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, lashed about in a moaning and whirling darkness.  A deadly chill paralyzed his limbs.  His closed eyes saw a red heaven, a sky of blood with black stars.  His ear drums were buzzing with a roaring glu-glu, while his body was turning somersaults through the darkness.  His confused brain imagined that an infinitely deep hole had opened in the depths of the sea, that all the waters of the ocean were passing through it, forming a gigantic vortex, and that he was swirling in the center of this revolving tempest.

“I am going to die!...  I am already dead!” said his thoughts.

And in spite of the fact that he was resigned to death, he moved his legs desperately, wishing to bring himself up to the yielding, treacherous surface.  Instead of continuing to descend, he noticed that he was going up, and in a little while he was able to open his eyes and to breathe, judging from the atmospheric contact that he had reached the top.

He was not sure of the length of time he had passed in the abyss,—­surely not more than a few minutes, since his breathing capacity as a swimmer could not exceed that limit....  He, therefore, experienced great astonishment upon discovering the tremendous changes which had taken place in so short a parenthesis.