Then, suddenly, there was bottom! The bottom seemed to jump up at them, when the boat was about a hundred feet away from the ship. They had floated right on over the rim of a tremendous sunken precipice. Even here the bottom was apparently fifty feet below surface, yet they could see it clearly.
“Stop the boat a minute,” Spider said.
Bennie stopped it, and then took his oars out again. Spider, meanwhile, had taken a nickel from his pocket, and when the ripples had died down, he laid it carefully overboard, flat on the water. They watched it wabble and flutter rapidly down, but fast as it went, it was a long time reaching bottom, showing the depth. Yet they could see it plainly after it landed and lay shining on the rocks fifty feet below. Then they watched a big trout swim by, five or six feet under the surface, and they could see every detail of his color, his fins—all through water that was bluer than the sky!
“Now look up at the ship,” said Uncle Billy.
It towered above them now like a real ship, a ship 200 feet long, with masts 175 feet tall. Here, on the south side, the walls rose in an almost sheer precipice for many feet, with little clumps of bright flowers growing in the cracks and on the tiny ledges, which Spider instantly coveted for his collection of specimens that was going to help him get a merit badge in botany.
There was one place, however, near the bowsprit, where you could make a landing, and Mr. Stone was already getting out there and setting up his camera. As soon as it was up, he asked the two boats to row around behind the island, and then come into sight again, passing slowly under the side of the ship, so he could show both the boats and the lava cliff. After that he got Spider ashore, and took a movie of him crawling, wherever he could get a finger or toe hold, twenty feet up the ship’s side and picking a large clump of pentstemon from a crevice.
“Don’t you want to take me and Dumplin’ diving off into the water?” Bennie called.
“Sure, if you’ll do it,” Mr. Stone laughed. “Put your arm down as far in as you can get it first.”
Bennie pushed up his sleeve and did so. He pulled his arm out again quickly.
“Thanks, not today,” he said.