"
"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.
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