CHAPTER IVSEEING THE SEA-SERPENT
For the next two days Perry was kept busily at work on his examinations, for, as his father had suggested, it was on ship-board that the boy’s uncle felt the time to be most opportune for getting that work done. He was deep in one of his examination papers, when, suddenly, his uncle called to him:
“Here’s a sea-serpent, Perry!”
The boy came out of his deck-chair with a jump, tripping over his steamer rug and nearly pitching headlong in his hurry. He scrambled to the rail and followed with his glance his uncle’s pointing finger.
There, not more than seventy-five feet from the vessel’s side, were the moving and undulating coils of what, at first sight, appeared to be a huge snake. Just for a moment, and then a picture that he had seen flashed back to the boy’s remembrance, and he turned to his uncle with a look of reproach.
“Uncle George, that’s only a school of porpoises!”
“Fooled you for a minute, didn’t they?” queried his leader.
“Yes,” the boy admitted, “they certainly did. But only for a minute.”
“Supposing you had never heard of porpoises, that you had seen them just once and that on a misty morning, seen them the way you saw them just now, heaving themselves clear out of the water, one after the other in a long wavering line, don’t you think you might have reported that you had seen the sea-serpent?”
“Likely enough,” the lad agreed. “But about the sea-serpent, Uncle George, I’ve often wondered. Do you suppose that there was ever any real reason for the yarn?”
“Why do you call it a yarn?” queried the scientist sharply.
“Why not?” was Perry’s astonished answer. “There isn’t any sea-serpent, is there?”
“You seem pesky sure about it,” his uncle retorted, with a distinct trace of irritation in his manner.
“But I thought every one knew it was a fake!”
“That what was a fake?”
Courtesy of Pall Mall Magazine.Sea-Serpent Attacking a Pirate Ship.Fanciful sketch, but the red flowing mane may have been suggested by an oarfish, of which specimens fifty feet long have been found.
Courtesy of Pall Mall Magazine.Sea-Serpent Attacking a Pirate Ship.Fanciful sketch, but the red flowing mane may have been suggested by an oarfish, of which specimens fifty feet long have been found.
Courtesy of Pall Mall Magazine.
Sea-Serpent Attacking a Pirate Ship.
Fanciful sketch, but the red flowing mane may have been suggested by an oarfish, of which specimens fifty feet long have been found.
“The sea-serpent yarn.”
“You persist in calling it a ‘yarn,’” his uncle warned him. “Get out of that habit, Perry, it won’t do you any good. It’s never safe to say that a certain thing does not exist, until you have absolute proof that it cannot exist. No one would have expected to find birds with teeth or lizards with wings, yet, as you know, there were plenty of these, and we have found many specimens. As for your way of talking about a sea-serpent ‘yarn,’ don’t forget that millions of sea-serpents swam in the oceans of long ago.”
“Could there be an Ichthyosaurus still living in the bottom of the sea?” hazarded the boy.
The professor wheeled on him in an instant.
“What was an Ichthyosaurus,” he asked sharply, “fish or reptile?”
“Reptile,” answered the boy promptly.
“Do true reptiles have gills?”
The question staggered Perry, for he did not know. He thought for a moment, and then remembered that all water-dwelling reptiles came up to the surface to breathe, so he answered:
“I’m not sure, Uncle George, but I don’t think any of them have.”
“They haven’t,” was the crisp correction.“How, then, could any of them be living in the bottom of the sea?”
The scientist snorted impatiently and paced the deck.
“There’s a lot of foolish talk,” he continued, after a few minutes’ pause, “about some race of fossil monsters having continued to the present time, as though, at almost any time, one might happen to come across an Agathosaurus at sea, or a Tyrannosaurus on land. There are, of course, a few survivals, such as the shrimp-like Nebalia, which goes back to the Cambrian Period, to the very beginning of life, but all these survivals are small and inconspicuous. And Agathosaurus of the Cretaceous Period certainly wasn’t inconspicuous!”
“Just how big was the Agathosaurus?” queried the boy.
“Big enough to satisfy any sea-serpent-hunter,” was the reply. “The Agathosaurus had a neck thirty feet long and a body as large as that of a small elephant, with powerful limbs turned into swimming paddles. This long neck, with its small head and sharp-toothed jaws, must have worked havoc with the fish of the Jurassic seas.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived.Tyrannosaurus, the tyrant saurian, greatest of flesh-eating giants, about to attack a family of Triceratops, “they of the three-horned face.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived.Tyrannosaurus, the tyrant saurian, greatest of flesh-eating giants, about to attack a family of Triceratops, “they of the three-horned face.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
The Fiercest Monster That Ever Lived.
