I meticulously noted these different depths, obtaining the underwater profile of this upside-down mountain chain that stretched beneath the sea. By evening there was still no improvement in our situation. The ice stayed between 400 and 500 meters deep. It was obviously shrinking, but what a barrier still lay between us and the surface of the ocean! By then it was eight o’clock. The air inside the Nautilus should have been renewed four hours earlier, following daily practice on board. But I didn’t suffer very much, although Captain Nemo hadn’t yet made demands on the supplementary oxygen in his air tanks. That night my sleep was fitful. Hope and fear besieged me by turns. I got up several times. The Nautilus continued groping. Near three o’clock in the morning, I observed that we encountered the Ice Bank’s underbelly at a depth of only fifty meters. So only 150 feet separated us from the surface of the water. Little by little the Ice Bank was turning into an ice field again. The mountains were changing back into plains. My eyes didn’t leave the pressure gauge. We kept rising on a diagonal, going along this shiny surface that sparkled beneath our electric rays. Above and below, the Ice Bank was subsiding in long gradients. Mile after mile it was growing thinner. Finally, at six o’clock in the morning on that memorable day of March 19, the lounge door opened. Captain Nemo appeared. “Open sea!” he told me. CHAPTER 14 The South Pole I RUSHED UP onto the platform. Yes, open sea! Barely a few sparse floes, some moving icebergs; a sea stretching into the distance; hosts of birds in the air and myriads of fish under the waters, which varied from intense blue to olive green depending on the depth. The thermometer marked 3 degrees centigrade. It was as if a comparative springtime had been locked up behind that Ice Bank, whose distant masses were outlined on the northern horizon. “Are we at the pole?” I asked the captain, my heart pounding. “I’ve no idea,” he answered me. “At noon we’ll fix our position.” “But will the sun show through this mist?” I said, staring at the grayish sky. “No matter how faintly it shines, it will be enough for me,” the captain replied. To the south, ten miles from the Nautilus, a solitary islet rose to a height of 200 meters. We proceeded toward it, but cautiously, because this sea could have been strewn with reefs.