We looked toward the forest. My hand stopped halfway to my mouth; Ned’s finished the journey. A second stone knocked a pigeon leg out of Conseil’s hand, and we jumped up with our guns.
About twenty islanders armed with bows and slings had appeared at the edge of the forest, hardly a hundred steps away. Stones and arrows fell all around us.
“To the boat!” I cried.
Ned would not leave his meat. With his pig on one side and his kangaroos on the other, he still ran fast, and in two minutes we had pushed off. Behind us about a hundred islanders ran into the water up to their waists, shouting and waving their arms. Nobody came out onto the platform of the Nautilus.
On board I went down to the salon. Captain Nemo was bent over his organ, lost in his music. I had to touch his hand before he noticed me.
“Ah, it is you, Professor. Did you have a good hunt?”
“Yes, Captain, but we have brought back some visitors. The islanders are attacking us.”
“The islanders!” he said, with a touch of irony. “And you are surprised to land on a strange shore and find men who throw stones? Where in the world will you not find them? And are these worse than the others? Professor Aronnax, if all the people of New Guinea gathered on that beach, the Nautilus would have nothing to fear from them.”
His fingers went back to the keys, and he soon forgot that I was there. That night many fires burned on the beach. Yet I was not afraid; the captain’s calm had calmed me too.
The next day the islanders kept their distance, but on the morning of January 8 they were there again, five or six hundred of them, and at low tide some walked out over the coral almost to the ship. With nothing better to do, Conseil and I fished for shells from the platform with a small net. Suddenly I plunged my arm into the net and gave a cry.
“Has master been bitten?” asked Conseil.
“No, my boy, but I would gladly have given a finger for this!”
I held up a shell whose spiral turned to the left instead of to the right, and handed it to Conseil. Almost all shells turn the other way, and collectors pay a fortune for one that does not. I was already imagining it in our museum in Paris when a stone thrown by an islander broke it in Conseil’s hand.
I cried out in despair. Conseil seized his gun and fired at a man swinging his sling ten meters away. The bullet broke the bracelet on the man’s arm.
“Conseil! A shell is not worth a man’s life!”
“Oh, the rascal!” cried Conseil. “I would rather he had broken my shoulder!”
Meanwhile about twenty canoes had surrounded us, and arrows were falling on the hull. I went down and knocked at the captain’s door.
“The islanders are coming in their canoes, Captain. In a few minutes hundreds of them will attack.”
“Then we must close the hatches,” he said quietly, and pressed an electric button. “It is done. You do not think that these gentlemen can break walls that your frigate’s cannonballs could not?”
“No, Captain. But tomorrow we must open the hatches to let in fresh air. If the islanders are on the platform, how will you keep them out?”
“Then let them come. These people are poor creatures, and I do not want my visit to their island to cost the life of a single one of them.” He stood up. “Tomorrow, at twenty minutes to three in the afternoon, the Nautilus will float and leave the Torres Strait unharmed.”
Back in my room I found Conseil.
“Trust the captain, my boy, and sleep in peace. What is Ned doing?”
“If master will excuse me, friend Ned is making a kangaroo pie that will be a marvel.”
All night I heard the islanders stamping on the platform and shouting. The crew paid no more attention to them than soldiers in a fort pay to the ants on its walls.
The next day, at twenty-five to three, Captain Nemo came into the salon. Already I could feel the hull trembling on the rising tide.
“We are leaving,” he said. “I have given the order to open the hatches.”
“And the islanders?”
He shrugged. “They will not come in through the hatches, even if they are open. Come and see.”
At the central staircase Ned and Conseil were watching some of the crew open the hatch. Furious cries came from outside, and twenty fierce faces appeared above us. But the first islander who put his hand on the iron rail of the stairs was thrown back by some invisible force and ran off screaming. Ten more tried, and the same thing happened to them all.
Conseil was delighted. Ned, carried away by his temper, rushed up the stairs, seized the rail with both hands, and was thrown back in his turn.
“I’ve been struck by lightning!” he cried, and swore.
That explained everything. The rail was charged with electricity. The shock would have killed them if the captain had sent the full current through it; he had put an invisible wall between his attackers and himself.
The islanders fled in terror. Half laughing, we rubbed poor Ned’s arms while he went on swearing. At that moment the Nautilus, lifted by the tide, rose from its bed of coral at exactly twenty minutes to three, as the captain had said, and left the Torres Strait safe and sound.