Tyrannosaurus, the tyrant saurian, greatest of flesh-eating giants, about to attack a family of Triceratops, “they of the three-horned face.”
“Weren’t there any fish big enough to give him a fight?”
“H’m, hardly,” the scientist replied meditatively. “Still, there was the Portheus Molossus, of course.”
“The what?” asked the boy. “I haven’t ever heard of him.”
“The bulldog fish,” his uncle explained. “Oh, Portheus was able to give a good account of himself. He had a head a little larger than that of a grizzly bear, with jaws even deeper than a bear’s in proportion to their length. The teeth stood about three inches above the gums, tiger-like, but, of course, they were fish teeth, much more slender and a great deal sharper. He had two rows of teeth which crossed each other, and even an Agathosaurus would have had trouble shaking off a Portheus if the fish took a fast hold on his snaky neck.”
“I wish I could see a scrap like that now,” exclaimed Perry regretfully.
“You were born about three million years too late,” was the reply, “for it’s fully as long ago since the saurians left. They were the strangest army, Perry, that ever trod the earth, some of them monsters of ferocity and terrible to look on,such as the Tyrannosaurus, which, as you can see, means the Tyrant Saurian, but most of them were slow, lumbering, and inoffensive. Of true quickness and agility they had none.
“Over earth and air and sea, they were the masters. In the shallow seas they ruled with an iron hand; they filled great shells like turtles with a bulk vaster than has been seen since; they reared themselves on towering hind limbs like colossal kangaroos, their monstrous tails swinging free behind them; they donned fantastic armor, with spikes and horns, and living saws upon their backs, such as outdid the wildest imaginations of man; they even rose into the air and filled it with the flying dragons, as though to make fairy tales believable.
“From Australia to the Arctic Circle the whole world was in their grip, and one can almost picture two of the great monsters thinking, in their sluggish way, of the impossibility that their mighty lordship should ever come to an end. I say ‘almost,’ Perry, for you know that these creatures had very little brain. A monster weighing thirty tons, like the Brontosaurus, had only one-quarter as much true brain as an ape of to-day. They could hardly think at all. Yet, in somebrute way, they knew that they had nothing but each other to be afraid of. The enemy that should conquer them they did not know.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.The Sharp-Toothed Death.Thirty-foot Tylosaurus pursuing Portheus, the six-foot bulldog fish, in the Jurassic ocean.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.The Sharp-Toothed Death.Thirty-foot Tylosaurus pursuing Portheus, the six-foot bulldog fish, in the Jurassic ocean.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
The Sharp-Toothed Death.
Thirty-foot Tylosaurus pursuing Portheus, the six-foot bulldog fish, in the Jurassic ocean.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.The Jurassic Sea-Serpent.Elasmosaurus, the scourge of the primitive ocean, seventy feet in length, ravaging the bottom of the shallow sea. Neck less flexible than shown in restoration.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.The Jurassic Sea-Serpent.Elasmosaurus, the scourge of the primitive ocean, seventy feet in length, ravaging the bottom of the shallow sea. Neck less flexible than shown in restoration.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
The Jurassic Sea-Serpent.
Elasmosaurus, the scourge of the primitive ocean, seventy feet in length, ravaging the bottom of the shallow sea. Neck less flexible than shown in restoration.
“Then came the cold, the awful cold that drove the Pterodactyls from the earth. The warm seas of the Age of Chalk grew chill, the land rose, the water ran into the deep beds of what is now the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the continents as we know them took their shape, the ever-rising earth grew impatient of its slow-brained huge inhabitants, and shook them off. The Tyrannosaurus and all the flesh-eating dinosaurs had found easy prey on the huge vegetarian monsters, but as these decreased they began to prey upon themselves. Their heavy shapes and their slow brains, however, made them unfit for the great battle of life, and quicker and more alert animals took their place.
“When, a hundred thousand years later, the climate relaxed and began to grow warmer again, in the Eocene Epoch, at the beginning of the Tertiary Period, the mighty monsters and the strange dragons were all gone, and a ragged regiment of crocodiles, turtles, and serpents in the tropics, with a swarm of smaller creatures, such as lizards,in the fringes of the warm zone, was all that remained of the world-conquering hosts of the Mesozoic reptiles.
“There are none left now, Perry, and you will wear out your eyes with watching over the sea before ever you will see any of the sea-snake-lizards—the Dolichosaurs and the Mosasaurs, or the fish-lizards—such as the Ichthyosaurus. The Plesiosaurus, too, have gone. Not one of those big sea-reptile forms has sought its prey in the waters of the earth for at least three million years.”
“Yet lots of people claim to have seen sea-serpents,” protested Perry.
