seemed hung in a bottomless abyss.

[Illustration]

On the surface of the water the birds were flying in large flocks,
like thick clouds big with a storm. Aquatic birds of all sorts were
there, from the albatross which is common to the south, to the penguin
of the arctic seas, but of enormous size. Their cries were deafening.
In considering them the doctor found his knowledge of natural history
too scanty; many of the names escaped him, and he found himself bowing
his head when their wings beat the air.

[Illustration: "Aquatic birds of all sorts were there."]

Some of these large birds measured twenty feet from tip to tip; they
covered the whole launch with their expanded wings; and there were
legions of these birds, of which the names had never appeared in the
London "Index Ornithologus." The doctor was dejected and stupefied at
finding his science so faulty. Then, when his glance fell from the
wonders of the air to the calm surface of the ocean, he saw no less
astonishing productions of the animal kingdom, among others, medusae
thirty feet broad; they served as food for the other fish, and they
floated like islands amid the sea-weed. What a difference from the
microscopic medusae observed in the seas of Greenland by Scoresby, and
of which that explorer estimated the number at twenty-three trillions
eight hundred and ninety-eight billions of millions in a space of two
square miles!

Then the eye glancing down into the transparent water, the sight was
equally strange, so full was it of fishes; sometimes the animals were
swimming about below, and the eye saw them gradually disappearing, and
fading away like spectres; then they would leave the lower layers and
rise to the surface. The monsters seemed in no way alarmed at the
presence of the launch; they even passed near it, rubbing their fins
against it; this, which would have alarmed whalers, did not disturb
these men, and yet the sea-monsters were very large.

[Illustration: "Then the eye glancing down into the transparent water,
the sight was equally strange."]

Young sea-calves played about them; the sword-fish, with its long,
narrow, conical sword, with which it cleaves the ice, was chasing the
more timid cetacea; numberless spouting whales were clearly to be
heard. The sword-caper, with its delicate tail and large caudal fins,
swam with incomprehensible quickness, feeding on smaller animals, such
as the cod, as swift as itself; while the white whale, which