De Beauxchamps approached Cosmo and motioned to him that it was time to ascend to the surface and leave the Jules Verne to her fate. But Cosmo signaled back that he wished first to examine more closely the strange statue that was gazing upon them in the still unextinguished beam of the searchlight with what they might now have regarded as a look of mockery.
The others, accordingly, waited while Cosmo Versál, greatly impeded by his extraordinary garment, clambered up to the front of the figure. There he saw something which redoubled his amazement.
On the broad breast he saw a representation of a world overwhelmed with a deluge and encircling it was what he instantly concluded to be the picture of a nebula. Underneath, in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, with which Cosmo was familiar, was an inscription in letters of gold, which could only be translated thus:
I Come Again—
At the End of Time.
"Great Heavens!" he said to himself. "It is a prophecy of the Second
Deluge!"
[Illustration: "IT IS A PROPHECY OF THE SECOND DELUGE.">[
He continued to gaze, amazed, at the figure and the inscription, until De Beauxchamps clambered to his side and indicated to him that it was necessary that they should ascend without further delay, showing him by signs that the air-renewing apparatus would give out.
With a last lingering look at the figure, Cosmo imitated the others by detaching the weights from below his feet, and a minute later they were all shooting rapidly toward the surface of the sea, De Beauxchamps, as he afterwards declared, uttering a prayer for the repose of the Jules Verne.
The imaginary time which Amos Blank had fixed as the limit set by Cosmo for the return from the depths was nearly gone, and he was beginning to cast about for some other invention to quiet the rising fears of the passengers, when a form became visible which made the eyes of Captain Arms, the first to catch sight of it, start from their sockets. He rubbed them, and looked again—but there it was!
A huge head, human in outline, with bulging, glassy eyes, popped suddenly out of the depths, followed by the upper part of a gigantic form which was no less suggestive of a monstrous man, and which immediately began to wave its arms!