SEEING THE SEA-SERPENT
For the next two days Perry was kept busily at work on his
examinations, for, as his father had suggested, it was on ship-board
that the boy’s uncle felt the time to be most opportune for getting
that work done. He was deep in one of his examination papers, when,
suddenly, his uncle called to him:
“Here’s a sea-serpent, Perry!”
The boy came out of his deck-chair with a jump, tripping over his
steamer rug and nearly pitching headlong in his hurry. He scrambled
to the rail and followed with his glance his uncle’s pointing finger.
There, not more than seventy-five feet from the vessel’s side, were
the moving and undulating coils of what, at first sight, appeared
to be a huge snake. Just for a moment, and then a picture that he
had seen flashed back to the boy’s remembrance, and he turned to his
uncle with a look of reproach.
“Uncle George, that’s only a school of porpoises!”
“Fooled you for a minute, didn’t they?” queried his leader.
“Yes,” the boy admitted, “they certainly did. But only for a minute.”
“Supposing you had never heard of porpoises, that you had seen them
just once and that on a misty morning, seen them the way you saw
them just now, heaving themselves clear out of the water, one after
the other in a long wavering line, don’t you think you might have
reported that you had seen the sea-serpent?”
“Likely enough,” the lad agreed. “But about the sea-serpent, Uncle
George, I’ve often wondered. Do you suppose that there was ever any
real reason for the yarn?”
“Why do you call it a yarn?” queried the scientist sharply.
“Why not?” was Perry’s astonished answer. “There isn’t any
sea-serpent, is there?”
“You seem pesky sure about it,” his uncle retorted, with a distinct
trace of irritation in his manner.
“But I thought every one knew it was a fake!”
“That what was a fake?”
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Pall Mall Magazine._
SEA-SERPENT ATTACKING A PIRATE SHIP.
Fanciful sketch, but the red flowing mane may have been suggested by
an oarfish, of which specimens fifty feet long have been found.]
“The sea-serpent yarn.”
“You persist in calling it a ‘yarn,’” his uncle warned him. “Get
out of that habit, Perry, it won’t do you any good. It’s never safe
to say that a certain thing does not exist, until you have absolute
proof that it cannot exist. No one would have expected to find birds
with teeth or lizards with wings, yet, as you know, there were
plenty of these, and we have found many specimens. As for your way
of talking about a sea-serpent ‘yarn,’ don’t forget that millions of
sea-serpents swam in the oceans of long ago.”
“Could there be an Ichthyosaurus still living in the bottom of the
sea?” hazarded the boy.
The professor wheeled on him in an instant.
“What was an Ichthyosaurus,” he asked sharply, “fish or reptile?”
“Reptile,” answered the boy promptly.
“Do true reptiles have gills?”
The question staggered Perry, for he did not know. He thought for a
moment, and then remembered that all water-dwelling reptiles came up
to the surface to breathe, so he answered:
“I’m not sure, Uncle George, but I don’t think any of them have.”
“They haven’t,” was the crisp correction. “How, then, could any of
them be living in the bottom of the sea?”
The scientist snorted impatiently and paced the deck.
“There’s a lot of foolish talk,” he continued, after a few minutes’
pause, “about some race of fossil monsters having continued to the
present time, as though, at almost any time, one might happen to come
across an Agathosaurus at sea, or a Tyrannosaurus on land. There are,
of course, a few survivals, such as the shrimp-like Nebalia, which
goes back to the Cambrian Period, to the very beginning of life, but
all these survivals are small and inconspicuous. And Agathosaurus of
the Cretaceous Period certainly wasn’t inconspicuous!”
“Just how big was the Agathosaurus?” queried the boy.
“Big enough to satisfy any sea-serpent-hunter,” was the reply. “The
Agathosaurus had a neck thirty feet long and a body as large as
that of a small elephant, with powerful limbs turned into swimming
paddles. This long neck, with its small head and sharp-toothed jaws,
must have worked havoc with the fish of the Jurassic seas.”
[Illustration: _Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._
THE FIERCEST MONSTER THAT EVER LIVED.
Tyrannosaurus, the tyrant saurian, greatest of flesh-eating giants,
about to attack a family of Triceratops, “they of the three-horned
face.”]
