It was an immense forest of large mineral vegetations,
enormous petrified trees, united by garlands of elegant
sea-bindweed, all adorned with clouds and reflections.
We passed freely under their high branches, lost in the shade
of the waves.

Captain Nemo had stopped. I and my companions halted, and, turning round,
I saw his men were forming a semi-circle round their chief.
Watching attentively, I observed that four of them carried on their
shoulders an object of an oblong shape.

We occupied, in this place, the centre of a vast glade
surrounded by the lofty foliage of the submarine forest.
Our lamps threw over this place a sort of clear twilight
that singularly elongated the shadows on the ground.
At the end of the glade the darkness increased, and was only relieved
by little sparks reflected by the points of coral.

Ned Land and Conseil were near me. We watched,
and I thought I was going to witness a strange scene.
On observing the ground, I saw that it was raised in certain
places by slight excrescences encrusted with limy deposits,
and disposed with a regularity that betrayed the hand of man.

In the midst of the glade, on a pedestal of rocks roughly
piled up, stood a cross of coral that extended its long arms
that one might have thought were made of petrified blood.
Upon a sign from Captain Nemo one of the men advanced;
and at some feet from the cross he began to dig a hole with
a pickaxe that he took from his belt. I understood all!
This glade was a cemetery, this hole a tomb, this oblong
object the body of the man who had died in the night!
The Captain and his men had come to bury their companion in this
general resting-place, at the bottom of this inaccessible ocean!

The grave was being dug slowly; the fish fled on all sides while their
retreat was being thus disturbed; I heard the strokes of the pickaxe,
which sparkled when it hit upon some flint lost at the bottom of the waters.
The hole was soon large and deep enough to receive the body.
Then the bearers approached; the body, enveloped in a tissue of white linen,
was lowered into the damp grave. Captain Nemo, with his arms crossed
on his breast, and all the friends of him who had loved them,
knelt in prayer.

The grave was then filled in with the rubbish taken from the ground,
which formed a slight mound. When this was done, Captain Nemo
and his men rose; then, approaching the grave, they knelt again,
and all extended their hands in sign of a last adieu.
Then the funeral procession returned to the Nautilus,
passing under the arches of the forest, in the midst
of thickets, along the coral bushes, and still on the ascent.
At last the light of the ship appeared, and its luminous track
guided us to the Nautilus. At one o'clock we had returned.

As soon as I had changed my clothes I went up on to the platform,
and, a prey to conflicting emotions, I sat down near the binnacle.
Captain Nemo joined me. I rose and said to him:

"So, as I said he would, this man died in the night?"

"Yes, M. Aronnax."

"And he rests now, near his companions, in the coral cemetery?"

"Yes, forgotten by all else, but not by us. We dug the grave,
and the polypi undertake to seal our dead for eternity."
And, burying his face quickly in his hands, he tried in vain to
suppress a sob. Then he added: "Our peaceful cemetery is there,
some hundred feet below the surface of the waves."

"Your dead sleep quietly, at least, Captain, out of the reach of sharks."

"Yes, sir, of sharks and men," gravely replied the Captain.



PART TWO



CHAPTER I

THE INDIAN OCEAN

We now come to the second part of our journey under the sea.
The first ended with the moving scene in the coral cemetery which left
such a deep impression on my mind. Thus, in the midst of this great sea,
Captain Nemo's life was passing, even to his grave, which he had
prepared in one of its deepest abysses. There, not one of the ocean's
monsters could trouble the last sleep of the crew of the Nautilus,
of those friends riveted to each other in death as in life.
"Nor any man, either," had added the Captain. Still the same fierce,
implacable defiance towards human society!

I could no longer content myself with the theory which satisfied Conseil.

That worthy fellow persisted in seeing in the Commander of
the Nautilus one of those unknown servants who return mankind
contempt for indifference. For him, he was a misunderstood
genius who, tired of earth's deceptions, had taken refuge in this


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