The sea girl

“Arturo! Arturo!” Polly’s voice held a quiver of anxiety. The lad should have been at the gateway to greet us, of course. “Arturo!” Her voice echoed as she ran upstairs. “Arturo—father, Jeff, come here!”

We rushed up. Arturo’s room was disordered. Some of his clothes and his luggage cases were gone. His small personal sending radio was gone from its accustomed table. In its place was a sheet of paper: a penciled radio code which evidently he had invented. And a note—a few brief words in his familiar scrawled handwriting.

We bent over it; pathetic, scrawled little note:

CHAPTER V.

NEREID OF THE SEA.

The westward-bound Australian mail left its Hendon Airport at 5 p.m., Greenwich time, August 10. At 9 p.m., Washington time, in the luminous darkness of the late summer twilight, we saw its lights over Norfolk—the immense, quadruple banks of its lighted hull windows. It came down over the landing field where our little Dolphin, with three of us on board, was lying cradled and ready. It hovered; its electro-magnetic grapples caught us up; in ten minutes, with the great flyer on its westward way again, we were stored on its lower deck.

Three of us on board: Dr. Plantet, Polly, and myself. We had had no heart to try and find a last minute substitute for Arturo. We could handle the Dolphin, we two men. It was, indeed, a craft with every modern device operated by the levers in its forward instrument room, of one-man control.

We had found no trace of Arturo. Dr. Plantet had uttered one anxious, heartfelt cry: “Why did he not tell me? I would have understood and advised him.”

Ah, but there lay the trouble! He would have advised his son; but he could not, probably, have understood! Whatever Arturo contemplated, quite evidently he feared that his father would have disapproved of it. And, disapproving, would have forbidden him to do it, with a gruff command enforced against all possibility of argument. Arturo knew it; Polly and I, as we read his timorous, pleading little note, realized it was true. But Dr. Plantet did not think of that, and there was no one to tell him, and no use in telling him.

He had done what he could to trace Arturo. The lad’s own small Wasp was gone from its hangar. Arturo had gone alone, by air. For an hour that afternoon when we returned from Norfolk to find him gone, Dr. Plantet shut himself up with his instruments; notified the authorities; had every detective bureau at every transfer point and in all the traffic towers of the country on the watch. But Arturo had evidently planned carefully. No report of him came to us.

We were very busy those last hours. With all his worry over his son—shot through with anger also, I am sure—Dr. Plantet would not let it interfere with our voyage. That was not his way; though he was right in that, of course. We were not going on a mere experimental voyage to try and chart the great unknown deeps. That was a mere incidental. The oceans were still receding; the deeps might soon be dry, so that any one could see and explore them. By this August 10, another eight fathoms were gone from the oceans. Some eighteen fathoms in all—over a hundred feet. We heard a newscaster give the figures on the evening of August 9. The oceans down nearly a hundred feet below low tide levels, everywhere, and the world was seething with the confusion of it.

Our voyage might locate the cause. But, most important of all, we hoped to locate this unknown enemy race, somewhere down there, to whose existence so much evidence had pointed. An enemy, perhaps making ready to attack our world; we must determine that, one way or the other; locate the point of attack, if attack there were to be; estimate its nature, and the best methods of repulsing it. These were the main reasons for our voyage. The fate of our world might depend upon our success—and no disappearance of a wayward son could swerve Dr. Plantet from the least detail of his starting preparations. Within an hour the affair seemed to be wiped from his mind.

Flying southwest, the mailship carried us over Mexico during that evening. We passed to the Pacific at latitude twenty-two degrees N. At fifteen degrees N. and one hundred and twenty degrees W., some one thousand two hundred miles off the Mexican coast, Dr. Plantet told them that they could put us down. By local time for that longitude, it was then nearly midnight.

The cranes lowered us into a placid sea; we lay awash, the three of us standing on the tiny deck of the Dolphin, watching the lights of the great liner vanish among the southwest stars. The lights winked, red and green and purple, and presently were gone.

We were alone on the falling Pacific. Our enterprise was begun!

I must recount now the strange adventure to which Arturo had set himself alone. From what he afterward told Polly, and, to a lesser degree, his father and myself, I can construct a picture of it. A picture no doubt lacking much in detail, for none could fathom the emotions that beset him. Yet withal it may be fairly accurate, for I doubt if he himself could have analyzed his motives.

Guiding him, no doubt, was the clear vision that upon his own slender shoulders might rest the salvation of his world. That, perhaps, was his compelling urge. I have no doubt but that he thought so. But beneath it, mingled with it, was what may have been an even stronger urge—a strange lure.

