“And the engines, how about them?” demanded Jack.
“Oh! he said they were all right,” Oscar told him. “The engineer shut off power the very instant we rebounded.”
“Lucky we were going pretty slow at the time, too,” Jack added. “If we’d been racing along at top speed it would have been good-night for everybody by now.”
“What do you suppose it was we struck?” asked Ballyhoo.
“Oh! one of those queer ledges that we’ve had to climb over several times before this,” Jack went on to say. “The floor of the ocean isn’t always like a level plain, you know. Sometimes there are hills, and then deep valleys, just as we have them on the land.”
“Somehow or other,” continued Oscar, “Captain Shooks doesn’t quite believe it was hard rock we struck. He says it didn’t just feel like it. Still, down in this section there’s a heap of coquina rock, which you know is really made by myriads of insects building. It looks like a mass of tiny shells welded together with some sort of cement. The skipper says coquina rock is lots softer than ordinary stone. It may have been a bank of that we ran smack up against.”
“Let’s hope so, anyhow,” said Ballyhoo fervently, “because to have anything injure our boat at this early stage of the game would be terrible. Jack here has only begun to take his under-the-sea motion pictures; and then again nary a cent have the treasure hunters found up to now, to help pay the enormous expenses of the enterprise.”
“There, the engines are working again,” remarked Oscar. “I suppose the next move will be to draw back out of this mess of giant ferns and other plants ten or twenty feet high. They’re all around us, you notice, boys.”
The boat was moving slowly, and just as Oscar had supposed would be the case, in a backward direction. It also began to swing to one side so that quite a broad avenue was left behind, showing where they had smashed through the aquatic growth.
During this time the boys had their eyes glued to the observation bull’s-eyes as though more than curious to discover what had lain ahead of them. The powerful electric searchlights were turned on again as soon as the engines had started, and they were thus enabled to see with distinctness.