broken,
but intelligible sentences, Hunt spoke,--

"Yes--there--a curtain of vapour--so the half-breed often
said--understand me. The two, Arthur Pym and he, were in the Tsalal
boat. Then an enormous block of ice came full upon them. At the
shock Dirk Peters was thrown into the sea, but he clung to the ice
block, and--understand me, he saw the boat drift with the current,
far, very far, too far! In vain did Pym try to rejoin his companion,
he could not; the boat drifted on and on, and Pym, that poor dear
Pym, was carried away. It is he who has never come back, and he is
there, still there!"

If Hunt had been the half-breed in person he could not have spoken
with more heartfelt emotion of "poor Pym."

It was then, in front of the "curtain of vapour," that Arthur
Pym and the half-breed had been separated from each other. Dirk
Peters had succeeded in returning from the ice-world to America,
whither he had conveyed the notes that were communicated to Edgar
Poe.

Hunt was minutely questioned upon all these points and he replied,
conformably, he declared, to what the half-breed had told him many
times. According to this statement, Dirk Peters had Arthur Pym's
note-book in his pocket at the moment when the ice-block struck
them, and thus the journal which the half-breed placed at the
disposal of the American romance-writer was saved.

"Understand me," Hunt repeated, "for I tell you things as I
have them from Dirk Peters. While the drift was carrying him away,
he cried out with all his strength. Pym, poor Pym, had already
disappeared in the midst of the vapour. The half-breed, feeding upon
raw fish, which he contrived to catch, was carried back by a cross
current to Tsalal Island, where he landed half dead from hunger."

"To Tsalal Island!" exclaimed Captain Len Guy. "And how long
was it since they had left it?"

"Three weeks--yes, three weeks at the farthest, so Dirk Peters
told me."

"Then he must have found all that remained of the crew of the
_Jane_--my brother William and those who had survived with him?"

"No," replied Hunt; "and Dirk Peters always believed that they
had perished--yes, to the very last man. There was no one upon the
island."

"No one?"
"Not a living soul."

"But the population?"

"No one! No one, I tell you. The island was a desert--yes, a
desert!"

This statement contradicted certain facts of which we were
absolutely certain. After all, though, it that when Dirk Peters
returned to T