He had planned it for a long time. He had fought against it, for there was a fear lurking in it, a strange instinctive dread, mingled with the urge that seemed rushing him on. He would have gone before, but he could not find opportunity. Our departure for Norfolk that morning gave him his chance.

There was a night—I think it was the evening of August 1—when he made up his mind definitely that he must act alone. It was that evening we heard the newscaster say that a fast air cruiser had been dispatched by the American Government from Guam to the uninhabited island upon which the mermaid had been reported. A formidable company of marines had landed with a flourish upon the outer shoals to which the ocean now had receded. They had scrambled up to the beach and searched the island to capture this mermaid. But nothing human or otherwise had been found to capture.

It came to Arturo evidently as at once a disappointment and a relief. And it spurred him to his decision. If his adventure had any rationality, any possibility of success, it must be undertaken alone. I think, too, that secretly in his heart he welcomed this.

He took his radio sender and a copy of his improvised radio code; in his Wasp, which he had provisioned and fueled, he started from “Sea End” within an hour after we had left. The Wasp, tiny as it was, could do a good three hundred. He flew north, and high, taking his chances with the traffic towers, who would have ordered him down below the five thousand foot lane upon any normal occasion. But this was not a normal occasion. The country was in confusion; the air directors were all more or less lax. Arturo was visible that morning to a score of their finders. But none, evidently, bothered to record his number; and when the air police, dutifully pursuing Dr. Plantet’s inquiry, sought to check the travel, there was no one to report his passage.

Arturo was no fool. He had guessed all this, and played upon it. He clung to the ten and twenty thousand foot through lanes. With his three hundred mile speed he swept north far into Quebec; turned west, passing over the Dominion, where he guessed they would be even more lax. He went west, crossed the middle of Vancouver Island. At Alberni he took a necessary chance and refueled. He had played skillfully for his favorable wind-drift, and made good time. By ten o’clock that evening he was over the Pacific.

He headed now southwest. It was a calm, clear night. The ten thousand foot lane was deserted. He lashed his controls, set his warning bells, and went to sleep.

The sun was rising when he awakened. The deserted sea beneath him was calm. No islands were in sight. The air was clear of craft.

He seemed poised, motionless and alone between the two matched domes of sea and sky. He was young enough to be thoroughly refreshed and hungry. He had slept very nearly nine hours; he ate a lavish breakfast.

Then he took his position. He found himself in thirty-two degrees twenty minutes N. and one hundred and fifty-five degrees six minutes W. Four hours of elapsed time afterward he swept over Gardner Island of the Hawaiians. The sun was still well in the east—he was gaining an hour of comparative local time for every fifteen degrees of longitude he traversed on his westward flight.

He had feared that the Gardner tower might challenge him, but they did not.

It was a long day of flight, but his eager thoughts possessed him. She might perhaps be there on her island. He wondered if it were the same girl he and I had seen in the globe beneath the surface. We had seen that face in the ocean not very far from this same island where the mermaid was reported.

Had she been on her way up from the abyss then? Coming up, perhaps alone? For what reason?

If she had still been upon the island, those marines, landing there with such a vainglorious, belligerent gesture, undoubtedly would have frightened her. She would have hidden, plunging into the lagoon perhaps, to await their departure. She might still be there. And Arturo, alone—he told himself that he would not frighten her. He found himself trembling. Ah, it would not be she who would be frightened; yet with every fiber of him he longed to encounter her.

The setting sun before him found Arturo and his little Wasp in the neighborhood of nine degrees thirty minutes N., one hundred and fifty-seven degrees twenty-five minutes E. He had met a fresh, strong head-wind for most of the day. And his engine, over this long, continuous flight, had been giving him some trouble. He had cut down his speed. But he was here, at sunset; it was that same evening of August 10 during which our little Dolphin was being carried westward by the Australian mail.

In the late afternoon Arturo had passed over the Northern Marshalls—the tip of the Ratack Chain. He had seen several of the through Flyers during the day, passing to the sides far above him; but none had spoken him.

“Nereid’s Island.” He was already calling it that in his mind. He would call her Nereid.

He had not wanted to reach here before the sunset anyway. In the golden path of the setting sun he raised the island. At low speed his motor was quite silent. He might have been a softly humming wasp, circling over the lonely little island, coming gently down, circling.

