orres without a
doubt!--had just met his view.

By a supreme instinct of self-preservation Benito uttered a cry. His
voice was lost in the metallic sphere from which not a sound could
escape!

And now the puraque redoubled its attacks; it gave forth shock after
shock, which made Benito writhe on the sand like the sections of a
divided worm, and his muscles were wrenched again and again beneath the
living lash.

Benito thought that all was over; his eyes grew dim, his limbs began to
stiffen.

But before he quite lost his power of sight and reason he became the
witness of a phenomenon, unexpected, inexplicable, and marvelous in the
extreme.

A deadened roar resounded through the liquid depths. It was like a
thunder-clap, the reverberations of which rolled along the river bed,
then violently agitated by the electrical discharges of the gymnotus.
Benito felt himself bathed as it were in the dreadful booming which
found an echo in the very deepest of the river depths.

And then a last cry escaped him, for fearful was the vision which
appeared before his eyes!

The corpse of the drowned man which had been stretched on the sand
arose! The undulations of the water lifted up the arms, and they swayed
about as if with some peculiar animation. Convulsive throbs made the
movement of the corpse still more alarming.

It was indeed the body of Torres. One of the suns rays shot down to
it through the liquid mass, and Benito recognized the bloated, ashy
features of the scoundrel who fell by his own hand, and whose last
breath had left him beneath the waters.

And while Benito could not make a single movement with his paralyzed
limbs, while his heavy shoes kept him down as if he had been nailed to
the sand, the corpse straightened itself up, the head swayed to and fro,
and disentangling itself from the hole in which it had been kept by a
mass of aquatic weeds, it slowly ascended to the surface of the Amazon.

CHAPTER XI. THE CONTENTS OF THE CASE

WHAT WAS it that had happened? A purely physical phenomenon, of which
the following is the explanation.

The gunboat Santa Ana, bound for Manaos, had come up the river and
passed the bar at Frias. Just before she reached the _embouchure_ of the
Rio Negro she hoisted her colors and saluted the Brazilian flag. At the
report vibrations were produced along the surface of the stream, and
these vibrations making their way down to the bottom of the river, had
been sufficient to r