THE MEDITERRANEAN. 83
Gibraltar. These bars, in the geological epoch, completely shut in the Mediterranean.” “Ah!” said Conseil, “and suppose some volcanic action should raise these reefs again?” “That is scarcely probable.” “At least, if Monsieur will allow me to finish; if this should happen, it will be very awkward for M. de Lesseps, who has taken so much trouble to cut the Suez Canal.” “I agree with you, Conseil; but I repeat I do not think it likely to happen. The violence of the subterranean forces is always diminishing. The volcanoes, so common in early ages, are now comparatively few; the interior heat is dying out, the temperature of the earth’s śtrata is being lowered appreciably every century, and to the detriment of our globe, for this heat is life.”
“Yet the sun——" “The sun is not enough, Conseil. Can it warm a corpse?” “No, I should say not.” “Well, my friend, the earth will one day become a cold body; it will become uninhabitable and uninhabited; like the moon, which has long ago lost its vital heat.” “In how many centuries?” asked Conseil. “In some hundreds of thousands of years.” “Then,” said Conseil, “we have still time to complete our voyage, if Ned Land does not interrupt us.” And Conseil, reassured, applied himself to the study of the high bank that the Nautilus was skirting at a moderated pace,
There, beneath a rocky and volcanic soil, was outspread a living flora of sponges, holotines, cydippes, ornamented with ruddy foliage, which emitted a slight phosphorescence; beroés, commonly known as sea-cucumbers, and bathed in
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