The things we do!

Watching attentively, I observed that four of them carried on their
shoulders an object of an oblong shape.
We occupied, in this place, the centre of a vast glade
surrounded by the lofty foliage of the submarine forest.
Our lamps threw over this place a sort of clear twilight
that singularly elongated the shadows on the ground.
At the end of the glade the darkness increased, and was only relieved
by little sparks reflected by the points of coral.
Ned Land and Conseil were near me. We watched,
and I thought I was going to witness a strange scene.
On observing the ground, I saw that it was raised in certain
places by slight excrescences encrusted with limy deposits,
and disposed with a regularity that betrayed the hand of man.
In the midst of the glade, on a pedestal of rocks roughly
piled up, stood a cross of coral that extended its long arms
that one might have thought were made of petrified blood.
Upon a sign from Captain Nemo one of the men advanced;
and at some feet from the cross he began to dig a hole with
a pickaxe that he took from his belt.


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