OCR Text |
Show I CONDENSED CLASSICS I I I 20,000 LEAGUES I UNDER THE SEA I I I I By JULES VERNE Condensation by 4 James B. Connolly . $ $ captain for several days; twu cama a note inviting us to a hunt on the bottom of. the sea. We donned diving snits, then fastened on a sort of knapsack knap-sack which famished us not only with air to breathe, but with the light to see our way. We carried air-guns which fired glass bullets heavily charg-L charg-L ed with electricity, which had only to f touch the most powerful animal to kill him. A connecting compartment filled with water let us Into the sea. And t thus equipped, wading on the bottom ' of the clear ocean, we killed our game ' with ease and without danger. J That hunt was but the first of the ' wonders of the cruise. Onward we ', rushed, sometimes on the surface, ; sometimes under the sea. There was our fight, with the immense devil-fish which once in a huge school enmeshed the Nautilus. There was the visit to a wonderful pearl, fishery, where Cap . tain Nemo showed us a mollusc within with-in whose Jaws was a pearl weighing perhaps 500 pounds. Some day ha would return and pluck that treasure, but not. yet every year was adding to its value. We visited the skeletons of long-sunken ships, the corpses of the drowned crew still clinging to the hulls of some. We hunted in the Papuan islands where the Nautilus was attacked at-tacked by the native savages. An electric elec-tric current turned them back shocked and howling ere they could climb aboard. - When one, of the crew died Captain Nemo had him buried in a coral glade in thA South Pacific, where was a Jnle Verne vrni born at Kan tern February 8, 182S. Though lie had gone to Pari to Mtudy for the bar he followed In the footnttpn of the lonrlon irho have found tho . Idle moment of the Abtw u pleaannt oc-canlon oc-canlon for the wandering: Imagination. Imagi-nation. The opera and the.ntag'e attracted at-tracted him, but It vrnn not Ions before he discovered discov-ered a field which he made hi own, that of Imaginary I voyage to any Impossible place 4o which hi whimsy might direct him, for which, however, he had prepared m time table and made all sort of cl-eatlfle cl-eatlfle preparation In the moat minute way. Such Imaginary trips have been made by writer from IXomer' day to those of II. G. Wells, and the guide have Included such personage as Virgil, Vir-gil, Dante, Cyrano de Dergerac, Dean Swift and Daniel Defoe. But none have been me matter of faet or more brilliant tn carrying off the matter, and the marvel of science In the present war have brought Jules Verne and his delightful day dream to the mind of 11. Perhaps the most famous trips were those to the ''Center of the Earth," "Fr0ra the Earth to the Moon," "Twenty "Twen-ty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," nnd . "Around the World In Eighty Days." All the language of the world know the tale, and most theater know the last named, as well a "Michael "Mi-chael Strogoff." He died at Amiens, where hi home has long been pointed out, March 24, 1C05. cross of red coral that looked like petrified blood. It was a wonderful, solemn sight to see the pall-bearera with the dead body on their shoulders, and all treading so reverentially the way from the ship to the coral cemetery, ceme-tery, where at the foot of the cross the body was Interred and covered up. All knelt in prayer. Captain Nemo was the last to leave. "Tour dead sleep quietly out of the reach of sharks," I said when we were back on the Nautilus. "Of sharks and men,' he replied. We voyaged under colossal Icebergs to the South Pole and all but perished there, escaping from an Icy tomb only as our last breath of storage air was exhausted. Wonderful was our passage from the Red sea Into the Mediterranean Mediter-ranean by means of a subterranean tunnel under the Isthmus. (This was before the digging of the Suez canal.) There we witnessed the transfer of a million dollars' worth of gold ingots from the Nautilus to the vessel of a Greek diver. , Whence came this store of gold? Later we learned. In Vigo bay, on tho Spanish coast, the Nautilus came to rest on bottom. Here in 1702 a fleet of Spanish galleons" gal-leons" ivere sunk, and here from this sunken treasure more than a century and a half later this ruler of the unJerseas came and helped himself whenever It pleased him. i4Five, hundred hun-dred millions were there," said Captain Cap-tain Nemo, "but not now. Do you see now h( w with these and the other treasures of my domain I could pay the national debt of France and not feel it?" We had now been six months aboard the Nautilus. For me, the scientist,' it was a voyage of "ceaseless interest but not so for.Consell and Ned Land At. their request I pleaded with Captain Cap-tain Nemo for our liberty. "You came to my ship without invitation. in-vitation. You will now remain here." was his grim answer. We had left the southern hemisphere hemi-sphere and were in the waters off France and the British Islands when we were pursued by an armed