Part 2 · Chapter 13The Iceberg

The Nautilus was cruising south, following the fiftieth meridian, and moving pretty fast. Was he trying to reach the North Pole? I didn’t think so. Every attempt to get there had failed so far.

Plus, the season was way too far along - in Antarctica, March thirteenth is like September thirteenth in the northern hemisphere, right around the equinox.

On March fourteenth, I spotted some ice floating in fifty-five° latitude - just pale chunks of debris, twenty to twenty-five feet long, forming banks where the sea curled over. The Nautilus stayed on the ocean's surface.

Ned Land, who’d fished in the Arctic, knew icebergs well, but Conseil and I were seeing them for the first time. On the southern horizon, the air shimmered with a white, dazzling band. English whalers call it "ice blink."

No matter how cloudy it was, you could always see it, and it meant an ice pack or bank was nearby. Soon, bigger chunks started appearing, their brilliance changing with the fog. Some of these masses had green veins, like long, wavy lines traced with copper sulfate.

Others looked like enormous amethysts, light shining right through them. Some reflected sunlight on a thousand crystal surfaces. Others, with vivid, chalky reflections, looked like a perfect marble town. The closer we got to the south, the more these floating islands grew, both in number and size.

At sixty° latitude, all the passages had disappeared. But Captain Nemo quickly found a narrow opening and boldly slipped through, knowing it would close behind him. So, guided by his expert hand, the Nautilus navigated all the ice with incredible precision, charming Conseil.

It was icebergs or mountains, ice-fields or smooth plains - seeming to have no limits. We passed through drift ice and floating ice packs, broken-up plains called "palchs" when they were circular, and long, winding "streams."

The temperature was freezing; the thermometer exposed to the air read two or three degrees below zero. But we were bundled up in fur, courtesy of the sea bear and seal. Inside the Nautilus, warmed by its electric systems, defied the worst cold.

Besides, it would only have taken a few steps below the waves to find a more comfortable temperature. Two months earlier, we would have had constant daylight in these latitudes, but now we had three or four hours of night, and soon there would be six months of darkness in these polar regions.

On March fifteenth, we were in the latitude of New Shetland and South Orkney. The Captain told me that numerous tribes of seals used to live there, but English and American whalers, in their frenzy to destroy, slaughtered the young and old.

So, where there was once life and energy, they left only silence and death.

Around eight o'clock on March sixteenth, the Nautilus, following the fifty-fifth meridian, sliced through the Antarctic polar circle. Ice was everywhere, totally surrounding us and blurring the horizon. But Captain Nemo kept moving, checking each opening, going higher and higher.

I couldn’t even begin to describe how amazing these new regions were. The ice took the most unexpected shapes. Here, it looked like an entire oriental city, with tons of mosques and minarets. There, a fallen city, as if thrown down by a massive earthquake.

The whole scene constantly changed with the slanted sunlight, or disappeared in a gray, snowy haze. Explosions and crashes echoed all around - huge icebergs collapsing and changing the entire landscape like a diorama.

Often, I thought we were totally trapped with no way out, but Captain Nemo, guided by instinct at the slightest hint, would find a new passage. He never missed seeing the thin, bluish streams of water trickling across the ice - and I was pretty sure he’s explored these Antarctic seas before.

But on March sixteenth, the ice fields were a total roadblock. It wasn’t just icebergs; it was vast, frozen fields cemented together by the extreme cold. But that didn’t stop Captain Nemo. He slammed into it with incredible force.

The Nautilus plunged into the brittle mass like a battering ram, splitting it with huge cracking sounds. It was like the ancient war machines, powered by unbelievable strength. Ice shot up in the air, falling around us like hail.

Our machine created a canal for itself, blasting a path - sometimes carried forward by its own momentum, it smashed into the ice, crushing it with its weight, and other times simply pitched forward, tearing huge cracks in it.

Strong winds hit us at the same time, along with thick fogs that made it impossible to see anything from one end of the platform to the other. The wind howled from every direction, and the snow piled up so hard we had to break it apart with pickaxes.

The temperature was always five degrees below zero; every part of the Nautilus was coated in ice. A regular ship would have been hopelessly tangled in the narrow gorges. But a ship without sails, powered by electricity and needing no coal, was the only thing that could handle such extreme latitudes.

Finally, on March eighteenth, after countless attempts, the Nautilus was completely stuck. It wasn’t streams, ice floes, or fields anymore - it was an endless, solid barrier, formed by mountains fused together.

"An iceberg!" the Canadian said to me.

