We had been under the painful necessity of abstaining from speech for three days and three nights. We opened our mouths, we moved our lips, but no sound came. Even when we placed our mouths to each other’s ears it was the same.
The wind carried the voice away.
My uncle once contrived to get his head close to mine after several almost vain endeavors. He appeared to my nearly exhausted senses to articulate some word. I had a notion, more from intuition than anything else, that he said to me, “We are lost.”
I took out my notebook, from which under the most desperate circumstances I never parted, and wrote a few words as legibly as I could:
“Take in sail.”
With a deep sigh he nodded his head and acquiesced.
His head had scarcely time to fall back in the position from which he had momentarily raised it than a disk or ball of fire appeared on the very edge of the raft—our devoted, our doomed craft. The mast and sail are carried away bodily, and I see them swept away to a prodigious height like a kite.
We were frozen, actually shivered with terror. The ball of fire, half white, half azure-colored, about the size of a ten-inch bombshell, moved along, turning with prodigious rapidity to leeward of the storm. It ran about here, there, and everywhere, it clambered up one of the bulwarks of the raft, it leaped upon the sack of provisions, and then finally descended lightly, fell like a football, and landed on our powder barrel.
Horrible situation. An explosion of course was now inevitable.
By heaven’s mercy, it is not so.
The dazzling disk moved on one side, it approached Hans, who looked at it with singular fixity; then it approached my uncle, who cast himself on his knees to avoid it; it came toward me, as I stood pale and shuddering in the dazzling light and heat; it pirouetted around my feet, which I endeavored to withdraw.
An odor of nitrous gas filled the whole air; it penetrated to the throat, to the lungs. I felt ready to choke.
Why is it that I cannot withdraw my feet? Are they riveted to the flooring of the raft?
No.
The fall of the electric globe has turned all the iron on board into loadstones—the instruments, the tools, the arms are clanging together with awful and horrible noise; the nails of my heavy boots adhere closely to the plate of iron incrustated in the wood. I cannot withdraw my foot.
It is the old story over again of the mountain of adamant.
At last, by a violent and almost superhuman effort, I tear it away just as the ball which is still executing its gyratory motions is about to run around it and drag me with it—if—
Oh, what intense stupendous light! The globe of fire bursts—we are enveloped in cascades of living fire, which flood the space around with luminous matter.
Then all went out and darkness once more fell upon the deep! I had just time to see my uncle once more cast apparently senseless on the flooring of the raft, Hans at the helm, “spitting fire” under the influence of the electricity which seemed to have gone through him.
Whither are we going, I ask? and echo answers, Whither?
Tuesday, August 25th. I have just come out of a long fainting fit. The awful and hideous storm still continues; the lightning has increased in vividness, and pours out its fiery wrath like a brood of serpents let loose in the atmosphere.
Are we still upon the sea? Yes, and being carried along with incredible velocity.
We have passed under England, under the Channel, under France, probably under the whole extent of Europe.
Another awful clamor in the distance. This time it is certain that the sea is breaking upon the rocks at no great distance. Then—
XI
We Reach Mount Sneffels—the “Reykir”
Stapi is a town consisting of thirty huts, built on a large plain of lava, exposed to the rays of the sun, reflected from the volcano. It stretches its humble tenements along the end of a little fjord, surrounded by a basaltic wall of the most singular character.