At times, as the Anclote held her course east-south-east, the trees thinned and a glimpse of the morass beneath met the eye. Some of these openings revealed ponds and even lakes. But the water was no longer blue or silvery. It lay glistening black like broken coal. Sighting one of these buried lakes, Bob swept the machine lower to have a closer view. As the whirr of the propellers came echoing back with a hollow, drum-like sound, a flock of snow white herons rose from an island of rotting logs.
“See him?” exclaimed Tom.
“’Bout fifteen feet long,” answered Bob.
The shrill cries of the startled birds had aroused a monster alligator, sunning himself high on the logs. With hardly a sound, he slid backwards into the ebony-colored pool.
The herons, their crane-like legs trailing behind them, flapped their way eastward. Some miles ahead, Bob slowing up on another spiral mount, the snow white birds disappeared.
“Somethin’ theah,” suggested Tom. “Let’s have a look.”
The aeroplane had been in the air nearly two hours. The retreat of the herons was something—the first sight of it was even startling. Here was another lake, but it was much larger—even a mile in diameter, and, by some strange freak of nature, of crystal clearness. A creek emptied into its sparkling waters and another led away southward through the wall of tangled, moss-draped palmettoes, grass and dead pines. About the little lake, there was an open shore of sand, so light in color as to be almost white, apparently packed into a firm grassless beach by the rising and falling lake.
“That’s something,” exclaimed Bob, attempting to relax his straining muscles. “We could land on that if it was restin’ time.”
But they had not yet covered their ninety-five miles. Tom carefully keeping note of the flying minutes and the anemometer for the speed, had just calculated that they advanced in one hour and fifty-five minutes nearly seventy-six miles, for, part of the time, the more and more confident Bob had speeded up to the limit, once reaching a rate of forty-three miles an hour.
“We’ll go ahead twenty miles,” suggested Bob. “If nothing turns up, we’ll come back this far, stop for a few hours’ rest and lunch, and then call it quits, and hike home.”