“Much more than you could ever imagine. You know the Rhone, the largest river in France; you have seen it at flood, when its muddy waters form a sheet from one bank to the other as far as the eye can reach. It is estimated that in this condition it pours into the sea about five million liters of water a second. Well, if it always preserved that majestic fulness, this large river could not, in twenty years, fill the thousandth part of the ocean basin. Does that make you understand any better how immense the sea is?” “My poor head is dizzy at the mere thought of it. What color are the waters of the sea? Are they yellow and muddy like the Rhone?” “Never, except at the mouths of rivers. Seen in a small quantity, the water looks colorless; seen in a great mass, it appears of its natural color, greenish blue. The sea, then, is blue with a greenish tinge, darker in the open sea, clearer near the coasts. But this coloring changes a great deal, according to the brightness of the sky. Under a bright sun the calm sea is now pale blue, now dark indigo; under a stormy sky it becomes bottle-green and almost black.” [Illustration: “The waters of the great deep”] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER LXXIV WAVES SALT SEAWEEDS “WHERE do the waves come from?” asked Jules. “The sea is very terrible, they say, when it is angry.” “Yes, my dear Jules, very terrible. I shall never forget those great moving ridges, capped with foam, that toss a heavy ship like a nutshell, carry it one moment on their monstrous backs, then let it plunge into the liquid valley that intervenes. Oh! how small and weak one feels on those four planks, mounting and plunging at the will of the waves! If the nutshell springs a leak under the furious blows of the billows, may the good God have pity on us! The shattered boat would disappear in fathomless depths.” “In the chasm you told us about?” Claire asked. “In those chasms from which no one returns. The shattered boat would be swallowed up in the sea, and nothing of you would be left but a remembrance, if there were people left on the earth who loved you.” “So the sea ought always to be calm,” said Jules. “It would be a pity, my child, if the sea were always at rest. This calm would be incompatible with the salubrity of the seas, which must be violently stirred up to keep them free from taint and to dissolve the air necessary to their animal and vegetable population. For the ocean of waters, as for the atmosphere or ocean of air, there is need of a salutary agitation—of tempests that churn up, renew, and vivify the waters.