Twenty thousand leagues under the sea

If you ask me, what was the story you like most when you was still a boy, I will answer without a doubt that it was “twenty thousand leagues under the sea”, a novel of French novelist Jules Verne. It is one of the most inspired novels of all time.

            My father bought it to me when I was 9 or 10 years old. It was a beautiful period of time, because every weekend, my father bought me a book to encourage my reading hobby. I was very happy about this. I remember that the novel was published in three parts, each of them had a blue cover with a drawing on it. On the first part, the drawing was a large ship with a man standing on the bow and looking ahead via a monocular. On the second, it was something like an electronic screen displaying a mysterious submarine. On the last part, it was couple of man and woman curiously looking to the sea. I felt that, to me, the last drawing was very hard to understand. I didn’t know who were on that picture.

            The story was about a mysterious ship, it was able to dive under the sea, a submarine, as we called it later. But in the time of the story, submarine did not exist, so nobody could explain about the appearance of something was as large as a whale but its power and speed were by far all known creatures and machines on the world. Some people guessed that it was a sea monster, but other asserted that it was a human made submarine. Sometime that mysterious thing caused accidents to other ships running on the sea surface, it made people and governments felt anxious and angry, so they decided to hunt that dangerous monster at all cost. And the extraordinary adventure began…

            Needless to say, it was the most attractive adventure I have known. The author described everything very beautifully. There are four main characters on the story, a French biology professor Pierre Aronnax and his faithful assistant Conseil, and a Canadian hapoonist Ned Land, they are three of people who went to hunt the unknown thing on the war ship called Lincoln; the last and the coolest character was Capitan Nemo, but I did not know where was he come from, I just knew that he was very rich – “I could repay the ten billion debts of French government very easily”, said he, and he did not like people, he made the submarine to keep away from people and ordinary life. This impressed me so much. The adventure led us through many wonderful places, we landed on some isolated or history islands, we saw some unusual phenomena and rare creatures in the deep blue, such as under sea volcano, giant poulpes, pearls as large as coconut fruit… They went around the world by this marine and never landed on the mainland. They even reached to the center of South pole, no one before them could do that. And they trapped by ice for some days, it was very dangerous situation, but because of the courage and clever, they escape from this and continued adventuring.

            But it was a sad story. At the end of adventure, the submarine encountered an accident, it went into a deathly water whirl. Three people, the professor Aronnax, Conseil and Net were escaped from this accident, and Capitan Nemo and other people on this submarine voluntarily died with their under water house although they had time to escape…

            As I stated above, twenty thousand leagues under the sea is one of the most inspired stories of all time. Many young generations have read it, and people will still like it in the future. People have found the love of nature in this story, and it encourage to think about new ideas…