Mare Nostrum (Our Sea)

The submarine grade, a gentle one down to this point, now becomes very steep, descending rapidly to the oceanic abysses,—that immense mass of water (almost the entire ocean), without light, without waves, without tides, without currents, without oscillations of temperature, which is called the "abyssal" zone.

In the littoral, the waters, healthfully agitated, vary in saltiness according to the proximity of the rivers. The rocks and deeps are covered with a vegetation which is green near the surface, becoming darker and darker, even turning to a dark red and brassy yellow as it gets further from the light. In this oceanic paradise of nutritive and luminous waters charged with bacteria and microscopic nourishment, life is developed in exuberance. In spite of the continual traps of the fishermen, the marine herds keep themselves intact because of their infinite powers of reproduction.

The fauna of the abyssal depths where the lack of light makes all vegetation impossible, is largely carnivorous, the weak inhabitants usually devouring the residuum and dead animals that come down from the surface. The strong ones, in their turn, nourish themselves on the concentrated sustenance of the little cannibals.

The bottom of the ocean, a monotonous desert of mud and sand, the accumulated sediment of hundreds of centuries, has occasional oases of strange vegetation. These grove-like growths spring up like spots of light just where the meeting of the surface currents rain down a manna of diminutive dead bodies. The twisted limestone plants, hard as stone, are really not plants at all, but animals. Their leaves are simply inert and treacherous tentacles which contract very suddenly, and their flowers, avid mouths, which bend over their prey, and suck it in through their gluttonous openings.

A fantastic light streaks this world of darkness with multicolored shafts, animal light produced by living organisms. In the lowest abysses sightless creatures are very scarce, contrary to the common opinion, which imagines that almost all of them lack eyes because of their distance from the sun. The filaments of the carnivorous trees are garlands of lamps; the eyes of the hunting animals, electric globes; the insignificant bacteria, light-producing little glands all of which open or close with phosphorescent switches according to the necessity of the moment,—sometimes in order to persecute and devour, and at others in order to keep themselves hidden in the shadows.

The animal-plants, motionless as stars, surround their ferocious mouths with a circle of flashing lights, and immediately their diminutive prey feel themselves as irresistibly drawn toward them as do the moths that fly toward the lamp, and the birds of the sea that beat against the lighthouse.

None of the lights of the earth can compare with those of this abyssal world. All artificial fires pale before the varieties of its organic brilliance.

The living branches of polyps, the eyes of the animals, even the mud sown with brilliant points, emit phosphoric shafts like sparks whose splendors incessantly vanish and reappear. And these lights pass through many gradations of colors:—violet, purple, orange, blue, and especially green. On perceiving a victim nearby, the gigantic cuttle-fishes become illuminated like livid suns, moving their arms with death-dealing strokes.

All the abyssal beings have their organs of sight enormously developed in order to catch even the weakest rays of light. Many have enormous, protruding eyes. Others have them detached from the body at the end of two cylindrical tentacles like telescopes.

Those that are blind and do not throw out any radiance are compensated for this inferiority by the development of the tactile organs. Their antennae and swimming organs are immeasurably prolonged in the darkness. The filaments of their body, long hairs rich in nerve terminals, can distinguish instantaneously the appetizing prey, or the enemy lying in wait.

The abyssal deeps have two floors or roofs. In the highest, is the so-called neritic zone,—the oceanic surface, diaphanous and luminous, far from any coast. Next is seen the pelagic zone, much deeper, in which reside the fishes of incessant motion, capable of living without reposing on the bottom.

The corpses of the neritic animals and of those that swim between the two waters are the direct or indirect sustenance of the abyssal fauna. These beings with weak dental equipment and sluggish speed, badly armed for the conquest of living prey, nourish themselves with the dropping of this rain of alimentary material. The great swimmers, supplied with formidable mandibles and immense and elastic stomachs, prefer the fortunes of war, the pursuit of living prey, and devour,—as the carnivorous devour the herbivorous on land,—all the little feeders on débris and plancton. This word of recent scientific invention presented to Captain Ferragut's mind the most humble and interesting of the oceanic inhabitants. The plancton is the life that floats in loose clusters or forming cloud-like groups across the neritic surface, even descending to the abyssal depths.

