CHAPTER VI.
THEIR LONELY, LOVELY LITTLE ISLAND.
The Dolphin lay, that midnight of August 10-11, awash on the surface of the Pacific some twelve hundred miles southwest of the Mexican coast. I had thought that for the time Arturo was far from Dr. Plantet’s mind. But not so. He made no move to start our voyage until for half an hour at least he had listened to the air. It was seething with world-activity--the silent echoes of our busy, modern life. But the sub-split wave-length which Arturo’s code specified, was dead.
Dr. Plantet turned at last away. “Nothing there.” He spoke in matter-of-fact tone, but I could guess at the emotion it was hiding. “Nothing there--well, we must remember to try again to-morrow night.”
There was in his manner what seemed to forbid discussion of Arturo. Indeed, we had much of our own concerns to busy us. We were to head, Dr. Plantet had planned, directly for the Micronesian islands. Most of the tangible evidence bearing upon the existence of a human menace, had seemed to come from that locality. The Malaysia had been lost in there, and several others of the surface freighters. And the submersible of my own line. Again, it was there that Arturo and I had seen the face in the sea; and the mermaid had been seen there.
“I think,” said Dr. Plantet, “that if we are to locate this hidden enemy at all, it will be upon some of the rises in sub-sea Micronesia.”
There was another factor that made him think so. For weeks he had been assembling world-data showing a disturbance of the ocean currents. With oceans receding, the water was seeping away somewhere. That the normal ocean currents were changing was unquestioned. The evidence was inconclusive, but there seemed to be an unmistakable drift toward the mid-Pacific. And Dr. Plantet thought that upon the ocean floor in Micronesia we might find evidence of the outlet.
We had had, he and I, a considerable discussion on these points.
“We can only try, Jeff,” he said at last. “But two thousand fathoms, even with our five hundred fathoms of additional vision, will show us no more than the mid-depth rises.”
The mountain ridges. Or the great submerged plateaus; domes; volcanic sub-sea cones. But if, in the lower basins, the great caldrons or the deeps, this enemy was lurking, we would have to wait until the water materially was lowered. And that might be months, or years.
We were starting from this point so comparatively near the continent because obviously it might not be in Micronesia at all that the menace lay. I had wanted to cruise the American continental shelf. Dr. Plantet would not take the time. He was convinced the danger lay farther west. But he had agreed that we should start here, and cruise across, searching as we went.
We closed up the Dolphin. The turret slid down after us. For all my hundred sub-sea trips in the Pacific, my heart was beating fast. Polly touched my hand, as we moved forward along the passage. Her fingers were cold; but in the dim light I caught her sturdy glance, and saw that her lips were smiling.
“Starting, Jeff--at last.”
“Yes.” I pressed her hand.
We gathered, all three of us, in the bow instrument room. Dr. Plantet fingered the control levers. The Franklin lights sputtered and glowed with their steady white beams; through the circular windows, the light sprayed ahead of us in the green ocean just below the surface. The jacket-pumps were throbbing. The windows dimmed a trifle with the passing sheet of water; but when it flashed faster, they brightened. The Parodyne atomic engine was operating; the water tanks were filling under pressure; the lateral planes, like fins, were extended from the hull outside.
We had settled, barely to tip the surface. I flung the water-ballast to the bow; in the silence with only the burring of the Parodyne and the humming of the pumps, the water came forward with a swish. The bow dipped. I held the rudder-levers; and released the atomic streams.
We slid smoothly forward and downward. Little Dolphin, sliding, forcing its way into the depths, with green phosphorescent sprays of fire from its sides.
* * * * *
It is not my present purpose to describe in detail this voyage. Under other, less vital circumstances, it would have had a scientific interest beyond any enterprise of the sea which for centuries had been undertaken. But we were too engrossed in what we sought--too absorbed in the possibility that at any moment we, like those others, might be attacked. In what strange, unnatural fashion we could not guess. It kept us tense--an aspect of the voyage which we had hardly discussed, but of which we were very keenly aware, every moment.
