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Rh spent as they were in the open, for the wreck had rebounded a fathom or so before the explosion came, but for a moment, while those broken plates of metal went up into the gloomy sky, an orange-coloured glare flamed over the scene and showed up everything distinctly for a wide space.

In the white surf the ghastly faces and broken bodies of the drowned, as they danced round that fierce whirlpool, and shot up into the air from that blow-hole, the shrinking survivors from the saloon on the outer edge recognised some of the faces of the dead, when not too much disfigured. They came very close to where they were crouching, seeming to glare at them as they paused a second on the summit of that spurt before they sank with it again into the fissure, hovering like glass balls over a fountain. A gruesome spectacle which made them turn their gaze away after a single glance—yet that glance stamped each feature for ever on the tablets of their memory.

Above and on either side spread sterile and forbidding rocks. Far as the eye could reach, basaltic masses, worn into fissures and holes with many a conflict against the stormy elements, fringed with edges of white where the snowflakes had found a shelter, but otherwise black and gloomy. It was a grand, stern and hopeless picture which that fiery glare lighted up.

They were at the entrance of a vast cavern that yawned darkly behind them. Detached masses of rocks lay about, large enough, most of them, to shelter them from the eyes of those six prostrate enemies who lay on their backs, as yet seemingly unconscious of their proximity. They saw who these six were in that second swift glance—Doctor Fernandez, Captain Anatole, the huge Irish-American Dennis MacBride, Princess