I knew that to Ned Land, and really to every navigator who’s come before us, this was just another roadblock. When the sun popped out for a second at noon, Captain Nemo took a quick measurement, which put us at fifty-one° thirty' longitude and sixty-seven° thirty-nine' south latitude.

We’d moved another degree further into this Antarctic region. There wasn't a glimpse of the open sea anymore. Underneath the Nautilus stretched a huge, tangled plain, full of jumbled blocks of ice.

Here and there were sharp points and skinny needles rising up to two hundred feet high; further on, a steep shore, like it had been chopped with an axe and covered in gray. Huge mirrors reflected a few sunbeams, half-drowned in the fog.

And over this empty landscape, a total silence reigned, barely broken by the flapping of petrel and puffin wings. Everything was frozen - even the sound. The Nautilus had to stop its adventurous journey through these ice fields.

Even though we tried, even with all the power we used to break up the ice, the Nautilus stayed put. Usually, when we hit a dead end, we can still turn around, but here, turning back was as impossible as moving forward - every route was blocked.

And for the few minutes we were stuck, we were likely to get completely sealed in, which actually happened around two o’clock that afternoon, as fresh ice quickly formed around its sides. I had to admit that Captain Nemo was being more than just reckless. I was on the platform at that moment.

The Captain had been watching our situation for a while when he said to me:

"Well, sir, what do you think of this?"

"I think we’re trapped, Captain." The Nautilus was totally blocked.

"So, M. Aronnax, you really think the Nautilus can’t get free?"

"It’s going to be tough, Captain; the season’s already too far along for the ice to break up on its own."

"Ah! sir," said Captain Nemo, in a sarcastic tone, "you’re always the same. You only see problems and roadblocks. I’m telling you, not only can the Nautilus get free, but it can go even further!"

"Further south?" I asked, looking at the Captain.

"Yes, sir; it will go to the pole."

"To the pole!" I exclaimed, unable to hide my disbelief.

Yes, replied the Captain, coldly, to the Antarctic pole - to that unknown point from which every meridian of the globe originates. You know I can do whatever I want with the Nautilus!

"Yeah, I knew that. I knew this guy was daring, even crazy. But to overcome those obstacles surrounding the South Pole, making it more unreachable than the North, which the boldest navigators hadn't even reached yet - wasn’t it a wild idea, something only a maniac would dream up?"

Then it hit me to ask Captain Nemo if he’d ever discovered that pole, one that no human had ever stepped foot on.

"No, sir," he replied; "but we’ll discover it together. Where others have failed, I won’t fail. I’ve never taken the Nautilus this far into southern waters before; but, I repeat, it will go even further."

"I believe you, Captain," I said, with a slightly sarcastic tone.

"I totally believe you! Let’s go for it! There are no roadblocks for us! Let’s smash this iceberg! Let’s blow it up; and if it resists, let’s give the Nautilus wings to fly over it!"

"Over it, sir!" said Captain Nemo, calmly; "no, not over it, but under it!"

"Under it!" I exclaimed, as a sudden idea about the Captain’s plans flashed through my mind.

I understood; the amazing abilities of the Nautilus were going to help us in this unbelievable mission.

"I think we’re starting to get each other, right?" said the Captain, kind of smiling.

"You’re starting to see the possibility - I’d say the success - of this plan. What’s impossible for an ordinary ship is easy for the Nautilus. If a continent’s in the way before the pole, it’s gonna stop there; but if the pole's surrounded by open ocean, we’ll make it all the way."

"Totally," I said, caught up in the Captain’s logic.

"If the surface of the sea freezes over with ice, the water below is still free, thanks to the way the ocean works - it’s at its densest just above freezing. And if I’m not mistaken, for every foot of iceberg we see above the water, there are four feet below."

"Pretty close," said the Captain.

"For every foot of iceberg above the sea, there are three feet below. If these ice mountains aren’t more than three hundred feet tall, they’re not more than nine hundred feet deep. What’s nine hundred feet to the Nautilus?" "Nothing, sir."

"We could even dive to even greater depths to find that consistent water temperature, and face that surface cold of thirty or forty degrees without a problem."

"Exactly, sir - exactly," I replied, getting excited.

"The only snag," continued Captain Nemo, "is staying underwater for days without getting more air."

"Is that it? The Nautilus has huge tanks; we can fill them, and they’d give us all the oxygen we need."

"Good thinking, M. Aronnax," replied the Captain, smiling.

"But I don’t want you thinking I’m being reckless, so let me give you all my concerns." "Got any more?"

"Just one. If there’s an ocean at the South Pole, it could be covered in ice, and we wouldn’t be able to surface."