warship. war-ship. Flying no colors, she attacked nt once. Her cannon shot rebounded from our Iron hull, " Captain Nemo, pointing to her, said : "I am the oppressed, and there is my oppressor. Through him I have lost country,, wife, children, father and mother. Why should I withhold ray vengeance?" - He called out his orders. The Nautilus Nau-tilus sunk below the sea. We felt her rushing forward, felt the shock of her stetl ram piercing the hull of the enemy. en-emy. . Through the glass panels we saw her doomed crew crowding the ratlines, clinging to the rails, struggling strug-gling In the sea. The Nautilus passed on. - I saw captain Nemo go to his room and kneel before "the portrait of a woman arid two little children. "How long, O Lord, how long!" he cried out. We steamed north, to that' part of the Norwegian coast where lies that dreaded maelstrom which draws Into Itself all floating things. The Nautilus was It an accident? was drawn into in-to the whirlpool. Around and around shevhirled. Even her steel hull felt the strain; we could hear bolts being pulled out from her girders. . The long-boat was torn from its place on deck and hurled like a stone into the whirlpool. I lost consciousness. When I came to myself, I was in a Loffoden fisherman's hut, and Consell and Ned Land were chafing my hands. So ended our voyage )f . 20,000 leagues under , the sea. What became of Captain Nemo and his strange craft I do not know I hope his powerful power-ful ship conquered the maelstrom, even as I hope, If he lived,' that his philosophy and powerful will finally conquered his desire for vengeance. Copyright, 1919. by Post Publishing Co (The Boston Post). All rights reserved. I WAS leaning forward on the starboard star-board bulwark, my servant Con-sell Con-sell beside me, when the voice of Ned Land, the big harpooner, broke the silence. "Look I There .is the thing we are looking for!" he cried. We "all saw the sea monster, or whatever it was, which we had been hunting for months. It made off as we charged. We gave chase. Throughout Through-out all that night and next day we pursued. We stopped, it topped. Once it allowed us to creep close to it; and as we crept It rammed us. r The shock of collision threw me into the sea. I would have drowned but for my faithful Consell. He supported me to the hard metallic back of the monster. mon-ster. Here we were Joined by Ned Land. As we were resting there, eight masked men came through a hatch and drew us down into the bowels of what we now sa.v was not a monster, but a strange kind of sea craft. Thus began the strange . voyage with that remarkable character who called himself him-self Captain Nemo, and In that strange wonderful ship which he called the Nautilus. The Nautilus was a cigar-shaped steel ship of 232 feet in length, 2G feet beam and 1,500 tons dead weight. There were two hulls, one inside the other Joined by T-shaped Irons, which rendered them of almost uncrushnble. strength. She was driven by eleric engines of tremendous power. Tanks which could be filled or emptied at will enabled her to cruise on the surface sur-face or under the water as she pleased. She was fitted with -all kinds of working and lounging quarters. In a library were books on the sciences, morals, literature of almost every language. lan-guage. There was a drawing room with a luminous celling which served also as a museum, and into which an Intelligent hand had gathered submarine subma-rine treasures of the world : the rarest shells, pearls of all colors and beyond price, every variety of undersea vegetation; vege-tation; also paintings of the masters, admirable statues in marble and bronze, a great organ piano. From the Inside of her a staircase led to a platform or deck from which rose two cages, partly enclosed by thick glasses. One cage was for the helmsman, the other contained an electric elec-tric searchlight to light the course of the ship in dark waters. On this olatform also was a place wherein was tored a long-boat. Captain Nemo was tall and robustly-nilt, robustly-nilt, with pale skin, lofty brow, and he fine taper hands of a highly nervous nerv-ous temperament. He spoke French, English. German, Latin, all equally well. He may have been thirty-five, he may have been fifty years oid. It was on November 6, 1800, with the coast of Japan in view, that this strange captain told us we were prisoners pris-oners for him to do with as he pleased. "And now," he added, "our course is E. N. E. and our cruising depth 20 fathoms. I leave you to the resources of these quarters and your own reflections"" re-flections"" We omaIned mute, not knowing what surprise awnlted us. Suddenly a dazzling light broke In on us. We saw that only glass panels separated us from a sea which was Illuminated far to either side by the powerful electric gleams from the ship. What a spectacle! spec-tacle! An army of undersea creatures escorted us. They were various and beautiful In the clear water, many known, but hundreds unknown to us. We heard and saw nothing of th |