“Plenty of them. But no one has ever made a photograph of one, nor has a single specimen of one ever been put into a Museum,” remarked the professor.
“Do you think they were all fake—I mean mistakes?” corrected the boy, hastily.
“Not at all,” was the reply. “Some of them were hoaxes, of course. But I’m not the man to believe that other people are lying because I don’t happen to agree with them. It’s easy to make errors in a subject on which you’re not an expert—and few of the people who have claimed to have seen sea-serpents were expert naturalists. Now,if a sea-serpent presented himself for examination to a scientific expedition, such as theChallenger, or theMichael Sars, it would be a different matter. That has never happened.”
Combat Between Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus.One of the most famous of the early restorations. Modern discovery has shown that the long neck of the Plesiosaurus was almost stiff, and that the Ichthyosaurus had not a whale-like spout. The latter also bore a triangular shark-like fin on the back.
Combat Between Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus.One of the most famous of the early restorations. Modern discovery has shown that the long neck of the Plesiosaurus was almost stiff, and that the Ichthyosaurus had not a whale-like spout. The latter also bore a triangular shark-like fin on the back.
Combat Between Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus.
One of the most famous of the early restorations. Modern discovery has shown that the long neck of the Plesiosaurus was almost stiff, and that the Ichthyosaurus had not a whale-like spout. The latter also bore a triangular shark-like fin on the back.
“But you think the people who reported a sea-serpent saw something?”
“I’m sure of it,” was the scientist’s instant reply. “The very difference in all the reports shows that.”
“What do you suppose they saw?”
“Some of them saw porpoises, without a doubt, like those you saw this morning. But, myself, I believe that most of the stories have started from appearances of the giant squid or calamary. You know, Perry, the squid has been known to reach fifty or sixty feet in length, from the tip of the broad arrow-like tail to the end of the longest tentacle. As squids swim tail first, and as their method of propulsion is by expelling water in little jets from a siphon which is situated near the head, and, moreover, as they often allow the tail (which might look like a head) to project half out of the water, their huge bulk would easily lead an observer to make a false estimate of their size. If you add to this the peculiar bubbling ripple caused by the squid’s curious method ofswimming, the wake would give the effect of the animal forty or fifty feet longer than its true size. Squids are not at all uncommon, though they seldom stay long at the surface, and their appearances may be the basis of many sea-serpent stories.”
“But you do think that all the stories are a bit high, don’t you, Uncle George? I mean, you think they’re not just right?”
“I may be a little partial to the sea-serpent,” the scientist answered with a quizzical smile, “so I should never declare that there may not be some monster of the deep that is occasionally seen.”
“But there have been some awfully queer stories,” put in Perry, incredulously.
“Yes, there have been,” the professor admitted. “The early ones, particularly, seem more or less fabulous. For example, Perry, there was the story of the island found by the old Swedish bishop-explorer, Olaus Magnus. Do you know that one?”
“You bet I do,” said the boy emphatically. “Father’s got a picture of it in an old sketch-book of his at home. Wasn’t that the one in which the old explorer said he landed on an island, took possession of it in the name of the King of Sweden,had a church service there, and then decided to wind up with a feast? After a bit, when the fire really got hot, they smelt a smell of burning skin, the ‘island’ began to move, and the bishop and the sailors hardly had time to scramble back aboard the ship and cut the rope fastened to the grappling anchor they had cast ‘ashore,’ when the huge beast plunged down to the bottom of the sea. I know you think a good deal of sea-serpent stories, Uncle George, but I’m leery about that one.”
“I’ll confess,” the professor answered, laughing, “that even the fact that the explorer was a bishop doesn’t quite convince me. Yet Svere, King of Norway, claimed to have seen a similar creature, just as large, which he called a husguife.’ If you don’t believe a bishop, how about a king?”
“I think he fibbed, too,” was the boy’s ready answer.
The professor’s eyes twinkled.
“If you do sometime become a paleontologist, my boy,” he said, “you’ll have to learn to comment on other people’s reports in language that is—well, we’ll call it a little more scientific. It is safer, as well as more courteous.”
“But they were fibs,” insisted the lad, with all the uncompromising attitude of boyhood. “How would you put that ‘scientifically,’ Uncle George?”
“They were—inaccuracies of description consequent upon insufficient opportunity for the development of correct observational methods,” was the reply. “That’s saying the same thing in another way, Perry.”
The lad laughed.
“Tell me some more of the ‘inaccuracies,’ Uncle,” he said.
