Page:Twenty Thousand Verne Frith 1876.pdf/370



CHAPTER X.

THE SUBMARINE COAL-FIELDS.

very late next morning, the 20th February. I dressed quickly, and hastened to ascertain the course of the Nautilus. The instruments indicated a southerly direction at a speed of twenty miles, and at 100 yards below the surface.

Conseil entered. I related to him the incidents of our nocturnal excursion, and the panels being open, we could catch a glimpse of the sunken continent.

In fact, the Nautilus was only about ten yards from the bottom of the Atlantic, and skimmed along like a balloon, hurried across terrestrial prairies, but it would be more correct to say that we were apparently in a saloon carriage of an express train. The first objects that we passed were fantastically splintered rocks, forests which had been changed from the vegetable to the animal kingdom, and whose immovable outline was shadowed beneath the waves. Stony masses hidden beneath a carpet of axidies and anemones, bristling with long vertical hydrophytes, and strangely twisted blocks of lava, which attested the fury of the eruptions.