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. Light plays 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.
CHAPTER V
THE MAD ARTIST AT THE SPHINX
“One of the Seven Wonders of the World stood there, Perry,” said the lad’s uncle, as the steamer came into the port of Alexandria, pointing to a small mosque with lofty pointing minarets, on the little island of Pharos. “That is where the Pharos was built, the first of all the large lighthouses of the world.”
“I’ve seen pictures of it, Uncle George,” responded the boy; “it didn’t seem so very wonderful.”
“Yet it was the first,” the scientist reminded him, “and in those days, the Mediterranean was as much dreaded as Cape Horn waters are to-day, and more. Upon that little island stood Man’s initial challenge to the elements. Before it was erected, a sailor could only reach harbor in daylight and when the elements were kind, but after the building of the Pharos, Man’s will blazed high above the fury of the storm. It was the fiery sign that Man was greater than the tempest and flaunted his defiance to the angry waves.”