"Jules Verne. Off on a Comet. WORKS" - читать интересную книгу автора

Unsparing of her fuel, the _Dobryna_ made her way at full steam towards
Cape Blanc. Neither Cape Negro nor Cape Serrat was to be seen.
The town of Bizerta, once charming in its oriental beauty,
had vanished utterly; its marabouts, or temple-tombs, shaded
by magnificent palms that fringed the gulf, which by reason of its
narrow mouth had the semblance of a lake, all had disappeared,
giving place to a vast waste of sea, the transparent waves of which,
as still demonstrated by the sounding-line, had ever the same uniform
and arid bottom.

In the course of the day the schooner rounded the point where,
five weeks previously, Cape Blanc had been so conspicuous an object,
and she was now stemming the waters of what once had been
the Bay of Tunis. But bay there was none, and the town from
which it had derived its name, with the Arsenal, the Goletta,
and the two peaks of Bou-Kournein, had all vanished from the view.
Cape Bon, too, the most northern promontory of Africa and
the point of the continent nearest to the island of Sicily,
had been included in the general devastation.

Before the occurrence of the recent prodigy, the bottom of
the Mediterranean just at this point had formed a sudden ridge
across the Straits of Libya. The sides of the ridge had shelved
to so great an extent that, while the depth of water on the summit
had been little more than eleven fathoms, that on either hand
of the elevation was little short of a hundred fathoms.
A formation such as this plainly indicated that at some remote
epoch Cape Bon had been connected with Cape Furina, the extremity
of Sicily, in the same manner as Ceuta has doubtless been
connected with Gibraltar.

Lieutenant Procope was too well acquainted with the Mediterranean
to be unaware of this peculiarity, and would not lose the opportunity
of ascertaining whether the submarine ridge still existed, or whether
the sea-bottom between Sicily and Africa had undergone any modification.

Both Timascheff and Servadac were much interested in watching the operations.
At a sign from the lieutenant, a sailor who was stationed at the foot
of the fore-shrouds dropped the sounding-lead into the water, and in reply
to Procope's inquiries, reported--"Five fathoms and a flat bottom."

The next aim was to determine the amount of depression on either
side of the ridge, and for this purpose the _Dobryna_ was shifted
for a distance of half a mile both to the right and left,
and the soundings taken at each station. "Five fathoms and a
flat bottom," was the unvaried announcement after each operation.
Not only, therefore, was it evident that the submerged chain
between Cape Bon and Cape Furina no longer existed, but it was
equally clear that the convulsion had caused a general leveling of