A sliding noise was heard: one would have said that panels were working at the sides of the Nautilus....
"It is the end of the end!" said Ned Land.
Suddenly light broke at each side of the saloon, through two oblong openings. The liquid mass appeared vividly lit up by the electric gleam. Two crystal plates separated us from the sea. At first I trembled at the thought that this frail partition might break, but strong bands of copper bound them, giving an almost infinite power of resistance. The sea was distinctly visible for almost a mile around the Nautilus. What a spectacle! What pen can describe it! Who could paint the effects of light through those transparent sheets of water, and the softness of the successive gradations ...
It was no longer luminous water, but liquid light ...we looked out as if this pure crystal had been the glass of an immense aquarium ...
Our imagination was kept at its height, interjections followed quickly on each other. Ned named the fish, and Conseil classed them. I was in ecstasies with the vivacity of their movements and the beauty of their forms. Never had it been given to me to surprise these animals, alive and at liberty, in their natural element. I will not mention all the varieties which passed before my dazzled eyes, all the collection of the seas of China and Japan. These fish, more numerous than the birds of the air, came, attracted, no doubt, by the brilliant focus of the electric light.
E.A.: We'll get the details of what's around here, but it looks like a collection of just about every shape - angularity, granularity, about every variety of rock... the colors - well ... there doesn't appear to be too much of a general color at all; however, it looks as though some of the rocks and boulders [are] going to have some interesting colors in them. . . .
N.E.: [Outside the] window is a relatively level plain cratered with a fairly large number of craters of the five- to fifty-foot variety, and some ridges, small, twenty, thirty feet high, I would guess, and literally thousands of little one- and two-foot craters around the area. We see some angular blocks out several hundred feet in front of us that are probably two feet in size and have angular edges. There is a hill in view, just ... ahead of us, difficult to estimate but might be half a mile or a mile.
