"By George! there she is," gasped Jay to himself in sheer delight. In spite of his accustomed self-complacency and cool nerve the youth found his pulses fluttering wildly.
"And now to get busy," he murmured to himself, picking his way laboriously over a sand hummock. The sea muck was so loose that the young diver's ponderous shoes settled deep into it at each stride. But the water was clear and the precious oxygen was coming to him in steady relays from the Nemo's pump.
"What could have become of that chap Weddigen?" speculated Jay as he strained through the windows of his eyes for some trace of the other diver. Not a hint of him in any direction.
At last the youth came to the side of the wreck. His sense of direction and implicit obedience to instructions had carried him right. He had arrived directly where the nose of the Dominion had imbedded itself in the sand.
"Good enough," he thought, as he gazed upward to where the torn timbers lifted themselves toward the surface of the sea. One glance indicated that the Dominion lay listed slightly to port in such a slanting position that her bow was elevated at something like an angle of thirty degrees.
Groping his way along the side of the old freighter the persevering young diver found to his great delight that the tides and deep water currents had banked in sand all along the side of the Dominion. Like a pillow ridge this sand supported the weight of the lost cargo-carrier.
"This makes it all the easier; I can walk right aboard without any formalities," laughed Dick as he dropped to his hands and knees. He figured it would be easier going "doggey" fashion than to attempt to walk up the side of the incline and run the risk of sinking deep into the fluid underfooting.
Cautiously he made his way forward. And now the giant proportions of the ship's superstructure were outlined against the green background. The three wide smokestacks loomed ominously in front of him pitched at an angle where they seemed tottering to their fall. The main mast forward with its crow's-nest still intact was poked out like a weird totem pole bereft of all rigging by reason of the lashing given it by the submarine currents.
In a few minutes Jay worked himself up close to the wounded hulk. He could see he had come alongside directly abaft the forward funnel.
"Things seem to be breaking right, for I am right off the particular spot where I want to go aboard," soliloquized the youth as he paused to adjust his air lines.