Max Pemberton

“ Rising as swiftly as she had sunk, the Zero came to the surface once more, and the hatches were opened. I stepped to the platform, to be blinded by a flash of radiant light, to see strange figures awaiting me, and to know that we had come up in the bowels of the mountains and that there were the Caves of Vares of which the Captain had spoken.
A prison, you say. Aye, but what a prison! No scene more wonderful has ever been opened to the eyes of man. Let all else but the Caves of Vares fade from Black's story and it will still be read through the generations. ”

“ I tell you that the men would have hurled themselves at Black's feet for very gratitude. Howling, blubbering, laughing, the crew surged to the platform and lay there in all attitudes, some prone upon their stomachs with their arms outspread; others raising gnarled hands to the sky as though it had drawn them upward; others, again, in a dead faint because of the horror of their fears. For my part, I think that I trembled from head to foot when at last I climbed out into the night air and stood by Black's side. ”

“ You know that the leadsman had called, "By the deep, six." Now, as though to witness the changing sea beneath us, he called, "By the mark, twenty," so that we must have passed from six fathoms to twenty in as many feet of our drifting. A spell further, and the rocks before us opened as though a Titan's axe had cleaved them to the base. I saw that we had rounded a bluff of the cliff, and found behind it a little circular basin for all the world like a pool between two spurs of the great cliff. ”