It was probably one of the steamers of the line from New York
to Liverpool, or Havre. It soon disappeared in the gloom.
At ten o'clock in the evening the sky was on fire.
The atmosphere was streaked with vivid lightning.
I could not bear the brightness of it; while the captain,
looking at it, seemed to envy the spirit of the tempest.
A terrible noise filled the air, a complex noise, made up
of the howls of the crushed waves, the roaring of the wind,
and the claps of thunder. The wind veered suddenly to all
points of the horizon; and the cyclone, rising in the east,
returned after passing by the north, west, and south, in the inverse
course pursued by the circular storm of the southern hemisphere.
Ah, that Gulf Stream! It deserves its name of the King of Tempests.
It is that which causes those formidable cyclones, by the
difference of temperature between its air and its currents.
A shower of fire had succeeded the rain. The drops of water were
changed to sharp spikes. One would have thought that Captain Nemo
was courting a death worthy of himself, a death by lightning.
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