"The tree is on fire!"
He was right. In a moment the flame, as if it had been communicated to an immense piece of fireworks, spread along the west side of the tree. The dead limbs, the nests of dry grass, and finally the live wood itself, furnished material for the devouring element.
The wind now rose and fanned the flames into fury. Glenarvan and his friends, speechless with terror, and venturing upon limbs that bent beneath their weight, hastily took refuge in the other, the eastern part of the tree.
Meantime the boughs shriveled, crackled, and twisted in the fire like burning serpents. The glowing fragments fell into the rushing waters and floated away in the current, sending forth flashes of ruddy light. The flames at one moment would rise to a fearful height, to be lost in the aerial conflagration, and the next, beaten back by the furious hurricane, would envelop the tree like a robe of molten gold.
Glenarvan, Robert, the major, Paganel, and the sailors, were terrified. A thick smoke was stifling them; an intolerable heat was scorching them. The fire was extending to the lower part of the tree on their side; nothing could stop or extinguish it; and they felt themselves irrevocably doomed to the torture of those victims who are confined within the burning sides of a sacrificial fire-basket.
At last their situation was no longer tenable, and of two deaths they were forced to choose the least cruel.
"To the water!" cried Glenarvan.
