spine; then the faint whispered musical moan tingled in each
man's ears, and the sounds as they departed eastwards gathered volume and
force till, in a moment, there fell perfect stillness.

Stillness, broken only by a sudden and mysterious chorus of animal cries
from the _George Washington_. A kind of wail, high, shrieking,
strenuous, ending in a noise as of air escaping from a pipe; a torrent of
barks such as no known beast could utter, subsiding into moans that
chilled the blood; a guttural scream, broken by heavy sounds as if of
water lapping on a rock at uncertain intervals; a human cry, human words,
with unfamiliar vowel sounds, soon slipping into quiet--these were among
the horrors that assailed the ears of the voyagers in the _Pendragon_.
Such a discord of laments has not tingled to the indifferent stars since
the ice-wave swept into their last retreats, and crushed among the rocks
that bear their fossil forms, the fauna of the preglacial period, the
Ichthyosaurus, the Brontosaurus, the Guyas Cutis (or Ring-tailed Roarer),
the Mastodon, and the Mammoth.

'What a row in the menagerie!' said Logan.

He was not answered.

Bude had fallen into a deck-chair, his face buried in his hands, his arms
rocking convulsively.

'I say, old cock, pull yourself together,' said Logan, and rushing down
the companion stairs, he reappeared with a bottle of champagne. To
extract the cork (how familiar, how reassuring, sounded the _cloop_!),
and to pour the foaming beverage into two long tumblers, was, to the
active Logan, the work of a moment. Shaking Bude, he offered him the
beaker; the earl drained it at a draught. He shuddered, but rose to his
feet.

'Not a man alive on that doomed vessel,' he was saying, when anew the
still air was rent by the raucous notes of a megalophone:

'Is _your_ exhibit all right?'

'Fit as a fiddle,' answered Logan through a similar instrument.

'Our exhibits are gone bust,' answered Captain Noah Funkal. 'Our
professors are in fits. Our darkeys are all dead. Can your skipper come
aboard?'

'Just launching a boat,' cried Logan.

Bude gave the necessary orders. His captain stepped up to him and
saluted.

'Do you know what these red fire-flies were that come aboard, sir?' he
asked.

'Fire-flies? Oh, _musae volitantes sonorae_, a common phenomenon in
these latitudes,' answered Bude.

Logan rejoiced to see that the earl was himself again.

'The other gentlemen's scientific beasts