It lay, a strangely augmented patch of land in the fallen ocean. All around it was a low, outside circular area of green-black and coral rocks, sloping steeply upward, strewn with shriveled, drying marine vegetation—at the bottom of which the sea was lapping. A sodden, upward rocky slope led to where, high up in the air, a fringe of white beach lay queerly dry. Above that, a crescent area of palms and vegetation. The inner lagoon was dry—an empty, sandy bowl, perched up there in the air on a spreading rocky base.

It seemed no earthly island; a small mountain top with a shallow crater in its center and a strange fringe of trees and meaningless beach.

There was no sign of moving object. With his heart pounding, Arturo gazed down. There were many caverns and pools in the lower slopes from which the ocean had fallen—she could hide there very easily.

And then he saw, or thought he saw, something unusual—the bulge of a metallic surface. It lay nearly submerged in a rift of rock far down the outer slope at the water’s edge. The globe we had seen in the ocean that night?

He fancied so. Lying in that position it would have been well covered by water when the marines were here.

In the glowing, glorious twilight of that tropic night, Arturo landed in the basin of the empty lagoon, then rolled his Wasp up the gentle slope of the inner beach.

He sat there that evening, silently waiting. Over him spread the blazing southern stars strewn on purple velvet. The arching palm fronds whispered about him as the night breeze stirred them. Ahead, down the slope of beach and lower slope of rocks, the sea lay quietly breathing. A quarter moon was following the vanished sun. It dropped a bright silver path on the water; it glorified the beach; it laid upon the brooding little island an amorous spell.

Arturo sat, edged with silver. Would she see him? Would she be too frightened? Was she, perhaps, not here at all?

The moon fell lower. He went, with sudden thought, back to his plane. He sat again under the palm, and the low voice of his violin throbbed into the somnolent night. He wondered if she would be as frightened, as emotion-swept as himself.

I think, as he sat there softly playing, that the world of 1990 was far away from Arturo. I think his mind must have been flung back, past all the counted centuries to those fabulous, magic times when the sea had no history, but only legend. One of the sailors of Ulysses, with his ears stuffed with wax against temptation, but being more courageous, or perhaps weaker than his fellows, might have slipped ashore—and waited thus, with the wax cast away, singing perhaps a soft song of his own to tell that he had yielded.

Arturo must have trembled, as the song of his violin was trembling. Was this a daughter of Amphitrite, mockingly cast in the fashion of a woman? Or was it a human girl?

And then he saw her. Partly behind him, among the long, slanting shadows of the palms. A dark figure edged in a silver patch. It stood motionless; then it moved toward him a trifle, and stood again.

Arturo laid his violin and bow beside him on the sand and very quietly got to his feet. He could see her better now, only a few yards away. A small, slim figure of a girl, white-limbed, but flushed like moonlit coral. A brief, dangling robe, which might have been green; smooth, lustrous green, as though a fabric of softly woven metal, painted green by the sea.

He stood tense, unmoving. The moonlight was on him—his slight, boyish figure of long, slim black trousers, and white ruffled shirt; his black tousled hair thick in waves over his pale forehead.

He stood trembling. She moved again toward him. The moonlight struck her face. Ah, this must be a human girl! He saw her features—a face of strange, soft beauty; wide eyes, parted coral lips; a face, timorous, gentle, eagerly wondering. And framing her face, lying in waves upon her coral shoulders, a tangled mass of tawny hair.

No fabulous siren, this! A strange, but very human girl—and yet, for all that, a siren.

Arturo spoke, tremblingly, very gently.

“Nereid! Can you hear me? Can you understand?”

She stood frozen. But her lips parted with a smile. He said: “Nereid!” He moved slowly toward her.

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.

CHAPTER VII.

THIS ENEMY INFERNAL!

In the pink and gold tropic dawn of the morning of August 15, we took them aboard the Dolphin. Arturo did not mention, then, the globe of metal lying there in the rocks at the ocean’s edge. We did not chance to notice it. We left Arturo’s plane—he said, with a quiet force which had come to him, that even if we could have taken it, we had no use for it.

They came out from the rocky slope, swimming to us as we lay near by. I saw the girl, like a nymph, swimming. She was nearly always under water. Each time as she came up, and waited for Arturo to overtake her, he seemed directing her.

We drew them aboard. I saw her then as a girl much smaller, more slim of figure than Arturo, standing drooping, with her face hidden in the tangle of her hair and her crooked arm. She was blinded by the light of the dawn. Frightened, perhaps, by our voices, by our clutching hands as we drew her up the Dolphin’s side.

Arturo carried her to one of the Dolphin’s tiny rooms. There in the dark, barring us, he left her.

