"Tumble up quicker'n you ever did in your life!" he exclaimed, his big brown beard wagging almost in Cosmo's face. "The flood's over!" Cosmo sprang out of bed and pulled on his coat in a second. "What do you mean?" he demanded. "Look for yourself," said the captain, pointing overhead. Cosmo Versál glanced up and saw the sky ablaze with stars! The rain had entirely ceased. The surface of the sea was almost as smooth as glass, though rising and falling slowly, with a long, rolling motion. The Ark rode steadily, shivering, like an ocean liner, under the impulse of its engines, and the sudden silence, succeeding the ceaseless roar of the downpour, which had never been out of their ears from the start of the voyage, seemed supernatural. "When did this happen?" he demanded. "It began not more than five minutes ago. I was just saying to myself that we ought to be somewhere near the center of the old Atlantic as it used to be, and wondering whether we had got our course laid right to go fairly between the Canaries and the Cape de Verdes, for I didn't want to be harpooned by Gogo or the Peak of Teneriffe, when all of a sudden there came a lightening in the nor'east and the stars broke out there. "I was so set aback that I didn't do anything for two or three minutes but stare at the stars. Then the rain stopped and a curtain seemed to roll off the sky, and in a minute more it was clear down to the horizon all around. Then I got my wits together and ran to call you." Cosmo glanced around and above, seeming to be as much astonished as the captain had been. He rubbed his huge bald dome and looked all round again before speaking. At last he said: "It's the nebula again. There must be a hole in it." "Its whole bottom's knocked out, I reckon," said the captain. "Maybe it's run out of water--sort o' squeezed itself dry." Cosmo shook his head. "We are not yet in the heart of it," he said. "It is evident to me now that what I took for the nucleus was only a close-coiled spiral, and we're run out of that, but the worst is yet to come. When we strike the center, then we'll catch it, and there'll be no more intermissions." "How long will that be?" inquired Captain Arms. "It may be a week, and it may be a month, though I hardly think it will be so long as that. The earth is going about twelve miles a second--that's more than a million miles a day--directly toward the center of the nebula. It has taken ten days to go through the spiral that we have encountered, making that about ten million miles thick. It's not likely that the gap between this spiral and the nucleus of the nebula is more than thirty million miles across, at the most; so you see we'll probably be in the nucleus within a month, and possibly much less than a month." Captain Arms took a chew of tobacco.