“What have you done with his mother?”
“Oh, she has gone to lie down—she has a headache, and the baby doesn’t give her much peace,” Norah answered. “He’s really quite good if you show him things. We’ve been looking for whales—but whales are so uninteresting in the distance.”
“I wish I could show you some giant rays I saw once,” the doctor said. “We were going up the coast from Bombay to Karachi in a British-India turbine boat, and after breakfast one morning on a calm day there were a lot of them jumping about two miles off. They’re worth seeing when they jump. You know their shape—enormous flat things—and they came out of the water with a sort of gradual upward rush, like a hydroplane lifting, rise about ten feet from the water, and then come down flat—whop! It’s like a billiard-table falling on the water.”
“Whew!” said Wally. “I’d like to see them. What size do they run to?”
“I could tell you of one that measured thirty feet from nose-tip to tail-tip, and sixteen feet from side to side—only people don’t always believe the yarn, and it discourages me,” said the doctor, with a twinkle in his eye.
“Go on, doctor—we promise to believe anything!” Jim assured him.
“As a matter of fact, the story is sober truth—but it was a queer coincidence,” the doctor said. “We were talking about these big rays to the first officer of the ship, that morning, and he told us that about two years before, a ship in which he was second mate had run into one of them in those same latitudes. It got across the bow, simply wrapped round it, and was drowned by being dragged through the water. They got a rope on to it and lifted it aboard by a windlass. It was the one of which I told you—measured thirty by sixteen.”
“What would he weigh?”
“Oh—tons. I caught a ray once in the Andaman Islands; it was a small one, four feet from side to side, and ten feet long—six or seven feet of that was tail. It weighed a hundred and forty pounds. So you can calculate the big one, Miss Norah.”
“No, thank you,” said Norah, hastily. “We’ll call it tons.”