We had only one weapon--the torpedo tube. Six small torpedoes, each loaded with some three hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene as its explosive charge. There were also a dozen of the more modern cylinder bombs of miscellaneous variety, to be dispatched through the same tube. A mere gesture of warfare! I could not feel that against this enemy it would be more than a gesture.
We slid down from the surface. Ah, that first plunge! At the beginning it was no more than running level, save that I could feel the Parodyne laboring a trifle and our forward thrust slackening. There was nothing to see but the dim green water rushing at our lights. Then I saw a fish of an unfamiliar type; it hung stupidly in the light and then moved away. We very nearly struck it.
Five hundred fathoms. A thousand. The red column in the pressure indicator was rising steadily. The ship was laboring, struggling. The Parodyne at its higher intensities, developed unexpected strength; the pressure pumps were humming with a shrill electrical whine.
Fifteen hundred.
Dr. Plantet said awkwardly: “I wouldn’t--I’d rather not take her below eighteen hundred, Jeff. Not at first.”
Seventeen hundred. The water seemed darker, more turgid, as though down here the sediment of dead organisms were settled in it like a fog.
Eighteen hundred!
“Enough, Jeff; hold us. Watch for elevations of the floor.”
I could imagine from the aspect of the water that we might be near the ocean floor. We slid ahead. Our chart showed in this region of the Pacific an estimated depth of two thousand five hundred to three thousand five hundred fathoms. But it was not so at this particular point. Even with all the patient thousands of soundings, how could they chart with any detailed accuracy the wide-spread ocean basins! We turned one of the Franklin lights downward.
A rising slope lay close beneath us, dark and cold, and seemingly black or dark-red ooze. The ocean floor! Smooth in its contours, almost level along here, with a gentle rise before us. Protected by the water from the rapid, sub-aërial erosion which sharpens the features of the land, piled by the regular accumulation of deposits, it stretched heavy-featured, morose, mysterious. I could imagine the cold waters from the frozen poles flowing in sluggish, heavy currents along this bottom.
But it was not all so uniform. We had of lighted region ahead of us barely half a mile. A rounded cliff came sweeping at us. I turned us aside; the cliff went up and backward to merge with a dome.
Then presently we found ourselves in a furrow, with elevations on both sides. We passed, when the furrow widened, over a great black caldron. The lip of it rose to a thousand fathoms. It was forty miles across--a pit of blackness, possibly four thousand fathoms or more in its depth, as though here were some giant crater, filled and immersed. We went to two thousand fathoms in it, and then rose and surmounted its opposite rim.
* * * * *
But there is no one now to whom the physical conformations of our ocean basins need be a mystery. And such details here are out of place.
We ran directly west on the fifteenth North Parallel. We made, each twenty-four hours, some twelve hundred to fourteen hundred miles. I give, not the nautical, but the statute measurements. The nautical now, is turning to be a thing of history. It was midnight of August 14-15 when our westward searching voyage was ended. Four days, during which we saw enough details to fill a weighty volume confirming or denying the groping research and speculations of science.
But to what purpose? The deep sea animals, the vegetation of the deeps--it will all find its place in the history of the sea. It has no place here, for I am concerned only with the little parts my friends and I played in this great world crisis. Of what use dogmatically to explain that the great Pacific Basin is not altogether what the charts picture it? Why describe the steeply narrow ridge winding like a thin mountain chain up to eight hundred fathoms at its highest elevations, crossing and recrossing the fifteen parallel? Or mention, as its discoverer, what now they call the “Country of the Moon”? Jagged pits and tumbled crags over that plateau a hundred miles in westward extent? We found that it stretched barely fourteen hundred fathoms deep.
Such things in detail would obtrude a pedantry into my tale.
We were south of Hawaii, the midnight of August 12-13. We listened, as we had listened the previous midnight, for Arturo. But his wave-length still was dead. We crossed into the Eastern Hemisphere about midnight of August 13-14. Again no signal from Arturo. Why should there be? I asked it to myself; I could not dare to voice it to the anxious Polly and her father. Arturo had said he might signal. But when, or from where? Perhaps he might not wish to. Or he might be desperately anxious to do so, and could not. Futile, meaningless speculation.
