ignorant of the motives for this strange existence, and I am unable to judge of the effects without knowing the causes, but what I do know is that a beneficent hand has been constantly extended to us since our arrival here, that we owe everything to a being good, generous, and powerful, and that this being, powerful, generous, and good, is you, Captain Nemo!”

“It is I,” answered the captain, quietly.

The engineer and the reporter had risen, the others had drawn near, and the gratitude which swelled their hearts would have sought expression in words and gesture, when Captain Nemo signed to them to be silent, and in a voice more moved, doubtless, than he wished:—

“When you have heard me,” he said. And then, in a few short, clear sentences, he told them the history of his life.

The history was brief. Nevertheless, it took all his remaining strength to finish it. It was evident that he struggled against an extreme feebleness. Many times Smith urged him to take some rest, but he shook his head, like one who knew that for him there would be no to-morrow, and when the reporter offered his services—

“They are useless,” he answered, “my hours are numbered.”

Captain Nemo was an Indian prince, the Prince Dakkar, the son of the rajah of the then independent territory of Bundelkund, and nephew of the hero of India, Tippo Saib. His father sent him, when ten years old, to Europe, where he received a complete education; and it was the secret intention of the rajah to have his son able some day to engage in equal combat with those whom he considered as the oppressors of his country.

From ten years of age until he was thirty, the Prince Dakkar, with superior endowments, of high heart and courage, instructed himself in everything; pushing his investigations in science, literature, and art to the uttermost limits.

He travelled over all Europe. His birth and fortune made his company much sought after, but the seductions of the world possessed no charm for him. Young and handsome, he remained serious, gloomy, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, with implacable anger fixed in his heart.

He hated. He hated the only country where he had never wished to set foot, the only nation whose advances he had refused: he hated England more and more as he admired her. This Indian summed up in his own person all the fierce hatred of the vanquished against the victor. The invader is always unable to find grace with the invaded. The son of one of those sovereigns whose submission to the United Kingdom was only nominal, the prince of the family of Tippo-Saib, educated in ideas of reclamation and vengeance, with a deep-seated love for his poetic country weighed down with the chains of England, wished never to place his foot on that land, to him accursed, that land to which India owed her subjection.

The Prince Dakkar became an artist, with a lively appreciation of the marvels of art; a savant familiar with the sciences; a statesman educated in European courts. In the eyes of a superficial observer, he passed, perhaps, for one of those cosmopolites, curious after knowledge, but disdaining to use it; for one of those opulent travellers, high-spirited and platonic, who go all over the world and are of no one country.

It was not so. This artist, this savant, this man was Indian to the heart, Indian in his desire for vengeance, Indian in the hope which he cherished of being able some day to re-establish the