The Mysterious Island

"Few can possibly have forgotten the terrible storm from the northeast, in the middle of the equinox of that year. The tempest raged without intermission from the 18th to the 26th of March. Its ravages were terrible in America, Europe, and Asia, covering a distance of eighteen hundred miles, and extending obliquely to the equator from the thirty-fifth north parallel to the fortieth south parallel... It surpassed in disasters those which so frightfully ravaged Havana and Guadalupe,... In fact, a balloon, as a ball might be carried on the summit of a waterspout, had been taken into the circling movement of a coition of air and had traversed space at the rate of ninety miles an hour, turning round and round as if seized by some aerial maelstrom. Beneath the lower point of the balloon, swung a car, containing five passengers, scarcely visible in the midst of the thick vapor mingled with spray which hung over the surface of the ocean...."