when to his surprise, he found that it was no heavier than a piece of
petrified sponge. "Confound the brute!" he exclaimed, "I might as well
throw a piece of bread at him. What accounts for its being as light as
this?"

Nothing daunted, however, he hurled the stone into the air. It missed
its aim; but the jackal, deeming it on the whole prudent to decamp,
disappeared across the trees and hedges with a series of bounds, which
could only be likened to those that might be made by an india-rubber
kangaroo. Ben Zoof was sure that his own powers of propelling must equal
those of a howitzer, for his stone, after a lengthened flight through
the air, fell to the ground full five hundred paces the other side of
the rock.

The orderly was now some yards ahead of his master, and had reached
a ditch full of water, and about ten feet wide. With the intention of
clearing it, he made a spring, when a loud cry burst from Servadac. "Ben
Zoof, you idiot! What are you about? You will break your back!"

And well might he be alarmed, for Ben Zoof had sprung to a height of
forty feet into the air. Fearful of the consequences that would attend
the descent of his servant to _terra firma_, Servadac bounded forwards,
to be on the other side of the ditch in time to break his fall. But the
muscular effort that he made carried him in his turn to an altitude of
thirty feet; in his ascent he passed Ben Zoof, who had already commenced
his downward course; and then, obedient to the laws of gravitation, he
descended with increasing rapidity, and alighted upon the earth without
experiencing a shock greater than if he had merely made a bound of four
or five feet high.

Ben Zoof burst into a roar of laughter. "Bravo!" he said, "we should
make a good pair of clowns."

But the captain was inclined to take a more serious view of the matter.
For a few seconds he stood lost in thought, then said solemnly, "Ben
Zoof, I must be dreaming. Pinch me hard; I must be either asleep or
mad."

"It is very certain that something has happened to us," said Ben Zoof.
"I have occasionally dreamed that I was a swallow flying over the
Montmartre, but I never experienced anything of this kind before; it
must be peculiar to the coast of Algeria."

Servadac was stupefied; he felt instinctively that he was not dreaming,
and yet was powerless to solve the mystery. He was not, however, the man
to puzzle himself for long over any insoluble problem. "Come what may,"
he present