Our sufferings for some time after this really pass my powers of description.
We no longer perspired, for all the perspiration had been sweated out of us.

We simply lay in the bottom of the boat, which we were now physically incapable of directing, feeling like hot embers, and I fancy undergoing very much the same sensations that the poor fish do when they are dying on land -- namely, that of slow suffocation.

Our skins began to crack, and the blood to throb in our heads like the beating of a steam-engine.
This had been going on for some time, when suddenly the river turned a little, and I heard Sir Henry call out from the bows in a hoarse, startled voice, and, looking up, saw a most wonderful and awful thing.

About half a mile ahead of us, and a little to the left of the centre of the stream -- which we could now see was about ninety feet broad -- a huge pillar-like jet of almost white flame rose from the surface of the water and sprang fifty feet into the air, when it struck the roof and spread out some forty feet in diameter, falling back in curved sheets of fire shaped like the petals of a full-blown rose.

Indeed this awful gas jet resembled nothing so much as a great flaming flower rising out of the black water.