We had found that the Dolphin labored under the downward thrust; was difficult to hold level at the depths; and we slid up the incline when ascending with a speed too great for safety. I set down these random notes from my log.
No sign, either of an enemy attack upon us, or of an enemy’s very existence. No indication of a rift in the ocean floor. We sometimes wondered if either one existed. Yet that too, was a futile question! We had followed a narrow line, like a thread across this small section of the ocean. More than four-fifths of the time, with the depth too great for us to see anything, we had shot up to the surface and run at a few fathoms of depth for the greater safety. We had seen only an infinitesimal part even of this tiny portion of the area in which our enemy might be lurking. The futility of it struck us at last. It occurred to Dr. Plantet, that the sub-marine slopes of the great rise crowned by the Societies and Tahiti might be worth investigating. Or the upper reaches of the Japan trench. Or, in fact, any of the continental shelves. I did not remind him that this latter had been my original idea.
We were running north of the Marshalls at noon of August 14. At midnight, that night, again we listened for Arturo. And this time his signal came!
His call, given in the code, repeated at intervals. We answered it, on our own wave-length which Dr. Plantet was sure the lad knew, if only he would remember. He did remember, and flashed:
“Your position?”
We told him. He sent us:
“Come at once--nine degrees thirty minutes N., one hundred and fifty-seven degrees twenty-five minutes E. Hurry!”
His wave-length went dead. To all our frantic questions it held only silence.
* * * * *
I can picture Arturo, there with Nereid for those four days upon their lonely, lovely little island. But of necessity it must be a fragmentary picture with much that I can only guess; and built, too, somewhat from my own impressions of the girl as afterward I saw her for myself; and as Polly saw her, and tried to talk with her. The whole translated by my own poor fancy, into a picture of what Arturo’s emotions for her must have been.
She could, even at first, understand his words a trifle; a British sailor had been drawn under alive, and had lived long enough to teach her and others some of his language. She learned it with an unnatural facility. A few broken words that first night; she said them and no more. But she understood and she was learning; so eager to learn!
I try now to imagine them that first night of their meeting. There was a shy, wild fear about her, mingled with a very evident desire not to be afraid of him. He could not touch her, but he sat near her; so quietly, so gently. And as I think of his gentle, boyish, romantic figure, there in the moonlight, I can realize that none but himself could have approached her.
Perhaps, that first night, they conversed only in the universal language of youth. Their crossing glances, eager yet shy, their own thoughts of what the other must be, as they gazed. Perhaps they drew together with the universal language of music. Perhaps he again played his violin for her. Perhaps she sang for him. There is no one to say.
He found her human as himself. A young girl, barely yet matured, fashioned with almost a normal earthly beauty, and yet with a strange something about her, making her different. It was not her slim rounded limbs, white and flushed with the tint of coral. Nor the thick tawny tresses, framing her timorous, girlish face. Nor yet her fashion of dress--her shimmering robe, with moonbeams dancing on it like green sea water ripples in moonlight. None of these, though in truth they were all strange enough.
It was something greater. A wild shyness in her manner; she sat, half reclining by the palm-trunk; but it seemed that every nerve and muscle in the young body was tense, as though she would spring away if too suddenly he moved. A gentle animal, bred in the wilds, might be like that, mistrustful of the first human hand to approach it.
And other strange things about her. Her gestures, graceful, yet often meaningless. And her eyes, as she sat regarding Arturo. The sea was in her eyes, the changing sea, whipped with wind, dim with mist, wan with starlight. He gazed, over long silences, into her eyes. They held level, as she gazed with equal wonderment into his.
The mystery of the sea was in her eyes. Unfathomable green depths. Eyes that had seen things he had never seen; things queer, unnatural to him. But her youth was there; her human womanhood. It glowed eager, yet afraid; it met him, and it understood him, strange though he must have been to her.
I think also, that first night, she tried to talk with him. He understood at least, her desire to learn his words. And presently he began teaching her.
There are other fragmentary pictures I can give. The dawn flushed the east, and it seemed to frighten her. She moved away from Arturo. But he followed. She came to a sort of cave entrance; it lay part way down the rocky slope from which the ocean had so recently receded, and was still partly filled with water. She slipped into it. Ah, then he must have been struck with her strangeness anew! She lay in the water relaxed; a familiarity with it, as though she scarce had remarked that it was water and not the land. It was not very deep, a few feet, lying in a passage which seemed to run back into what perhaps was a dark cave here in the rocks.