“Weren’t there any fish big enough to give him a fight?”
“H’m, hardly,” the scientist replied meditatively. “Still, there was
the Portheus Molossus, of course.”
“The what?” asked the boy. “I haven’t ever heard of him.”
“The bulldog fish,” his uncle explained. “Oh, Portheus was able
to give a good account of himself. He had a head a little larger
than that of a grizzly bear, with jaws even deeper than a bear’s in
proportion to their length. The teeth stood about three inches above
the gums, tiger-like, but, of course, they were fish teeth, much more
slender and a great deal sharper. He had two rows of teeth which
crossed each other, and even an Agathosaurus would have had trouble
shaking off a Portheus if the fish took a fast hold on his snaky
neck.”
“I wish I could see a scrap like that now,” exclaimed Perry
regretfully.
“You were born about three million years too late,” was the reply,
“for it’s fully as long ago since the saurians left. They were
the strangest army, Perry, that ever trod the earth, some of
them monsters of ferocity and terrible to look on, such as the
Tyrannosaurus, which, as you can see, means the Tyrant Saurian, but
most of them were slow, lumbering, and inoffensive. Of true quickness
and agility they had none.
“Over earth and air and sea, they were the masters. In the shallow
seas they ruled with an iron hand; they filled great shells like
turtles with a bulk vaster than has been seen since; they reared
themselves on towering hind limbs like colossal kangaroos, their
monstrous tails swinging free behind them; they donned fantastic
armor, with spikes and horns, and living saws upon their backs, such
as outdid the wildest imaginations of man; they even rose into the
air and filled it with the flying dragons, as though to make fairy
tales believable.
“From Australia to the Arctic Circle the whole world was in their
grip, and one can almost picture two of the great monsters thinking,
in their sluggish way, of the impossibility that their mighty
lordship should ever come to an end. I say ‘almost,’ Perry, for you
know that these creatures had very little brain. A monster weighing
thirty tons, like the Brontosaurus, had only one-quarter as much true
brain as an ape of to-day. They could hardly think at all. Yet, in
some brute way, they knew that they had nothing but each other to
be afraid of. The enemy that should conquer them they did not know.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._
THE SHARP-TOOTHED DEATH.
Thirty-foot Tylosaurus pursuing Portheus, the six-foot bulldog fish,
in the Jurassic ocean.]
[Illustration: _Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History_.
THE JURASSIC SEA-SERPENT.
Elasmosaurus, the scourge of the primitive ocean, seventy feet in
length, ravaging the bottom of the shallow sea. Neck less flexible
than shown in restoration.]
“Then came the cold, the awful cold that drove the Pterodactyls from
the earth. The warm seas of the Age of Chalk grew chill, the land
rose, the water ran into the deep beds of what is now the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans, the continents as we know them took their
shape, the ever-rising earth grew impatient of its slow-brained
huge inhabitants, and shook them off. The Tyrannosaurus and all the
flesh-eating dinosaurs had found easy prey on the huge vegetarian
monsters, but as these decreased they began to prey upon themselves.
Their heavy shapes and their slow brains, however, made them unfit
for the great battle of life, and quicker and more alert animals took
their place.
“When, a hundred thousand years later, the climate relaxed and began
to grow warmer again, in the Eocene Epoch, at the beginning of the
Tertiary Period, the mighty monsters and the strange dragons were
all gone, and a ragged regiment of crocodiles, turtles, and serpents
in the tropics, with a swarm of smaller creatures, such as lizards,
in the fringes of the warm zone, was all that remained of the
world-conquering hosts of the Mesozoic reptiles.
“There are none left now, Perry, and you will wear out your eyes
with watching over the sea before ever you will see any of the
sea-snake-lizards—the Dolichosaurs and the Mosasaurs, or the
fish-lizards—such as the Ichthyosaurus. The Plesiosaurus, too, have
gone. Not one of those big sea-reptile forms has sought its prey in
the waters of the earth for at least three million years.”
“Yet lots of people claim to have seen sea-serpents,” protested Perry.
“Plenty of them. But no one has ever made a photograph of one, nor
has a single specimen of one ever been put into a Museum,” remarked
the professor.
