If you ask me what was the story
I liked most when I was still a boy, I will answer without a doubt that it
was Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, a novel of the French novelist
Jules Verne. It is one of the most inspired novels of all time.
My father
bought it for 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 one, it was something like an electronic
screen displaying a mysterious submarine. On the last part, it was a 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 in that picture.
The story
was about a mysterious ship which 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 which was as large as a
whale and by far the most powerful and speedy known creatures and machines all over the world. Some people guessed that it was a sea monster, but others 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
feel anxious and angry, so they decided to hunt that dangerous monster at all
cost. And the extraordinary adventure began…
Needless to
say, it is the most attractive adventure I have ever known. Everything was described
very beautiful. There are four main characters in the story. Three of them participated
in hunting the unknown thing on the warship called Lincoln . They were the French biology
professor Pierre Aronnax, his faithful assistant Conseil and the Canadian
harpoonist Ned Land. The remaining character was Captain Nemo. I did not know
where was he came from, I just knew that he was very rich – “I could repay the
ten billion debt 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 me through many
wonderful places, they landed on some isolated or historic islands, they saw
some unusual phenomena and rare creatures in the deep blue sea, such as undersea
volcanoes, giant poulpes, pearls as large as coconut fruits… They went around
the world by that submarine and never landed on the mainland. They even reached to
the center of South Pole, no one before them could do that. And they were
trapped by ice for some days, it was a very dangerous situation, but because of
their courage and cleverness, they escaped from this situation and continued
adventuring.
But it was
a sad story. At the end of the adventure, the submarine encountered an
accident, it went into a deathly water whirl. Three people, the professor
Aronnax, Conseil and Net escaped from this accident, while Capitan Nemo
and other people on this submarine voluntarily died with their underwater house
although they had enough time to escape…
As I stated
above, Twenty thousand leagues under the sea is one of the most inspired story
of all time. Many 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
encourages all of them to think about lofty and beautiful ideas…
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