A yell, from four chests, followed after the first moment of stupefaction.
Clawbonny: Hatteras?
Johnson & Bell: Disappeared!
Everyone: Lost!
They looked around themselves. Nothing appeared on this sea in full swell. Duk desperately barked; he wanted to throw himself in the middle of the waves and Bell barely managed to hold him back.
Clawbonny: Take the helm, Altamont, and let's try everything that's possible to find our poor captain!
Johnson and Bell retook their places on the benches, Altamont headed to the helm, and the lost boat returned. Johnson and Bell began to vigorously paddle; in one hour, they didn't leave the place where the catastrophe took place. They searched, but in vain! Poor Hatteras, taken by the hurricane, was lost. Lost! And so close to the pole! So close to the target of which he only had to foresee!
The doctor called him and fired a few shots; Duk adjoined with his lamentable barks; but no one answered to the captain's friends. Then, a profound pain took over Clawbonny; with his head between his hands, his comrades heard him weep. Indeed, at this distance from the shore, without a paddle, without a piece of wood to support himself, Hatteras couldn't make it to the coast alive and, if some of him would reach, at last, this desired land, it would only be his swollen and crushed corpse.
After an hour of searching, they had to continue the journey towards the north and face the storm's last wrath.
At 5 AM, on 11 July, the wind calmed down; the swell decreased bit by bit; the sky regained its polar clarity and, at less than three miles, the land presented itself in all its splendor. This new continent was only an island or, rather, a volcano raised like a lighthouse of the world's boreal pole.
The mountain, in full eruption, spilled a mass of hot rocks and pieces of incandescent rocks; it seemed to be distressed under the repeated jolts like a giant's breath; the masses were projected in the air at a great height, in the middle of the jets of some intense flames, and the melted lava spilled on flanks in impetuous torrents; here, ablaze snakes slipped through the smoldering rocks; beyond, hot waterfalls prevailed in the middle of some purple vapors, and deeper, a fire stream, formed by thousands of hot rivers, spilled into the sea through a hot hole.
The volcano seemed to only have one crater, from which the column of fire gushed, furrowed by transversal lights; it could have been said that electricity played a role in this magnificent phenomenon.
Above the panting flames induced a trail of smoke, red at the base, black towards the top. It rose with incomparable greatness and unfolded generously, in dense volutes.
The sky, at a great height, dressed in a grayish color; the darkness experienced during storms, of which the doctor seemed to not observe, originated, evidently, from the grayish columns stretched in front of the sun like an impenetrable curtain. Then he remembered a similar fact, happening in 1812, on Barbados Island, which, in broad daylight, was sunk in a profound darkness by the grayish mass thrown by the crater from Saint-Vincent Island.
This enormous rock in the eruption, raised in the middle of the ocean, measured a thousand yards tall, having approximately the height of Hecla. The line brought from its peak at the base formed with the horizon an angle of approximately eleven degrees.
It seemed to come out little by little from the waves, as long as the boat approached it. It presented no form of vegetation. It lacked the shore itself and its coasts vertically fell on the sea.
Clawbonny: Can we debark?
Altamont: The wind is pushing us.
Clawbonny: But I see no piece of the beach on which we could set foot!
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Jules Verne's Captain Hatteras - Part 2: Ice Desert
General FictionAbandoned in a field of ice, Hatteras and his remaining men must work together to survive long enough to see their dear country again!
