One resource still left was to speak English. Perhaps they would be familiar with this nearly universal language. But I only knew it, as I did the German language, well enough to read it fluently, not well enough to speak it correctly. Here, however, our overriding need was to make ourselves understood. “Come on, it’s your turn,” I told the harpooner. “Over to you, Mr. Land. Pull out of your bag of tricks the best English ever spoken by an Anglo-Saxon, and try for a more favorable result than mine.” Ned needed no persuading and started our story all over again, most of which I could follow. Its content was the same, but the form differed. Carried away by his volatile temperament, the Canadian put great animation into it. He complained vehemently about being imprisoned in defiance of his civil rights, asked by virtue of which law he was hereby detained, invoked writs of habeas corpus, threatened to press charges against anyone holding him in illegal custody, ranted, gesticulated, shouted, and finally conveyed by an expressive gesture that we were dying of hunger. This was perfectly true, but we had nearly forgotten the fact. Much to his amazement, the harpooner seemed no more intelligible than I had been. Our visitors didn’t bat an eye. Apparently they were engineers who understood the languages of neither the French physicist Arago nor the English physicist Faraday. Thoroughly baffled after vainly exhausting our philological resources, I no longer knew what tactic to pursue, when Conseil told me: “If master will authorize me, I’ll tell the whole business in German.” “What! You know German?” I exclaimed. “Like most Flemish people, with all due respect to master.” “On the contrary, my respect is due you. Go to it, my boy.” And Conseil, in his serene voice, described for the third time the various vicissitudes of our story. But despite our narrator’s fine accent and stylish turns of phrase, the German language met with no success. Finally, as a last resort, I hauled out everything I could remember from my early schooldays, and I tried to narrate our adventures in Latin. Cicero would have plugged his ears and sent me to the scullery, but somehow I managed to pull through. With the same negative result. This last attempt ultimately misfiring, the two strangers exchanged a few words in their incomprehensible language and withdrew, not even favoring us with one of those encouraging gestures that are used in every country in the world. The door closed again. “This is outrageous!” Ned Land shouted, exploding for the twentieth time. “I ask you! We speak French, English, German, and Latin to these rogues, and neither of them has the decency to even answer back!” “Calm down, Ned,” I told the seething harpooner. “Anger won’t get us anywhere.” “But professor,” our irascible companion went on, “can’t you see that we could die of hunger in this iron cage?” “Bah!” Conseil put in philosophically. “We can hold out a good while yet!”