CHAPTER EIGHT

FROM CAPE VERDE TO
THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

It was only when they were level with the initial islets of the archipelago that Trinitus resolved to quit the trail of the sperm whales, to which he was exceedingly grateful. The monstrous cetaceans, still guided by their captain, turned abruptly south-westwards off the cape of Santa Antão, and the scientist piloting the Éclair, after have wished his liberators bon voyage, took his boat into the narrow strait separating the islands of Sal and São Nicolau.

To begin with he followed a kind of volcanic alleyway, a submarine crevice of extreme depth, and emerged from it a few minutes later, fearing that the Éclair might run into a reef, opposite the old town of Santiago, the largest in the Cape Verde archipelago.

Two rocks, rising ten or twelve meters out of the water and almost contiguous, formed a kind of comprehensively-sheltered little bay, into which Trinitus steered in order to moor the boat and disembark with his two companions.

At the base of the overlapping rocks, vesicular fucus grew in dense clumps, along with veritable meadows of Zostera, and on the narrow platform they presented, a few grasses, beaten by the winds, were vegetating in the cracks in the stone.

As the travelers approached, the seagulls that inhabited the sterile islets flew away in alarm, but the cunning Nicaise took advantage of their departure to search their nests, and brought back half a dozen eggs, which he proposed to cook for the evening meal.

Meanwhile, Marcel had climbed the rock and, standing on the platform, contemplated delightedly the magnificent panorama that was unfurled around him. Trinitus and Nicaise, excited by his cries of admiration, climbed up to the summit of the reef in their turn, and all three, profoundly moved by the sublime spectacle that they had before their eyes, thanked the Providence that had miraculously brought them this far.

The Ocean, calm and transparent, lay before them all the way to Santiago, whose principal town they could see on the horizon, sited on the edge of the waves. A few fishing-boats, their sails inflated by the wind, were coming out of the harbor, vividly illuminated by the ardent sun, swaying gracefully on the blue waters of the Atlantic. The seagulls, in their bold flight, brushed the crests of the waves uttering joyful cries; and from time to time, a fish, leaping out of the water, darted silvery reflections in the sunlight.

Beyond the town of Santiago were the island’s mountains, whose volcanic peaks, like those of the Azores and Canaries, were lost in the azure of the sky.

The mildness and beauty of the landscape made Marcel sigh and filled Trinitus’ soul with melancholy. They were both thinking about the cherished individuals for whom they were undertaking this perilous voyage. Trinitus wondered whether God would permit him ever to see his beloved wife and daughter again, Marcel whether he would ever hold hands with his tender fiancée Alice.

To these moving question posed by their hearts, they dared not make any reply. They saw in their imagination, on one side misfortune, the most horrible death, the most frightful catastrophe that it was possible to conceive, and on the other, joy, happiness, the most perfect felicity that one could experience in this world.

Which was the truth? They were both impatient to find out and fearful. Marcel, especially since he had escaped a death that he had believed to be inevitable in the heart of the Sargasso Sea, was hopeful and inclined toward happiness. Trinitus, his brow anxious, as if he could still see a yawning gulf full of darkness at his feet, could hardly make any but sad assumptions.

As for Nicaise, insouciant but grumpy, like a mariner who has sailed all the seas, thought through the smoke of his pipe that with all the spermaceti that could have been collected from the skulls of the sperm whales to which they owed their lives, they could have secured an income of at least sixty thousand francs a year. He estimated that those “diabolical animals,” collectively, were carrying two million in merchandise Now that the old mariner was out of danger, that was the form that his gratitude took.

Suddenly, Trinitus broke the silence that had reigned for some time. “My dear friends,” he said, “after the terrible dangers we’ve run, who can tell what Providence still has in store for us? In order to arrive in the midst of these Oceanic islands, we’ve only covered a quarter of the distance that still remains for us to travel. Before going any further, reflect. If you’re hesitant about following me, I can leave you in Santiago. To return to France, you can take one of the steamships that come from the Cape or the River Plate once a week, and I’ll depart alone for Australia.…”

At these words, the indignant Nicaise straightened up so precipitately that he broke three of the eggs he had collected. That ill-timed omelet raised his fury to the point of paroxysm.

“Damnation!” he said. “Rather than do that, I’d prefer to be chewed like a plug of tobacco by all the sharks in the world!”

As for Marcel, he contented himself with squeezing Trinitus’ hand gently.

Five minutes later, the Éclair, carrying the three companions, disappeared under the waves again.

On leaving Cape Verde, Trinitus steered his boat toward Ascension Island, which, like its neighbor Saint Helena, is nothing but an enormous basaltic rock rearing up in the middle of the ocean.

