The lieutenant laughed. “It’s not!” he replied. “We’re in the river now. The lightship’s on the bar. We’ll be slowing down to take on the pilot in a few moments.”
“In the river!” exclaimed Frank. “Oh, you’re just fooling! How can this be a river when there are no banks?”
“Honest Injun, ’tis though,” declared the officer. “The banks are there all right, but they’re so low you can’t see them and the river’s thirty-five miles wide.”
“Jimminy crickets!” cried Tom. “Thirty-five miles wide! Say, I thought the Amazon and the Orinoco were the only big rivers down here.”
“Oh, this is just a brook compared to the Amazon,” said the lieutenant, “but it’s wider than the Orinoco. It’s really the mouth of two big rivers--the Demerara and the Essequibo. Look, there comes the pilot.”
A small boat had put off from the lightship and came bobbing towards the destroyer, which had slowed down, and presently a grizzled old negro came scrambling over the side.
With all the pomposity and dignity of an admiral he saluted the lieutenant and climbed to the bridge and a moment later the destroyer was steaming once more on its way under the guidance of the incongruous old negro. Presently, far ahead, the boys saw bits of hazy detached land. Then tall chimneys of sugar mills and the slender towers of a wireless station became visible; the detached bits of dull green, which the boys had taken for islands, joined and formed a low green bank, and before they realized it, the boys found they were passing up a wide muddy stream and that roofs, buildings and spires of a large town were just ahead.
“Gosh, isn’t everything flat!” exclaimed Frank. “I don’t see a hill or a mountain or anything but that line of low brush anywhere. And the town looks as if it were below the water.”
“So it is,” replied Commander Disbrow. “Or rather it’s below the water level. There’s a dyke or sea wall to keep the water out, there are canals running through the streets to drain the place and there are big tide gates, or ‘kokers’ as they call them, which are closed at high tide and opened at low water.”
“Why, it must be like Holland then!” exclaimed Tom.