A quiet force had come to Arturo. He met his father’s questions and turned them aside. It was this time not sullenness, not brooding, nor anything neurotic. A quiet force, rather, a purpose. There were things that he would tell us, and things that he would not. No fire from his father could shake him. No irony touched him. No pleading from Polly could soften him. Yet, with it all, he was tender, affectionate; and underneath, I think, sometimes a little wistful.

This was a new Arturo. It struck Dr. Plantet sharply. There was one brief passage in which Dr. Plantet was so obviously the loser, for he said much, and Arturo said almost nothing. And when it was ended, Arturo kissed his father.

“I want you to believe in me. You will have to trust me, father, there isn’t any other way; you’ll have to go it blind. I’m sorry—and I love you, all of you, very much—”

It was in these latter words that I caught the wistful note, a gentle sorrow, mingled with his purpose.

It was Arturo now who gave us orders. That Dr. Plantet obeyed them, with the knowledge that Arturo knew more than he, I think is a tribute to the man’s inherent bigness. Nor, after those first hours, were there any clashes or recriminations. We did what Arturo so gently but firmly suggested we should do. But he would give us very little explanation. Even without any compact he may have had with Nereid to enforce his reticence, he was right; had he told us his full purpose, we would have restrained him.

We ran northeast, close under the surface. The course would take us south and east of Wake Island, and then we were to head for the northwestern end of the Hawaiian archipelago. Beyond that—the mere laying down of our course and our depth—we knew very little.

In thirty-six hours we were near Ocean and Midway Islands. It was late afternoon of August 16.

For myself that day and a half, I scarcely saw Nereid. But to the picture of her through Arturo’s eyes which I have given, I can add the woman-impressions as Polly saw her; and glimpse her with Dr. Plantet’s prosaic, classifying viewpoint of the scientist.

She would not talk to Polly. But she seemed to understand Polly’s words quite well. A very gentle little girl, shy, but seeming readily to respond to human affection. She evidently took a great liking to Polly, and the feeling was mutual.

They sat once, in the gloom of the tiny room with their arms around each other; Nereid’s body was soft and warm and yielding; but there was a firmness to it, and apparently a considerable strength for all its frail aspect. Nereid seemed quickly affectionate toward this other girl; but it was the mistrustful affection of a creature of the wilds. She drew away sharply at one of Polly’s questions.

She was a creature of swift-springing moods. Polly admits she tried to win the girl, to gain her trust, to make her answer questions. Once, in that dim light of the tiny cabin, Polly caught the expression on Nereid’s face. A whimsical smile; an amusement that this girl of the great, bright, atmospheric world should think her so simple. It struck Polly with chagrin and humiliation. This Nereid was no fool.

Dr. Plantet, with Arturo standing watchfully in the doorway, had several opportunities of studying Nereid. Oh, the passionate obsession of science for classification! As though one could capture the moods of the sea and set them down in logical, descriptive sequence!

Dr. Plantet found that Nereid was really not her name. He made her say her name, but he could think of no sounds in our earthly languages to represent it fairly. He found her, in height four feet eleven inches. In weight, ninety-one pounds. Coarse, thick, unruly hair, apparently of human structure; in length nearly to her knees; in color, tawny.

Her skin was soft, smooth, and white, with coral pink and red flush to it. He found her eyes light green; but apparently changing in their shade. A trifle tinted very pale green over the white eyeball. The tiny capillaries on the eyeball were pale coral pink rather than red. The pupils, with a deep green light in them, were overlarge, but shrank suddenly at the slightest light, and suffused readily with moisture. Her eyelids were thin as a delicate coral veil, with curving lashes, long and thick and tawny.

He found her apparently intelligent, shy and gentle. Of human stock; but different from ourselves in a score of details which he set down. A slightly rounder skull-shape; broader hips and higher breasts. Fingers and toes slimmer and longer. The skin connecting the fingers and toes crossed nearly at the middle joint, suggesting a closer heritage to a time when a membrane might have been there, making the members webbed.

He found her chest high and deep, with a proportionately greater lung-capacity than ours. Her breath, he surmised, could without undue discomfort, be held for at least five minutes while under water.

A human specimen of wholly different stock from any of our known earthly races. A civilization advanced as far perhaps, as our own; but obviously in a different direction. It was, he wrote down, as though on the great family tree of mankind, this were a blossom on a different branch and a wholly different limb.

He felt, when the case were closely studied, that evidence would be found to show that this was the parent stock of earth-humanity. Itself risen directly from the creatures of the sea. That from this stock, it was we who branched off, to leave the depths, ascend to the air and the land and sunlight and rise through the primates into what now we were pleased to call Man.

