“What does that signify? I am not complaining that the rate is slow, but that the sea is so wide.”

I then remembered that the Professor, before starting, had estimated the length of this underground sea at thirty leagues. Now we had made three times the distance, yet still the southern coast was not in sight.

“We are not descending as we ought to be,” the Professor declares. “We are losing time, and the fact is, I have not come all this way to take a little sail upon a pond on a raft.”

He called this sea a pond, and our long voyage, taking a little sail!

“But,” I remarked, “since we have followed the road that Saknussemm has shown us⁠—”

“That is just the question. Have we followed that road? Did Saknussemm meet this sheet of water? Did he cross it? Has not the stream that we followed led us altogether astray?”