So I hoped he would now hug the coasts of Europe and America, which would allow the Canadian to try again with a greater chance of success.
We were stretched out in this delightful cave for an hour.
Our conversation, lively at the outset, then languished.
A definite drowsiness overcame us.
Since I saw no good reason to resist the call of sleep, I fell into a heavy doze.
I dreamed—one doesn't choose his dreams—that my life had been reduced to the vegetating existence of a simple mollusk.
It seemed to me that this cave made up my double–valved shell. . . .
Suddenly Conseil's voice startled me awake.
"Get up!
Get up!" shouted the fine lad.
"What is it?"
I asked, in a sitting position.
"The water's coming up to us!"
I got back on my feet.
Like a torrent the sea was rushing into our retreat, and since we definitely were not mollusks, we had to clear out.
In a few seconds we were safe on top of the cave.
"What happened?"
Conseil asked.
"Some new phenomenon?"
"Not quite, my friends!"
I replied.
"It was the tide, merely the tide, which wellnigh caught us by surprise just as it did Sir Walter Scott's hero!
The ocean outside is rising, and by a perfectly natural law of balance, the level of this lake is also rising.
We've gotten off with a mild dunking.
Let's go change clothes on the Nautilus."
Three–quarters of an hour later, we had completed our circular stroll and were back on board.
Just then the crewmen finished loading the sodium supplies, and the Nautilus could have departed immediately.
But Captain Nemo gave no orders.
Would he wait for nightfall and exit through his underwater passageway in secrecy?
Perhaps.
Be that as it may, by the next day the Nautilus had left its home port and was navigating well out from any shore, a few meters beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
Chapter 11 The Sargasso Sea
THE Nautilus didn't change direction.
For the time being, then, we had to set aside any hope of returning to European seas.
Captain Nemo kept his prow pointing south.
Where was he taking us?
I was afraid to guess.
That day the Nautilus crossed an odd part of the Atlantic Ocean.
No one is unaware of the existence of that great warm–water current known by name as the Gulf Stream.
After emerging from channels off Florida, it heads toward Spitzbergen.
But before entering the Gulf of Mexico near latitude 44° north, this current divides into two arms; its chief arm makes for the shores of Ireland and Norway while the second flexes southward at the level of the Azores; then it hits the coast of Africa, sweeps in a long oval, and returns to the Caribbean Sea.
Now then, this second arm—more accurately, a collar—forms a ring of warm water around a section of cool, tranquil, motionless ocean called the Sargasso Sea.
This is an actual lake in the open Atlantic, and the great current's waters take at least three years to circle it.
Properly speaking, the Sargasso Sea covers every submerged part of Atlantis.
Certain authors have even held that the many weeds strewn over this sea were torn loose from the prairies of that ancient continent.
But it's more likely that these grasses, algae, and fucus plants were carried off from the beaches of Europe and America, then taken as far as this zone by the Gulf Stream.
This is one of the reasons why Christopher Columbus assumed the existence of a New World.
When the ships of that bold investigator arrived in the Sargasso Sea, they had great difficulty navigating in the midst of these weeds, which, much to their crews' dismay, slowed them down to a halt; and they wasted three long weeks crossing this sector.
Such was the region our Nautilus was visiting just then: a genuine prairie, a tightly woven carpet of algae, gulfweed, and bladder wrack so dense and compact a craft's stempost couldn't tear through it without difficulty.
Accordingly, not wanting to entangle his propeller in this weed–choked mass, Captain Nemo stayed at a depth some meters below the surface of the waves.