drifting broadside to the
sea.

The line of torpedo-boats, slightly curving inward, had advanced about
a mile, when Repeller No. 11 awoke from her seeming sleep, and began to
act. The two great guns at her bow were trained upward, so that a bomb
discharged from them would fall into the sea a mile and a half ahead.
Slowly turning her bow from side to side, so that the guns would cover
a range of nearly half a circle, the instantaneous motor-bombs of the
repeller were discharged, one every half minute.

One of the most appalling characteristics of the motor-bombs was the
silence which accompanied their discharge and action. No noise was
heard, except the flash of sound occasioned by the removal of the
particles of the object aimed at, and the subsequent roar of wind or
fall of water.

As each motor-bomb dropped into the channel, a dense cloud appeared
high in the air, above a roaring, seething cauldron, hollowed out of
the waters and out of the very bottom of the channel. Into this chasm
the cloud quickly came down, condensed into a vast body of water, which
fell, with the roar of a cyclone, into the dreadful abyss from which it
had been torn, before the hissing walls of the great hollow had half
filled it with their sweeping surges. The piled-up mass of the
redundant water was still sending its maddened billows tossing and
writhing in every direction toward their normal level, when another
bomb was discharged; another surging abyss appeared, another roar of
wind and water was heard, and another mountain of furious billows
uplifted itself in a storm of spray and foam, raging that it had found
its place usurped.

Slowly turning, the repeller discharged bomb after bomb, building up
out of the very sea itself a barrier against its enemies. Under these
thundering cataracts, born in an instant, and coming down all at once
in a plunging storm; into these abysses, with walls of water and floors
of cleft and shivered rocks; through this wide belt of raging turmoil,
thrown into new frenzy after the discharge of every bomb,--no vessel,
no torpedo, could pass.

The air driven off in every direction by tremendous and successive
concussions came rushing back in shrieking gales, which tore up the
waves into blinding foam. For miles in every direction the sea swelled
and upheaved into great peaked waves, the repeller rising upon these
almost high enough to look down into the awful chasms which her bombs
were making. A tor