hundred miles
an hour.

My uncle and I looked at one another with wild and haggard eyes; we
clung convulsively to the stump of the mast, which, at the moment when
the catastrophe took place, had snapped short off. We turned our backs
as much as possible to the wind, in order not to be stifled by a
rapidity of motion which nothing human could face and live.

And still the long monotonous hours went on. The situation did not
change in the least, though a discovery I suddenly made seemed to
complicate it very much.

When we had slightly recovered our equilibrium, I proceeded to examine
our cargo. I then made the unsatisfactory discovery that the greater
part of it had utterly disappeared.

I became alarmed, and determined to discover what were our resources. My
heart beat at the idea, but it was absolutely necessary to know on what
we had to depend. With this view, I took the lantern and looked around.

Of all our former collection of nautical and philosophical instruments,
there remained only the chronometer and the compass. The ladders and
ropes were reduced to a small piece of rope fastened to the stump of the
mast. Not a pickax, not a crowbar, not a hammer, and, far worse than
all, no food--not enough for one day!

This discovery was a prelude to a certain and horrible death.

Seated gloomily on the raft, clasping the stump of the mast
mechanically, I thought of all I had read as to sufferings from
starvation.

I remembered everything that history had taught me on the subject, and I
shuddered at the remembrance of the agonies to be endured.

Maddened at the prospects of enduring the miseries of starvation, I
persuaded myself that I must be mistaken. I examined the cracks in the
raft; I poked between the joints and beams; I examined every possible
hole and corner. The result was--simply nothing!

Our stock of provisions consisted of nothing but a piece of dry meat and
some soaked and half-moldy biscuits.

I gazed around me scared and frightened. I could not understand the
awful truth. And yet of what consequence was it in regard to any new
danger? Supposing that we had had provisions for months, and even for
years, how could we ever get out of the awful abyss into which we were
being hurled by the irresistible torrent we had let loose?

Why should we trouble ourselves about the sufferings and tortures to be
endured from hunger when death stared us in the face under so many other
swifter and perhaps even m