Jules Verne's Mysterious Island: Cyrus Harding Meets Ayrton, 1875

Surprisingly grounded for speculative fiction, this engraving depicts a tense shoreline encounter between two bearded men — one civilized in a frock coat, the other wild-haired and barefoot — standing on cracked, desolate terrain with a vast ocean horizon behind them. The contrast between refinement and feral survival suggests a confrontation between civilization and isolation central to Jules Verne's adventure narratives, rendered with the meticulous crosshatching characteristic of 19th-century French scientific romance illustration.