his hands and he went staggering about like a drunken man, even banging
his abdomen against the balustrade of the bridge. "_Cristo del
Grao!_..."

The cup that Ferragut was carrying to his mouth fell with a crash, and
the French officer, seated on a bench, was almost thrown on his knees.
The helmsman had to clutch the wheel with a jerk of surprise and
terror.

The entire ship trembled from keel to masthead, from quarter-deck to
forecastle, with a deadly shuddering as though invisible claws had just
checked it at full speed.

The captain tried to account for this accident. "We must be aground,"
he said to himself, "a reef that I did not know, a shoal not marked on
the charts...."

But a second had not passed before something else was added to the
first shock, refuting Ferragut's suppositions. The blue and luminous
air was rent with the thud of a thunderclap. Near the prow, appeared a
column of smoke, of expanding gases of yellowish and fulminating steam
and, coming up through its center in the form of a fan, a spout of
black objects, broken wood, bits of metallic plates and flaming ropes
turning to ashes.

Ulysses was no longer in doubt. They must have just been struck by a
torpedo. His anxious look scanned the waters.

"There!... There!" he said, pointing with his hand.

His keen seaman's eyes had just discovered the light outline of a
periscope that nobody else was able to see.

He ran down from the bridge or rather he slid down the midship ladder,
running toward the stern.

"There!... There!"

The three gunners were near the cannon, calm and phlegmatic, putting a
hand to their eyes, in order to see better the almost invisible speck
which the captain was pointing out.

None of them noticed the slant that the deck was slowly beginning to
take. They thrust the first projectile into the breech of the cannon
while the gunner made an effort to distinguish that small black cane
hardly perceptible among the tossing waves.

Another shock as rude as the first one! Everything groaned with a dying
shudder. The plates were trembling and falling apart, losing the
cohesion that had made of them one single piece. The screws and rivets
sprang out, moved by the general shaking-up. A second crater had opened
in the middle of the ship, this time bearing in its fan-shaped
explosion the limbs of human beings.

The captain saw that further resistance was useless. His feet warned
him of the cataclysm that was developing ben