Wherever the plancton goes, there is living animation, grouping itself in closely packed colonies. The purest and most translucent salt water shows under certain luminous rays a multitude of little bodies as restless as the dust motes that dance in shafts of sunlight. These transparent beings mingled with microscopic algae and embryonic mucosities are the plancton. In its dense mass, scarcely visible to the human eye, float the siphonoforas, garlands of entities united by a transparent thread as fragile, delicate and luminous as Bohemian crystal. Other equally subtle organisms have the form of little glass torpedoes. The sum of all the albuminous materials floating on the sea are condensed in these nutrient clouds to which are added the secretions of living animals, the remnants of cadavers, the bodies brought down by the rivers, and the nourishing fragments from the meadows of algae.

When the plancton, either by chance or following some mysterious attraction, accumulates on some determined point of the shore, the waters boil with fishes of an astonishing fertility. The seaside towns increase in number, the sea is filled with sails, the tables are more opulent, industries are established, factories are opened and money circulates along the coast, attracted thither from the interior by the commerce in fresh and dried fish.

If the plancton capriciously withdraws itself, floating toward another shore, the marine herds emigrate behind these living meadows, and the blue plain remains as empty as a desert accursed. The fleets of fishing boats are placed high and dry on the beach, the shops are closed, the stewpot is no longer steaming, the horses of the gendarmerie charge against protesting and famine stricken crowds, the Opposition howls in the Chambers, and the newspapers make the Government responsible for everything.

This animal and vegetable dust nourishes the most numerous species which, in their turn, serve as pasture for the great swimmers armed with teeth.

The whales, most bulky of all the oceanic inhabitants, close this destructive cycle, since they devour each other in order to live. The Pacific giant, without teeth, supplies his organism with plancton alone, absorbing it by the ton; that imperceptible and crystalline manna nourishes his body (looking like an overturned belfry), and makes purple, fatty rivers of warm blood circulate under its oily skin.

The transparency of the beings in the plancton recalled to Ferragut's memory the marvelous colorings of the inhabitants of the sea, adjusted exactly to their needs of preservation. The species that live on the surface have, as a general rule, a blue back and silver belly. In this way it is possible for them to escape the sight of their enemies; seen from the shadows of the depths, they are confounded with the white and luminous color of the surface. The sardines that swim in shoals are able to pass unnoticed, thanks to their backs blue as the water, thus escaping the fish and the birds which are hunting them.

Living in the abysses where the light never penetrates, the pelagic animals are not obliged to be transparent or blue like the neritic beings on the surface. Some are opaque and colorless, others, bronzed and black; most of them are clad in somber hues, whose splendor is the despair of the artist's brush, incapable of imitating them. A magnificent red seems to be the base of this color scheme, fading gradually to pale pink, violet, amber, even losing itself in the milky iris of the pearls and in the opalescence of the mother-of-pearl of the mollusks. The eyes of certain fish placed at the end of jaw bones separated from the body, sparkle like diamonds in the ends of a double pin. The protruding glands, the warts, the curving backs, take on the colorings of jewelry.

But the precious stones of earth are dead minerals that need rays of light in order to emit the slightest flash. The animated gems of the ocean—fishes and corals—sparkle with their own colors that are a reflex of their vitality. Their green, their rose color, their intense yellow, their metallic iridescence, all their liquid tints are eternally glazed by a moist varnish which cannot exist in the atmospheric world.

Some of these beings are capable of a marvelous power of mimicry that makes them identify themselves with inanimate objects, or in a few moments run through every gamut of color. Some of great nervous activity, make themselves absolutely immovable and contract, filling themselves with wrinkles, taking on the dark tone of the rocks. Others in moments of irritation or amorous fever, cover themselves with streaks of light and tremulous spots, different colored clouds passing over their epidermis with every thrill. The cuttlefish and ink fish, upon perceiving that they are pursued, enwrap themselves in a cloud of invisibility, just as did the enchanters of old in the books of chivalry, darkening the water with the ink stored in their glands.