“Most of them were Norse,” the professor continued. “Just in the same way that all English-speaking people believed in the dragon, and all the Greeks believed in nymphs and fauns, and all the Irish believed in fairies, so the Norse world pinned its faith to the Kraken, or the Warrum or Sea-Worm of Iceland.”
“I don’t remember the Kraken,” put in the boy. “Just what was that supposed to be?”
“It was described as being a creature of the deepest parts of the sea. It was supposed to be a mile and a half in circumference, and its horns were as high and as large as the masts of small vessels.”
“Did any one ever claim to have seen such a beast?”
“Several people,” the scientist replied. “In 1680, a Lutheran minister, the Rev. Anson Friis, reported the discovery of a small Kraken, stranded in a fjord near Alstahoug. He described the creature as almost round, with a head something like that of a parrot and a long tail divided into four round swimming paddles. He went on to say that it took him nine minutes of sharp walking to walk round the carcass. Baron Grippenhjelme, the local magnate, was more moderate in his estimate, but even he declared it to be sixty fathoms (300 feet) across. With a better perception than the minister who had first discovered the carcass, he hazarded the guess that the strange creature was a polyp.”
“What do you suppose it really was?” queried the boy.
“That’s a little difficult to say,” was the guarded reply. “There’s not much evidence to go on. There seems no doubt that Friis and Grippenhjelme found something. The remarks about a parrot’s beak by one, and the other’s reference to a polyp suggest that perhaps a giant squid and an octopus were washed ashore together, and if,as probable, their flesh already was decaying, examination would be apt to be very brief. Don’t forget, Perry, that the size was only an estimate. Even the most conservative guesses shrink under the application of a two-foot rule.”
“Yet you seem to think, Uncle George, that some of the sea-serpent reports might have something in them?”
“All of them are based on something,” was the reply, “and there are a few that one hesitates to deny. It would almost seem certain that there are some large creatures in the sea, in addition to the whales, though probably nothing as large as a full-sized sulphur-bottom whale. It is equally certain that, whatever these creatures may be, they are not serpents, though they may possess snakelike features. One has to be careful about denials,” he went on, taking a battered old note-book out of his pocket, and turning over the leaves, “because some reports are quite circumstantial. The most famous of them was the report once made by the captain and officers of a British man-o’-war, the frigateDædalus, in 1848. I thought I had that note in here. Yes, here it is.
“Listen to this, Perry,” he went on, “and perhaps your disbelief will have a jolt:
“‘I have the honor,’” he read, “‘to acquaint you for the information of my Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty, that at 5 o’clockP. M.on the 6th of August last, in latitude 24° 44´ S. and longitude 9° 22´ E. (1,000 miles west of the coast of South Africa) with the weather dark and cloudy, wind fresh from the NW, with a long ocean swell from the SW, the ship on the port tack heading NE by N, something very unusual was seen by Mr. Sartoris, midshipman, rapidly approaching the ship from before the beam. The circumstance was immediately reported by him to the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, with whom and Mr. Wm. Barrett, the master, I was at the time walking the quarterdeck.
“‘On our attention being called to the object, it was discovered to be an enormous serpent, with head and neck kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and, as nearly as we could approximate, by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail yard would show in the water, there was, at the very least, 60 feet of the animal,à fleur d’eau(flush with the surface of the water), no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the watereither by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily have recognized his features with the naked eye, and it did not, either in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the SW, which it held on at the pace of from 12 to 15 miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose.
“‘The diameter of the serpent was about 15 or 16 inches behind the head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake, and it was never, during the twenty minutes that it remained in sight of our glasses, once below the surface of the water; its color a dark brown, with yellowish-white about the throat.
“‘It had no fins, but something more like the mane of a horse, or rather, a bunch of seaweed, washing about its back. It was seen by the quartermaster, the boatswain’s mate and the man at the wheel, in addition to myself and officers above mentioned.
“‘I am having a drawing of the serpent made from a sketch taken immediately after it was seen, which I hope to have ready for transmission tomy Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty by to-morrow’s post.’
“‘Peter M’Quhae, Capt.’”
Sea-Serpent Swallowing Sailors.From the records of the Swedish bishop-explorer, Olaus Magnus.
Sea-Serpent Swallowing Sailors.From the records of the Swedish bishop-explorer, Olaus Magnus.
Sea-Serpent Swallowing Sailors.
From the records of the Swedish bishop-explorer, Olaus Magnus.
Courtesy of Illustrated London News.The Most Authentic Sea-Serpent.This drawing was made on the British man-o’-warDaedalus, and thecaptain and officers, men of high naval rank and standing, signedan official statement that the creature closely resembled thisdrawing, made at the time. The monster was observedfor more than twenty minutes and came close tothe vessel. Science has never been able toexplain this sea-serpent, and it is stillone of the mysteries of the ocean.
