When we awoke the next morning we were out of sight of land and were steaming at full speed north in the Pacific Ocean.
CHAPTER VI.
THE COASTS OF MYSTERY
Hour after hour the destroyer kept up her furious pace almost due north in the Pacific. We never came in sight of land, and it was impossible for me to guess whence we were bound.
Throughout the first day Dr. Gresham remained in his stateroom—silent, troubled, buried in a mass of arithmetical calculations.
In another part of the ship the six tailors I had brought on board labored diligently upon a number of Chinese costumes, the designs for which the doctor had sketched for them.
And on deck a detail of men was busy unpacking and assembling one of the two hydroplanes.
By the middle of the second day Dr. Gresham laid aside his calculations and began to display the keenest interest in the details of the voyage. About midnight he had the ship stopped, although neither land nor any other craft was in sight; whereupon he went to the hold and studied the hydro-seismographs. To my surprise I saw that, although we were adrift upon the restless ocean, the instrument was recording tremors similar to earthquakes on land. These occurred precisely eleven minutes and six seconds apart.
Seeing my astonishment, the doctor explained:
“It is possible to record earth shocks even at sea. The ocean bed imparts the jar to the water, through which the tremor continues like the wave caused by throwing a stone into a pond.”
But the thing which seemed to interest my friend most was that these shocks now appeared to be originating at some point to the northeast of us, instead of to the northwest, as we had noted them in Washington.