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It was the only word that passed his lips. In fact, it was a "puraque," the name given by the Brazilians to the gymnotus, or electric snake, which had just attacked him. It is well known that the gymnotus is a kind of eel, with a blackish, slimy skin, furnished along the back and tail with an apparatus composed of plates joined by vertical lamellae, and acted on by nerves of considerable power.
His voice was lost in the metallic sphere from which not a sound could escape! And now the puraque redoubled its attacks; it gave forth shock after shock, which made Benito writhe on the sand like the sections of a divided worm, and his muscles were wrenched again and again beneath the living lash. Benito thought that all was over; his eyes grew dim, his limbs began to stiffen.
"There it is!" answered Fragoso, pointing to a pirogue then coming up to the raft with the corpse. "But what has been the matter, Benito?" asked Manoel. "Has it been the want of air?" "No!" said Benito; "a puraque attacked me! But the noise? the detonation?" "A cannon shot!" replied Manoel. "It was the cannon shot which brought the corpse to the surface."
Neither Manoel nor his companions could suspect the horrible combat which was going on beneath them between the formidable puraque and the unhappy diver, who only fought to suffer, without any power of defending himself. And that at the moment when a body the body of Torres without a doubt! had just met his view. By a supreme instinct of self-preservation Benito uttered a cry.
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