“In an instant I was seated within the mighty maw of this famous monster.  His jaw-bones were forty feet in length; the roof of his mouth was fifteen feet high, and formed of a spacious arch of ‘balleen,’ or whale-bone.  His crescent-shaped tail, thirty-five feet from tip to tip, swept the depths twice or thrice; and when we emerged into the air, the blood spouted from his pores, and he threw cataracts of water through his spiracle.  I saw the Crimson Dragon some miles away, but there were no traces of her boats.  The crews of the launches were fathoms deep in the ocean!

“I passed the cape of Greenland, rounded the base of Mount Hecla, and was escorted to the abode of the king of the cetacea by a multitude of his subjects.  A submarine island, forty fathoms from the surface, had been occupied three thousand years by this venerable person.  He came out to meet me upon the back of a mighty ‘rorqual,’ and a body-guard of four hundred picked narwhals swam before him.  Fifty white whales surrounded their monarch, and a host of dolphins, grampuses, and porpoises brought up the rear.  Banners of dyed seal-skin bore his arms—­three gourds, argent, upon a field vert; and with these were carried as trophies the wrecks of ships, including the identical shallop whence he was expelled on the voyage to Tarshish.  But, marvellous beyond all, the ‘great fish’ (falsely so translated, since no cetaceous creature can be denominated a fish) into which he was received still lived, and accompanied him.  It was now the eldest of the species, but very sprightly, and burdened with dignities.  The Seer-King saluted gravely, and gave me a draught of spirits, distilled from the fronds of a rare sea-tangle.  His long tenure in the deep had obliterated much of the similitude to man, but his memory of terrestrial matters was extraordinary.  The weeds were wrapped about his head after the manner of a crown, and he carried a sceptre of walrus tusk.  He told me that his original three days’ experience under the sea had so cooled his blood, that the suns of Nineveh parched him, and he had cried for cooling water.  I informed him that Nineveh no longer existed, at which he was gratified beyond measure; for his only knowledge of events happening on the earth had been derived from the wrecks which had sunk into his domain.  I found that he was badly informed upon matters of science, and he heard my theories of harmonizing the universes with impatience.  In his days, he said, no such ideas were broached, and he was indifferent to the intellectual development of his subjects.

“My visit was brief, for, though the palace of Jonah had a sepulchral grandeur about it—­a mighty cavern beneath the waves—­yet the glittering stalactites which studded the roof, and the cold columns of ice supporting its halls, nearly froze me, and at length I made ready to depart.