Таинственный остров / Mysterious Island

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“Are we going up again?”

“No. On the contrary; we are going down!”

“Worse than that, Mr. Smith[1], we are falling!”

“Throw over all the ballast!”

“The last sack is empty!”

“And the balloon rises again?”

“No!”

“I hear the splashing waves!”

“The sea is under us!”

“It is not five hundred feet off!”

“God help us!”

Such were the words which rang through the air above the vast wilderness of the Pacific[2], at 4 o’clock in the afternoon of the 23d of March, 1865.

It was a hurricane lasting without intermission from the 18th to the 26th of March. Covering a space of 1,800 miles, it occasioned immense destruction in America, Europe and Asia. Cities in ruins, forests uprooted, hundreds of shipwrecks, thousands of persons crushed to the earth or engulfed in the sea; such were the witnesses to its fury.

And while these catastrophes were taking place upon the land and the sea, something was enacting in the heavens.

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