Dr. Plantet was very enthusiastic over Nereid. With scientific zeal he looked eagerly forward to the moment when he would present her to the study of our world-scientists. I remarked Arturo’s strange expression as his father said that.

On the late afternoon of August 16, we were just south of Ocean and Midway Islands, those extreme northwestern outposts of the Hawaiians. It was then Arturo told us what little we were to know of those things he had learned from Nereid.

We gathered in the stern chart-room; the Dolphin lay awash on the surface of a placid sea. With sudden decision Arturo brought Nereid in to join us. He shaded the light carefully for her and in the gloom of a corner of the floor, she sat watching us.

It was one of the few times I had seen her. I noticed with what a quiet dignity she came in, following Arturo’s guiding hand; and with what intent, alert intelligence she sat watching and listening. She did not speak; but once or twice I saw her nod with confirmation of Arturo’s words.

“There is not much I can tell you, father. But enough. Please do not question me—for if you do, I will tell nothing.” He threatened it, quietly, but with a very firm, very convincing finality.

“Many of your theories, father, are correct. There is a race of people under the ocean beds—I think largely here under the Pacific. Nereid, as you see her here before you, is, I am sure, a representative of the higher portion of this other civilization. It menaces us—you were right about that, father! The conquest of our world is contemplated—and has already begun. Soon I—we, Nereid and I, will show you.”

Dr. Plantet sat very still. I knew that a score of questions were storming within him. He sat, regarding Arturo with keen, scientifically appraising glance. He saw Arturo striving now to talk with a precise, scientific exactness, but failing, for the lad was evidently laboring under a tense excitement. Dr. Plantet was enough of the physician to understand his son’s condition; he knew that very easily Arturo could fall into a stubborn silence which nothing could break through. And Dr. Plantet did not dare question.

But I was not so self-controlled. I burst out, “Arturo, look here—the water is leaving our oceans. Why? And why can’t you tell us everything you know? Why pick and choose? With the fate of our world at stake—”

He turned on me. “You’re childish, Jeff. I’m telling you as clearly as I can. I don’t know very much myself—do you think that Nereid has been able to give me a complete scientific report on all these questions which you would like answered? Our world is doubtless at stake, as you say. This enemy is ruthless—inhuman by all our standards of humanity. Oh, do not judge the enemy you will have to confront by what you see of gentle Nereid! Yes, the oceans will probably empty of water. The ‘Gians’ have contrived it. How long it will take, I do not know. Where the main rift is—or how many rifts there are—I do not know. I think there is one in sub-marine Micronesia—I don’t know just where—”

Polly stammered, “The people—‘Gians’?”

“Yes, Polly, you can call them that—this enemy. The word Nereid gives me sounds about like that. I don’t know what weapons they have. Nereid doesn’t know; she is neither a warrior nor a scientist—just a girl. If I knew the weapons with which they will attack, I’d describe them quickly enough!”

He spoke with a rising vehemence. “Our world will have to defend itself, father! You were right in your fears! The main attacks may not come until after the ocean beds are dry. It will be a land-fight then—in these new strange lands that we have never seen! Or there may be an attack very shortly. The Gians, an army of them, are coming up. Moving up an equipment of weapons. It may be merely an experiment preparatory to the main warfare. Nereid has heard it may be; I certainly hope so.” He paused, then suddenly added: “They are moving upon the Hawaiian group, not far from here—down near Maui. We’re going to show you!”

The Hawaiian group of mountain-tops were built long ages ago along a crack on the ocean floor by a string of volcanos; some are peaks, seven miles straight up from the surrounding depths. An island-bearing rise some seventeen hundred miles long, quite narrow, extends from Hawaii in the southeast, to Ocean Island at the northwest tip.

We circled Ocean Island, and running a hundred miles from the crest, near the bottom of the slope, we followed it southeast. Past the peak of Midway; past Gambia Shoal; Pearl and Hermes Reef; Lisiansky; Brooks and Bird; and came at last near Kauai.

We ran often near the surface, but sometimes deep. Everywhere, we saw the same sharp upward rise to this hog-back, razor ridge. A jagged, tumbled sub-marine region. Here, in some remote geological era of the past, nature had obviously been convulsed. Domes and peaks and crags; steep, sharp ridges; caldrons like black pits; tumbled, broken land, submerged now, but lying like some wild, naked mountain fastness. There were slopes of truly precipitous character; cliffs, eroded with great side holes; black ravines and gullies; bowlders of giant size, pitted and scarred, strewn where some volcano had flung them. A wild, naked region; rising in great serrated tiers from the ocean floor up this hundred-mile slope to the island peaks at its summit.

