The species of fishes here did not differ much from those already noticed. There were rays of giant size, five yards long and endowed with great muscular strength, which enabled them to shoot above the waves; sharks of many kinds, among others a glaucus fifteen feet long, with triangular sharp teeth, and whose transparency rendered it almost invisible in the water; brown sagr?; humantins, prism-shaped and clad with a tuberculous hide; sturgeons, resembling their congeners of the Mediterranean; trumpet syngnathes a foot and a half long, furnished with grayish bladders, without teeth or tongue, and as supple as snakes. M. Aronnax, said he, are you ready to start? The 6th of February, the Nautilus floated in sight of Aden, perched upon a promontory which a narrow isthmus joins to the mainland, a kind of inaccessible Gibraltar, the fortifications of which were rebuilt by the English after taking possession in 1839. I caught a glimpse of the octagon minarets of this town, which was at one time, according to the historian Edrisi, the richest commercial magazine on the coast. This dugong, which Ned Land was preparing to attack, was of colossal dimensions; it was more than seven yards long. It did not move, and seemed to be sleeping on the waves, which circumstance made it easier to capture.
At a sign from him the anchor was dropped, but the chain scarcely ran, for it was little more than a yard deep, and this spot was one of the highest points of the bank of pintadines. Do you not understand, he replied, that this congelation of water will help us? Do you not see that, by its solidification, it would burst through this field of ice that imprisons us, as, when it freezes, it bursts the hardest stones? Do you not perceive that it would be an agent of safety instead of destruction? It became necessary to renew the atmosphere of our prison, and no doubt the whole in the submarine boat. That gave rise to a question in my mind. How would the commander of this floating dwelling-place proceed? Would he obtain air by chemical means, in getting by heat the oxygen contained in chlorate of potash, and in absorbing carbonic acid by caustic potash? Or, a more convenient, economical, and consequently more probable alternative, would he be satisfied to rise and take breath at the surface of the water, like a cetacean, and so renew for twenty-four hours the atmospheric provision? During the geological epochs, the igneous period succeeded to the aqueous. The ocean originally prevailed everywhere. Then by degrees, in the silurian period, the tops of the mountains began to appear, the islands emerged, then disappeared in partial deluges, reappeared, became settled, formed continents, till at length the earth became geographically arranged, as we see in the present day. The solid had wrested from the liquid thirty-seven million six hundred and fifty-seven square miles, equal to twelve billions nine hundred and sixty millions of acres.
Near the island of Santorin, sir, replied the captain, and just in the canal which separates Nea Kamenni from Pali Kamenni. I wished to give you a sight of the curious spectacle of a submarine eruption. The letter N was no doubt the initial of the name of the enigmatical person who commanded at the bottom of the seas. What! the archiotherium, the hyracotherium, the oreodons, the cheropotamus, and the other skins? Captain Nemo's hand contracted, and some tears glistened in his eyes, which I thought incapable of shedding any.