Jules Verne

“ Antekirtt from the moment when Count Mathias Sandorf precipitated himself into the waves of the Adriatic—”
“Yes, Pierre.”
“Then there is something else I ought to know about Count Mathias Sandorf.”
“Are you strong enough to hear it?”
“Speak.”
“Be it so,” replied the doctor. “It is better to finish with the secrets that you have a right to know, with all the terrible past that will never return. Pierre, you thought I had abandoned you because I had left Gravosa! Listen, then, and judge for yourself. ”

“ I reckoned I would have to remain where I was for another twenty-four hours if the steamer was going to call at Brindisi or Otranto. What I should have to suffer most from would be hunger and thirst. The important thing for me was that I could not be seen from the deck nor even from the boat hanging by the stern davits. Some vessel meeting us might, it is true, see me and signal me. But very few ships met us that day, and they passed too far off for them to notice a man banging by the rudder chains. ”

“ In a foreign country Count Mathias Sandorf would have nothing to fear from the Austrian police. There is no extradition for political refugees. But it was not enough that they should think my life was saved. I wished them to think I was dead. No one should know that the last fugitive from the donjon of Pisino had set foot on Italian soil. ”

“ Fifty miles across the Adriatic! Yes! And I was willing to swim them. Yes! I would swim them. Ah! Pierre, you must go through such trials before you know of what man is capable, before you know what the human machine can do when all its mental and physical forces are combined. ”

“ What he had said about the audacious voyage across the Adriatic was true in the minutest details. It was thus that he arrived at Brindisi, where Mathias Sandorf remained dead to the world.
But he had to leave Brindisi without delay. The town is only a transfer station. People come to it merely to embark for India or land for Europe. It is generally except on the two days of the week when the P. and 0. boats come in.
If the doctor had no further fear for his life, it was important that his death should be believed in. ”

“ There at the north of the group of the Syrtic Islands, is the island of Antekirtta. A few years before the doctor had traveled through the Tripolitan coasts, and visited Souza, the old port of Cyrene, the Barca country, the towns that have replaced the old Ptolemais, Berenice, Adrianapolis, and in a word, that old Pentapolis, formerly Greek, Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Saracenic, and now Arabian, and belonging to the Pachalik of Tripoli. ”

“ I was fortunate enough to succeed, and more promptly than I had hoped, first at Smyrna, where for seven or eight years I obtained great reputation as a physician. Some unexpected cures brought me into connection with the richest people of those countries in which the medical art is still in a rudimentary state. ”

“ His zaouiyas, his vilayets, his centers of activity established in Egypt, in the Turkish Empire, in Europe and Asia, in Eastern Nigritia, Tunis, Algeria, Morocco and the independent Sahara up to the frontiers of Western Nigritia, existed in still greater numbers in Barca and Tripoli. ”