“Do you think they were all fake—I mean mistakes?” corrected the boy,
hastily.
“Not at all,” was the reply. “Some of them were hoaxes, of course.
But I’m not the man to believe that other people are lying because
I don’t happen to agree with them. It’s easy to make errors in a
subject on which you’re not an expert—and few of the people who have
claimed to have seen sea-serpents were expert naturalists. Now,
if a sea-serpent presented himself for examination to a scientific
expedition, such as the _Challenger_, or the _Michael Sars_, it would
be a different matter. That has never happened.”
[Illustration: COMBAT BETWEEN ICHTHYOSAURUS AND PLESIOSAURUS.
One of the most famous of the early restorations. Modern discovery
has shown that the long neck of the Plesiosaurus was almost stiff,
and that the Ichthyosaurus had not a whale-like spout.
The latter also bore a triangular shark-like fin on the back.]
“But you think the people who reported a sea-serpent saw something?”
“I’m sure of it,” was the scientist’s instant reply. “The very
difference in all the reports shows that.”
“What do you suppose they saw?”
“Some of them saw porpoises, without a doubt, like those you saw this
morning. But, myself, I believe that most of the stories have started
from appearances of the giant squid or calamary. You know, Perry, the
squid has been known to reach fifty or sixty feet in length, from the
tip of the broad arrow-like tail to the end of the longest tentacle.
As squids swim tail first, and as their method of propulsion is by
expelling water in little jets from a siphon which is situated near
the head, and, moreover, as they often allow the tail (which might
look like a head) to project half out of the water, their huge bulk
would easily lead an observer to make a false estimate of their size.
If you add to this the peculiar bubbling ripple caused by the squid’s
curious method of swimming, the wake would give the effect of the
animal forty or fifty feet longer than its true size. Squids are not
at all uncommon, though they seldom stay long at the surface, and
their appearances may be the basis of many sea-serpent stories.”
“But you do think that all the stories are a bit high, don’t you,
Uncle George? I mean, you think they’re not just right?”
“I may be a little partial to the sea-serpent,” the scientist
answered with a quizzical smile, “so I should never declare that
there may not be some monster of the deep that is occasionally seen.”
“But there have been some awfully queer stories,” put in Perry,
incredulously.
“Yes, there have been,” the professor admitted. “The early ones,
particularly, seem more or less fabulous. For example, Perry, there
was the story of the island found by the old Swedish bishop-explorer,
Olaus Magnus. Do you know that one?”
“You bet I do,” said the boy emphatically. “Father’s got a picture
of it in an old sketch-book of his at home. Wasn’t that the one in
which the old explorer said he landed on an island, took possession
of it in the name of the King of Sweden, had a church service
there, and then decided to wind up with a feast? After a bit, when
the fire really got hot, they smelt a smell of burning skin, the
‘island’ began to move, and the bishop and the sailors hardly had
time to scramble back aboard the ship and cut the rope fastened to
the grappling anchor they had cast ‘ashore,’ when the huge beast
plunged down to the bottom of the sea. I know you think a good deal
of sea-serpent stories, Uncle George, but I’m leery about that one.”
“I’ll confess,” the professor answered, laughing, “that even the fact
that the explorer was a bishop doesn’t quite convince me. Yet Svere,
King of Norway, claimed to have seen a similar creature, just as
large, which he called a husguife.’ If you don’t believe a bishop,
how about a king?”
“I think he fibbed, too,” was the boy’s ready answer.
The professor’s eyes twinkled.
“If you do sometime become a paleontologist, my boy,” he said,
“you’ll have to learn to comment on other people’s reports in
language that is—well, we’ll call it a little more scientific. It is
safer, as well as more courteous.”
“But they were fibs,” insisted the lad, with all the uncompromising
attitude of boyhood. “How would you put that ‘scientifically,’ Uncle
George?”
“They were—inaccuracies of description consequent upon insufficient
opportunity for the development of correct observational methods,”
was the reply. “That’s saying the same thing in another way, Perry.”
The lad laughed.
“Tell me some more of the ‘inaccuracies,’ Uncle,” he said.
