Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 7.djvu/94

74 In front of the row of spectators, standing one above the other, were Captain Anderson and his principal officers in full uniform. The captain, holding a prayer book in his hand, took his hat off, and for some minutes, during a profound silence, which not even the breeze interrupted, he solemnly read the prayer for the dead, every word of which was distinctly audible in the deathlike silence. On a sign from the captain, the body, released by the bearers, sank into the sea. For one moment it floated on the surface, became upright, and then disappeared in a circle of foam.

At this moment the voice of the sailor on watch was heard crying "Land!"

land announced at the moment when the sea was closing over the corpse of the poor sailor was low-lying and of a yellow color. This line of slightly elevated downs was Long Island, a great sandy bank enlivened with vegetation, which stretches along the American coast from Montauk Point to Brooklyn, adjoining New York. Several yachts were coasting along this island, which is covered with villas and pleasure houses, the favorite resorts of the New Yorkers.

Every passenger waved his hand to the land so longed for after the tedious voyage, which had not been exempt from painful accidents. Every telescope was directed towards this first specimen of the American continent, and each saw it under a different aspect. The Yankee beheld in it his mother-land; the Southerner regarded these northern lands with a kind of scorn, the scorn of the conquered for the conqueror; the Canadian looked upon it as a man who had only one step to take to call himself a citizen of the Union; the Californian in his mind's eye traversed the plains of the far west, and crossing the Rocky Mountains had already set foot on their inexhaustible mines. The Mormonite, with elevated brow and scornful lip, hardly noticed these shores, but peered beyond to where stood the City of the Saints on the borders of Salt Lake, in the far-off