on which his vessel would go to pieces,
perhaps, where was it, if it was not there? Be it the Southern
Continent or the Northern Continent--for anything way possible in that
chaos--the "Pilgrim" could not miss either one or the other. What had
happened since the beginning of this frightful tempest? What was still
going on, as that coast, whether it should prove salvation or
destruction, did not appear? Must Dick Sand suppose, then, that he was
deceived by his compass, whose indications he could no longer control,
because the second compass was lacking to make that control? Truly, he
had that fear which the absence of all land might justify.

So, when he was at the helm, Dick Sand did not cease to devour the
chart with his eyes. But he interrogated it in vain; it could not give
him the solution of an enigma which, in the situation in which Negoro
had placed him, was incomprehensible for him, as it would have been for
any one else.

On this day, however, the 26th of March, towards eight o'clock in the
morning, an incident of the greatest importance took place.

Hercules, on watch forward, gave this cry:

"Land! land!"

Dick Sand sprang to the forecastle. Hercules could not have eyes like a
seaman. Was he not mistaken?

"Land?" cried Dick Sand.

"There," replied Hercules, showing an almost imperceptible point on the
horizon in the northeast.

They hardly heard each other speak in the midst of the roaring of the
sea and the sky.

"You have seen the land?" said the novice.

"Yes," replied Hercules.

And his hand was still stretched out to larboard forward.

The novice looked. He saw nothing.

At that moment, Mrs. Weldon, who had heard the cry given by Hercules,
came up on deck, notwithstanding her promise not to come there.

"Madam!" cried Dick Sand.

Mrs. Weldon, unable to make herself heard, tried, for herself, to
perceive that land signaled by the black, and she seemed to have
concentrated all her life in her eyes.

It must be believed that Hercules's hand indicated badly the point of
the horizon which he wished to show: neither Mrs. Weldon nor the novice
could see anything.

But, suddenly, Dick Sand in turn stretched out his hand.

"Yes! yes! land!" said he.

A kind of summit had just appeared in an opening in the fog. His
sailor's eyes could not deceive him.

"At last!" cried he; "at last!"

He clang feverishly to the netting. Mrs. Weldon, sustained by Hercules,
continued to watch that land