We came to the surface off the island of Kauai. More than a hundred feet of naked slope, had been exposed by the fallen ocean. But the green island stood serene up there on its peak. The comparatively shallow two-thousand-fathom depth extended out here in a great circular plateau to the north. Our charts showed it almost level for several hundred miles. We dived and followed over its shoreward, necklike width, and came again into deeper water.

North of Maui, the tumbled rise went up a regular, ascending slope, terminating at the peak which was the island. We lay, at twenty-one degrees, thirty-three minutes, ten seconds N., one hundred and fifty-six degrees, eight minutes W., in two thousand fathoms. The slope was another thousand beneath us; but we could see its higher crags down there, and as we moved slowly south, toward Maui, holding the two thousand depth, the crags came up to meet us. We went cautiously, with only one light preceding us. Winding now, down in the ravines and furrows of the steady upward grade.

Silent, mysterious passages! Sometimes they seemed about to close over us; or opened into valleys, with cliff-walls and jagged rims. Darkly, sinister depths! Our half-dimmed light showed us very little. Like a silent, cautious monster, surprising this other marine life which sometimes we saw fleeing before us, we slowly felt our way along.

We came to a sharp, winding gully, barely a hundred feet wide, with sides twice as high. Its jagged, uneven floor wound upward. Once, perhaps, lava had come down here. But now its side-walls were eroded with many cavelike openings larger than the Dolphin. Still more slowly, with our little light struggling ahead of us, we followed the gully.

We were all in the forward instrument room. I was at the controls, with the others around me. Nereid and Arturo stood together at my elbow with the port forward bull’s-eye before us. Occasionally he would whisper to her. With the tenseness of it, we all spoke instinctively in undertones.

We were in no more than three hundred and thirty fathoms now; the Dolphin handled steadily. Some two thousand feet over us was the surface of the sea. The gully was narrowing; rising steeply ahead to what seemed a crest.

Nereid whispered something. Arturo said suddenly: “Turn off the light, Jeff.”

I cut off the Franklin. Through the bull’s-eye a grim, sullen darkness leaped to enfold us. But in a moment, what Nereid had seen, we began to see. A dim, pale-green effulgence far ahead, a glow, a radiance. It seemed very distant, as though the source of it might be down behind this gully-crest—a radiance in the upper water which was our sky.

I heard Dr. Plantet’s sharp intake of breath; and Arturo’s murmur:

“Keep our light off, Jeff. Can you see to get us up there? Stop at the crest.”

We crept on up, holding close to the gully floor. The green radiance faintly painted the gully walls. At the crest we paused.

There lay before us a sharp declivity—a drop of perhaps five hundred feet to a broad oval caldron. It must have been ten miles or more in width. Beyond it, in a great steep rise the main slope ascended toward Maui.

The whole scene was painted dimly green with a diffused effulgence of light. We stared, all of us for a moment unbreathing. Mysterious, awesome, uncanny! A crest to the left with a dangling forest of marine vegetation, gently swaying. Occasional dark blobs of prowling marine life. All dark and dimly turgid. A scene with a quality almost infernal.

I could not grasp much of it at first. But it grew upon me—I think we may have been there an hour, staring. It grew upon me, like formless shadows slowly taking form in a pregnant darkness.

The green light suffused everything. But down in the caldron it was concentrated into many small points. Moving dots; blobs of light—and near the center a large luminous area which presently seemed almost bright.

Moving dots of light. Things moving, carrying with them the lights. Things that presently seemed cubes and oblongs of metal. I fancied they may have been, some of them, a hundred or two hundred feet in length; moving metal containers. With human occupants? My reason told me so.

They showed no details, only as distant blobs. But my fancy supplied details; I could imagine them being dragged very slowly up the slope toward Maui with giant chains. Or perhaps they went as our old-fashioned tractors used to move, with caterpillar tread. One moved, and stopped; and I did not see it move again. Then another; another—a little distance gained for each.

And the movement was always upward, toward Maui’s green mountaintop—toward that bright ethereal other world of land and sky!

It grew upon me, this scene so darkly, silently infernal. The slow patience of it!

But there was other, swifter movement. Smaller, individual, metallic vehicles moved more swiftly about as though commanding. Some darted like tiny sub-sea vessels, carrying lights. Others moved on the bottom. There were unlighted shapes that seemed not much larger than a human figure, moving among the rocks on the caldron floor.