Ferragut continued to pass slowly along the Aquarium between the two rows of vertical tanks,—stone cases with thick glass that permitted full view of the interior. The clear and shining walls that received the fire of the sun through their upper part, spread a green reflection over the shadows of the corridors. As they made the rounds, the visitors took on a livid paleness, as though they were marching through a submarine defile.

The tranquil water within the tanks was scarcely visible. Behind the thick glass there appeared to exist only a marvelous atmosphere, an air of dreamland in which drifted up and down various floating beings of many colors. The bubbles of their respiration was the only thing that announced the presence of the liquid. In the upper part of these aquatic cages, the luminous atmosphere vibrated under a continual spray of transparent dust,—the sea water with air injected into it that was renewing the conditions of existence for these guests of the Aquarium.

Seeing these revivifying streams, the captain admired the nourishing force of the blue water upon which he had passed almost all his life.

Earth lost its pride when compared with the aquatic immensity. In the ocean had appeared the first manifestations of life, continuing then its evolutionary cycle over the mountains which had also come up from its depths. If the earth was the mother of man, the sea was his grandmother.

The number of terrestrial animals is most insignificant compared with the maritime ones. Upon the earth's surface (much smaller than the ocean) the beings occupy only the surface of the soil, and an atmospheric canopy of a certain number of meters. The birds and insects seldom go beyond this in their flights. In the sea, the animals are dispersed over all its levels, through many miles of depth multiplied by thousands and thousands of longitudinal leagues. Infinite quantities of creatures, whose number it is impossible to calculate, swim incessantly in all the strata of its waters. Land is a surface, a plane; the sea is a volume.

The immense aquatic mass, three times more salty than at the beginning of the planet, because of a millennarian evaporation that has diminished the liquid without absorbing its components, retains mixed with its chlorides, copper, nickel, iron, zinc, lead, and even gold, from the metallic veins that planetary upheaval deposits upon the oceanic bottom; compared with this mass, the veins of mountains with their golden sands deposited by the rivers are but insignificant tentacles.

Silver also is dissolved in its waters. Ferragut knew by certain calculations that with the silver floating in the ocean could be erected pyramids more enormous than those in Egypt.

The men who once had thought of exploiting these mineral riches had given up the visionary idea because the minerals were too diluted and it would be impossible to make use of them. The oceanic beings know better how to recognize their presence, letting them filter through their bodies for the renovation and coloration of their organs. The copper accumulates in their blood; the gold and silver are discovered in the texture of the animal-plants; the phosphorus is absorbed by the sponges; the lead and the zinc by species of algae.

Every oceanic creature is able to extract from the water the residuum from certain metals dissolved into particles so incalculably tiny that no chemical process could ever capture them. The carbonates of lime deposited by the rivers or dragged from the coast serve innumerable species for the construction of their coverings, skeletons, and spiral shells. The corals, filtering the water across their flabby and mucous bodies, solidify their hard skeletons so that they may finally be converted into habitable islands.

The beings of disconcerting diversity that were floating, diving, or wiggling around Ferragut were no more than oceanic water. The fish were water made into flesh; the slimy, mucilaginous animals were water in a gelatinous state; the crustaceans and the polypi were water turned to stone.

In one of the tanks he saw a landscape which appeared like that of another planet, grandiose yet at the same time reduced, like a woods seen in a diorama. It was a palm grove, surging up between the rocks, but the rocks were only pebbles, and the palm trees,—annelides of the sea,—were simply worms holding themselves in upright immovability.

They kept their ringed bodies within a leathern tube that formed their protective case, and from this rectilinear, marble-colored trunk sent forth, like a spout of branches, the constantly moving tentacles which served them as organs for breathing and eating.