"Okay, but don't you forget the Nautilus has a super-powerful spike? We could ram it diagonally into those ice fields, and they’d crack open from the impact."

"You’re full of ideas today, sir."

"Besides, Captain," I added, enthusiastically, "why shouldn’t we find the sea open at the South Pole, just like the North?"

"The frozen poles of the Earth don’t line up, either in the southern or northern regions; and until proven otherwise, we can assume there’s either a continent or an ocean free from ice at those two points on the globe."

"I think so too, M. Aronnax," replied Captain Nemo.

"I just wish you’d notice that, after raising so many issues with my plan, you’re now crushing me with arguments in its favor!"

The plan was officially in motion. The Nautilus’s powerful pumps were blasting air into the storage tanks, packing it in tight. Around four o’clock, Captain Nemo announced that the platform panels were sealing up. I took one last look at the gigantic iceberg we were about to cross.

The sky was clear, the air was crisp, and it was seriously cold - twelve degrees below zero. Luckily, the wind had died down, so it wasn’t totally unbearable.

About ten guys climbed onto the sides of the Nautilus, armed with pickaxes to chop away at the ice around the ship, and it was pretty quick work. The ice was still thin. We all headed inside. The usual tanks were filled with the fresh water, and the Nautilus started to sink.

I grabbed a spot with Conseil in the lounge; through the open window, we could see the ocean floor way below. The thermometer climbed, and the compass needle jumped around. At about nine hundred feet, just like Captain Nemo predicted, we were floating under the wavy bottom of the iceberg.

But the Nautilus kept going down - to a depth of four hundred fathoms. The water temperature at the surface was twelve degrees; now it was only ten - we’d gained two. I don’t have to tell you that the heating system cranked up the temperature inside the Nautilus; every move was super precise.

"We’re gonna make it, right, sir?" asked Conseil.

"I’m pretty sure we will," I said, sounding confident.

Out in the open ocean, the Nautilus had taken a straight shot to the pole, staying on the fifty-second line of longitude. From sixty-seven° thirty' to ninety degrees, there were twenty-two and a half degrees of latitude left to cover - about five hundred miles.

The Nautilus was cruising at an average speed of twenty-six miles an hour - like a high-speed train. If we kept that up, we’d hit the pole in forty hours.

We stayed glued to the window for a while, just checking things out. The ocean glowed with the electric lights, but it was totally empty. No fish around - these waters were like a prison for them, just a shortcut from the Antarctic Ocean to the open polar sea.

We were moving super fast; you could feel it in the long steel hull vibrating. Around two in the morning, I finally crashed for a few hours, and Conseil did too. When I walked across the deck, I didn’t see Captain Nemo; I figured he was in the pilot’s room.

The next morning, March nineteenth, I headed back to the lounge. The electric speed gauge showed the Nautilus had slowed down. It was heading towards the surface, but carefully releasing water, nice and slow. My heart was pounding. Were we finally going to surface and breathe the open polar air again?

Nope! A jolt told me the Nautilus had bumped into the iceberg - still really thick, judging by the muffled sound. We’d "hit" it, to use a sailor’s term, but in reverse, and a thousand feet deep. That meant three thousand feet of ice above us; a thousand feet above the waterline.

The iceberg was even taller than it looked from the sides - not exactly reassuring. Throughout the day, the Nautilus tried again and again, but each time it just bounced off the wall above us. Sometimes it was only nine hundred yards away, with only two hundred yards showing above the surface.

It was twice as high as when the Nautilus dove under. I carefully wrote down all the different depths, and figured out a profile of the iceberg underwater. That night, nothing had changed. Still ice, four to five hundred yards deep!

It was definitely getting thinner, but still, what a massive chunk of ice between us and the surface! It was eight o’clock.

According to the routine on the Nautilus, the air should have been refreshed four hours ago, but I wasn’t feeling too bad, even though Captain Nemo hadn’t asked for his oxygen reserve to be used. I had a restless night; hope and fear kept battling it out. I woke up a bunch of times.

The Nautilus kept bumping around. Around three in the morning, I noticed the bottom of the iceberg was only about fifty feet deep. Just one hundred and fifty feet now separated us from the surface. The iceberg was turning into an ice field, the mountain becoming a plain.

My eyes never left the pressure gauge. We were still rising diagonally towards the surface, which sparkled under the electric lights. The iceberg was spreading out, both above and below, getting thinner and thinner.

Finally, at six in the morning of that unforgettable day, March nineteenth, the saloon door opened, and Captain Nemo appeared. "The sea is open!" he said.