"Well, what do you think of the trip?" asked Ferragut gayly, before drinking. "Shall we arrive in good condition?..."
The cook made as scornful a gesture as though the Germans could see him.
"Nothing will befall us; I am sure of that.... We have One who is watching over us, and ..."
He was suddenly interrupted in his affirmations. The tray leaped from his hands and he went staggering about like a drunken man, even banging his abdomen against the bal.u.s.trade 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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 beneath them--the liquid water-spout invading with a foamy bellowing the s.p.a.ce 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 d.y.k.e. 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 p.o.o.p 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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.
He thought it was already night. Perhaps in the upper strata of the atmosphere were still shining the last rays of the sun, but at the water"s level, there was no more than a twilight gray, like the dim glimmer of a cellar.
The almost even surface seen a few minutes before from the height of the bridge was now moved by broad swells that plunged him in momentary darkness. Each one of these appeared a hillock interposed before his eyes, leaving free only a few yards of s.p.a.ce. When he was raised upon their crests he could take in with rapid vision the solitary sea that lacked the gallant ma.s.s of the ship, astir with dark objects. These objects were slipping inertly by or moving along, waving pairs of black antennae. Perhaps they were imploring help, but the wet desert was absorbing the most furious cries, converting them into distant bleating.
Of the _Mare Nostrum_ there was no longer visible either the mouth of the smokestack nor the point of a mast; the abyss had swallowed it all.... Ferragut began to doubt if his ship had ever really existed.
He swam toward a plank that came floating near, resting his arms upon it. He used to be able to remain entire hours in the sea, when naked and within sight of the coast, with the a.s.surance of returning to _terra firma_ whenever he might wish.... But now he had to keep himself up, completely dressed; his shoes were tugging at him with a constantly increasing force as though made of iron ... and water on all sides! Not a boat on the horizon that could come to his aid!... The wireless operator, surprised by the swiftness of the catastrophe, had not been able to send out the S.O.S.
He also had to defend himself from the debris of the shipwreck. After having grasped the raft as his last means of salvation, he had to avoid the floating casks, rolling toward him on the swelling billows, which might send him to the bottom with one of their blows.
Suddenly there loomed up between two waves a species of blind monster that was agitating the waters furiously with the strokes of its swimming. Upon coming close to it, he saw that it was a man; as it drifted away, he recognized Uncle Caragol.
He was swimming like a drunken man with a super-human force which made half of his body come out of the water at each stroke. He was looking before him as though he could see, as if he had a fixed destination, without hesitating a moment, yet going further out to sea when he imagined that he was heading toward the coast.
"_Padre San Vicente!_" he moaned. "_Cristo del Grao!_..."
In vain the captain shouted. The cook could not hear him, and continued swimming on with all the force of his faith, repeating his pious invocations between his noisy snortings.
A cask climbed the crest of a wave, rolling down on the opposite side.
The head of the blind swimmer came in its way.... A thudding crash.
_Padre San Vicente!_... And Caragol disappeared with bleeding head and a mouth full of salt.
Ferragut did not wish to imitate that kind of swimming. The land was very far off for a man"s arms; it would be impossible to reach it. Not a single one of the ship"s boats had remained afloat.... His only hope, a remote and whimsical one, was that some vessel might discover the shipwrecked men and save them.
In a little while this hope was almost realized. From the crest of a wave he could see a black bark, long and low, without smokestack or mast, that was nosing slowly among the debris. He recognized a submarine. The dark silhouettes of several men were so plainly visible that he believed he heard them shouting.----
"Ferragut!... Where is Captain Ferragut?..."
"Ah, no!... Better to die!"
And he clung to his raft, hanging his head as though drowning. Then as night closed down upon him he heard still other shouts, but these were cries of help, cries of anguish, cries of death. The rescuers were searching for him only, leaving the others to their fate.
He lost all notion of time. An agonizing cold was paralyzing his entire frame. His stiffened and swollen hands were loosening from the raft and grasping it again only by a supreme effort of his will.
The other shipwrecked men had taken the precaution to put on their life preservers when the ship began to sink. Thanks to this apparatus, their death agony was going to be prolonged a few hours more. Perhaps if they could hold out until daybreak, they might be discovered by some boat!
But he!...