three o’clock
in the morning
It occurred to me , lord knows why , that this boat buried under the sea might have been the Atlas , lost with all hands some twenty years ago and never heard from again ! Oh , what a gruesome tale these Mediterranean depths could tell , this huge boneyard where so much wealth has been lost , where so many victims have met their deaths ! Meanwhile , briskly unconcerned , the Nautilus ran at full propeller through the midst of these ruins . On February 18 , near three o'clock in the morning , it hove before the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar . There are two currents here : an upper current , long known to exist , that carries the ocean 's waters into the Mediterranean basin ; then a lower countercurrent , the only present-day proof of its existence being logic . In essence , the Mediterranean receives a continual influx of water not only from the Atlantic but from rivers emptying into it ; since local evaporation is n't enough to restore the balance , the total amount of added water should make this sea 's level higher every year . Yet this is n't the case , and we 're naturally forced to believe in the existence of some lower current that carries the Mediterranean 's surplus through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic basin .