Friday was the momentous day. On that day, Bob and Tom were to attempt the crowning event of the week’s outing—the flight by aeroplane over the Everglades. The eventful morning broke with signs of a perfect day.
[CHAPTER XIX]
THE SECRET CITY OF THE SEMINOLES
The flight in the Anclote to the swamp land for a glimpse of the famed Everglades and a possible sight of the Secret City of the Seminoles (an excursion which nearly ended with a fatality) began at seven o’clock in the morning. The only clue to the location of the mythical town was a vague reference to it in a little paper bound book, written by an old alligator and egret hunter, entitled “Thirty Years in the Everglades.” In this, the writer did not claim to have seen the fabled town, but he quoted old Billy Bowlegs—a well known modern Seminole—as authority for the statement that such a place existed.
According to the veteran hunter, the city should be due east of present St. Petersburgh, a town on the southern tip of Tampa Peninsula, and north of Lake Istokpoga; “two days’ travel,” as described by the Indian. This, in the swamps, meant about ten miles. Mapped on their charts, the two boys laid out a course east-south-east of their camp on the Key, and estimated the distance at ninety-five miles.
With gasoline sufficient for a two hundred and fifty-mile flight, the aeroplane was over Tarpon Springs in fifteen minutes, and then, rising to nearly 1,000 feet, began its cross country flight. For nearly a half hour, fruit orchards and truck farms indicated civilization, and then the rough palmetto scrub and sparse pine lands began to tell of the wilderness. Already deer were plentiful. An hour after the start, the airship still high and the engine working perfectly, the myriad small lakes and creeks began to disappear in a lower swamp land.
In this, the dark green of cabbage and fan palmettoes and stunted pines, suddenly changed to a darker expanse of vegetation. Out of a prairie of tall swamp grass, rose oaks and taller pines draped with fantastic garlands of waving Spanish moss. Then this changed to a new and dense wilderness of tangled oaks, palmettoes and pines seemingly bound together with interminable bands of the melancholy moss.
Out of this silent chaos, reaching eastward as far as the eye could see, rose the tall, black spars of blasted oaks with eagles’ nests here and there, and always the ghostly moss.
“It’s as bad as flying at sea,” remarked Bob. “You might come up out of the water, but a punch from one of those old snags, and it’s all off.”