• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Nemo and Liedenbrock donned their own suits, while others assisted the cumbersome guard, forcing him to leave his curved sword behind. The muscular man did not understand why he couldn’t carry the blade inside his heavy, waterproof suit. The impatient caliph commanded him to cooperate so they could go outside and walk on the ocean floor.

Leaving the rest of the Nautilus crew with the remainder of the white-clad guards, the four suited men stood inside the small, double-walled exit chamber. Nemo grasped a long, barbed spear from a rack on the wall. In his heavy suit the caliph’s guard moved clumsily to grab the weapon away from him. Robur’s helmet plate opened. “What is the meaning of taking this weapon, Engineer?”

“We must defend ourselves, Caliph,” Nemo said in an innocent voice. “We are entering unexplored territory. We do not know what dangers may wait for us beneath the sea. Is it not better to be prepared, than to be slaughtered by a man-eating fish?” He looked intent, making certain he increased the uneasy guard’s fear. “Or perhaps a sea monster?”

The caliph grumbled, “Very well, but my guard will carry the weapon himself. Now, let us be off so I can experience the last of the Nautilus’s wonders.”

Nemo forced a tight smile again and looked at Cyrus Harding waiting just outside the airlock hatch. His anger had turned to ice, and he was completely prepared for what he must do. “Yes, Caliph, we will have much to celebrate.” The second-in-command gave a curt nod to show that he understood.

The four suited men sealed the airlock chamber. Nemo turned a rotating wheel to open a valve that allowed sea water to pour in. Both the guard and the caliph became frantic at the gushing flow, but Nemo raised his gloved hand, gesturing for them not to fear. When the water filled the chamber, they stood together for a moment, testing their breathing apparatus and looking through their helmets.

Nemo tasted metallic air in his lungs and again saw a bright vision of the meteorologist lying beheaded on the docks. Conseil had developed these systems, much improved over the crude bladder helmet young Nemo had used to walk under the Loire, when he’d been unable to save his drowning father. . . . With renewed determination, he opened the outer door, and the party stepped out of the sub-marine boat and onto the bottom of the sea.

Nemo’s boot sank deep, sending up a cloud of silty mud. For a second he wondered if he had stumbled upon a murky trough of quicksand . . . but then he struck hard rock. With slow, fluid steps, he left footprints that the ocean erased.

Caliph Robur walked beside him like a child, struggling to keep his balance, but soon he was filled with delight and wonder. Liedenbrock followed them, letting himself become accustomed to the suit. The reluctant guard used his harpoon like a walking stick. Nemo watched them every second, ready to strike the moment either man made a mistake or showed any weaknesses.

They passed through a garden of olive-green seaweed that waved like ferns around their knees and provided shelter for darting, exotic fish. The ground rose in rippled mounds of volcanic rock mixed with colorful coral like the antlers of a stag.

When Nemo saw the twined coral, he felt another sharp pang. He recalled that long-ago morning when he and Jules Verne had each promised to obtain a coral necklace for the beautiful young Caroline Aronnax. Now he stood looking at a fortune of the substance . . . and he was farther from Caroline than he had ever been -- and far from his wife Auda, as well, who had risked a great deal to warn him of the dangers he faced.

Robur intends to kill us all.

Hidden among boulders, they saw a cluster of giant clams, each one like a wide set of gray lips rimming a hard shell. Nemo wondered if they might find enormous black pearls inside the crushing bivalve jaws of the clams.

The explorers were so intent on the mollusks that only Nemo noticed the shadow like a sharp canoe