Ferguson's eyes gleamed with a ray of energetic hope.
"The simoom!" he exclaimed.
"The simoom!" repeated Joe, without exactly knowing what it meant.
"So much the better!" said Kennedy, with the bitterness of
despair. "So much the better--we shall die!"
"So much the better!" echoed the doctor, "for we
shall live!" and, so saying, he began rapidly to throw out
the sand that encumbered the car.
At length his companions understood him, and took
their places at his side.
"And now, Joe," said the doctor, "throw out some
fifty pounds of your ore, there!"
Joe no longer hesitated, although he still felt a fleeting
pang of regret. The balloon at once began to ascend.
"It was high time!" said the doctor.
The simoom, in fact, came rushing on like a thunderbolt,
and a moment later the balloon would have been
crushed, torn to atoms, annihilated. The awful whirlwind
was almost upon it, and it was already pelted with showers
of sand driven like hail by the storm.
"Out with more ballast!" shouted the doctor.
"There!" responded Joe, tossing over a huge fragment
of quartz.
With this, the Victoria rose swiftly above the range
of the whirling column, but, caught in the vast displacement
of the atmosphere thereby occasioned, it was borne
along with incalculable rapidity away above this foaming
sea.
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