Arturo waded in after her; and as she stood up, for the first time, she touched him. Her fingers were warm and human. Her touch pushed him away. She slid again into the water and with a silent swimming stroke, was gone back into the darkness.
* * * * *
The sunrise came full. Arturo was very tired. He ate, and slept. He went that midday, to the cave entrance. No sign of her. He wondered if he should go in, and at last he started. But there was a place where the passage ended. The water stood waist-deep and touched the lowering ceiling. She had evidently gone under it. Or had she left the island?
He returned outside. Down the slope he saw the rounded top of her globe. The high tide had brought the ocean pounding over it; the sea was rougher this day. But her globe was still there. She had not gone.
She came out again when night had fully fallen. He found then that it was the daylight which frightened her; blinded her.
She let him follow her into the cave that second night. She swam so humanly graceful and yet with a natural grace surpassing what we call human. It was only a few feet underwater, where the passage roof chanced to bend down. Arturo was by all our earthly standards, a good swimmer. He followed her.
She had in the small cave her own supply of food and fresh water, brought from her globe. She seemed able to see, in that degree of darkness. But Arturo had to go back to his plane and bring a small vacuum bulb; he kept it shaded from her. They ate together--food unknown to Arturo. They laughed together, tried to talk. He went out and brought his own food from the plane, and let her taste it.
They swam together in the deep little pool that covered half the cave-floor. He sat and watched her, later, while she disported herself alone, as a girl of our world might dance for her audience of one; a slim, green-and-coral-tinted nymph at play. He saw that she swam under the surface for several times the length he could manage; but she always came up breathless and very human. He saw her limbs flashing in the water with a silent, gliding grace; her tangled, tawny hair floating like seaweed. Her eyes were often laughing; dancing like the sea in the moonlight under a soft, fair night-breeze.
She lay in the shallow water at its edge, her hair tumbling over her back; her shoulders and head raised, elbows down with chin propped by her hands. Her eyes dancing at him--
“Flinging back a million moonbeams, the tropic sea reminds me of thine eyes.” He murmured it. “That’s the way you look, Nereid. Oh, if you could only understand me.”
She seemed to like it. “Say--that--” Her voice was soft, with liquid tones. “Say--that--” She thought for a space. “Say that--one time more--”
He said it again. She came up from the water, and sat beside him, abruptly serious. The water dripped from her green robe; her tawny hair dripped with it. She was abruptly serious. She understood far more than he realized; she could talk, with long spaces of thought between the words.
He stared into her eyes now when they were neither laughing, nor timorous, and saw there an intelligence as great as his own. Different, with all its knowledge different, and yet very much the same. He caught through those sea-green windows, a glimpse of the girl herself. Purposeful, anxious, apprehensive, not for herself, or himself, or anything of their own concerns, but something greater.
And that evening, or the next, or both, she began giving him fragments of strange and startling things.
He had been in his mind following the probable course of our Dolphin. He knew our plans; he could estimate that at midnight of August 14, we would very likely be at our closest point to him. And it was that night that he got out his sending instrument. With Nereid sitting beside him, he connected it. He saw anew, the real girl which was Nereid. Her glance, quickly intelligent, following all his strange movements; the solemn intentness with which she watched him carrying out their agreed-upon plans.
For there was between her and Arturo now a mutual, secret, absorbing purpose. And for all their youth they executed it unswervingly.
One picture more I can give. Polly had it from Arturo, when just for one brief moment on the Dolphin she reached him with her sisterly affection. There was a night, there on the island, when suddenly swept by longing, he held out his arms to Nereid. She came quite close to him, and gazed, with the tip of her hand holding him off. He saw, far in the tender moonlit sea of her eyes, the answer he sought. But her lips and her restraining hand denied him. He said, like a very manly, human boy:
“Why, yes--you’re right, Nereid.”
And her tender eyes, dimmed suddenly by mist, were thanking him as he turned away.