Title: The Mysterious Island

Author: Jules Verne

PART 1--DROPPED FROM THE CLOUDS

Chapter 1

"Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?" "Worse

than that, captain! we are falling!" "For Heaven's sake heave out the

ballast!" "There! the last sack is empty!" "Does the balloon rise?" "No!"

"I hear a noise like the dashing of waves. The sea is below the car! It

cannot be more than 500 feet from us!" "Overboard with every weight!

. . . everything!"

Such were the loud and startling words which resounded through the air,

above the vast watery desert of the Pacific, about four o'clock in the

evening of the 23rd of March, 1865.

Few can possibly have forgotten the terrible storm from the northeast, in

the middle of the equinox of that year. The tempest raged without

intermission from the 18th to the 26th of March. Its ravages were terrible

in America, Europe, and Asia, covering a distance of eighteen hundred

miles, and extending obliquely to the equator from the thirty-fifth north

parallel to the fortieth south parallel. Towns were overthrown, forests

uprooted, coasts devastated by the mountains of water which were

precipitated on them, vessels cast on the shore, which the published

accounts numbered by hundreds, whole districts leveled by waterspouts which

destroyed everything they passed over, several thousand people crushed on

land or drowned at sea; such were the traces of its fury, left by this

devastating tempest. It surpassed in disasters those which so frightfully

ravaged Havana and Guadalupe, one on the 25th of October, 1810, the other