se two barriers
above the waves?"

"It is not probable, Conseil."

"Well, but allow me to finish, please, sir; if this phenomenon should
take place, it will be troublesome for M. Lesseps, who has taken so
much pains to pierce the isthmus."

"I agree with you; but I repeat, Conseil, this phenomenon will never
happen. The violence of subterranean force is ever diminishing.
Volcanoes, so plentiful in the first days of the world, are being
extinguished by degrees; the internal heat is weakened, the temperature
of the lower strata of the globe is lowered by a perceptible quantity
every century to the detriment of our globe, for its heat is its life."

"But the sun?"

"The sun is not sufficient, Conseil. Can it give heat to a dead body?"

"Not that I know of."

"Well, my friend, this earth will one day be that cold corpse; it will
become uninhabitable and uninhabited like the moon, which has long
since lost all its vital heat."

"In how many centuries?"

"In some hundreds of thousands of years, my boy."

"Then," said Conseil, "we shall have time to finish our journey--that
is, if Ned Land does not interfere with it."

And Conseil, reassured, returned to the study of the bank, which the
Nautilus was skirting at a moderate speed.

During the night of the 16th and 17th February we had entered the
second Mediterranean basin, the greatest depth of which was 1,450
fathoms. The Nautilus, by the action of its crew, slid down the
inclined planes and buried itself in the lowest depths of the sea.

On the 18th of February, about three o'clock in the morning, we were at
the entrance of the Straits of Gibraltar. There once existed two
currents: an upper one, long since recognised, which conveys the waters
of the ocean into the basin of the Mediterranean; and a lower
counter-current, which reasoning has now shown to exist. Indeed, the
volume of water in the Mediterranean, incessantly added to by the waves
of the Atlantic and by rivers falling into it, would each year raise
the level of this sea, for its evaporation is not sufficient to restore
the equilibrium. As it is not so, we must necessarily admit the
existence of an under-current, which empties into the basin of the
Atlantic through the Straits of Gibraltar the surplus waters of the
Mediterranean. A fact indeed; and it was this counter-current by which
the Nautilus profited. It advanced rapidly by the narrow pass. For
one instant I caught a glimpse of the be