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"How am I to know anything about the points in this blackness?" growled the captain. "You must go the best you can by the compass," said Cosmo. Cosmo Versal, as subsequently appeared, was right in supposing that the nucleus of the nebula was exceedingly irregular in density. The condensation was not only much heavier in the north, but it was very erratic.
An overpowering sense of loneliness and helplessness came over them, and only the stout heart of Cosmo Versal, and his reassuring words, kept the others from making the signal which would have caused the bell to be hastily drawn back to the Ark. "M. De Beauxchamps," said Cosmo, breaking the impressive silence, "to what depth have we now descended?"
Notwithstanding the fact that the atmosphere was filled with falling water, they could yet breathe, if they kept the rain from striking directly in their faces. It was owing to this circumstance, and to some extraordinary occurrences which we shall have to relate, that the fate of the human race was not precisely that which Cosmo Versal had predicted.
"Do you mean Pike's Peak?" demanded Cosmo. "Do I mean Pike's Peak?" cried the captain, whose excitement had become uncontrollable. "Yes, I mean Pike's Peak, and the deuce to him! Wasn't I born at his foot? Didn't I play ball in the Garden of the Gods? And look at him, Mr. Versal! There he stands! No water-squirting pirate of a nebula could down the old Pike!"
The Frenchman bowed politely, and with a slight smile replied: "I believe, M. Versal, that the Jules Verne is as safe and comfortable, and proportionately as well provisioned, as your Ark." "So you call it the Jules Verne?" returned Cosmo, smiling in his turn. "We were proud to give it that name, and its conduct has proved that it is worthy of it."
But it annoyed him to find that his own explanations were always falsified by the event, while Cosmo Versal seemed to have a superhuman foreglimpse of whatever happened. His pride would not allow him to recede from the position that he had taken, but he could not free himself from a certain anxiety about the future.
In their latest editions, several of the papers printed an interview with Cosmo Versal, in which he gave figures and calculations that, on their face, seemed to offer mathematical proof of the correctness of his forecast.
Release them, and lead Campo to the promenade deck." Nobody thought that Cosmo would literally execute his threat to make the mutineer walk the plank, but, as he had told Captain Arms, they didn't know him. They were about to see that in Cosmo Versal they had not only a prophet, a leader, and a judge, but an inexorable master also. A plank was prepared and placed sloping from the rail.
It was only after long and careful study of their position, rendered possible by occasional glimpses of the Orange Hills and high points further up the course of the Hudson, that Cosmo Versal and Captain Arms were able to reach that conclusion. Where New York had stood nothing was visible but an expanse of turbid and rushing water.
From the shelter of a "captain's bridge," constructed at the forward end of the huge levium dome that covered the vessel, Cosmo Versal, with Captain Arms, a liberally bewhiskered, veteran navigator in whose skill he confided, peered over the interminable waste of waters. There was nothing in sight except floating objects that had welled up from the drowned city and the surrounding villages.
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