this, in our apparatus, without shutting ourselves away in the cabin?”
“What an idea!” said Trinitus.
“It seems to me,” Marcel continued, “that nothing would be simpler. It would be sufficient to fit a kind of swing under the boat, on which one could sit, while the Éclair traveled at top speed.…”
“That’s true—we’d have a better view of the country,” added Nicaise.
“Well, my lads, we’ll see about that,” Trinitus replied. “As regards breakfast, though, it’s still necessary to go back into the cabin—we can talk about Marcel’s project while eating our oysters!”
Immediately, the three voyagers hoisted themselves up to the ship, and Nicaise, laden with the booty, went in first. Trinitus carefully reclosed the opening of the cylinder; the cook went to his oven in order to prepare the crab and the sea-urchin, and Marcel visited the apparatus for manufacturing air.
The boat, which had only sustained insignificant damage as a result of the collision, set off again with frightful speed, and the captain recorded the first incident that had occurred in his journal.
The breakfast was excellent, and Marcel’s proposal, after mature reflection, was accepted unanimously. It was decided that three seats on a plank would be suspended beneath the vessel, in the fashion of a swing, and that each passenger would be armed with a long barbed harpoon for self-defense.
That was not sufficient for Nicaise, however; he wanted to have a more formidable weapon against the large marine animals that would not fail to present themselves, and Trinitus was obliged to invent a kind of thunderbolt with which to kill them.
He devised a kind of iron arrow, which a long metallic chain would connect to the boat’s electrical apparatus. A small steel hammer, sustained by a spring, would serve to change the direction of the current and make a quantity of electricity large enough to kill an enormous shark instantly to pass into the arrow through the intermediary of the chain.
The apparatus was, moreover, easy to construct. Trinitus had the principal components in his stores, and in the Azores, where they would have to pause in order to repair the boat, they would obtain the luxury of a small thunderbolt in no time.
Nicaise and Marcel then started rooting through the storage-lockers and gathering together everything they might need. In the meantime, Trinitus drew up all the details of the thunderbolt as he imagined it, and calculated its effects theoretically, which awaiting an opportunity to take account of them in reality.
The entire morning was devoted to that important work, and during the rest of day, Trinitus, in accordance with his promise, told his companions the story of some of the bizarre creatures that they had seen on the sea-bed.
To begin with, he showed them, under the microscope, the animalcule that produces the phosphorescence of the waves. It was a tiny creature, triangular in form, bearing a slender fin at reach of its angles, formed of extremely delicate threads. On its globular back, a host of little spherical dots could be seen, distributed at random, which shone at times with a bright gleam. The phenomenon was produced most strikingly when Trinitus caressed the Noctiluca’s threads with the point of a needle, or teased the animal slightly.
Then the scientist introduced his companions to several extremely curious zoophytes that he had removed from the electric cable or collected on the nearby rocks. He showed them starfish with pink limbs; sponges and Thetis clad with their polyps, gray Pennatula that resembled silky and curly feathers; and Eleutheria, the numerous arms of which were each terminated by a flower.
What amused Marcel most, however, was a kind of Holothurian, Duvernoy’s Synapta, thus baptized by Monsieur de Quatrefages,4 who had first observed it in the little archipelago of Chausey abut thirty years before. Trinitus explained how the Synapta tolerated famine and abstinence philosophically. Its body, as transparent as crystal, contracts and segments with the greatest ease. In times of famine, when it is impossible to nourish its entire body, the Synapta does not hesitate to sacrifice itself in small portions as the necessity becomes apparent. It shrinks, strangling itself at the place where it wants to cut through itself, and gradually diminishes thus by a quarter, a half and three-quarters. Sometimes, alas, it only retains its head, and is very glad when it can find something to eat.
As the day went by, however, the Éclair continued traveling toward the Azores. When night fell and Trinitus calculated that the islands could not be far away, he took the boat up to the surface, which slowed its progress considerably but allowed the voyagers to interrogate the horizon through the windows.
The sea extended in all directions, seemingly infinite. Its high and rapid waves shook the boat forcefully, and after half an hour of continual shocks, Trinitus was on the point of deciding to go back down to calmer layers when Marcel saw an almost-imperceptible light shining on the horizon. It looked to him like a kind of gray needle outlined against the wan background of the sky, in which numerous stars were twinkling, and he thought he recognized the mast of a vessel.
Nicaise, whose sight was rather weak, could not make anything out, even with the aid of a powerful telescope, but Trinitus, on seeing the needle identified by Marcel uttered a cry of joy.
“Land! Land, my friends! It’s the volcanic peak of the Azores; we’ll have disembarked within the hour.”
2. Maître Jacques is Harpagon’s cook in L’Avare [The Miser] (1668)
3. The first telegraphic cable linking England and France was laid between Dover and Calais in 1850 by John Watkins Brett and his brother. It had to be replaced in 1851 with an armored version after a French fisherma cut the first one.
4. The zoologist Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810-1892) had been a pupil of Georges Louis Duvernoy (1777-1855). His paper on the “Synapte de Duvernoy” was published in 1841.
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