The greatest adventure
"That you could show me where to find a living specimen like this one
you found so recently dead. Can you do that?"
"Let me be aboveboard with you from the beginning, Dr. Lane. I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because we picked this up in the sea a hundred and twenty miles from
the nearest land."
"It had fallen into the water from exhaustion and been drowned?"
"I guess not. In fact I know that it never flew the hundred and twenty
miles from the land. For I saw it roll up from below directly under the
stern of our ship."
"Did it leap out like a salmon? If so that was a queer performance for
a creature built like this."
"No, it boiled out, dead as a dummy."
The doctor regarded the grizzled whale pirate with rather more than a
touch of suspicion.
"If I had not seen this thing with my own eyes," he remarked, "I should
disbelieve your whole story."
"You haven't heard it yet," the Captain dryly rejoined. "Before I tell
it will you agree either to pay me ten thousand dollars for it or to
keep still about it after I leave this house?"
"That's fair enough. I agree."
"And this young lady?" the Captain queried, with an interrogative
glance at Edith.
"My daughter Edith, Captain Anderson. Pardon me for not having
introduced you before."
"Oh, we had a fine row in the garden," Edith laughed, "before I came
up. I agree too, Captain Anderson, if you will let me stay and listen.
Only please cover up the hideous thing before you begin. I shall have
nightmares for a month as it is."
With a laugh the Captain replaced the cover of his box. But the Doctor,
after a moment's hesitation removed it, telling Edith she might turn
her back if the creature's beauty overpowered her.
"I want to have a good long look at this thing," he said. "It isn't
what I thought it might be. Well, Captain, how did you happen to come
to me with your find?"
"It was on the mate's advice. One of my men, it seems, once got five
dollars from your daughter for a fake mermaid. I thought," he added
with a malicious glint in his steel gray eyes, "she might be willing to
give me ten for a real one."
"You may be sure, Captain Anderson," Edith retorted indignantly, "that
I knew perfectly well what I was buying. And if I gave your man five
dollars for a wretched fake worth fifty cents it was because the poor
fellow looked half-clothed and underfed. Really, Captain Anderson, you
should treat your men better."
"He can't have been one of mine. The only thing my men suffer from is a
lack of rum."
"That's fortunate," the Doctor interposed. "Otherwise they might pass
by feathered reptiles as mere creations of a rummy imagination."
"True," the Captain agreed. "As a matter of fact all my men know of you
and your hobby. I was only trying to get a rise out of your daughter
for what she did to me in the garden. We're quits now."
"Are you sure?" Edith asked with exasperating calm.
"Not so sure as I was a second ago," the honest Captain admitted. "No
wonder your father lets you do the buying. Now, Dr. Lane," he continued
with a change in tone, "as I said in the beginning I want this whole
business to be open and aboveboard. So I should like you to know that
one of the main reasons for my troubling you at all is the fact that
you are a rich man with barrels of money to spend on your hobbies. I
have known of you for years. They still talk of your big coal strike
over in China. Now a man who knows as much as you do about coal should
be able to appreciate the value of oil."
"To a certain extent," the Doctor smiled. "I have sense enough to let
wildcatting alone."
"I haven't. And that, in a word, is why I'm here. Unless I can
persuade you for once to invest heavily in oil I shall have to take my
queer fish elsewhere."
"Perhaps I can afford to throw ten thousand dollars down your oil well
to feed the fish at the bottom. Go ahead and see if you can sell me."
"Then here goes. Don't call me a liar until I've finished. I shall tell
you only enough to let you see for yourself whether you want to come in
or stay out and forget all about me and my queer fowl.
"I was educated as a mining engineer, but gave up my profession to
follow the sea. For the past twenty years I have been master and part
owner of a whaling vessel.
"About eighteen months ago, having cleaned up for the season, we
started north. We were in the South Polar Seas, to the east of Cape
Horn and considerably south. That is close enough description of our
position for the present. The nearest coastline of the Antarctic
continent lay about a hundred and twenty miles southeast of us. The
season, though well advanced, was extraordinarily mild and open. For
eight days we had sighted no ice.
"One night shortly before eleven I was awakened by a peculiar jarring
of the whole ship. It lasted fully forty seconds. The mate and the man
at the wheel also felt it. Like me they could make nothing of it till
daylight. Then we guessed. For the water was a peculiar milky green
as if muddied by finely powdered chalk. There had evidently been a
submarine earthquake and a volcanic eruption on the ocean floor during
the night. All that morning the water grew milkier and milkier. By
noon it was the color of a dirty river and as sluggish as molasses.
"Suddenly, about two o'clock in the afternoon, the whole surface of the
water began to boil up in huge bubbles like a cauldron of hot porridge.
The ship rattled and clattered as if it were being shaken to bits. The
men, of course, acted like a pack of panic-stricken idiots. Discipline
went to the devil. That fool of a mate's account of what probably was
happening a mile or two beneath us drove them clean crazy. Then I took
a fist in things and knocked some sense into their silly heads.
