The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Mysterious Island

Author: Jules Verne

Posting Date: August 24, 2008 [EBook #1268]
Release Date: April, 1998
[This file last updated on July 22, 2010]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND ***

Produced by Anthony Matonak, and Trevor Carlson

THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND

by Jules Verne

1874

PART 1--DROPPED FROM THE CLOUDS

Chapter 1

"Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?"
"Worse than that, captain! we are falling!" "For Heaven's sake heave out
the ballast!" "There! the last sack is empty!" "Does the balloon rise?"
"No!" "I hear a noise like the dashing of waves. The sea is below the
car! It cannot be more than 500 feet from us!" "Overboard with every
weight! ... everything!"

Such were the loud and startling words which resounded through the air,
above the vast watery desert of the Pacific, about four o'clock in the
evening of the 23rd of March, 1865.

Few can possibly have forgotten the terrible storm from the northeast,
in the middle of the equinox of that year. The tempest raged without
intermission from the 18th to the 26th of March. Its ravages were
terrible in America, Europe, and Asia, covering a distance of eighteen
hundred miles, and extending obliquely to the equator from the
thirty-fifth north parallel to the fortieth south parallel. Towns were
overthrown, forests uprooted, coasts devastated by the mountains of
water which were precipitated on them, vessels cast on the shore, which
the published accounts numbered by hundreds, whole districts leveled
by waterspouts which destroyed everything they passed over, several
thousand people crushed on land or drowned at sea; such were the traces
of its fury, left by this devastating tempest. It surpassed in disasters
those which so frightfully ravaged Havana and Guadalupe, one on the 25th
of October, 1810, the other on the 26th of July, 1825.

But while so many catastrophes were taking place on land and at sea, a
drama not less exciting was being enacted in the agitated air.

In fact, a balloo