Then a dull sound behind her made the cruiser tremble. She was seized with a sudden fever, and each of her metal plates resounded. Death spread through her limbs and muscles. In through a breach in her very heart rushed the dark water, leaped and broke everything before it. What happened then? I do not know. I do not yet know. But some of the messages make it possible to imagine the details of the horror. Filled with water on her wounded side, the _Gambetta_, lurched toward her sea grave, and the sailors who were not killed at once thrust out their arms to save themselves. Everything slid around them. To stand upright they had to lean over; their hands had to serve them for eyes, for darkness enveloped the cruiser. Naked and silent they rushed on toward the deck, but the slanting companion ways were now as perpendicular as walls. How many unfortunates perished in their suddenly interrupted sleep, without realizing that their ship was going down for the last time? * * * * * On the deck, a black chaos! Each second the cruiser sinks deeper. The gulf of the waves grows larger, and each moment perhaps will be the final plunge. By main force the sailors launch the boats and the cutter, which drop into the water wrong side or right side up. The officers are calm and have put aside their fatigue; they give the necessary orders for the rescue. In the sky the two masts and the four stacks sink lower and lower. The cruiser, with its apparatus damaged, can send out no signal for help, and all those who dwell on her plunge into the depths as if down a silent stair. A handful of men have been able to enter the boats. Chilled, but struggling for life, they have taken the oars, and during the last hours of the night have rowed towards the friendly lighthouse. At the first gleam of day, with bleeding hands, but with a marvelous tenacity of will, they have made a supreme effort, and the Italian customs-officers take in sixty exhausted men almost at the point of death. * * * * * From Tarentum to Rome, from Rome to Paris, from Paris to Malta, and from Malta to the _Waldeck-Rousseau_, this story of the drama has been traveling for twenty-four hours. The good neighbor we loved to see in our meetings on the high sea has met the death which might have been our own. She has disappeared without a word, felled at the first stroke in an eddy of the sea, as befalls her pilgrims. The wound was muffled and dumb, for over there on the horizon I saw nothing. One of the flashes that played in the sky was perhaps the gleam of the torpedo which killed her, but I was deceived by the illusion of distance. * * * * *