"Thank you, Master Land," said he.

"It was in revenge, Captain," replied Ned Land. "I owed you that."

A ghastly smile passed across the Captain's lips, and that was all.

"To the Nautilus," said he.

The boat flew over the waves. Some minutes after we met the shark's
dead body floating. By the black marking of the extremity of its fins,
I recognised the terrible melanopteron of the Indian Seas, of the
species of shark so properly called. It was more than twenty-five feet
long; its enormous mouth occupied one-third of its body. It was an
adult, as was known by its six rows of teeth placed in an isosceles
triangle in the upper jaw.

Whilst I was contemplating this inert mass, a dozen of these voracious
beasts appeared round the boat; and, without noticing us, threw
themselves upon the dead body and fought with one another for the
pieces.

At half-past eight we were again on board the Nautilus. There I
reflected on the incidents which had taken place in our excursion to
the Manaar Bank.

Two conclusions I must inevitably draw from it--one bearing upon the
unparalleled courage of Captain Nemo, the other upon his devotion to a
human being, a representative of that race from which he fled beneath
the sea. Whatever he might say, this strange man had not yet succeeded
in entirely crushing his heart.

When I made this observation to him, he answered in a slightly moved
tone:

"That Indian, sir, is an inhabitant of an oppressed country; and I am
still, and shall be, to my last breath, one of them!"

CHAPTER IV

THE RED SEA

In the course of the day of the 29th of January, the island of Ceylon
disappeared under the horizon, and the Nautilus, at a speed of twenty
miles an hour, slid into the labyrinth of canals which separate the
Maldives from the Laccadives. It coasted even the Island of Kiltan, a
land originally coraline, discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1499, and one
of the nineteen principal islands of the Laccadive Archipelago,
situated between 10 deg. and 14 deg. 30' N. lat., and 69 deg. 50' 72"
E. long.

We had made 16,220 miles, or 7,500 (French) leagues from our
starting-point in the Japanese Seas.

The next day (30th January), when the Nautilus went to the surface of
the ocean there was no land in sight. Its course was N.N.E., in the
direction of the Sea of Oman, between Arabia and the Indian Peninsula,
which serves as an outlet to the Persian Gulf. It was evidently a
block without any po