The broad, circular, nearly-bright area seemed to have a great transparent dome over it, like an amphitheater suffused with illumination. I think the water was excluded from under it.

The encampment of this attacking army! It was distant from us, with image tiny to our sight. Human figures in there, moving about. Tiny dots of green light strung above them. Shapes of things that might have been houses; tiers of them, terraced like sections of a pyramid. An encampment, crowded with apparatus perhaps. I even fancied I could see some of it, which the figures were assembling.

Dr. Plantet was fumbling with our telescope. He turned on its tiny penetrating ray of light, but Arturo leaped at him. “Don’t, father!”

I reached and snapped off the light. But it had betrayed us. We did not know it then; for another interval we gazed down from this height where it seemed that in darkness the Dolphin lay secure on the crest of the gully-mouth.

But our light had betrayed us. I was first aware that though, with the Parodyne cut off, we had been poised motionless, we were not motionless! The gully had passed behind us! Slowly, silently, as though drifting, we were moving out over the caldron! The declivity with its sudden drop was now behind us; we were in open water, five hundred feet above the caldron floor.

I clutched at the Parodyne control, to start it. I think I must have stammered some startled, horrified words. There was no time to say or do anything. A light—it may have been a form of light, or something more tangible perhaps—shot suddenly upward at us. A narrow green beam with red fire woven through it, a darting thing like a dim narrow beam of light. It caught us. More tangible than light, for I could feel it strike us, grip us! As though caught in the magnetic grapples of a crane, I could feel the solid grip of it; holding the Dolphin, partly turning us over. And drawing us, sucking us—there are no words to describe it—pulling us downward!

There was an instant of horrified confusion. The shock had thrown all of us against the instrument room wall. I heard Dr. Plantet shout something. I must have been able to start the Parodyne; it was burring; the pressure pumps fortunately continued to work; I could hear their whine. The Dolphin was shuddering; shaken; stricken. And being pulled down—a great fish held struggling but helpless in the luminous tentacle of a monster.

Polly was clutching me. I caught a vision of Arturo, holding Nereid, his encircling arms trying to protect her. I did not see Dr. Plantet.

I flung the Parodyne to all its power. I could feel it futilely surge against this thing holding us.

I was thrown again. Through the bull’s-eye a slanted scene of movement was coming up at us as we went down.

And then there was a flash down there—a flash of blinding white, brief and silent. I know now that Dr. Plantet had been able to get to the torpedo tube—had taken swiftly what came to hand and launched it. A mere light-bomb, of the sort recently developed for sub-sea photography.

It may have been harmless or not, to this strange enemy. Perhaps it blinded whatever eyes were guiding this grappling thing. And for an instant, the clutching hold upon us loosened. The Dolphin righted, and as I turned on the ejecting pumps, we started upward, gathering speed. The Parodyne took hold and added its power. I turned our bow straight up.

The grappling light sprang upward, past us. It missed us, came back and missed again. Its source was very mobile—it seemed rising after us; it swept off to one side and the beam leaped again, and again did not strike.

We shot up the two thousand feet to the surface with the speed almost of a diving plane. I leveled us off and we raced at a fathom’s depth. The attacking light had vanished. The depths beneath us were dark. We sped away, shoreward. Presently we lay awash on a starlit glassy sea, with Maui’s green-brown heights staring down at us. And the blessed stars in a canopy above.

CHAPTER VIII.

MYSTERY OF THE SEA.

Dr. Plantet would have landed at once upon Maui, and warned them, but Arturo dissuaded him.

“It is not necessary, father. That has been going on down there for weeks. There is no hurry that way. Besides—” He checked himself suddenly.

“What?” his father demanded. “Arturo, if there is anything more—”

But Arturo remained silent. He had conveyed the impression of having other vital knowledge; I think now, looking back upon it, that he did it knowingly, cleverly bending his father to his further purpose.

“What?” demanded Dr. Plantet again.

“Father, won’t you trust me? I brought you here and showed you what I could—”

I said: “Arturo, look here, you’re not telling us that you want us to keep this thing secret? That would be dastardly!”

He turned those solemn dark eyes upon me. He was only eighteen, this lad; but at that moment he seemed older than I.

“No, Jeff, of course not. When you—when we get back, father can discuss it fully with the authorities. If you like, father, you might try now to call Washington. Tell them, briefly, that with your own eyes you have confirmed your theories—your worst fears. Tell them that there may be warfare such as this world has never imagined. But I hardly think I would specifically name this threat against Maui. It might cause—if news of it leaked out—a panic in the Hawaiians. And from its remoteness to Europe it might make those people over there less earnest in preparing. No good in that, and besides—”

He paused, and then as though having decided to finish, he added:

“Besides, I am not—we are not, Nereid and I—altogether sure that the main threat is against Maui. There may be other localities.”

