our mouths to each other's ears
it was the same.

The wind carried the voice away.

My uncle once contrived to get his head close to mine after several
almost vain endeavors. He appeared to my nearly exhausted senses to
articulate some word. I had a notion, more from intuition than anything
else, that he said to me, "We are lost."

I took out my notebook, from which under the most desperate
circumstances I never parted, and wrote a few words as legibly as I
could:

"Take in sail."

With a deep sigh he nodded his head and acquiesced.

His head had scarcely time to fall back in the position from which he
had momentarily raised it than a disk or ball of fire appeared on the
very edge of the raft--our devoted, our doomed craft. The mast and sail
are carried away bodily, and I see them swept away to a prodigious
height like a kite.

We were frozen, actually shivered with terror. The ball of fire, half
white, half azure-colored, about the size of a ten-inch bombshell, moved
along, turning with prodigious rapidity to leeward of the storm. It ran
about here, there, and everywhere, it clambered up one of the bulwarks
of the raft, it leaped upon the sack of provisions, and then finally
descended lightly, fell like a football and landed on our powder barrel.

Horrible situation. An explosion of course was now inevitable.

By heaven's mercy, it was not so.

The dazzling disk moved on one side, it approached Hans, who looked at
it with singular fixity; then it approached my uncle, who cast himself
on his knees to avoid it; it came towards me, as I stood pale and
shuddering in the dazzling light and heat; it pirouetted round my feet,
which I endeavored to withdraw.

An odor of nitrous gas filled the whole air; it penetrated to the
throat, to the lungs. I felt ready to choke.

Why is it that I cannot withdraw my feet? Are they riveted to the
flooring of the raft?

No.

The fall of the electric globe has turned all the iron on board into
loadstones--the instruments, the tools, the arms are clanging together
with awful and horrible noise; the nails of my heavy boots adhere
closely to the plate of iron incrustated in the wood. I cannot withdraw
my foot.

It is the old story again of the mountain of adamant.

At last, by a violent and almost superhuman effort, I tear it away just
as the ball which is still executing its gyratory motions is about to
run round it and drag me with it--if--

Oh, what intense stupendou