Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea Read Online Free Page B

thousand metres. At exactly that moment, by strange synchronicity, the whole length of the vessel began to moan, like a spirit in torment. The noise was a sinuously modulated organ note, an octave and a half below middle C: a weirdly vocalic, human-sounding din. Struggling back into his tipped-forward seat, Le Petomain wrestled the main controls.
    ‘The ship itself sings our death chant,’ said Dilraj Ghatwala, looking surprisingly calm. ‘Under the circumstances …’ he began, before drawing a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his tunic, and taking out a white tube.
    The captain rubbed his face with his hand. Finally – an action nobody in any of his previous crews had ever seen him perform before – he crossed himself. ‘Messieurs,’ he announced, to the bridge. ‘Our fate is sealed. We have, I fear, only short moments before inevitable extinction.’
    He lifted the ship’s microphone from its cradle, and addressed the entire craft. ‘Messieurs, crewmen, comrades. Please assemble on the bridge, without delay.’
    Replacing the microphone, he turned to Ghatwala, ‘Sir, my pipe is in my cabin, and I do not believe I shall have time to retrieve it. May I trouble you for a cigarette, and a light?’
    ‘By all means, Captain,’ Ghatwala replied, in his heavily accented French. He fumbled one of the white, hyphen-shaped sticks from his case, and then struck a match to light it for Cloche. As the captain sat back, blowing out smoke, the bridge slowly filled withthe entire complement of crew. Billiard-Fanon, his passage aided by the forward tilt of the craft, returned from the engine room. Alain de Chante led Avocat, Capot and Castor up from the front. Even Pannier emerged from the galley, wiping sweaty hands on his white apron.
    ‘Monsieur Le Petomain,’ the captain said, when everybody was assembled. ‘Please silence the alarm.’
    Though the chiming alarm-sound could hardly be heard over the Hadean groaning of the hull, Le Banquier did as he was ordered.
    ‘Messieurs,’ said Capitaine Cloche, drawing deeply on his cigarette and exhaling a spear of smoke. He spoke loudly, to be audible over the din. ‘I regret to inform you all that disaster, swift and deadly as a serpent, has stung the Plongeur . We descend to inevitable death. You can all see for yourself, on the depth gauge, the terrible speed with which we are going down; you can hear for yourself the implacable, increasing forces pressing in upon us from every side. Truly did a great poet once write: facilis descensus Averno . As truly did he add: impossibility attends the return. We must ready ourselves!’
    Every face was angled towards the captain; every ear strained to hear his words over the persistent metallic clanging noises.
    ‘Soon one of two things will happen,’ Cloche continued. ‘Either we will strike the seabed in a collision that must rip open the stern; or else the sheer pressure of water will overwhelm the structural integrity of the Plongeur , crushing us all. In either case we will all die quickly, and cleanly, and so we shall surrender our spirits to the deep. Some of us here have been sailors all our lives; and fought not long ago through a long, bitter war, a conflict that could have taken our lives at any moment. Some of you’ – and he nodded towards Lebret and the scientists – ‘are not. In either case, messieurs, I suggest you direct your minds to whichever God commands your heart.’
    He drew himself up in his chair, bracing himself against the angle with both feet, and looked about him, speaking still more loudly to be heard as the noises of the squeezed hull magnified and shrieked. ‘I shall share with you all something I have toldno other human being – not even my wife! It is this: Death is an ocean . I have always known that I would die beneath the surface of the sea. God created the earth not from void; but from the primal waters – you can read this truth, in the book of Genesis , at the very