I dropped my water-hose, and went back fifty feet along the line. Past experience with the weight of the surges had suggested another trick with which to fight the giant Pacific. I had brought a small anchor, and, with this set into the sand as best I cou’d do it, I anchored my air-hose and water-hose about fifty feet from the wreck. I proposed to let the ocean wreak the most of its spite on the two hundred and fifty feet between that anchor and the lighter. I figured that I might be able to handle the other fifty feet, no matter how ugly the surges were.
I crawled back to the wreck and found my bearings. There were the “cat scratchings” on the sand where the other divers had spent their energy that morning. I grinned—I couldn’t help it. They had just had their own experience with the tricks of a Pacific undertow.
Well, the great and awful moment had come for me!
In the years that have passed since then the vivid memory of that moment has never left me. I wake up in the night even now, and the thrill of it shakes me.
If my scheme did not work, what would become of me when I went back to the surface of the sea?
If my scheme did work, what was I facing down there? I was proposing to bore into that sand—to sink into it. No such plan had ever been tried by a human being up to that time. Was I not digging my own grave?
* Although sticking a statement of fact into writing which
is professedly fiction may be considered supererogation by
the cynical critic, some honest reader may be grateful for a
certain bit of information. Here it is: My old and valued
friend, the diver who recovered the Golden Gate treasure,
still lives at a ripe age and he has detailed to me how he
devised the hydraulic apparatus out of makeshift material,
how he bored into the sand, and how he, with his own hands,
recovered the bullion. Also, the incident of his narrow
escape when the water-hose shifted was a part of his bitter
experience on the bed of the Pacific. I hasten to state
that, so far as the rest of the yam goes, my good friend,
Diver Cook, is not culpable.—H. D.
I sat down on the sand, Turk fashion, like a tailor on his table, pointed the nozzle down, holding it against the sand, and gave the agreed-upon signal for water. It took a long time in coming, and it was an agony of waiting. Then at last I felt the hose swell under my arm. I pressed the nozzle harder against the sand. I cannot describe my delight. I felt that my dreams were coming true, for when I jammed the nozzle down I found that the sand was moving. That stream had merely trickled above the surface, but now a pressure was created when I held the nozzle hard against the bottom of the sea. Yes, the sand moved under me. It began to boil up around me. It swept and swirled in yellow clouds. I realized that I was boring a hole about as big as a barrel, and into that hole I was gradually sinking. I was on my way! I did not know where I was going—but, bless the good Lord, I was on my way! The sand in that boiling water made all dark. Down and down I went slowly, my bare feet searching eagerly.
But though I descended more rapidly as the swirling motion increased, I felt no boxes. Had I, then, happened upon a straggler among the boxes of gold on my earlier trip? Had my rivals also found two more stragglers from the main treasure—loosened boxes which had been forced out of the chamber by the impact of the wreck on the bar or had worked near the surface of the sand by the action of a sucking undertow? If that were true, it meant that Keedy’s men were dumped if they stuck to shovels. Provided I could reach the treasure, and could keep my own system a secret, I was headed toward a glorious victory, and could depend upon the ocean to keep off others—but was I headed toward victory? My feet touched nothing that had square corners. And yet, to the best of my judgment, I had already gone down at least ten feet in that hole in the sand.
Down and down—five feet more, so I reckoned. Then my heart gave a jump. My feet had touched something. It was smooth and hard and flat, and spread under me horizontally. But I soon discovered that it had too large a surface to be a box of ingots. I could not bend over to feel it with my hands, for the rush of the whirlpool of sand and water about me, sweeping upward, would not allow me to force my helmet and the upper part of my body down. I must depend on my bare feet to tell me what I had struck.