“Oh? And what, Mr. Land?”
“Break out of here!”
“Breaking out of a prison on shore is difficult enough, but with an underwater prison, it strikes me as completely unworkable.”
“Come now, Ned my friend,” Conseil asked, “how would you answer master’s objection? I refuse to believe that an American is at the end of his tether.”
Visibly baffled, the harpooner said nothing. Under the conditions in which fate had left us, it was absolutely impossible to escape. But a Canadian’s wit is half French, and Mr. Ned Land made this clear in his reply.
“So, Professor Aronnax,” he went on after thinking for a few moments, “you haven’t figured out what people do when they can’t escape from their prison?”
“No, my friend.”
“Easy. They fix things so they stay there.”
“Of course!” Conseil put in. “Since we’re deep in the ocean, being inside this boat is vastly preferable to being above it or below it!”
“But we fix things by kicking out all the jailers, guards, and wardens,” Ned Land added.