"20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"

[fiefoe]

Jules Verne is a big fan of lists and electricity. He manages to come out with wonders that get greater and greater, like a magician who pulls out bigger and bigger rabbits out of his hat, so in the end the last rabbit is as big as a lion.

• Finally, in a much-dreaded satirical newspaper, its favorite writer took care of the whole matter by attacking the monster, dealing it a death blow and finishing it off in the midst of universal laughter. Wit had conquered science.
• Only a government could possess such a weapon of destruction, and in these disastrous times when man’s genius is being put to work increasing the power of weapons, some country might have tried to build such a formidable device. After the chassepot rifles, torpedoes; after the torpedoes, underwater battering-rams;
• Therefore, after inquiries made in England, France, Russia, Prussia, Spain, Italy, America and even Turkey;
• Therefore, until I receive fuller information, I shall be of the opinion that it is a unicorn-fish of colossal proportions, armed not with a halberd but with a real battering-ram like a warship,
• Long ago in geological times earthbound animals, quadrupeds, quadrumana, reptiles and birds all produced species of gigantic size. The Creator had formed them in a colossal mold which time has reduced little by little.
• It seemed as if this unicorn-fish knew about the plots being hatched against it. There had been so much discussion about it, and even over the transatlantic cable!
• I had no more thought about chasing the unicorn-fish than I had about trying to find the Northwest Passage.
• He was impassive by nature, of regular habits as a matter of principle, eager out of habit, scarcely ever taken aback by life’s surprises, very clever with his hands, fit for any kind of service and the sort of person who, in spite of having a name meaning “Advice,” never gave any even when asked. .. In him I had a well-informed specialist in natural -history classification, who could, with an acrobat’s ease, rush up and down the ladder of phyla, divisions, classes, sub classes, orders, families, genera, sub genera, species and varieties
• He was thirty, and his age was to his master’s as fifteen is to twenty. Please excuse me for thus stating that I was forty years old.
• As for me, I did not lag far behind the others, and personally did my share of daily watching. The frigate was like the mythological Argus with its hundred eyes.
• Ah, brave Ned! I only ask to live another hundred hears so that your memory will remain with me that much longer!
• Then it went two or three miles off, leaving a phosphorescent trail like the swirling smoke left by the locomotive of an express train.
• "Get them up to ten."
  This was an American order if there ever was one. It made me feel as if we were in one of those famous races on the Mississippi.
• Had I discovered some truly fabulous, mythological creature, it would not have come as a greater shock to me. It was quite easy to believe that God had created something prodigious. But suddenly to find, before one’s very eyes, the impossible realized by mysterious human means, that truly was a staggering thought!
• “Confound them!” he cried. “These people are as hospitable as a bunch of Caledonians!
• energy—evinced by the rapid way he would contract his eyebrows; and finally courage—for his deep breathing indicated an expansive, vital nature.
  In addition this man was proud. His firm calm look seemed to reflect thoughts of high nature, and one could see in everything, in his bodily and facial movements, an undeniable openness of manner. I felt myself “involuntarily” reassured in his presence,
• What use are the best of arguments when they can be destroyed by force?
• sugar extracted from rock weed in the North Sea, and lastly permit me to offer you anemone jam, which is as good as that made from most delicious fruit.”
• The cloth you are now wearing was made from the filaments of certain shellfish; it was colored with the same purple dye used by ancient Greeks and Romans,
• The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it; it is only movement and love; it is the living infinite, as one of your poets has said.
• The sea does not belong to tyrants. On its surface, they can still exercise their iniquitous rights, fighting, destroying one another and indulging in their other earthly horrors. But thirty feet below its surface their power ceases, their influence dies out and their domination disappears!
• For it was a veritable museum, in which an intelligent, prodigal hand had brought together all the treasures of nature and art and placed them about in a slightly helter-skelter fashion
• three little genre paintings by Gerard Dow, Metsu and Paul Potter, two works by Géricault and Prudhon, several seascapes by Backhuysen and Vernet. Among the works of modern painters, there were pictures signed by Delacroix, Ingres, Decamp, Troyon, Meissonier, Daubigny
• a bowl made from a single giant clam. This shell, furnished by the largest of acephalous mollusks, measured about thirty-three feet around its delicately scalloped rim. It was even larger than those love ly giant clams given to Francis I by the Republic of Venice, and which the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris has made into two huge holy-water basins.
