The terrain consisted mostly of thick slime mixed with petrified branches, but it changed little by little near four o'clock in the afternoon;
下午四點左右,地面上夾帶有化石枝葉的厚泥土漸漸改變了;
it grew rockier and seemed to be strewn with pudding stones and a basaltic gravel called "tuff," together with bits of lava and sulfurous obsidian.
石頭愈來愈多,有好些變質(zhì)巖,玄武石凝灰?guī)r,同時又有硫磺火石和黑暇石散在中間。
I expected these long plains to change into mountain regions, and in fact, as the Nautilus was executing certain turns, I noticed that the southerly horizon was blocked by a high wall that seemed to close off every exit.
我想山岳地帶不久就要接上遼闊的平原。真的,在諾第留斯號更往前駛的時候,我望見南方的天際水平線,被一帶高墻擋起來,好像完全沒有出路似的。
Its summit obviously poked above the level of the ocean.
很顯然,墻頂是超出大洋水面了。
It had to be a continent or at least an island, either one of the Canaries or one of the Cape Verde Islands.
那可能是大陸,至少也是一個島,或加納里群島之一,或青角群島之一。
Our bearings hadn't been marked on the chart-perhaps deliberately-and I had no idea what our position was.
船方位的標記還沒有做—可能是有意這樣—我不知道我們所在的方位。
In any case this wall seemed to signal the end of Atlantis, of which, all in all, we had crossed only a small part.
總之,這座高墻我看來是標記出大西洋洲的盡頭,我們沒有走過的恐怕也只有很小的一部分了。
Nightfall didn't interrupt my observations. I was left to myself. Conseil had repaired to his cabin.
黑夜沒有中斷我的觀察,我獨自一人留下,康塞爾回他的房中去了。
The Nautilus slowed down, hovering above the muddled masses on the seafloor, sometimes grazing them as if wanting to come to rest, sometimes rising unpredictably to the surface of the waves.
諾第留斯號行駛緩慢,在地面認不清的一堆一堆東西上面往來盤旋,有時它接觸到這些亂堆,好像它想停留在上面似的;有時又很任意地浮出海水面上來。
Then I glimpsed a few bright constellations through the crystal waters, specifically five or six of those zodiacal stars trailing from the tail end of Orion.
我這時通過海水透明晶體,望見一些光輝的星宿,那正是跟參墾魚貫排列起來的六七顆黃道星宿。