Endowed with rare sensitiveness, it was enough for a cloud to pass before the sun to make them shrink quickly within these tubes, deprived of their showy capitals, like beheaded palm trees. Then, slowly and prudently the animated pincers would come protruding again through the opening of their cylindrical scabbards, floating in the water with anxious hope. All these trees and flower-animals developed a mechanical voracity whenever a microscopic victim fell under the power of their tentacles; then the soft clusters of branches would contract, close, drawing in their prey, and the worm, withdrawing into the lowest part of the slender tower secreted by himself, would digest his conquest.

The other tanks then attracted the attention of the sailor.

Slipping over the stones, introducing themselves into their caverns, drowsing, half buried in the sand,—all the varied and tumultuous species of crustaceans were moving their cutting and tentacular grinders and making their Japanese armor gleam: some of their frames were red—almost black—as though guarding the dry blood of a remote combat; others were of a scarlet freshness as though reflecting the first fires of the flaming dawn.

The largest of the lobsters (the homard, the sovereign of the tables of the rich) was resting upon the scissors of its front claws, as powerful as an arm, or a double battle-axe. The spiny lobster was leaping with agility over the peaks, by means of the hooks on its claws, its weapons of war and nutrition. Its nearest relative, the cricket of the sea, a dull and heavy animal, was sulking in the corners covered with mire and with sea weed, in an immovability that made it easily confounded with the stones. Around these giants, like a democracy accustomed to endure from time to time the attack of the strong, crayfish and shrimps were swimming in shoals. Their movements were free and graceful, and their sensitiveness so acute that the slightest agitation made them start, taking tremendous springs.

Ulysses kept thinking of the slavery that Nature had imposed upon these animals, giving them their beautiful, defensive envelopment.

They were born armored and their development obliged them repeatedly to change their form of arms. They sloughed their skins like reptiles, but on account of their cylindrical shape were able to perform this operation with the facility of a leg that abandons its stocking. When it begins to crack, the crustaceans have to withdraw from out their cuirass the multiple mechanism of their members and appendages,—claws, antennae and the great pincers,—a slow and dangerous operation in which many perish, lacerated by their own efforts. Then, naked and disarmed, they have to wait until a new skin forms that in time is also converted into a coat of mail,—all this in the midst of a hostile environment, surrounded with greedy beasts, large and small, attracted by their rich flesh,—and with no other defense than that of keeping themselves in hiding.

Among the swarm of small crustaceans moving around on the sandy bottom, hunting, eating, or fighting with a ferocious entanglement of claws, the onlookers always search for a bizarre and extravagant little creature, the paguro, nicknamed "Bernard, the Hermit." It is a snail that advances upright as a tower, upon crab claws, yet having as a crown the long hair of a sea-anemone.

This comical apparition is composed of three distinct animals one upon the other—or, rather, of two living beings carrying a bier between them. The paguro crab is born with the lower part of his case unprotected,—a most excellent tid-bit, tender and savory for hungry fishes. The necessity for defending himself makes him seek a snail shell in order to protect the weak part of his organism. If he encounters an empty dwelling of this class, he appropriates it. If not, he eats the inhabitant, introducing his posterior armed with two hooked claws into its mother-of-pearl refuge.

But these defensive precautions are not sufficient for the weak paguro. In order to live he needs rather to put himself on the offensive, to inspire respect in devouring monsters, especially in the octopi that are seeking as prey his trunk and hairy claws, exposed to locomotion outside his tower.

In course of time a sea-anemone comes along and attaches itself to the calcareous peak, the number often amounting to five or six, although there is no bodily relation between the paguro and the organisms on top. They are simply partners with a reciprocal interest. The animal-plants sting like nettles; all the monsters without a shell flee from the poison of their tingling organs, and the fragments of their hair burn like pins of fire. In this manner the humble paguro, carrying upon his back his tower crowned with formidable batteries, inspires terror in the gigantic beasts of the deep. The anemones on their part are grateful to him for being thus able to pass incessantly from one side to the other, coming in contact with every class of animals. In this way, they can eat with greater facility than their sisters fixed on the rocks; for they do not have to wait, as the others must, until food drifts casually to their tentacles. Besides this, there is always floating on top some of the remains of the booty that the crafty crab in his wandering impunity has gathered below.

