“Can nothing be done?” he asked, turning to Garth.
“Nothing,” returned the inventor, “for, see, even could we get the engines to work, the passage to the sea is blocked.”
“But you cannot mean that there is no hope?” Wilson persisted. “Surely there is some way out of this accursed lake?”
“Then I guess it’s got to be found,” the Yankee broke in sharply. “This is how the thing pans out: if we stop here it means suffocatin’; if we bust the glass and clear outside, the sulphur’ll do the trick for us in a little less than no time.”
“It resolves itself into a choice of deaths,” remarked Seymour, “one slow and terrible, the other terrible enough, but mercifully swift.”
“Precisely,” agreed the millionaire; “but I reckon there’s no manner of sense in rushin’ on your fate. I’m stayin’ right here.”
Even as the words left his lips, a series of deafening explosions rang out, each one louder than the preceding: the whole culminating in one stupendous crash, which shook the island to its very foundations.
While yet the last echoes of this fearful cannonade reverberated amid the cliffs, a giant wave roared furiously up from the bed of the lake, and tearing the Seal from her sandy bed, bore her fifty feet into the air.
For one brief instant it swayed there, then its crest curled over, and with a thunderous roar, it plunged downward.
Downward—the water seething and boiling around the vessel, threatening each moment to beat in the glass of the turret; still downward—the Seal whirling like a straw in the grip of the maddened waters, and the occupants of her turret clinging for dear life to the walls. The deck of the vessel sloped like the roof of a house as she surged downward in the glissade of waters.