CHAPTER XVI — WANT OF AIR

WANT OF AIR Thus around the _Nautilus_, above and below, was an impenetrable wall of ice. We were prisoners to the iceberg. I watched the Captain. His countenance had resumed its habitual imperturbability. “Gentlemen,” he said calmly, “there are two ways of dying in the circumstances in which we are placed.” (This puzzling person had the air of a mathematical professor lecturing to his pupils.) “The first is to be crushed; the second is to die of suffocation. I do not speak of the possibility of dying of hunger, fo…