"But tell me first," interrupted Cosmo, "how you succeeded in finding the Ark again."
"That was not very difficult," replied De Beauxchamps, smiling. "Of course, it was to some extent accidental, for I didn't know that you would be here, navigating over France; but I had an idea that you might come this way if you had an intention of seeing what had happened to Europe. It is my regular custom to rise frequently to the surface to take a look around and make sure of my bearings, and you know that the Ark makes a pretty large point on the waters. I saw it long before you caught sight of me."
"Very well," said Cosmo. "Please go on with your story. It must, indeed, be an extraordinary one."
"I was particularly desirous of seeing Paris again, deep as I knew her to lie under the waves," resumed De Beauxchamps, "because it was my home, and I had a house in the Champs Elysées. You cannot divorce the heart of a Frenchman from his home, though you should bury it under twenty oceans."
"Your family were lost?"
"Thank God, I had no family. If I had had they would be with me. My companions are all like myself in that respect. We have lost many friends, but no near relatives. As I was saying, I started for France, poor drowned France, as soon as I left you. With the powerful searchlight of the Jules Verne I could feel confident of avoiding obstructions; and, besides, I knew very closely the height to which the flood had risen, and having the topography of my country at my fingers' ends, as does every officer of the army, I was able to calculate the depth at which we should run in order to avoid the hilltops."
"But surely," said Cosmo, "it is impossible—at least, it seems so to me—that you can descend to any great depth—the pressure must be tremendous a few hundred feet down, to say nothing of possible thousands."
"All that," replied the Frenchman, "has been provided for. You probably do not know to what extent we had carried experiments in France on the deep submersion of submarines before their general abandonment when they were prohibited by international agreement in war. I was myself perhaps the leader in those investigations, and in the construction of the Jules Verne I took pains to improve on all that had hitherto been done.
"Without going into any description of my devices, I may simply remind you nature has pointed out ways of avoiding the consequences of the inconceivable pressures which calculation indicates at depths of a kilometer, or more, in her construction of the deep-sea fishes. It was by a study of them that I arrived at the secret of both penetrating to depths that would theoretically have seemed entirely impossible and of remaining at such depths."
"Marvelous!" exclaimed Cosmo; "marvelous beyond belief!"