Courtesy of Illustrated London News.The Most Authentic Sea-Serpent.This drawing was made on the British man-o’-warDaedalus, and thecaptain and officers, men of high naval rank and standing, signedan official statement that the creature closely resembled thisdrawing, made at the time. The monster was observedfor more than twenty minutes and came close tothe vessel. Science has never been able toexplain this sea-serpent, and it is stillone of the mysteries of the ocean.
Courtesy of Illustrated London News.
The Most Authentic Sea-Serpent.
This drawing was made on the British man-o’-warDaedalus, and thecaptain and officers, men of high naval rank and standing, signedan official statement that the creature closely resembled thisdrawing, made at the time. The monster was observedfor more than twenty minutes and came close tothe vessel. Science has never been able toexplain this sea-serpent, and it is stillone of the mysteries of the ocean.
“What on earth can that have been?” queried Perry, in surprise. “It sounds almost real, somehow!”
“It was real enough,” was the reply. “There’s no doubt of that. The only question is: What was it that they saw? The sketch—I copied it in my book, here it is—shows that it wasn’t a serpent. The captain thought it was a serpent, because it was long and thin. A worm is long and thin, but it isn’t a serpent; an eel is long and thin, but it isn’t a serpent; and a ribbon-fish may be fifty or sixty feet long, but it’s not in the least like a snake. Look at the head in the sketch, Perry, and you’ll see that it isn’t like a snake’s head, at all.”
Perry took the note-book and looked at the drawing with the intensest interest.
“It doesn’t look like anything in particular,” he said, “it’s more like a cross between a seal and a whale.”
The scientist nodded approvingly.
“Once in a while, Perry,” he said, “you showa whole lot of good sense. Professor Owen, the great naturalist, when theDædalussketch was shown him, wrote a long article suggesting that what Captain M’Quhae had seen was a sea-elephant, of which specimens have been found nearly thirty feet in length. And a sea-elephant is of the family of the seals.
“Personally, I rather question whether Professor Owen was right, because so conspicuous a thing as the trunk-like prolongation of the nose, at least a foot long, would not have escaped the attention of sailors. Seamen’s eyes are keen for objects in the water. Some of the supposed sea-serpents probably have been squids, some have been schools of porpoises, some have been ribbon-fish, but I think the monster seen from the quarter-deck of theDædalusprobably some aged and patriarchal creature of the seal variety, a mammal and not a reptile, a creature of this age, not of an age of two million years ago.”
The porpoises had passed far out of sight long before this conversation was ended, but his uncle’s belief that there was some huge creature still swimming in the seas quickened the lad’s interest, and he scanned the waters with the professor’s field-glass eagerly and often. He thoughtof the phrase “beginner’s luck” and his hopes continued unabated.
Two days later land was sighted, and the steamer came to the great gateway of that sea which has formed the basin of civilization, that great Mediterranean Sea on which Venice, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Phœnicia have played their part. To the right, lay mysterious Africa; to the left, frowning and sheer, rose the great rock of embattled Gibraltar, Great Britain’s guardian of the straits. The boy was enjoying the sight of land and picturing to himself the scene if the dogs of war were loosed and that front of rock should suddenly belch forth a flame curtain of fire and death before which no vessel could live for a moment.
“No signs of Scylla and Charybdis,” said a voice behind him.
“That’s so, Uncle George,” the boy said, turning, “this is where the old Greeks believed Scylla to be, isn’t it? But I’d rather tackle that six-headed monster, in spite of all her appetite, even though each head took a man from the crew, as it did from Ulysses’ ship, than I would run the gauntlet of the guns of Gibraltar let loose on us. Still, even Scylla might be uncomfortable. Whatdo you suppose was the basis of that old story, Uncle George!”
“Personification of the peril of adventure,” was the reply. “That is why Scylla and Charybdis were first said to hold guard over the Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, while afterwards the twin terrors of the ravening whirlpool and the six-headed man-eating woman monster were located at Gibraltar. As the Straits of Messina became more familiar, the terror had to be put farther away, where only the most daring would venture.
“Remember, Perry, that the Greeks believed they saw a god or a goddess or a demon in all the forces of Nature. The sea was under the rule of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him; the dawn goddess Eos, or Aurora, was the mother of the Winds, such as Boreas, the North Wind and Zephyr, the West Wind. So, you see, the Greeks felt sure that every point of danger must be guarded by some kind of demon or monstrous form, while beautiful places were inhabited by fair maidens. After all, Perry, it’s not so very long ago since people believed in mermaids. So far as that goes, some people believe in them still.”