The scientist promised himself firmly not to stop there, for he was burning with desire to reach the Cape of Good Hope, and, thanks to the Éclair’s speed, he was not expecting to take two days to arrive there.

It seemed to him that his troubles would be over when they emerged from the Atlantic to enter into the great Austral Ocean. The very name Cape of Good Hope made him shiver; in spite of the sad thoughts that assailed him at times, he could not imagine that that name, full of sweet promise, could be a cruel irony. When he thought about it, the black thoughts that pressed upon his brain disappeared immediately, and a violent emotion made his heart beat faster.

His gaze glued to the map, he traced the Éclair’s itinerary with a feverish impatience, and submitted his plans to Nicaise and Marcel.

Nothing appeared to him to be simpler than to go from the Cape to the Coral Sea. For him, it was a mater of a week. He did not want to go via the Indian Sea. The best course to reach Botany Bay, where he hoped to obtain information, appeared to him to be directly across the Austral Sea. From Good Hope he would reach the fortieth degree of latitude and would follow it as far as the Bass Strait, situated between Australia and Tasmania. He would pass to the north of Prince Edward Island, Marion Island and the Kerguelen Islands, and also to the north of Amsterdam Island and Saint Paul. The route was, so to speak, already mapped out, and no mistake!

Nicaise and Marcel were in complete agreement, and could only applaud the wisdom of their captain. But the old mariner said to himself that it looked very simple on the map, but it wasn’t so easy when one could tangled up in the kelp!

Meanwhile, the Éclair was traveling with unprecedented speed—flying, so to speak, over oceanic mountains and valleys.

In spite of the extreme depth of the sea on the Equator, the three voyagers, navigating at more than three thousand meters beneath the surface of the waves, were able, up to a point, to take account of the configuration of the submarine landscapes. Solar light does not penetrate more than five hundred meters, but the vivid gleam of the boat’s electric lamp permitted them to distinguish the surrounding terrain with sufficient clarity.

Sometimes, along their course, they were brushing the sharp summits of a mountain chain, sometimes they were gliding, so to speak, over the surface of an immense plateau. Sometimes, they were following broad valleys of enormous depth, whose slopes were carpeted with Fucus and Zostera. In those immense submarine meadows, innumerable herds of mollusks and zoophytes were grazing. From time to time, the voyagers went down on to the swings in order to get a better view, and the spectacle they contemplated absorbed them to such an extent that they remained there for hours without speaking.

Often, they passed with the rapidity of an express train through the middle of a shoal of fish, in which they made a hole like a cannon-ball in the ranks of an enemy army. Several times they had to fight off hungry dogfish that attacked them, but such combats were mere recreations compared with those in which they had been obliged to engage in the Sargasso Sea.

Trinitus pointed out to his companions how difficult it would be to place a transatlantic cable in the regions they were traversing. Between Newfoundland and Ireland, following great efforts, it had been possible to lay two cables, which functioned marvelously, because in that area the sea covered an immense plateau over which the cables could be drawn and supported, but in the tropics, the bed of the sea is far from being favorable to similar endeavors.

For his part, Marcel observed that the submarine terrain was almost always covered with a layer of white dust, as if it snow had fallen on it. Having collected a small quantity of that dust, Trinitus placed it under the microscope and showed his companions that it was composed of a multitude of imperceptible seashells in a state of perfect conservation.

“Those shells,” he told them, “are the debris of animalcules that live in oceanic waters. As they die, their shells fall to the sea-bed, and it is their accumulation, since the world’s beginning, that forms the layer of white powder that Marcel has just compared to snow.

“By means of a special sound, developed by the American Brooke,6 numerous specimens of the infusoria that cover them have been collected from the depths of various oceans. In the Atlantic, as you see, these animalcules have the whiteness of snow. That is because the water of that ocean contain an abundance of calcareous salts, and it’s at the expense of those salts that the infusoria build their shells. It’s not the same in the Pacific; the dust that covers the bed there is gray rather than white, because silica is more abundant there than calcium, and the shells of the infusoria are silicates.

“When we are thoroughly acquainted with the nature of the animalcules deposited on the sea-bed, we will be able to solve many problems that are presently insoluble. The oceans will have no more mystery for us; the infinitely small will explain the infinitely large!”

6. John Mercer Brooke (1826-1906) developed his deep-sea sounding device in the early 1850s; it proved invaluable to his patron, the oceanographer Matthew Maury, who sent samples of the material he had dredged up from the Atlantic sea-bed to Jacob Whitman Bailey in 1853, who determined that they were composed of the tiny calcareous shells of Foraminifera. The more general term preferred in France, “infusoria,” also embraced the siliceous diatoms to which Trinitus refers.