“Most of them were Norse,” the professor continued. “Just in the same
way that all English-speaking people believed in the dragon, and all
the Greeks believed in nymphs and fauns, and all the Irish believed
in fairies, so the Norse world pinned its faith to the Kraken, or the
Warrum or Sea-Worm of Iceland.”
“I don’t remember the Kraken,” put in the boy. “Just what was that
supposed to be?”
“It was described as being a creature of the deepest parts of the
sea. It was supposed to be a mile and a half in circumference, and
its horns were as high and as large as the masts of small vessels.”
“Did any one ever claim to have seen such a beast?”
“Several people,” the scientist replied. “In 1680, a Lutheran
minister, the Rev. Anson Friis, reported the discovery of a small
Kraken, stranded in a fjord near Alstahoug. He described the creature
as almost round, with a head something like that of a parrot and a
long tail divided into four round swimming paddles. He went on to
say that it took him nine minutes of sharp walking to walk round the
carcass. Baron Grippenhjelme, the local magnate, was more moderate
in his estimate, but even he declared it to be sixty fathoms (300
feet) across. With a better perception than the minister who had
first discovered the carcass, he hazarded the guess that the strange
creature was a polyp.”
“What do you suppose it really was?” queried the boy.
“That’s a little difficult to say,” was the guarded reply. “There’s
not much evidence to go on. There seems no doubt that Friis and
Grippenhjelme found something. The remarks about a parrot’s beak
by one, and the other’s reference to a polyp suggest that perhaps
a giant squid and an octopus were washed ashore together, and if,
as probable, their flesh already was decaying, examination would be
apt to be very brief. Don’t forget, Perry, that the size was only
an estimate. Even the most conservative guesses shrink under the
application of a two-foot rule.”
“Yet you seem to think, Uncle George, that some of the sea-serpent
reports might have something in them?”
“All of them are based on something,” was the reply, “and there are
a few that one hesitates to deny. It would almost seem certain that
there are some large creatures in the sea, in addition to the whales,
though probably nothing as large as a full-sized sulphur-bottom
whale. It is equally certain that, whatever these creatures may be,
they are not serpents, though they may possess snakelike features.
One has to be careful about denials,” he went on, taking a battered
old note-book out of his pocket, and turning over the leaves,
“because some reports are quite circumstantial. The most famous
of them was the report once made by the captain and officers of a
British man-o’-war, the frigate _Dædalus_, in 1848. I thought I had
that note in here. Yes, here it is.
“Listen to this, Perry,” he went on, “and perhaps your disbelief will
have a jolt:
“‘I have the honor,’” he read, “‘to acquaint you for the information
of my Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty, that at 5 o’clock P. M. on
the 6th of August last, in latitude 24° 44´ S. and longitude 9° 22´
E. (1,000 miles west of the coast of South Africa) with the weather
dark and cloudy, wind fresh from the NW, with a long ocean swell from
the SW, the ship on the port tack heading NE by N, something very
unusual was seen by Mr. Sartoris, midshipman, rapidly approaching the
ship from before the beam. The circumstance was immediately reported
by him to the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, with
whom and Mr. Wm. Barrett, the master, I was at the time walking the
quarterdeck.
“‘On our attention being called to the object, it was discovered
to be an enormous serpent, with head and neck kept about four feet
constantly above the surface of the sea, and, as nearly as we could
approximate, by comparing it with the length of what our main-topsail
yard would show in the water, there was, at the very least, 60 feet
of the animal, _à fleur d’eau_ (flush with the surface of the water),
no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it
through the water either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It
passed rapidly, but so close under our lee quarter, that had it
been a man of my acquaintance, I should easily have recognized his
features with the naked eye, and it did not, either in approaching
the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest
degree from its course to the SW, which it held on at the pace of
from 12 to 15 miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose.
“‘The diameter of the serpent was about 15 or 16 inches behind the
head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake, and it was
never, during the twenty minutes that it remained in sight of our
glasses, once below the surface of the water; its color a dark brown,
with yellowish-white about the throat.
“‘It had no fins, but something more like the mane of a horse, or
rather, a bunch of seaweed, washing about its back. It was seen by
the quartermaster, the boatswain’s mate and the man at the wheel, in
addition to myself and officers above mentioned.
