The lost worlds of 2001 Abyss

The character of the story is Bowman, a space pilot. He is sent off on a star journey with the aid of some powerful civilization . In the extract under study he approaches some strange inhabited planet.

Now his eyes were drawn to the planet that began to fill the sky ahead, and for the first time he realized that it was entirely covered with sea. On the silent hemisphere turned toward him, there were no continents, nor even

any islands. There was only a smooth and featureless expanse of ocean.

It was a most peculiar ocean - straw-yellow in some areas, ruby-red over what Bowman assumed were the great deeps. At the center of the disk, almost immediately beneath him, something metallic glittered in the sun- light.

And now for the first time, the effects of atmosphere became noticeable. A barely visible ovoid appeared to have formed around the capsule, and behind it trailed a flickering wake of radiation. Bowman could not be sure, but for a moment he thought he could hear the shriek of tortured air: one thing was certain - he was still protected by the forces that had drawn him to the stars. This vehicle was designed only for the vacuum of space, and a wind of a few score miles an hour could tear it to pieces. But there was no wind against the fragile metal shell; the incandescent furies of reentry were held at bay by an invisible shield.

The metallic glitter grew and took shape before his eyes. He could see now that it consisted of a group of incredibly flimsy towers, reaching up out of the ocean and soaring two or three miles into the atmosphere. At their upper levels they supported stacks of dully gleaming circular plates, translucent green spheres, and mazes of equipment as meaningless to him as a radar station would have been to ancient man.

The capsule was falling down the side of the structure, at a distance of about a mile, and now he could see that all around its base, apparently floating on the surface of the sea, was a mass of vegetation forming a great raft of brilliant blue. Some of the plants climbed for several hundred feet up the lattice-work of the tower, as if struggling to reach the sun from the lightless ocean depths.

This burst of vegetation did not give any impression of neglect or decay; the great towers climbing through it were obviously quite unaffected by the efflorescence at their feet. On this reddish-yellow sea, the deep blue of the growing plants gave a startling vivid touch of color.

Now the capsule was only a few feet above the ocean, and Bowman could see that its surface had a curiously indeterminate texture. It was not as sharply defined as a liquid should be; for the first time, he began to realize that it might be some heavy gas.

Immediately under the capsule, it became concave, as if depressed by an invisible shield. The hole in the fluid - Bowman no longer thought of it as water - became deeper. and then closed over him..

Like a fly in amber, he was trapped in a bubble of crys­talline transparency; and it was carrying him down into

unknown depths.

Questions and tasks

1. Give synonyms or paraphrases of the following words: hemisphere. ovoid, radiation, vacuum, incandescent, circular, translucent, sphere. vegetation, efforescence, indeterminate. texture, concave, depressed. fluid. What colouring is given to the text with the help of such words?

2. Find and specify tropes in the text. What is described with their help - Bowmans’ s feeling and actions or the objects and phenomena he observes?

3. Choose words denoting color and light, characterize their role in in the extract.

4. What colouring is given to the text by such words, as peculiar,incredibly, meaningless, start1ing, curiously, unknown? What additional means create and support the same impression?

5.. What is the position of the observer ( active or passive) and the effect of estrangement... How is the atmosphere of the end of XX century reflected in this extract?