Vingt mille lieues sous les mers

Pierre Aronnax had only to return to France, his trunks full of Nebraska fossils, when the news of a terrifying sea monster thrust him into the adventure that would change his worldview. Ships were sinking across every ocean, rammed by a phosphorescent mass that survivors described as a gigantic whale, yet faster than any known cetacean. The Abraham Lincoln set sail from Brooklyn with the mission of ridding the seas of this menace, carrying the Museum professor, his faithful servant Conseil, and Ned Land, the king of Canadian harpooners. The frigate pursued the monster for months across the Pacific, until that fateful night when the luminous thing charged at them with a violence that cast the three men overboard.

They believed themselves lost in the black immensity of the ocean when their hands met not the skin of a beast, but the cold metal of a bolted hull. A hatch opened, and masked men dragged them into the bowels of a submarine vessel that no one had ever imagined possible. Captain Nemo welcomed them aboard his Nautilus as privileged prisoners, opening the doors to a submersible palace crammed with masterpieces of art, a library of twelve thousand volumes, and marvels torn from the depths. Mobilis in mobile, mobile within the mobile element: thus lived this man who had severed all ties with humanity to dwell beneath the waters, feeding himself exclusively from the sea, drawing electricity from its currents, and transforming its salt into sodium to power his prodigious machines.

The voyage began as a scientific phantasmagoria through the kelp forests of the Pacific, where multicolored fish danced before the saloon windows. Aronnax marveled at being able to walk upon the seabed in a self-contained diving suit, hunting with Nemo in the submarine plains of Crespo, and discovering the pearl banks of Ceylon, where the captain saved an Indian pearl diver from a monstrous shark. The Nautilus traversed the Red Sea via a secret tunnel beneath the Isthmus of Suez that Nemo had discovered, swept up the Mediterranean in forty-eight hours, and plunged into the Atlantic down to the sunken ruins of Atlantis, where columns of petrified lava bore witness to a civilization vanished into the abyss.

Yet, behind the marvels, the captain's dark side gradually revealed itself. Whenever a warship appeared on the horizon, Nemo became a different man; his eyes blazed with a terrible hatred, and the Nautilus transformed into a steel ram to pierce hulls and send crews to the bottom. At the South Pole, where no man had ever set foot, they planted a black flag on the ice floes before becoming imprisoned beneath the ice, narrowly escaping suffocation until the crew shattered the frozen carapace with pickaxes. In the waters of the Atlantic, giant squid with seven-meter tentacles attacked the submersible, and a sailor was snatched away before their very eyes, crushed by the monsters' horny beaks.

Ned Land dreamed only of escape, growing ever less tolerant of this gilded cage traveling twenty thousand leagues under the sea. When the Nautilus headed north toward the Norwegian coast, pursued by a warship it was preparing to sink, the harpooner convinced his companions to flee. They slipped into the dinghy just as the submarine plunged toward the Maelstrom, that whirlpool which crushes ships off the Lofoten Islands. The roar of the water deafened them, the boat spun in the deadly spiral, and then all went black. Aronnax awoke in the cabin of a Norwegian fisherman, saved along with his two companions, while the Nautilus had vanished into the vortex, bearing Nemo and his secrets toward the depths from which they might never return, leaving the professor with the searing memory of having glimpsed a world that the men of the surface were not yet ready to understand.