CHAPTER XIX THE GOLPH STREAM

This terrible scene of the 20th of April none of us can ever forget.

I have written it under the influence of violent emotion.

Since then I have revised the recital.

I have read it to con say into the Canadian.

They found it exact as to facts, but insufficient as to effect.

To paint such pictures one must have the pen of the most illustrious of our poets, the

author of the Toilers of the Deep.

I have said that Captain Nemo wept while watching the waves.

His grief was great.

It was the second companion he had lost since our arrival on board, and what a death.

That friend, crushed, stifled, bruised by the dreadful arms of a polyp, pounded by his

iron jaws, would not rest with his comrades in the peaceful choral cemetery.

In the midst of the struggle it was the despairing cry uttered by the unfortunate man that had

torn my heart.

The poor Frenchman, forgetting his conventional language, had taken to his own mother tongue

to utter a last appeal.

Amongst the crew of the Nautilus associated with the body and soul of the captain, recoiling

like him from all contact with men, I had a fellow-countryman.

Did he alone represent France in this mysterious association, evidently composed of individuals

of divers nationalities?

It was one of these insoluble problems that rose up in ceasingly before my mind.

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