“Had I been always blind you could not expound sight to me. A deaf man cannot understand sound.”
“You mean you've developed some new sense, some knowledge of direction and location that we haven't got?”
“Yea, it must be so. In all these many centuries among the dark mists we have to know. And this gloom, this night, are the same to us as you have told me a lake on the surface would be to you in the brightness of that sun which none of use have ever yet beheld.”
“Is that so? Well, hanged if I get it! However, no matter about that just so they locate the place. Can they find the exact spot, father?”
“Perhaps not so. But they will come near to it, my son. Only have patience; you shall see!”
Stern and the girl relapsed into silence again, and for perhaps a quarter-hour the boats moved steadily forward through the vapors in a kind of crescent, the tips of which were hidden by the mist.
Then all at once a sharp cry rang from a boat off to the right, a cry taken up and echoed all along the line. The paddles ceased to ply; the canoes now drifted idly forward, their wakes trailing out behind in long “slicks” of greasy blackness flecked with sparkles from the reflected light of all those many torches.
Another word of command; the boatmen slowed their craft.
“Drop the iron here, son, and drag the bottom,” said the patriarch.
“Good!” answered Stern, thrilled with excitement and wonder.