r upon the surface of the sea or in the sky!
Beneath, we could wait until this frightful outburst of the elements
was at an end!

Then amid this wild excitement my own passion, all my instincts of
duty, arose within me! Yes, this was madness! Yet must I not arrest
this criminal whom my country had outlawed, who threatened the entire
world with his terrible invention? Must I not put my hand on his
shoulder and summon him to surrender to justice! Was I or was I not
Strock, chief inspector of the federal police? Forgetting where I
was, one against three, uplifted in mid-sky above a howling ocean, I
leaped toward the stern, and in a voice which rose above the tempest,
I cried as I hurled myself upon Robur:

"In the name of the law, I--"

Suddenly the "Terror" trembled as if from a violent shock. All her
frame quivered, as the human frame quivers under the electric fluid.
Struck by the lightning in the very middle of her powerful batteries,
the air-ship spread out on all sides and went to pieces.

With her wings fallen, her screws broken, with bolt after bolt of the
lightning darting amid her ruins, the "Terror" fell from the height
of more than a thousand feet into the ocean beneath.

Chapter 18

THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER'S LAST COMMENT

When I came to myself after having been unconscious for many hours, a
group of sailors whose care had restored me to life surrounded the
door of a cabin in which I lay. By my pillow sat an officer who
questioned me; and as my senses slowly returned, I answered to his
questioning.

I told them everything. Yes, everything! And assuredly my listeners
must have thought that they had upon their hands an unfortunate whose
reason had not returned with his consciousness.

I was on board the steamer Ottawa, in the Gulf of Mexico, headed for
the port of New Orleans. This ship, while flying before the same
terrific thunder-storm which destroyed the "Terror," had encountered
some wreckage, among whose fragments was entangled my helpless body.
Thus I found myself back among humankind once more, while Robur the
Conqueror and his two companions had ended their adventurous careers
in the waters of the Gulf. The Master of the World had disappeared
forever, struck down by those thunder-bolts which he had dared to
brave in the regions of their fullest power. He carried with him the
secret of his extraordinary machine.

Five days later the Ottawa sighted the shores of Louisiana; and on
the morn