"Pump _hard_!" cried Roberts to the men, excitedly. The handles clanked smartly; the mate turned the tap of the jet; and in an instant a long thin stream of oil, ignited by its passage through the flame blazing round the orifice of the jet, poured in a flood of fire across the intervening space of water, and struck the proa fairly in the bows. To raise the nozzle sufficiently to touch the men was an action quick as thought, when it was so manipulated as to cause the stream to travel deliberately right along the entire length of the vessel's rail, from the eyes of her to the taffrail. The effect surpassed my most sanguine expectations; that stream of fire, thin as it was, could not be withstood; and in less time than it takes to tell of it the deck of the proa was full of shrieking men, who, with clothes ablaze, and suffering Heaven only knows what extremity of torture wherever the fiery spray had touched them, were plunging headlong below out of the way of the dreadful missile. The helmsman had, as I expected, instinctively put his helm hard a starboard the instant that the jet began to play, with the result that the proa, instead of touching us, forged slowly past us to port, and so ahead, with little tongues of flame creeping here and there about her hull wherever the flaming oil had fallen; Roberts keeping the jet remorselessly playing upon her until she had shot quite beyond its reach. "Thank God, we are well rid of that danger!" I ejaculated; "and, unless I am greatly mistaken, we shall get a breeze before any of the others are near enough to attempt the same trick." "Ay; and here it comes with a vengeance, too! Look there, sir, on our starboard beam," cried Roberts. "Avast pumping there, you two, and run the engine away for'ard, out of the way. Stand by the braces fore and--" A terrific blaze of lightning at this moment enveloped the ship in a sheet of living flame, which was accompanied by a simultaneous crash of thunder that was indescribably dreadful and terrifying by reason of its awful intensity of sound. It literally stunned me for a few seconds, so completely that I knew not where I was; and when I recovered my senses I discovered that the tremendous shock of sound had rendered me stone deaf, so that I was utterly incapable of hearing anything. Fortunately for us all, this deafness passed off again in a few minutes; but while it lasted I found it exceedingly inconvenient and unpleasant. My first act, on coming to my senses, was to glance instinctively in the direction indicated by the mate, when a complete transformation in the appearance of the heavens in that quarter met my anxious gaze. The heaped-up masses of cloud had there been rent asunder by the power of the imprisoned wind, revealing a large and rapidly widening patch of clear sky, with the stars brilliantly shining in the blue-black space; while beneath it the water was all white with the foam of the approaching squall.