“Well, what do you want us to do?” asked Dr. Plantet.

He told us then, with a simple directness. Run the Dolphin to ten degrees one minute five seconds N., one hundred and fifty-eight degrees four minutes eighteen seconds E. I looked it up on the chart. Open sea. A point in Micronesia, not far from the island where Arturo had found Nereid—some fifty miles to the northeast of it. We had to go there, lie on the surface for a night, and wait.

Arturo, for all his quiet force, turned to sudden pleading. “Oh, father dear, won’t you trust me? Please believe Nereid and I are thinking only to do what is best!”

I am very glad—since fate seemed determined to give Arturo his way—that Dr. Plantet yielded in the fashion he did. He put his hands on Arturo’s slim shoulders; he gazed into the lad’s earnest, flushed face. There was a somber wistfulness there. I think Dr. Plantet must have seen it. He suddenly enfolded his son in his strong arms.

“Your world already owes you a great deal for what you have done, Arturo. I do believe in you.”

We ran the Dolphin to the position Arturo gave us. A depth was here evidently far beyond our reaching. But we did not try to investigate it. We lay awash, at sundown, idly waiting as Arturo directed.

A tenseness had fallen over all of us on the Dolphin. It showed clearly stamped on Arturo and Nereid. It communicated to us. Polly and Arturo were much together. Polly says that never had she felt him so gentle, so affectionate. Or so quietly obdurate in his secretiveness.

Dr. Plantet and I discussed the situation. There would be much to do when we got ashore.

But we both realized that our discussion was premature. Arturo still had something to show us. It might change everything—add new factors to make all our present plans useless.

We lay awash that night on the surface of the empty sea. There was a brilliant moon coming up near midnight in the east. It painted the sea with a running stream of silver.

Toward midnight it clouded over with a leaden sky, and the wind fell. A hush was on everything; an oppressive, ominous hush. The surface turned glassy, grimly brooding.

Arturo gave his orders. This was a rendezvous—something he said, some vague suggestion he dropped, made us realize it was that. He had for a day been puttering with something in his cabin. He brought it up at midnight—a small but brilliant hand-light which was part of the Dolphin’s equipment. He showed it to me.

“Look, Jeff—what I did!” He had pasted a yellow strip of mica with a queer design on it, across the flash light face. He smiled like a boy triumphant over a great boy-secret. “Don’t ask me, Jeff—you’ll see presently. To-night—or it may be we’ll have to wait, so don’t be disappointed.”

He sent us below, and sat on the dark deck alone with Nereid. Waiting. He said he would like to let us stay up there with him—but our presence there would interfere. There could be two on the deck, no more.

We three were in the instrument room. Dr. Plantet, unknown to Arturo, had the under-sea telescope ready; if anything appeared, he would snap it on. We had loaded the torpedo tube also. It was possible that Arturo might be tricked. This might be some enemy for whom we were thus trustfully waiting.

We were tense, ready as we could be, for what might come. Occasionally Dr. Plantet would send me on tiptoe in the darkness to the turret-top to observe in secret Arturo and Nereid upon the deck.

It was dark out there on the deck. The two figures sat some distance from me as I crouched in the turret doorway. But I could see their outlines fairly clearly—Arturo sitting close to her, sometimes whispering.

She stood up. She evidently saw something. My heart began pounding. Whatever it was, it was hidden from my position. Arturo was on his feet beside her. She gestured—I could see her slim white arm gesturing. I saw him raise the flash light, and send its narrow, penetrating yellow beam steadily out over the water. That device he had cut in the yellow face of it—something, some one out there must be seeing that—and recognizing it, as Nereid? I thought so.

There was a space, while Arturo held the light steadily level. Then Nereid said something to him. He snapped off the light. They stood waiting. A minute? Ten minutes? I do not know. I heard nothing; saw nothing save those two motionless, tense figures standing there by the Dolphin’s low rail. Boy and girl, so slim, so frail, so youthful, both of them. They stood, so close together that her long wild tresses seemed almost enfolding him.

I recall that I was about to go below and tell Dr. Plantet and Polly of this signal I had seen. A movement of Nereid stiffened me. She drew apart from Arturo. The Dolphin’s rail was lower than her waist. She seemed poised; her arms went up; she went in a graceful arc, over and head downward into the sea.