“‘I am having a drawing of the serpent made from a sketch taken
immediately after it was seen, which I hope to have ready for
transmission to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty by
to-morrow’s post.’
[Illustration: SEA-SERPENT SWALLOWING SAILORS.
From the records of the Swedish bishop-explorer, Olaus Magnus.]
[Illustration: _Courtesy of Illustrated London News._
THE MOST AUTHENTIC SEA-SERPENT.
This drawing was made on the British man-o’-war _Daedalus_, and the
captain and officers, men of high naval rank and standing, signed
an official statement that the creature closely resembled this
drawing, made at the time. The monster was observed
for more than twenty minutes and came close to
the vessel. Science has never been able to
explain this sea-serpent, and it is still
one of the mysteries of the ocean.
]
“‘PETER M’QUHAE, Capt.’”
“What on earth can that have been?” queried Perry, in surprise. “It
sounds almost real, somehow!”
“It was real enough,” was the reply. “There’s no doubt of that. The
only question is: What was it that they saw? The sketch—I copied it
in my book, here it is—shows that it wasn’t a serpent. The captain
thought it was a serpent, because it was long and thin. A worm is
long and thin, but it isn’t a serpent; an eel is long and thin, but
it isn’t a serpent; and a ribbon-fish may be fifty or sixty feet
long, but it’s not in the least like a snake. Look at the head in the
sketch, Perry, and you’ll see that it isn’t like a snake’s head, at
all.”
Perry took the note-book and looked at the drawing with the intensest
interest.
“It doesn’t look like anything in particular,” he said, “it’s more
like a cross between a seal and a whale.”
The scientist nodded approvingly.
“Once in a while, Perry,” he said, “you show a whole lot of good
sense. Professor Owen, the great naturalist, when the _Dædalus_
sketch was shown him, wrote a long article suggesting that what
Captain M’Quhae had seen was a sea-elephant, of which specimens have
been found nearly thirty feet in length. And a sea-elephant is of the
family of the seals.
“Personally, I rather question whether Professor Owen was right,
because so conspicuous a thing as the trunk-like prolongation of the
nose, at least a foot long, would not have escaped the attention of
sailors. Seamen’s eyes are keen for objects in the water. Some of
the supposed sea-serpents probably have been squids, some have been
schools of porpoises, some have been ribbon-fish, but I think the
monster seen from the quarter-deck of the _Dædalus_ probably some
aged and patriarchal creature of the seal variety, a mammal and not a
reptile, a creature of this age, not of an age of two million years
ago.”
The porpoises had passed far out of sight long before this
conversation was ended, but his uncle’s belief that there was
some huge creature still swimming in the seas quickened the lad’s
interest, and he scanned the waters with the professor’s field-glass
eagerly and often. He thought of the phrase “beginner’s luck” and
his hopes continued unabated.
Two days later land was sighted, and the steamer came to the great
gateway of that sea which has formed the basin of civilization, that
great Mediterranean Sea on which Venice, Rome, Greece, Egypt, and
Phœnicia have played their part. To the right, lay mysterious Africa;
to the left, frowning and sheer, rose the great rock of embattled
Gibraltar, Great Britain’s guardian of the straits. The boy was
enjoying the sight of land and picturing to himself the scene if the
dogs of war were loosed and that front of rock should suddenly belch
forth a flame curtain of fire and death before which no vessel could
live for a moment.
“No signs of Scylla and Charybdis,” said a voice behind him.
“That’s so, Uncle George,” the boy said, turning, “this is where the
old Greeks believed Scylla to be, isn’t it? But I’d rather tackle
that six-headed monster, in spite of all her appetite, even though
each head took a man from the crew, as it did from Ulysses’ ship,
than I would run the gauntlet of the guns of Gibraltar let loose on
us. Still, even Scylla might be uncomfortable. What do you suppose
was the basis of that old story, Uncle George!”
“Personification of the peril of adventure,” was the reply. “That
is why Scylla and Charybdis were first said to hold guard over the
Straits of Messina, between Sicily and Italy, while afterwards the
twin terrors of the ravening whirlpool and the six-headed man-eating
woman monster were located at Gibraltar. As the Straits of Messina
became more familiar, the terror had to be put farther away, where
only the most daring would venture.
