Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/343

 84                              THE MEDITERRANEAN.

glittering light of a solar spectrum ; walking comatula a yard long, whose purple hue coloured the water.

Conseil occupied himself chiefly in observing the molluscs and the articulates. Time failed him to complete the crustacea by the examination of the stomapodes, the then amphipodes, the homopodes, the trilobites, the branchiapodes, the ostracods, and the entomostaces. But the Nautilus having passed the high bank on the right of the African coast, redescended into deep water, and proceeded at her full speed. No more molluscs, no more articulates, no more zoophytes. Only a few large fish passed us, like great shadows.

During the night of the 16-17th February we entered the second Mediterranean basin, whose greatest depth is 3,000 yards. The Nautilus descended almost to the very bottom.

There, in default of natural wonders, the great mass of waters offered me very moving and terrible scenes. We were then traversing that portion of the Mediterranean so fertile in shipwrecks. From the Algerine coast to Provence what vessels have disappeared! The Mediterranean is but a lake compared to the Pacific, but it is a capricious and changeful lake: to-day smiling and beautiful, to-morrow raging, roaring, and swept by furious winds, disabling the finest vessels, and smashing them against its precipitous rocks.

So in this rapid transit, at these immense depths, I could perceive anchors, cannon, cannon-balls, iron utensils, threads of screws, pieces of the engines, cylinders, boilers, hulls floating mid-way, some upright, some overturned!

Of these shipwrecked vessels, some had been injured by collision, others from striking on the rocks. I saw some which had gone down “all standing.” They looked as if