CHAPTER VI.
IN THE HOLD.
Phillip Mortlake raised himself from the floor on which he had been dashed down by the explosion, and looked about him for a moment stupidly.
He had fallen on a body from which the head had been torn and the limbs disjointed, while the clothes which had covered it were in tatters.
The saloon was in a state of wreckage, still filled with the smoke of the explosion, and all about him lay the dismembered bodies of the passengers. How he had escaped whole, for he felt no wounds about him, he could not tell.
His first thought on recovering consciousness was about Adela; had she escaped as he had done, or been mutilated like the others?
He ran over to the couch where she had been lying, and was overjoyed to find her rising to her feet with a dazed look in her eyes; she had evidently been thrown from the couch some distance away, for she rose from a mound of dead—a fearful mound of battered humanity, male and female, all mingled together. Fortunately for her she had been flung upon a woman's body, singularly like her own figure, whom he could not recognise, so fearfully was the face torn, yet it was costumed similarly to what Adela had been; but he thought nothing of
