eath them--the liquid
water-spout invading with a foamy bellowing the space between keel and
deck, destroying the metal screens, knocking down the bulk-heads,
upsetting every object, dragging them forth with all the violence of an
inundation, with the ramming force of a breaking dyke. The hold was
rapidly becoming converted into a watery and leaden coffin fast going
to the bottom.

The aft gun hurled its first shot. To Ferragut its report seemed mere
irony. No one knew as he did the ship's desperate condition.

"To the life boats!" he shouted. "Every one to the boats!"

The steamer was tipping up in an alarming way as the men calmly obeyed
his orders without losing their self-control.

A desperate vibration was jarring the deck. It was the engines that
were sending out death-rattles at the same time that a torrent of steam
as thick as ink was pouring from the smokestack. The firemen were
coming up to the light with eyes swollen with the terror stamping their
blackened faces. The inundation had begun to invade their dominions,
breaking their steel compartments.

"To the boats!... Lower the life boats!"

The captain repeated his shouts of command, anxious to see the crew
embark, without thinking for one moment of his own safety.

It never even occurred to him that his fate might be different from
that of his ship. Besides, hidden in the sea, was the enemy who would
soon break the surface to survey its handiwork.... Perhaps they might
hunt for Captain Ferragut among the boatloads of survivors, wishing to
bear him off as their triumphant booty.... No, he would far rather give
up his life!...

The seamen had unfastened the life boats and were beginning to lower
them, when something brutal suddenly occurred with the annihilating
rapidity of a cataclysm of Nature.

There sounded a great explosion as though the world had gone to pieces,
and Ferragut felt the floor vanishing from beneath his feet. He looked
around him. The prow no longer existed; it had disappeared under the
water, and a bellowing wave was rolling over the deck crushing
everything beneath its roller of foam. On the other hand, the poop was
climbing higher and higher, becoming almost vertical. It was soon a
cliff, a mountain steep, on whose peak the white flagstaff was sticking
up like a weather-vane.

In order not to fall he had to grasp a rope, a bit of wood, any fixed
object. But the effort was useless. He felt himself dragged down,
overturned, la