“Uncle George,” exclaimed the boy in surprise, “surely they don’t!”
“Oh, yes, they do,” the professor replied. “In the year 1903—that’s not so long ago—two girls who lived on the Island of Sark, one of the Channel Islands, off the north coast of France, came hurrying to the house of the village clergyman, telling him that they had found a baby with a fish’s tail on a beach, and that it was swimming in a pool of water. They were going to pick it up, they said, but when one of the girls put her hand down toward it, the supposed baby opened its mouth and showed a row of sharp teeth like a fish.”
“But they couldn’t have seen any such thing!” declared the boy. “I know enough for that.”
“Wait a bit,” came the warning answer; “you haven’t heard all the story yet. The minister or abbé, who seems to have been an inquisitive fellow, hurried to the place with the two girls. There, in a rock pool, as he described it in a communication to some local scientific society, he found a mermaid, a little creature not quite three feet long, but looking more like an old woman than a baby, as the girls had described it. He remarks, in his letter, in a certain naïve way, that the mermaiddid not seem to understand either English or French. Thinking that she might be bewitched, he baptized her, then and there.”
“Baptized her!” said Perry, in surprise. “What for? Did he think she could go to church on a tail?”
“Perhaps he thought it best to be on the safe side,” was the reply. “Now here is a point that gives a curious twist of apparent truth to the story. The abbé added that the christening did not seem to make any difference. If he really wanted to color the tale, there was his chance to make a miracle out of it.
“In his half-scientific account of the occurrence, the abbé stated that the mermaid breathed like a woman, not a fish. Although warned by the girls, he tried to pick up the strange creature, but she fastened her teeth savagely in his arm, and when he tried to shake her off, she hung on, letting go her hold suddenly when free from the rock-bound pool in which she had been a prisoner. Falling on the flat ledges of the rocks, she shuffled rapidly to the sea, plunged in and was gone. The doctor who cauterized the abbé’s arm added a statement concerning the unusual character of the bite.”
“That’s a fishy tale!” exclaimed the boy derisively.
“It does sound a bit queer,” the professor admitted, “and yet, it’s not so long ago since Harvard University had in its museum a ‘specimen’ of a mermaid.”
“What was it?”
“It was a mummied young monkey down to the waist sewed on to the tail of a fish, the monkey’s body being all covered with fish scales. It was a marvelous piece of Japanese workmanship, and the naturalists accepted it as truth.”
“What a fake!” exclaimed the boy. “I wonder if there’s anything like that in our Museum at home.”
“Probably not. I doubt if a hoax like that could be worked nowadays,” the professor responded, rising from his deck-chair as the bugler blew the call to dinner.
All through their trip along the Mediterranean, Perry became a howitzer of questions and kept Antoine and his uncle busy every moment that they were on deck. One of the things which especially caught the lad’s imagination was his friend Antoine’s picture of the constant risings and fallings of the great sea on which they were traveling,so that Perry began to think of the Mediterranean as a huge pond which came and went with changes in geology, being sometimes like a puddle in the roadside on a showery day, and sometimes a vast ocean which linked together the waters of the world. Antoine had whiled away many hours of the trip modeling in clay, while the boy watched his skillful fingers—the Belgian was an excellent sculptor—and so, when one day, he undertook to explain to Perry the geological changes in the Mediterranean, he brought up one of his modeling boards. Spreading on it a lump of clay, he smoothed it out and began the story of the formation and changes of the great inland sea.
“At first the world was all fire, all fire,” he said, spreading his hands above the board, “thick hot mists, so dense that the sun could not shine through, so hot that the rain could not fall as water, but was turned to steam as it came near the white-hot earth. There was no land, and no sea, then. The earth was without form, and void. So hundreds of millions of years went by.
“After a long time, so long a time that we cannot even guess how long, the earth began to get a little cooler, and a crust was formed. This was the beginning of land. As yet it was only a shellthat vibrated like a boiler-skin, a land bordered on every side by oceans that hissed and steamed.”
Antoine swept his hand across the clay, until only the thinnest layer lay on the surface of the board.
“So land began,” he repeated. “But the crust was very thin. Even the attraction of the moon, which causes the tides, would rip the crust across, the molten rock would well up through the fissures, and the whole world was a glare with fire shining red and reflected on the low-hung clouds of swirling steam. Every century the skin of land grew slightly thicker, though wrinkled and crumpled by the constant wrench and cleavage, first by the daily tides, then by the spring tides, and at last it remained steadfast, save when the frequent volcanic eruptions and earthquakes cracked the crust across.”
“It must have been awfully thin!” exclaimed the listener.
