bank of mud or a reef of rock. Irregular in outline, dark green as seen through the water, unlike anything he had ever seen, yet somehow it had a vaguely familiar look; it did not seem quite like mud or rock of any natural formation, but rather like some sort of boat. Yes, that was it—like the hull of a boat—it reminded him of a picture of a sunken wreck. Perhaps it was. Yes, now that the thought had entered his head, he could see that it was a wreck; he could make out the stump of a mast, the remains of deck houses, something like portions of rails. But what was it doing here? Why should a sunken hulk be lying in the East River? Of course it was out of the channel, it was lying partly beneath a dock or pier and Tom noticed that the spiles of the pier sagged and that several were broken off under water. Evidently the pier was an old one, perhaps disused, and maybe the old hulk had been sunk during some fire which had destroyed the pier at the same time.
All these thoughts flashed through Tom’s mind as he peered into the dim greenness and then all were wiped from his brain as he caught a glimpse
of the two divers moving from among the spiles. Tom was as much at sea as ever as to the distances under water. He could not tell whether the wreck was fifty or five hundred feet away. He was not at all sure that, if he reached out, he could not touch the old hulk or even the moving forms. The next moment the two had reached the side of the wreck and then, to Tom’s amazement, they seemed to disappear within it, to step through the sides as though it were only a shadow in the water.
“Gosh,” he ejaculated unconsciously, “they went into that wreck!”
“Wreck!” came Rawlins’ whispered words. “Wreck! That’s no wreck. That’s a submarine. That’s their hangout!”
So absolutely thunderstruck was Tom at Rawlins’ words that he could not even reply. But now he saw that what he had mistaken for a waterlogged sunken hulk was indeed an under-sea boat, a submarine and a big one. He had never seen a submarine except from above water before. He had no idea how such a craft would appear under water. He did not realize that the narrow deck almost awash, the tiny superstructure and conning
tower which are all the landsman sees are but a very small portion of a submarine’s whole; that out of sight, and never exposed above the surface of the sea, is a big boat-shaped hull with rudders and propellers; that the cigar-shaped Jules Verne type of submersible so familiar in fiction is not a thing of fact; and that the modern submarine if seen under water might easily be mistaken for an ordinary vessel’s hull.
It was not at all surprising therefore that Tom had mistaken the submerged craft for the hulk of a steamer or ship, for submarines were the last thing in his mind and no one would have dreamed of seeing one here beneath the surface of the East River.
Now, however, Tom could see that what he had mistaken for the stump of a mast was the conning tower; what he had thought were shattered deck houses and rails were the superstructure; and he could now even make out the lateral horizontal rudders and the vertical rudder and screws.
But this made the mystery still greater. It was even more wonderful to find a submarine here than a sunken vessel. Of course, Tom knew