“Bears! bears!” cried Bell, in terror.
And each one gazed with terror. The floe pitched fearfully, sometimes at such an angle that the bears were all rolled together. Then their roars were almost as loud as the tempest; a formidable din arose from the floating menagerie.
If the floe had upset, the bears would have swum to the boat and clambered aboard.
For a quarter of an hour, which was as long as a century, the launch and floe drifted along in consort, twenty fathoms from one another at one moment and nearly running together the next, and at times they were so near to one another, the bears need only have dropped to have got on board. The Greenland dogs trembled from terror; Duke remained motionless. Hatteras and his companions were silent; it did not occur to them to put the helm down and sail away, and they went straight on. A vague feeling, of astonishment rather than terror, took possession of them; they admired this spectacle which completed the struggle of the elements. Finally the floe drifted away, borne by the wind, which the launch was able to withstand, as she lay with her head to the wind, and it disappeared in the mist, its presence being known merely by the distant roaring of the bears.
At that moment the fury of the tempest redoubled; there was an endless unchaining of atmospheric waves; the boat, borne by the waves, was tossed about giddily; her sail flew away like a huge white bird; a whirlpool, a new Maelstrom, formed among the waves; the boat was carried so fast that it seemed to the men as if the rapidly revolving water were motionless. They were gradually sinking down. There was an irresistible power dragging them down and ingulfing them alive. All five arose. They looked at one another with terror. They grew dizzy. They felt an undefinable dread of the abyss! But suddenly the launch arose perpendicularly. Her prow was higher than the whirling waves; the speed with which she was moving hurled her beyond the centre of attraction, and escaping by the tangent of this circumference which was making more than a thousand turns a second, she was hurled away with the rapidity of a cannonball.
Altamont, the doctor, Johnson, and Bell were thrown down among the seats. When they rose, Hatteras had disappeared. It was two o’clock in the morning.
XXIII
The English Flag
One cry, bursting from the lips of the other four, succeeded their first stupefaction.
“Hatteras!” cried the doctor.
“Gone!” said Johnson and Bell.
“Lost!”
They looked about, but nothing was to be seen on the storm-tossed sea. Duke barked despairingly; he tried to spring into the water, but Bell managed to hold him.
“Take a place at the helm, Altamont,” said the doctor; “let us try everything to save the captain.”
Johnson and Bell took their seats. Altamont took the helm, and the launch came into wind again. Johnson and Bell began to row vigorously; for an hour they remained at the scene of the accident. They sought earnestly, but in vain. The unfortunate Hatteras was lost in the storm! Lost, so near the Pole, so near the end, of which he had had but a glimpse!
The doctor called aloud, and fired the guns; Duke added his howling, but there was no answer. Then profound grief seized Clawbonny; his head sank into his hands, and his companions saw that he was weeping. In fact, at this distance from land, without a scrap of wood to hold him up, Hatteras could not reach the shore alive; and if anything did come ashore, it would be his disfigured corpse. After hunting for an hour, they decided to turn to the north, and struggle against the last furies of the tempest.
At five o’clock in the morning of July 11th the wind went down; the sea grew quieter; the sky regained its polar clearness, and within three miles of them appeared the land. This continent was but an island, or rather a volcano, peering up like a lighthouse at the North Pole. The mountain, in full eruption, was hurling forth a mass of burning stones and melting rocks. It seemed to be rising and falling beneath the successive blasts as if it were breathing; the things which were cast out reached a great height in the air; amid the jets of flame, torrents of lava were flowing down the side of the mountain; here creeping between steaming rocks, there falling in cascades amid the purple vapor: and lower down a thousand streams united in one large river, which ran boiling into the sea.
The volcano seemed to have but a single crater, whence arose a column of fire, lighted by transverse rays; one would have said that part of the magnificence of the phenomenon was due to electricity. Above the flames floated an immense cloud of smoke, red below, black above. It rose with great majesty, and unrolled into huge layers.
The sky at a considerable height had an ashy hue; the darkness, which was so marked during the tempest, and of which the doctor could give no satisfactory explanation,