"But for the infernal boiling there was a dead calm. It was shortly
after three o'clock that the first great bubble of black oil burst with
a gurgling plop half over the decks. Inside of ten minutes the sea was
a heaving blanket of heavy oil three feet thick. If only we had been
a fleet of tankers with pumping gear we could have made our fortunes
within a radius of half a mile. Sheer to the horizon the whole sea was
a dance of sleek black bubbles as big as whales.
"About five o'clock the oily mess began to boil more furiously. Our
decks were one black slop from stem to stern. Then without warning a
great gusher of sticky brown tar burst right under our bows and shot
roaring straight up a hundred and fifty feet above our masts in a
tumbling spout.
"We had banked our fires at the beginning of the row. Otherwise we
should have been ablaze in a sea of fire hours before. Now the filthy
brown tar began streaming down our funnels to the boilers. There was
only one thing to do, stuck there as we were, and we did it, half
smothered in the sticky brown mess. Somehow or another we got the
funnels capped with tarpaulins. There we rocked and rattled in that
boiling filth till dark, unable to get up steam and dodge the worst of
it, stuck fast under that slapping deluge of brown muck.
"Night came down slowly. Except for the eruption of oil and tar, and
the queer deadness of the air, the last hours of that rotten day were
like those of any other open weather twilight in the South Polar Seas.
Just as it began to get too dusky to see clearly that beastly tar spout
gave a mumbling gulp and dropped down into the pitch as dead as a
stone. That was the end of it.
"We thought our troubles were over. And so they were in a way. I sent
the mate below to kick the men up to swab the decks. The sea was still
boiling violently when he left. I was alone on deck when the next
nightmare, and the jumpiest of all, leapt from the sea."
Captain Anderson paused for a moment in his narrative, seeking the
right words to convince his curious audience of his veracity.
"The mate had just disappeared," he resumed, "when a terrific jar, as
if the ship were being hit with a hundred battering rams, warned me
that the devil was about to break loose. And he did. A huge chunk of
black rock--the size of the Baptist Church down the street--shot from
the heaving oil about a hundred yards east of the ship, whizzed clear
over us in a crazy curve and sent up a whooping splash of black muck
as it dived that nearly swamped us. If that chunk had been aimed a
trifle lower I shouldn't be here now.
"Well, that was only the first of them. At intervals of half a mile to
a mile apart the whole sputtering mess of black oil began to spit up
the floor of the sea in hunks of black rock as big as city hotels. None
of them broke loose or hit closer to the ship than half a mile. The
first was our one close call.
"That fool of a mate got the men on deck just when the show was at
its best. They let out one yell and ducked back to their holes in the
forecastle. The idiots missed a sight they'll never get another chance
of seeing, for in five minutes that particular row was over. Either
there was nothing left on the bottom of the sea to be thrown up, or
sufficient vents had been torn in the floor for what was to come next.
It came with a gurgling, oily rush.
"Before it happened, however, the black oil suddenly stopped heaving.
No more bubbles rose. Evidently the intermittent supply of oil from
below had given place to slow, even gushers. The surface of the oil
became almost flat with the whirling ends of stream lines spinning
up and twisting out everywhere. It looked just like a gigantic black
millrace, gnarled over like the water of a river half a mile below a
high fall.
"The mate and I are the only witnesses of what seethed up through the
crawling oil. The only human witnesses, I mean. For if our pickled
friend in the salt there could speak he might spin us a good yarn. He
came up in that slow, churning motion of the pitch, one of thousands
like him, and one small fry in a stew of huge beasts whose horny
ugliness made him and his bigger sisters look like rosy June brides.
"All the three hundred foot nightmares of our dragon-ridden fairy-tale
days boiled lazily up in that infernal black stew. Lizards as big
as small trains with grinning mouths jammed full of six-inch teeth
rolled over and over in the swashing oil as dead as Trojans, and huge
armor plated, four-legged brutes the size of locomotives twirled
round and round belly up in the twilight. Some of them had been split
wide open, and their insides, black with oil, steamed and smoked like
slaughter houses. Smaller beasts in thousands, and a thick scum of
broken insects, littered the crawling oil between the slowly plunging
carcasses of the big fellows.
"The mate is a fussy man given to footling hobbies. Photography is his
messiest. He now dived below to fetch up his camera. Any fool could
have told the idiot there was no use trying to get a snapshot in that
light. But he kept at it like a mule and wasted five dollars' worth of
films. He found out what an extravagant fool he had been about three
weeks later when he got time to develop his rubbish.
"His idiocy gave me an idea. Nobody would believe our unsupported
story. So I took a line and fished up this freak." He indicated the
bird-reptile in its box. "I should have liked one of the big lizard
brutes, but that we had no room to stow it on deck. And anyway the
light was about gone."
"You said, Captain," Dr. Lane began, "that your catch was evidently
just dead when you hauled it in. How do you know?"
"Because I stuck my knife into its neck to make sure. Thick warm blood
oozed out. Here, I'll show you the place."
Once more he exhibited his scaly, feathered monster. It was as he had
said. There was plainly visible on the left side of the neck a deep
gash.
"It's a queer fish and a queerer story," Edith remarked, with a glance
of distaste at the poor pickled monster.