For a few seconds we three men stood staring at each other in awestruck silence; then Gurney spoke, with a curious little quaver in his voice.
“That was no squall, Mr Troubridge,” said he. “It was a submarine earthquake, and of extraordinary violence, too. I should not be in the least surprised if you find that its effects have been powerful and widespread enough to make your chart of these seas absolutely useless to you. For instance, we are supposed to be a long way off soundings here, are we not? Yet what are we to make of those shocks that we felt just now; were they merely the result of the earth tremor communicated to the water, and through it to the hull of the ship; or were we actually swept violently over the surface of a shoal? I should like, just for curiosity’s sake, to take a cast of the—”
He paused suddenly. While speaking, his eyes had been fixed intently upon something that he seemed to see over my shoulder, away out on the port side of the ship; and now, without attempting to finish his sentence, he abruptly walked to the rail and stood staring out over it.
“What is the matter, Gurney; what do you think you see?” I demanded, going to his side, and somehow thrilled by the queerness of his manner.
“Come up on the poop,” he said; “we shall see better from there.”
He led the way, and I followed; and as I drew to his side he slowly stretched forth his arm in a pointing attitude, and, sweeping his hand slowly right round the horizon, said, in a low, impressive voice that was almost a whisper, the single word:
“Look!”
Then, for the first time, I saw the explanation of his strangeness of manner. While he had been voicing his anticipations as to the possible effects of the earthquake, I had been looking at him, meanwhile merely catching a suggestion out of the corner of my eye, as it were, of the fact that the disturbance of the ocean’s surface around us was very rapidly subsiding, but without grasping the significance of it all; for I was listening to what he was saying, and turning it over in my mind. But now, as we stood together on the poop and gazed out in every direction round about us, I saw, to my unspeakable awe and consternation, that what, a quarter of an hour earlier, had been, to the best of my knowledge and belief, an unfathomable ocean was now, to a very large extent, dry land! That is to say, the ship appeared to be floating—or was she aground?—in a kind of pond, or small lake, of perhaps eight or ten acres in extent, surrounded on every side by land of some sort, off the rugged surface of which the salt water was still pouring in a multitude of little streams and cataracts. How far this land extended it was at that moment quite impossible to say; but, so far as could be seen in the dim uncertain light of the stars, it appeared to extend nearly or quite to the horizon. And the whole of it had been hove up from the ocean depths in the space of a few seconds. True, this part of the great Pacific Ocean was thickly dotted with reefs and shoals, the positions of many of which had never been accurately determined, while it was known that there were many others with a sufficient depth of water upon them to allow a ship to pass safely over them in any weather. This might possibly be one of them; but, even so, the fact remained that a low island of quite respectable extent had suddenly been created.
“Well, Gurney,” I exclaimed, looking round in ever-growing amazement, “this is something quite new in the way of shipwrecks; something, indeed, that, if recorded in the newspapers, would be denounced by the clever ones who know everything as an outrageous falsehood, an audacious attempt to impose upon people’s credulity.”
“Very possibly,” agreed Gurney. “I have run up against a good many people in my time who seem to make a point of disbelieving everything that has not come within the scope of their own actual experience. Yet there is nothing so very wonderful in this business, after all. New land is frequently being discovered where deep water is known to have previously existed; and this is a case in point, that is all. And, as to calling our present plight a shipwreck—well, I think it is rather anticipating matters to do that. If we had chanced to be caught floating immediately over any of that portion that has been hove out of water, and the ship left high and dry, we might be justified in calling ourselves shipwrecked; but here we are, still afloat; and who is to say that a way may not be found out of this dock into the open ocean?”