The cup that Ferragut was carrying to his mouth fell with a crash, and the French officer, seated on a bench, was almost thrown on his knees.  The helmsman had to clutch the wheel with a jerk of surprise and terror.

The entire ship trembled from keel to masthead, from quarter-deck to forecastle, with a deadly shuddering as though invisible claws had just checked it at full speed.

The captain tried to account for this accident.  “We must be aground,” he said to himself, “a reef that I did not know, a shoal not marked on the charts....”

But a second had not passed before something else was added to the first shock, refuting Ferragut’s suppositions.  The blue and luminous air was rent with the thud of a thunderclap.  Near the prow, appeared a column of smoke, of expanding gases of yellowish and fulminating steam and, coming up through its center in the form of a fan, a spout of black objects, broken wood, bits of metallic plates and flaming ropes turning to ashes.

Ulysses was no longer in doubt.  They must have just been struck by a torpedo.  His anxious look scanned the waters.

“There!...  There!” he said, pointing with his hand.

His keen seaman’s eyes had just discovered the light outline of a periscope that nobody else was able to see.

He ran down from the bridge or rather he slid down the midship ladder, running toward the stern.

“There!...  There!”

The three gunners were near the cannon, calm and phlegmatic, putting a hand to their eyes, in order to see better the almost invisible speck which the captain was pointing out.

None of them noticed the slant that the deck was slowly beginning to take.  They thrust the first projectile into the breech of the cannon while the gunner made an effort to distinguish that small black cane hardly perceptible among the tossing waves.

Another shock as rude as the first one!  Everything groaned with a dying shudder.  The plates were trembling and falling apart, losing the cohesion that had made of them one single piece.  The screws and rivets sprang out, moved by the general shaking-up.  A second crater had opened in the middle of the ship, this time bearing in its fan-shaped explosion the limbs of human beings.

The captain saw that further resistance was useless.  His feet warned him of the cataclysm that was developing beneath them—­the liquid water-spout invading with a foamy bellowing the space between keel and deck, destroying the metal screens, knocking down the bulk-heads, upsetting every object, dragging them forth with all the violence of an inundation, with the ramming force of a breaking dyke.  The hold was rapidly becoming converted into a watery and leaden coffin fast going to the bottom.

The aft gun hurled its first shot.  To Ferragut its report seemed mere irony.  No one knew as he did the ship’s desperate condition.

“To the life boats!” he shouted.  “Every one to the boats!”