“Compared with the size of the earth, that first crust was thinner than a tissue made of spiders’ webs around a baseball,” was Antoine’s reply. “Little by little it grew thicker, however, until parts of it were strong enough to resist the tides. Over these stretches of land, which werethe first continents, the radiation of heat grew less, and when the mist from the upper air condensed into rain, it was allowed to fall, instead of being turned into steam, and reached the earth at last, to lie there a bubbling and seething body of water, almost boiling hot. These were the first river and lake systems of the world. All, of course, have gone; the world has been made over, many, many times.”
“There was no life then, I suppose?” hazarded the boy.
“Not at first, no, no. But, even to-day, tiny one-celled plants have been found living in hot springs (170°) that are not far from boiling point, and it must have been at some early time in that ocean, as it grew cooler, that life began.”
“And whereabouts was that first continent?”
“No one knows, no one,” was the answer. “The largest outcrop of the oldest or Archæan rocks is in Canada, where the great Laurentian Range tells the story of the fire-made earth in its granite and gneiss deposits. All that had been deposited upon those rocks has been washed away and the old formation is laid bare. Then, as the land and seas cooled further, the hot steaming mists condensed the water that for so many millionsof years had hung in clouds of vapor over the earth and torrential rains began to fall. Thus the huge shallow oceans spread over the globe, leaving very little land. This was the Cambrian Period, the oldest of the six divisions of the Paleozoic Era. You know what ‘paleozoic’ means, Perry?”
“Sure,” answered the boy, “the oldest life.”
“Right, right. Now, in the Cambrian Period, all the present Mediterranean was upheaved, part of an early continent that included all of Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. Western Europe was a shallow sea. In the next Period, the Ordovician, there was a further change and leveling. The Atlantic reached as far as what is now Italy, while Greece and Asia Minor were its coast lands. Siberia was sea, then, Perry, and the Indian Ocean was land.”
The lad passed his hand in a puzzled way across his forehead.
“It’s hard enough to remember geography now,” he said, “but it would be fierce if a chap had to know all that ancient stuff as well!”
Antoine laughed and swept his hand again across the clay.
“You wouldn’t have to learn much geographyaround this part of the world during the next stage, the Silurian Period,” he said, “because it was all sea. But,” and his fingers modeled a plateau, “at the end of the Silurian Period the land rose again, and when all these changes were complete, two things had happened. Fish had evolved in the sea, and plants had appeared on the land.
“Then,” he continued, “came the Devonian Period, when the Old Red Sandstone was laid down under the sea. Curiously enough, Perry, except for a small range of hills in Scotland and for parts of Norway, the only high land in Europe was the part that is now the bed of the Mediterranean Sea, the very land over which we are at present sailing,” and he pointed over the vessel’s side.
“All through the Devonian Period and the next, that of the Coal Forests or the Carboniferous, the sea ate steadily into the land, the big Mediterranean island was cut in two, and nearly all the world became a dull, hot, dank marsh, with mosses a hundred feet high and huge horse-tails five feet in circumference. There were no seasons then, summer and winter were the same. There was no movement except the sluggishcrawling of a giant salamander or the flight of a large primitive insect. Not a spot of color existed, not the song of a single bird. The Carboniferous Period ended with the whole of Europe one sinister and gloomy marsh, the giant vegetation of which became the coal we use to-day.”
“Is that why we sometimes find things that look like fern-leaves in coal?” queried Perry.
“Yes, yes, they are fern leaves, for in the Coal Forests were many kinds of primitive ferns.
“Then came the Permian revolution,” and Antoine’s nimble fingers began to put the clay in great masses on his board. “Real mountain ranges began. The swamps awoke from the dark sleep of the Coal-Forest time and reared themselves into plateaus, the shallow seas were hurled into deeper beds, and though the Mediterranean again became a sea, yet there was even more land surface then than there is to-day.
“With this upheaving, came the First Age of Cold. The coal-forests died, the pine-trees took their places. The marshes became plains. Nearly all species of life belonging to that warm age died. The Empire of the Fishes and Amphibians ended. The Mediterranean slowly diminished in size and again became an inland sea,while in Europe to the north, Africa to the south and in America, beyond the Atlantic, the Empire of the Reptiles began.
“The Middle Ages of the Earth had come, known as the Mesozoic Era. The Mediterranean held its place as an inland sea, as one might well expect, since it was sea during the Permian times when most of the world was high, but all through the Triassic—which is the first Period of the Mesozoic Era—the land began to fall, and before it was over, the Mediterranean joined the Atlantic once again. Slowly the land fell further, the sea spread out vast arms of warm water; plants and animals increased. By the Jurassic Period there was marsh again from Norway to Africa and the huge dinosaurs became the masters of the world, living on the islands and peninsulas in the midst of that shallow tropical sea.
