It starts below Suez and leads to the Bay of Pelusium."
"But isn't that isthmus only composed of quicksand?"
"To a certain depth.
But at merely fifty meters, one encounters a firm foundation of rock."
"And it's by luck that you discovered this passageway?"
I asked, more and more startled.
"Luck plus logic, professor, and logic even more than luck."
"Captain, I hear you, but I can't believe my ears."
"Oh, sir!
The old saying still holds good: Aures habent et non audient!* Not only does this passageway exist, but I've taken advantage of it on several occasions.
Without it, I wouldn't have ventured today into such a blind alley as the Red Sea."
*Latin:
"They have ears but hear not."
Ed.
"Is it indiscreet to ask how you discovered this tunnel?"
"Sir," the captain answered me, "there can be no secrets between men who will never leave each other."
I ignored this innuendo and waited for Captain Nemo's explanation.
"Professor," he told me, "the simple logic of the naturalist led me to discover this passageway, and I alone am familiar with it.
I'd noted that in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean there exist a number of absolutely identical species of fish: eels, butterfish, greenfish, bass, jewelfish, flying fish.
Certain of this fact, I wondered if there weren't a connection between the two seas.
If there were, its underground current had to go from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean simply because of their difference in level.
So I caught a large number of fish in the vicinity of Suez.
I slipped copper rings around their tails and tossed them back into the sea.
A few months later off the coast of Syria, I recaptured a few specimens of my fish, adorned with their telltale rings.
So this proved to me that some connection existed between the two seas.
I searched for it with my Nautilus, I discovered it, I ventured into it; and soon, professor, you also will have cleared my Arabic tunnel!"
Chapter 5 Arabian Tunnel
THE SAME DAY, I reported to Conseil and Ned Land that part of the foregoing conversation directly concerning them.
When I told them we would be lying in Mediterranean waters within two days, Conseil clapped his hands, but the Canadian shrugged his shoulders.
"An underwater tunnel!" he exclaimed.
"A connection between two seas!
Who ever heard of such malarkey!"
"Ned my friend," Conseil replied, "had you ever heard of the Nautilus?
No, yet here it is!
So don't shrug your shoulders so blithely, and don't discount something with the feeble excuse that you've never heard of it."
"We'll soon see!"
Ned Land shot back, shaking his head.
"After all, I'd like nothing better than to believe in your captain's little passageway, and may Heaven grant it really does take us to the Mediterranean."
The same evening, at latitude 21° 30' north, the Nautilus was afloat on the surface of the sea and drawing nearer to the Arab coast.
I spotted Jidda, an important financial center for Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and the East Indies.
I could distinguish with reasonable clarity the overall effect of its buildings, the ships made fast along its wharves, and those bigger vessels whose draft of water required them to drop anchor at the port's offshore mooring.
The sun, fairly low on the horizon, struck full force on the houses in this town, accenting their whiteness.
Outside the city limits, some wood or reed huts indicated the quarter where the bedouins lived.
Soon Jidda faded into the shadows of evening, and the Nautilus went back beneath the mildly phosphorescent waters.
The next day, February 10, several ships appeared, running on our opposite tack.
The Nautilus resumed its underwater navigating; but at the moment of our noon sights, the sea was deserted and the ship rose again to its waterline.
With Ned and Conseil, I went to sit on the platform.
The coast to the east looked like a slightly blurred mass in a damp fog.
Leaning against the sides of the skiff, we were chatting of one thing and another, when Ned Land stretched his hand toward a point in the water, saying to me:
"See anything out there, professor?"