• exotic cockles from Senegal with their fragile white shells and double valves which a breath could shatter like a soap bubble;
• “I have no further objections to make,” I answered; “I would only like to know, Captain, how you light your way along the ocean floor.”
  “With a Ruhmkorff device, Monsieur Aronnax. The breathing apparatus is carried on the back, whereas this is attached to the belt. It’s composed of a Bunsen battery which is activated not with potassium bichromate, but with sodium. An induction coil gathers the electricity produced and sends it along to a special kind of lantern. Within this lantern there is a glass tube in the form of a coil which contains only a residue of carbonic gas. When the apparatus is turned on, this gas becomes luminous, giving off a whitish continuous light.
• “Because these guns don’t shoot ordinary bullets, but little glass capsules invented by the Austrian chemist Leniebroek, and I have a large stock of them. These glass capsules are covered with a steel case and weighted with lead; thus they are veritable little Leyden jars into which electricity has been forced under very high tension.
• This dazzling carpet acted as a reflector, sending back the sun’s rays with surprising intensity. As a result, there was an immense reverberation of light which penetrated each liquid molecule. Will the reader believe me if I state that at this depth of thirty feet I could see as well as if I were in broad daylight?
• They take in marine salts, absorb the soild elements in water; by their formation of corals and madrepores they are the true creators of calcareous continents! And then, the drop of water, deprived of its mineral content, becomes lighter and rises to the surface where it absorbs those salts left behind by evaporation, becomes heavier, and goes back down bringing new elements to be consumed by these organisms. Thus you have a double current, rising and falling—incessant movement and life!
• Through the thick glass panels we could watch them swimming backward very fast, impelling themselves by means of their locomotor tube, chasing fish and other, mollusks, eating the little ones and being eaten by the larger ones, and in indescribable confusion tossing around the ten arms nature had attached to their heads like a crest of pneumatic serpents.
• It was Tasman who discovered this group in 1643, the year Torricelli invented the barometer and Louis XIV mounted the throne. I leave the reader to decide which of these events has been more useful to the human race.
• And the only reason Ned Land did not regret his gluttony, is that the oyster is the only article of food that never causes indigestion. In fact, it takes at least six dozen of these creatures to furnish the 315 grams of nitrogenous substance necessary for a man’s daily sustenance.
• western coast of the main island of tho group, between Cape Deception and Cape Satisfaction!”
• “Savages!” replied Captain Nemo in an ironic tone of voice. “Does it surprise you, Professor, to set foot on land and find savages? Where won’t you find savages? Besides, these creatures you call savages—are they any worse than others?”
• As naturalists have pointed out, right-handedness is one of the laws of nature. Stars and their planets move and rotate from right to left.
• These monarchs (in Timor) consider themselves descendants of crocodiles, which they claim is the highest possible origin a human being can have. As a result the rivers of this island are full of their scaly ancestors, which the inhabitants worship. They are protected, spoilt, adulated, nourished and fed young girls, and woe to the outsider who touches one of these sacred creatures.
• Coral is a group of microscopic animals gathered on a brittie, rocklike polypary. These polyps—which produce these little creatures by a kind of sprouting process and therefore provide their sole means of growth—not only partake of this communal existence, but also have a life of their own. This is therefore a kind of natural socialism.
• “Oh, Monsieur,” he said in a trembling voice, “I’ve never killed ‘that kind of critter.’”
  All his harpooner’s soul was contained in this one phrase. <at sight of a dugong>
• The Canadian did not answer for a few moments. He then crossed his arms and said: “Frankly, I don’t regret having made this trip beneath the seas. I’ll be happy to have done it, but in order to have done it, it has to end. That’s the way I feel about it.”
