The Maracot Deep quotes

“

The task of the pioneer has always been to disprove the thing which has been clearly shown.

Use your brains, young man. You have been for the last month fishing up some of the most delicate Bathic forms of life, creatures so delicate that you could hardly transfer them from the net to the tank without marring their sensitive shapes.

… seemed to realize that black box down in the primeval depths, to feel the foul twice-breathed air, and then to see the walls sagging, bulging inwards, rending at the joints with the water spouting in at every rivet-hole and crevice and crawling up from below.

It was a slow, dreadful death to die.

But I looked up, and there were the old man’s fiery eyes fixed upon me with the exaltation of a martyr to Science. It’s catching, that sort of enthusiasm, and if it be crazy, it is at least noble and unselfish.

And at that moment we landed.

There was never a babe lowered by its mother on to a featherbed who nestled down more gently than we on to the extreme bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

The soft thick elastic ooze upon which we lit was a perfect buffer, which saved us from the slightest jar.

It was impossible, inconceivable, but none the less the evidence of our senses told us that it was a fact.

The great ocean floor is luminous.

“Why not?” cried Maracot, when we had stood for a minute or two in silent wonder. “Should I not have foreseen it? What is this pteropod or globigerina ooze? Is it not the product of decay, the mouldering bodies of a billion billion organic creatures?

I closed my eyes and my senses were rapidly slipping away. Then I opened them for one last glimpse of that world which I was leaving, and as I did so I staggered to my feet with a hoarse scream of amazement.

A human face was looking in at us through the porthole!

Was it my delirium? I clutched at the shoulder of Maracot and shook him violently. He sat up and stared, wonder-struck and speechless at this apparition. If he saw it as well as I, it was no figment of the brain.

“A dainty feeder!” said the Professor after our return. “There is a hawk parrot in New Zealand which will kill the lamb in order to get at a particular morsel of fat above the kidney. So this creature will slay the man for his eyes.

In the heavens above and in the waters below Nature knows but one law, and it is, alas! remorseless cruelty.

”

Indeed, he might have been the twin brother of Manda, save that his features were harsh and menacing—a brute man, but one who was brutal not from ignorance but from the trend of his own nature.

The brute and the brain are surely the most dangerous of all combinations.

In this high forehead and sardonic, bearded mouth one sensed the very essence of evil.

We had for a moment seen a corner lifted in the great dark veil of Nature and had one passing gleam of truth amid the mysteries which surround us.

Each life is but one chapter in a story which God has designed.

You cannot judge its wisdom or its justice until in some supreme day, from some pinnacle of knowledge, you look back and see at last the cause and the effect, acting and reacting, down all the long chronicles of Time.

I have said material knowledge. Soon we were to have proof that in spiritual culture there was a vast chasm which separated them from us.

The lesson which we carry from their rise and their fall is that the greatest danger which can come to a state is when its intellect outruns its soul.

It destroyed this old civilization, and it may yet be the ruin of our own.

I have so handled things that I could not die if I would. Some will stronger than my own is to be found if I am ever to die.

Oh, mortals, never pray to be delivered from death. It may seem terrible, but eternal life is infinitely more so.

To go on and on and on while the endless procession of humanity goes past you. To sit ever at the wayside of history and to see it go, ever moving onwards and leaving you behind.

“That lets me out,” he said. “I’m through. Yes, thank you, the pain is better. But it is K.O. to William Scanlan. I’ve learned my lesson.

You don’t fight hell with six-shooters, and it’s no use to try.

I give him best from now onwards.”