He was suddenly interrupted in his affirmations. The tray leaped from his hands and he went staggering about like a drunken man, even banging his abdomen against the balustrade of the bridge. "Cristo del Grao!…"
The cup that Ferragut was carrying to his mouth fell with a crash, and the French officer, seated on a bench, was almost thrown on his knees. The helmsman had to clutch the wheel with a jerk of surprise and terror.
The entire ship trembled from keel to masthead, from quarter-deck to forecastle, with a deadly shuddering as though invisible claws had just checked it at full speed.
The captain tried to account for this accident. "We must be aground," he said to himself, "a reef that I did not know, a shoal not marked on the charts…."
But a second had not passed before something else was added to the first shock, refuting Ferragut's suppositions. The blue and luminous air was rent with the thud of a thunderclap. Near the prow, appeared a column of smoke, of expanding gases of yellowish and fulminating steam and, coming up through its center in the form of a fan, a spout of black objects, broken wood, bits of metallic plates and flaming ropes turning to ashes.
Ulysses was no longer in doubt. They must have just been struck by a torpedo. His anxious look scanned the waters.
"There!… There!" he said, pointing with his hand.
His keen seaman's eyes had just discovered the light outline of a periscope that nobody else was able to see.
He ran down from the bridge or rather he slid down the midship ladder, running toward the stern.
"There!… There!"