“And possibly dangerous!” I added in an insinuating tone.
“Dangerous?” Ned Land replied. “A simple trip to an oysterbank?”
Assuredly, Captain Nemo hadn’t seen fit to plant the idea of sharks in the minds of my companions. For my part, I stared at them with anxious eyes, as if they were already missing a limb or two. Should I alert them? Yes, surely, but I hardly knew how to go about it.
“Would master,” Conseil said to me, “give us some background on pearl fishing?”
“On the fishing itself?” I asked. “Or on the occupational hazards that—”
“On the fishing,” the Canadian replied. “Before we tackle the terrain, it helps to be familiar with it.”
“All right, sit down, my friends, and I’ll teach you everything I myself have just been taught by the Englishman H. C. Sirr!”
Ned and Conseil took seats on a couch, and right off the Canadian said to me:
“Sir, just what is a pearl exactly?”
“My gallant Ned,” I replied, “for poets a pearl is a tear from the sea; for Orientals it’s a drop of solidified dew; for the ladies it’s a jewel they can wear on their fingers, necks, and ears that’s oblong in shape, glassy in luster, and formed from mother-of-pearl; for chemists it’s a mixture of calcium phosphate and calcium carbonate with a little gelatin protein; and finally, for naturalists it’s a simple festering secretion from the organ that produces mother-of-pearl in certain bivalves.”