• It was the remora, which often attaches itself to the bellies of sharks. According to ancient writers it could stop a ship by sticking to its hull, and it was said that one of these remora had held back Anthony’s ship in the battle of Actium and thereby helped Augustus gain his victory. On how little hangs the destiny of nations!
• “Near Santorin Island, Professor,” replied the captain, “and to be more precise, in the channel separating Nea Kaumene from Palaea Kaumene. I wanted to show you the strange spectacle of an underwater volcanic eruption.”
• finally schools of marvelous red mullets, the ocean’s equivalent of birds of paradise, for which Romans would pay as much as ten thousand sesterces apiece so they could cruelly watch them change from deep vermilion to pale white as they died on their table.
• I understood. This was the scene of the battle of October 22, 1702. This was the spot where the Spanish galleons had sunk. This was where Captain Nemo came to take the millions with which he would ballast his Nautilus. It was to him and him alone that South and Central America had delivered their precious metals.
• This underwater crater threw up lava, but no flames. Flames need oxygen from the air, and they cannot exist under water; but streams of incandescent lava can achieve a reddish-white color, struggle victoriously against  the  surrounding water and become vaporized upon contact. Fast currents carried off all these diffused gases, and the torrents of lava slid to the base of the mountain,
• Conseil, who was never surprised by anything, acted as if it were perfectly natural to wake up under a mountain after going to sleep under the sea.
• “Moreover, Captain,” I added, working up to a pitch of enthusiasm, “why shouldn’t there be open water at the South Pole just as there is at the North Pole? The poles of cold and those of the earth are not the same either in the Arctic or the Antarctic, and until we have proof to the contrary, we must suppose that at these two points there is either land or open ocean.”
  “I think so too, Monsieur Aronnax,” replied Captain Nemo. “Let me merely remark that after raising so many objections to my plan, you’re now flooding me with arguments in its favor.”
  This was true. I was getting bolder than he! I was the one persuading him to go to the Pole! I was the leader, the man willing to ... No, stop your daydreaming, you poor fool! Captain Nemo knew better than you the pros and cons of the question; he was just playing a game with you, watching you being carried away with visions of the impossible.
• And on this trip,  which  was  longer  than  the  circumference  of  the  earth,  how  many  fascinating  or  terrifying  incidents  had held us spellbound: the hunting expedition in the forests of Crespo Island, running aground in Torres Strait, the coral graveyard, the pearl fisheries of Ceylon, the Arabian Tunnel, the volcano of Santorin Island, the treasure in Vigo Bay, Atlantis, the South Pole!
• The Nautilus had gotten under way and was now traveling at high speed. All the quiet luster from the walls of ice had changed into flashing streaks. The fire from these myriads of diamonds had blended together. The Nautilus,  propelled by its powerful engines, was traveling through a sheath of lightning.
• “And wasn’t its head,” Conseil went on, “crowned with eight tentacles which thrashed about on the water like a nest of snakes?”
  “Absolutely.”
  “And didn’t it have huge, popping eyes?”
  “Yes, Conseil.”
  “And wasn’t its mouth like a parakeet’s beak, but enormous?”
  “That’s right.”
  “Well then, if Monsieur doesn’t mind my saying so,” Conseil replied calmly, “this is either Bouguer’s squid or one of his first cousins.”
  I looked at Conseil. Ned Land rushed to the window.
  “What a horrible creature!” he cried.
  I then looked around, and I could not repress a gesture of repulsion. Before my eyes wriggled a terrible monster worthy of all the legends about such creatures.
  It was a giant squid twenty-five feet long.
• The Maelstrom! In the midst of our terrifying situation, could a more frightening word have reached our ears? Were we in those dangerous waters off the coast of Norway? Was the Nautilus being dragged down into this abyss just as our dinghy was about to float free from its flanks?
  As is well known, during ebb tide the waters rush out between Lofoten and Vaerö Islands with tremendous violence. There, they form a whirlpool from which no ship has ever been able to escape. Monstrous waves converge from all points of the horizon. They form this chasm so justly called “the Navel of the Ocean.” It can pull things in from a distance of ten miles, and drag down not only ships and whales, but even polar bears from farther north.