Ferragut, on passing from one tank to the other, mentally established the gradation of the fauna from the primitive protoplast to the perfect organism.

The sponges of the Mediterranean swam as soon as they were born, when they were like pin-heads, with vibratory movements. Then they remained immovable, the water filtering through the cracks and crannies of their texture, protecting their delicate flesh with a bristling of spikes,—sharp limestone needles with which they pierced the passing fishes and rendered them immovable, availing themselves of the nourishment of their putrefying remains.

The nettles of the sea spread out their stinging threads by the thousands, discharging a venom that stupefies the victim and makes him fall into their corolla. With unlimited voracity, and fastened to the rocks, they overpower fish much larger than they, and at the first hint of danger shrink together in such a way that it is very difficult to see them. The sea-plumes lie flabby and dark as dead animals, until absorbing water, they suddenly rear themselves up, transparent and full of leaves. Thus they go from one side to the other, with the lightness of a feather, or, burrowing in the sand, send forth a phosphoric glow. The belles of the sea, the elegant Medusae, open out the floating circle of their fragile beauty. They are transparent fungi, open umbrellas of glass that advance by means of their contractions. From the inner center of their dome hangs a tube equally transparent and gelatinous,—the mouth of the animal. Long filaments depend from the edges of their circular forms, sensitive tentacles that at the same time maintain their floating equilibrium.

These fragile beings, that appear to belong to an enchanted fauna, white as rock crystal with soft borders of rose color or violet, sting like nettles and defend themselves by their fiery touch. Some subtle and colorless parasols were living here in the tank under the protection of a second enclosure of crystal, and their mucous mistiness scarcely showed itself within this bell-shaped glass except as a pale line of blue vapor.

Below these transparent and ethereal forms that burn whatever they touch, venturing to capture prey much larger than themselves, were grouped as in gardens the so-called "flower of blood," the red coral, and especially the star-fish, forming with their corolla an orange-colored ring.

The captain had seen these stony vegetations, like submerged groves, in the depths of the Dead Sea and also in the southern seas. He had sailed over them under the illusion that through the bluish depths of the ocean were circulating broad rivers of blood.

The oseznos (bear-cubs) and the star-fish were slowly waving the forms that had given rise to their names, secreting poisons in order to paralyze their victims, contracting themselves until they formed a ball of lances that grasped their prey in a deadly embrace or cut it with the bony knives of their radiating body. The iris of the sea balanced themselves on end, moving their members as though they were petals.

Upon the fine sandy depths or attached to the rocks, the mollusks lived in the protection of their shells.

The necessity of giving themselves up to sleep with relative security, without fear of the general rapacity which is the oceanic law, is a matter of concern to all of these marine beings, making them constructive and inventive. The crustaceans live within their shells or take advantage of ready-made refuges of limestone, expelling their former owners; the animal-plants exhale toxins; the planctonic beings, transparent and gelatinous, burn like a crystal exposed to fire; some organisms apparently weak and flabby, have in their tails the force of a carpenter's bit, perforating the rock sufficiently to create a cavern of refuge in its hard interior…. And the timid mollusks, trembling and succulent pulp, have fabricated for their protection the strong shields of their valves,—two concave walls that on opening form their door, and on closing, their house.

A bit of flesh protrudes outside these shells, like a white tongue. In some it takes the form of a sole, and serves as a foot, the mollusk marching with his dwelling upon the back of this unique support. In others it is a swimmer, and the shell, opening and shutting its valves like a propelling mouth, ascends in a straight line to the surface, falling afterwards with the two shields closed.

These herbivorous fresh-water animals live by drinking in the light,—feeling the necessity of the surface waters or the shallow depths with their limpid glades—and this light, spreading over the white interior of their dwelling, decorates it with all the fleeting colors of the iris, giving to the limestone the mysterious shimmer of mother-of-pearl.