vessel. A few minutes more and shipwreck would be inevitable.

They must perish or put a summary end to the disaster. A decision must be
made--but how?

What a combatant--this cannon!

They must check this mad monster. They must seize this flash of lightning.
They must overthrow this thunderbolt.

Boisberthelot said to La Vieuville:

"Do you believe in God, chevalier?"

La Vieuville replied:

"Yes. No. Sometimes."

"In a tempest?"

"Yes; and in moments like this."

"Only God can aid us here," said Boisberthelot.

All were silent; the cannon kept up its horrible fracas.

The waves beat against the ship; their blows from without responded to the
strokes of the cannon.

It was like two hammers alternating.

Suddenly, into the midst of this sort of inaccessible circus, where the
escaped cannon leaped and bounded, there sprang a man with an iron bar in
his hand. It was the author of this catastrophe--the gunner whose culpable
negligence had caused the accident; the captain of the gun. Having been
the means of bringing about the misfortune, he desired to repair it. He
had caught up a handspike in one fist, a tiller rope with a slipping noose
in the other, and thus equipped had jumped down into the gun-deck.

Then a strange combat began, a Titanic strife--the struggle of the gun
against the gunner; a battle between matter and intelligence; a duel
between the inanimate and the human.

The man was posted in an angle, the bar and rope in his two fists; backed
against one of the riders, settled firmly on his legs as on two pillars of
steel, livid, calm, tragic, rooted as it were in the planks, he waited.

He waited for the cannon to pass near him.

The gunner knew his piece, and it seemed to him that she must recognize
her master. He had lived a long while with her. How many times he had
thrust his hand between her jaws! It was his tame monster. He began to
address it as he might have given an order to his dog.

"Come!" said he. Perhaps he loved it.

He seemed to wish that it would turn toward him.

But to come toward him would be to spring upon him. Then he would be lost.
How to avoid its crush? There was the question. All stared in terrified
silence.

Not a breast respired freely, except perchance that of the old man who
alone stood in the deck with the two combatants, a stern second.

He might himself be crushed by the piece. He did not stir.

Beneath them the blind sea directed the battle.

At