“Yet the slow death of cold which had awaited the Fishes and Amphibians in the Permian Revolution was awaiting the Reptiles also. The Second Age of Cold was near. After the Cretaceous Period, the land began to rise, until, when hundreds of thousands of years had elapsed, the northern part of Europe was elevated, the Mediterranean lost its opening to the ocean, and becameonce more an inland sea. Then came the Second Ice Age, the second cataclysm of want and death. The Pterodactyls died away completely, the huge reptile monsters fell by thousands and all the giant Saurians had to give place to the warmer-blooded mammals.
“So came the Age of New Life, the Cenozoic Era, of which only the first portion or the Tertiary Period concerns us now. During the Eocene Epoch began the leveling and wearing away of the land raised at the end of the Age of Chalk. Almost to the Equator, Africa was flooded. Italy, Turkey, Southern Russia and Asia Minor sank. The Atlantic and the Pacific joined then, as they would not be joined again for millions of years to come, when Man should pierce an isthmus at Panama.
“Then, after the Oligocene Epoch, the mountains of to-day began to rise. Through the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Atlas Mountains, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Apennines and the Caucasus rose above the plain, and the floor of the Eocene ocean is found to-day ten thousand feet above sea-level in the Alps, fifteen thousand feet above sea-level in the Himalayas, and twenty thousand feet above sea-level in Thibet. And,Perry, as the land rose at the end of the Pliocene Epoch, and the Pleistocene Epoch began, tropical beasts and plants fled to the Equator, snow gathered on the newly made mountain ranges, glaciers glittered on their flanks. The Third Ice Age had come, the beginning of the Quarternary or Modern Period. Nor is the Third Ice Age yet past, for it is only recently that the shrinking of the ice has allowed Man to stand on the North and South Poles of the globe.”
“Perry!” suddenly rang out a cry, with a note of strident urgency, “get me my field-glass, quick!”
Wondering, but realizing the note of haste in the command, the boy jumped into full stride along the deck and down the companion way. He was back in half a minute, taking the glass out of the case as he ran. Already the rail was crowded with figures, but they made way for him. He handed the field-glass breathlessly to the professor, and looked, with an intensity that made his eyes burn, in the direction whither the binocular was pointing.
“It’s a boat,” he said, “a little boat; no, two boats; no, three—”
He clutched his uncle’s arm.
“Those aren’t boats—” he began, and stopped.
About a quarter of a mile away, the even blue ripples of the great inland sea were broken by something black that seemed to be advancing on the ship, moving on a line that converged upon the vessel’s course. Excitement sent the boy’s heart thumping like the engines of the steamer, and when, a moment later, without a word, his uncle handed the glass to him, his hands shook so much that he could hardly focus the instrument.
There leaped into view, in the field of the glass, a broad head, something like that of a seal, but poised upon a thick, long neck. He could have sworn there were long coils behind, but he could not see them.
“TheDædalus—” he half panted.
“My camera!” came a second crisp order.
Perry handed back the glass, which the professor almost snatched from his grasp.
If the boy had hurried the first time for the binocular, he made the decks burn on his second trip. He knew that the professor’s big camera would take valuable time to unpack, so he fairly raced along the stateroom corridors to his own cabin for his own small camera, and he thanked his luckystars, as he ran, that he had put in a new roll of film that morning.
He could not have gone faster, but, when he returned, his uncle was sweeping the horizon with the glass in a way that showed all too plainly that the object of search was no longer in view.
“Gone!” he cried, in apprehension.
“Yes,” said the professor, “gone!”
“But it must be there! We both saw it!”
“I thought I saw—”
“There! Uncle George! Over there! There it is again!”
Perry pointed almost directly abeam of the vessel.
The scientist looked, and shook his head.
“You try,” he said, and handed the glass to the boy.
The lad rested his elbows on the rail to steady his shaking hands, but whatever the object was that he thought he had seen, he could not find in the glass.
“If I’d only had my camera with me!” he mourned.
“It was too far away for anything to have shown on the plate,” his uncle responded, “and, perhaps, there was nothing there to show. Lightplays some strange tricks sometimes. The records of the sea are full of just such appearances as this. But they are never near enough, or exact enough, for science to use. Still, you’re beginning young, Perry, and maybe you’ll be the first to catch him.”
“He might come up again,” the lad cried eagerly.
“He might,” was the guarded reply.
But, though from that time Perry scarcely left the ship’s rail, even for meals, until the ship was docked, and though he slept with field-glass and camera within his grasp, the sea-serpent, if such it was, was seen no more.