"And farther on a monstrous crocodile.
Look at its vast jaws and its rows of teeth!
It is diving down!"
"There's a whale, a whale!" cried the Professor. "I can see its great fins.
See how he is throwing out air and water through his blowers."
And in fact two liquid columns were rising to a considerable height above the sea.
We stood amazed, thunderstruck, at the presence of such a herd of marine monsters.
They were of supernatural dimensions; the smallest of them would have crunched our raft, crew and all, at one snap of its huge jaws.
Hans wants to tack to get away from this dangerous neighbourhood; but he sees on the other hand enemies not less terrible; a tortoise forty feet long, and a serpent of thirty, lifting its fearful head and gleaming eyes above the flood.
Flight was out of the question now.
The reptiles rose; they wheeled around our little raft with a rapidity greater than that of express trains. They described around us gradually narrowing circles.
I took up my rifle.
But what could a ball do against the scaly armour with which these enormous beasts were clad?
We stood dumb with fear.
They approach us close: on one side the crocodile, on the other the serpent.
The remainder of the sea monsters have disappeared.
I prepare to fire.
Hans stops me by a gesture.
The two monsters pass within a hundred and fifty yards of the raft, and hurl themselves the one upon the other, with a fury which prevents them from seeing us.
At three hundred yards from us the battle was fought.
We could distinctly observe the two monsters engaged in deadly conflict.
But it now seems to me as if the other animals were taking part in the fray—the porpoise, the whale, the lizard, the tortoise.
Every moment I seem to see one or other of them.
I point them to the Icelander.
He shakes his head negatively.
"Tva," says he.
"What two?
Does he mean that there are only two animals?"
"He is right," said my uncle, whose glass has never left his eye.
"Surely you must be mistaken," I cried.
"No: the first of those monsters has a porpoise's snout, a lizard's head, a crocodile's teeth; and hence our mistake.
It is the ichthyosaurus (the fish lizard), the most terrible of the ancient monsters of the deep."
"And the other?"
"The other is a plesiosaurus (almost lizard), a serpent, armoured with the carapace and the paddles of a turtle; he is the dreadful enemy of the other."
Hans had spoken truly.
Two monsters only were creating all this commotion; and before my eyes are two reptiles of the primitive world.
I can distinguish the eye of the ichthyosaurus glowing like a red-hot coal, and as large as a man's head.
Nature has endowed it with an optical apparatus of extreme power, and capable of resisting the pressure of the great volume of water in the depths it inhabits.
It has been appropriately called the saurian whale, for it has both the swiftness and the rapid movements of this monster of our own day.
This one is not less than a hundred feet long, and I can judge of its size when it sweeps over the waters the vertical coils of its tail.
Its jaw is enormous, and according to naturalists it is armed with no less than one hundred and eighty-two teeth.
The plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical body and a short tail, has four flappers or paddles to act like oars.
Its body is entirely covered with a thick armour of scales, and its neck, as flexible as a swan's, rises thirty feet above the waves.
Those huge creatures attacked each other with the greatest animosity. They heaved around them liquid mountains, which rolled even to our raft and rocked it perilously. Twenty times we were near capsizing.
Hissings of prodigious force are heard.
The two beasts are fast locked together; I cannot distinguish the one from the other.
The probable rage of the conqueror inspires us with intense fear.
One hour, two hours, pass away.
The struggle continues with unabated ferocity.
The combatants alternately approach and recede from our raft.