CHAPTER IX.
Early the next morning, Percival turned out long before there were any sounds from the galley or dining-room. The sun had not yet cleared the tree-tops to the east; the decks of the Doraine were still wet with dew. A few sailors were abroad; a dull-eyed junior officer moodily picked his way through the debris on the forward deck. Birds were singing and chattering in the trees that lined the shore; down at the water's edge, like sentinels on duty, with an eye always upon the strange, gigantic intruder, strutted a number of stately, bright-plumaged birds of the flamingo variety—(doubtless they were flamingoes); the blue surface of the basin was sprinkled with the myriad white, gleaming backs of winged fishermen, diving, flapping, swirling; on high, far above the hills, soared two or three huge birds with wings outspread and rigid, monarchs of all that they surveyed. The stowaway leaned on the port rail and fixed his gaze upon the crest of the severed hill, apparently the tallest of the half dozen or so that were visible from his position.
With powerful glasses he studied the wooded slope. This hill was probably twelve or fourteen hundred feet high. He thought of it as a hill, for he had lived long in the heart of the towering Andes. Behind him lay the belt of woodland that separated the basin from the open sea, a scant league away. The cleft through the hill lay almost directly ahead. It's walls apparently were perpendicular; a hundred feet or less from the pinnacle, the opening spread out considerably, indicating landslides at some remote period, the natural sloughing off of earth and stone in the formation of this narrow, unnatural passage through the very centre of the little mountain. For at least a thousand feet, however, the sides of the passage rose as straight as a wall. That the mountain was of solid rock could not be doubted after a single glance at those sturdy, unflinching walls, black and sheer.
“Well, what do you make of it?” inquired a voice at his elbow. He turned to find Mr. Mott standing beside him.
“Earthquake,” he replied. “Thousands of years ago, of course. Split the island completely in two.”
“Sounds plausible,” mused the First Officer. “But if that is the case, how do you account for the shallowness of the water in the passage and out here in the basin? An earthquake violent enough to split that hill would make a crack in the earth a thousand fathoms deep.”
“I have an idea that if we took soundings in this basin we'd find a section twenty or thirty feet wide in the centre of it where we couldn't touch bottom. The same would be true of the passage if we plumbed the middle. When we came through it the ship scraped bottom time and again. As a matter of fact,—the way I figure it out,—she was simply bumping against the upper edges of a crevice that reaches down God knows how far. We took no soundings, you will remember, until we swung out into this pool. I'll bet my head that that cut through the hill yonder is a mile deep. Earthquake fissures seldom go deeper than that, I've heard. Generally they are mere surface cracks, a hundred feet deep at the outside. But this one,—My God, it gives me the creeps, that crack in the earth does.”
“Umph!” said Mr. Mott, his elbows on the rail beside the young man, his chin in his hands. He was looking down at the water. “Captain Trigger is planning to send a couple of boats outside to survey the coast. I dare say he'll be asking you to go out in one of them. You're a civil engineer and so he feels—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Mott, but what's the sense of sending boats out to explore the coast before we find out how big the island is?”
“What's the sense? Why, how are we to find out how big the island is unless we make the circuit of it? And how in thunder are we to find out that there isn't a village or some sort of trading port on it—What are you pointing up there for?”