"Now to go down slowly," mused the ship's captain. Gracefully as in an elevator in the Woolworth Tower the Nautilus was eased down until it was poised directly over the forward deck of the E-70 to starboard.
"See anything you can get a hold of?" asked Captain Austin as he brought the Nautilus to a stop not more than five or ten feet from the submarine chaser.
Everybody in the party, including the superintendent, was down on his knees peering through the aquascope.
"Sure as a cat has kittens!" yelled Larry Seymour. "Slip me a knockout if I don't see one of that old busted bird's binnacle lamps still hanging there. See it!" He was pointing now and directing the others where to look.
Soon they saw it. And no sooner was it spied than every last one of them resolved they would stay down here now until they had their souvenir. Forthwith Captain Austin signaled the Jules Verne again to be lowered. Three feet was all he wanted.
And then the miracle again. One hundred feet down in the embrace of the ocean, bottled up in a diving chamber that stood directly over a shipwreck, suffering not, even though working in a high-pressure atmosphere, these five men saw the floor beneath them rolled away again and the water of the deep sea held completely in check,—an unseen hand of compressed air hurling it back as King Canute would have swept the ocean back from the strand!
"Get it, Seymour," said Superintendent Brown, pointing to the binnacle lamp of the E-70. For there it was directly beneath the open aquascope of the Nautilus.
And the debonair young Mr. Seymour, now quite at ease in the diving chamber that had been both a riddle and a nightmare to him when he came below for the first time, nonchalantly sat down on the floor of the Nautilus and thrust his legs out into the sea. With no more effort than though he were hauling out a huge sea carp, he leaned down and tore from its rusted fastenings the binnacle lamp of the E-70. Willing hands reached to assist him lift it into the Nautilus; but Larry was more than equal to the occasion.
"There it is—E-70," exclaimed Superintendent Brown, pointing to lettering on the side of the lamp, still visible through rust.