Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 5.djvu/218

194 We descended the mountain rapidly, and the mineral forest once passed, I saw the lantern of the Nautilus shining like a star. The captain walked straight to it, and we got on board as the first rays of light whitened the surface of the ocean. CHAPTER X THE SUBMARINE COAL-MINES

next day, the 20th of February, I awoke very late; the fatigues of the previous night had prolonged my sleep until eleven o'clock. I dressed quickly and hastened to find the course the Nautilus was taking. The instruments showed it to be still toward the south, with a speed of twenty miles an hour and a depth of fifty fathoms.

The species of fishes here did not differ much from those already noticed. There were rays of giant size, five yards long and endowed with great muscular strength, which enabled them to shoot above the waves; sharks of many kinds, among others a glaucus fifteen feet long, with triangular sharp teeth, and whose transparency rendered it almost invisible in the water.

Among bony fish Conseil noticed some blackish makairas about three yards long, armed at the upper jaw with a piercing sword; other bright-colored creatures, known in the time of Aristotle by the name of the sea-dragon, which are dangerous to capture on account of the spikes on their back; also some coryphænes with brown backs marked with little blue stripes and surrounded with a gold border; some beautiful dorades, and swordfish four-and-twenty feet long, swimming in troops, fierce animals, but rather herbivorous than carnivorous.

About four o'clock the soil, generally composed of a thick mud mixed with petrified wood, changed by degrees, and it became more stony and seemed strewn with conglomerate and pieces of basalt, with a sprinkling of lava and sulphurous obsidian. I thought that a mountainous region was succeeding the long plains, and accordingly, after a few evolutions of the Nautilus, I saw the southerly horizon blocked by a high wall which seemed to close all exit. Its summit evidently passed the level of the ocean. It must be a