"Straight ahead," Conseil replied.
"Ultimately, when he can't go any farther, he'll stop."
"I wouldn't bet on it!"
I replied.
And in all honesty, I confess that this venturesome excursion was far from displeasing to me.
I can't express the intensity of my amazement at the beauties of these new regions.
The ice struck superb poses.
Here, its general effect suggested an oriental town with countless minarets and mosques.
There, a city in ruins, flung to the ground by convulsions in the earth.
These views were varied continuously by the sun's oblique rays, or were completely swallowed up by gray mists in the middle of blizzards.
Then explosions, cave–ins, and great iceberg somersaults would occur all around us, altering the scenery like the changing landscape in a diorama.
If the Nautilus was submerged during these losses of balance, we heard the resulting noises spread under the waters with frightful intensity, and the collapse of these masses created daunting eddies down to the ocean's lower strata.
The Nautilus then rolled and pitched like a ship left to the fury of the elements.
Often, no longer seeing any way out, I thought we were imprisoned for good, but Captain Nemo, guided by his instincts, discovered new passageways from the tiniest indications.
He was never wrong when he observed slender threads of bluish water streaking through these ice fields.
Accordingly, I was sure that he had already risked his Nautilus in the midst of the Antarctic seas.
However, during the day of March 16, these tracts of ice completely barred our path.
It wasn't the Ice Bank as yet, just huge ice fields cemented together by the cold.
This obstacle couldn't stop Captain Nemo, and he launched his ship against the ice fields with hideous violence.
The Nautilus went into these brittle masses like a wedge, splitting them with dreadful cracklings.
It was an old–fashioned battering ram propelled with infinite power.
Hurled aloft, ice rubble fell back around us like hail.
Through brute force alone, the submersible carved out a channel for itself.
Carried away by its momentum, the ship sometimes mounted on top of these tracts of ice and crushed them with its weight, or at other times, when cooped up beneath the ice fields, it split them with simple pitching movements, creating wide punctures.
Violent squalls assaulted us during the daytime.
Thanks to certain heavy mists, we couldn't see from one end of the platform to the other.
The wind shifted abruptly to every point on the compass.
The snow was piling up in such packed layers, it had to be chipped loose with blows from picks.
Even in a temperature of merely –5° centigrade, every outside part of the Nautilus was covered with ice.
A ship's rigging would have been unusable, because all its tackle would have jammed in the grooves of the pulleys.
Only a craft without sails, driven by an electric motor that needed no coal, could face such high latitudes.
Under these conditions the barometer generally stayed quite low.
It fell as far as 73.5 centimeters.
Our compass indications no longer offered any guarantees.
The deranged needles would mark contradictory directions as we approached the southern magnetic pole, which doesn't coincide with the South Pole proper.
In fact, according to the astronomer Hansteen, this magnetic pole is located fairly close to latitude 70° and longitude 130°, or abiding by the observations of Louis–Isidore Duperrey, in longitude 135° and latitude 70° 30'.
Hence we had to transport compasses to different parts of the ship, take many readings, and strike an average.
Often we could chart our course only by guesswork, a less than satisfactory method in the midst of these winding passageways whose landmarks change continuously.
At last on March 18, after twenty futile assaults, the Nautilus was decisively held in check.
No longer was it an ice stream, patch, or field—it was an endless, immovable barrier formed by ice mountains fused to each other.
"The Ice Bank!" the Canadian told me.
For Ned Land, as well as for every navigator before us, I knew that this was the great insurmountable obstacle.
When the sun appeared for an instant near noon, Captain Nemo took a reasonably accurate sight that gave our position as longitude 51° 30' and latitude 67° 39' south.
This was a position already well along in these Antarctic regions.
As for the liquid surface of the sea, there was no longer any semblance of it before our eyes.
Before the Nautilus's spur there lay vast broken plains, a tangle of confused chunks with all the helter–skelter unpredictability typical of a river's surface a short while before its ice breakup; but in this case the proportions were gigantic.
Here and there stood sharp peaks, lean spires that rose as high as 200 feet; farther off, a succession of steeply cut cliffs sporting a grayish tint, huge mirrors that reflected the sparse rays of a sun half drowned in mist.
Beyond, a stark silence reigned in this desolate natural setting, a silence barely broken by the flapping wings of petrels or puffins.
By this point everything was frozen, even sound.
So the Nautilus had to halt in its venturesome course among these tracts of ice.