"Suppose it is something else!" exclaimed Robur. "Force the door,
Tom; drive in the door!"

But the mate had not made one step towards it when a fearful
explosion shook the "Albatross." The cabins flew into splinters. The
lamps went out. The electric current suddenly failed. The darkness
was complete. Most of the suspensory screws were twisted or broken,
but a few in the bow still revolved.

At the same instant the hull of the aeronef opened just behind the
first deck-house, where the engines for the fore-screw were placed;
and the after-part of the deck collapsed in space.

Immediately the last suspensory screw stopped spinning, and the
"Albatross" dropped into the abyss.

It was a fall of ten thousand feet for the eight men who were
clinging to the wreck; and the fall was even faster than it might
have been, for the fore propeller was vertical in the air and still
working!

It was then that Robur, with extraordinary coolness, climbed up to
the broken deck-house, and seizing the lever reversed the rotation,
so that the propeller became a suspender. The fall continued, but it
was checked, and the wreck did not fall with the accelerating
swiftness of bodies influenced solely by gravitation; and if it was
death to the survivors of the "Albatross" from their being hurled
into the sea, it was not death by asphyxia amid air which the
rapidity of descent rendered unbreathable.