Marston looked like a man in a stupor. He made no objection to the
signal given by the others to return; he even helped to cut the ropes by
which the cannon balls had been attached. Not a single word was spoken
by the party, as they slowly rose to the surface. Marston seemed to be
struggling against despair. For the first time, the impossibility of the
great enterprise seemed to dawn upon him. He and his friends had
undertaken a great fight with the mighty Ocean, which now played with
them as a giant with a pigmy. To reach the bottom was evidently
completely out of their power; and what was infinitely worse, there was
nothing to be gained by reaching it. The Projectile was not on the
bottom; it could not even have got to the bottom. Marston said it all in
a few words to the Captain, as the Clubmen stepped on deck a few hours
later:
"Barbican is floating midway in the depths of the Pacific, like Mahomet
in his coffin!"
Blindly yielding, however, to the melancholy hope that is born of
despair, Marston and his friends renewed the search next day, the 30th,
but they were all too worn out with watching and excitement to be able
to continue it longer than a few hours.
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