“Remember, Perry, that the Greeks believed they saw a god or a
goddess or a demon in all the forces of Nature. The sea was under
the rule of Poseidon, or Neptune, as the Romans called him; the dawn
goddess Eos, or Aurora, was the mother of the Winds, such as Boreas,
the North Wind and Zephyr, the West Wind. So, you see, the Greeks
felt sure that every point of danger must be guarded by some kind
of demon or monstrous form, while beautiful places were inhabited
by fair maidens. After all, Perry, it’s not so very long ago since
people believed in mermaids. So far as that goes, some people believe
in them still.”
“Uncle George,” exclaimed the boy in surprise, “surely they don’t!”
“Oh, yes, they do,” the professor replied. “In the year 1903—that’s
not so long ago—two girls who lived on the Island of Sark, one of
the Channel Islands, off the north coast of France, came hurrying to
the house of the village clergyman, telling him that they had found
a baby with a fish’s tail on a beach, and that it was swimming in a
pool of water. They were going to pick it up, they said, but when one
of the girls put her hand down toward it, the supposed baby opened
its mouth and showed a row of sharp teeth like a fish.”
“But they couldn’t have seen any such thing!” declared the boy. “I
know enough for that.”
“Wait a bit,” came the warning answer; “you haven’t heard all
the story yet. The minister or abbé, who seems to have been an
inquisitive fellow, hurried to the place with the two girls. There,
in a rock pool, as he described it in a communication to some local
scientific society, he found a mermaid, a little creature not quite
three feet long, but looking more like an old woman than a baby, as
the girls had described it. He remarks, in his letter, in a certain
naïve way, that the mermaid did not seem to understand either
English or French. Thinking that she might be bewitched, he baptized
her, then and there.”
“Baptized her!” said Perry, in surprise. “What for? Did he think she
could go to church on a tail?”
“Perhaps he thought it best to be on the safe side,” was the reply.
“Now here is a point that gives a curious twist of apparent truth to
the story. The abbé added that the christening did not seem to make
any difference. If he really wanted to color the tale, there was his
chance to make a miracle out of it.
“In his half-scientific account of the occurrence, the abbé stated
that the mermaid breathed like a woman, not a fish. Although warned
by the girls, he tried to pick up the strange creature, but she
fastened her teeth savagely in his arm, and when he tried to shake
her off, she hung on, letting go her hold suddenly when free from the
rock-bound pool in which she had been a prisoner. Falling on the flat
ledges of the rocks, she shuffled rapidly to the sea, plunged in and
was gone. The doctor who cauterized the abbé’s arm added a statement
concerning the unusual character of the bite.”
“That’s a fishy tale!” exclaimed the boy derisively.
“It does sound a bit queer,” the professor admitted, “and yet,
it’s not so long ago since Harvard University had in its museum a
‘specimen’ of a mermaid.”
“What was it?”
“It was a mummied young monkey down to the waist sewed on to the tail
of a fish, the monkey’s body being all covered with fish scales. It
was a marvelous piece of Japanese workmanship, and the naturalists
accepted it as truth.”
“What a fake!” exclaimed the boy. “I wonder if there’s anything like
that in our Museum at home.”
“Probably not. I doubt if a hoax like that could be worked nowadays,”
the professor responded, rising from his deck-chair as the bugler
blew the call to dinner.
All through their trip along the Mediterranean, Perry became a
howitzer of questions and kept Antoine and his uncle busy every
moment that they were on deck. One of the things which especially
caught the lad’s imagination was his friend Antoine’s picture of
the constant risings and fallings of the great sea on which they
were traveling, so that Perry began to think of the Mediterranean
as a huge pond which came and went with changes in geology, being
sometimes like a puddle in the roadside on a showery day, and
sometimes a vast ocean which linked together the waters of the
world. Antoine had whiled away many hours of the trip modeling in
clay, while the boy watched his skillful fingers—the Belgian was an
excellent sculptor—and so, when one day, he undertook to explain to
Perry the geological changes in the Mediterranean, he brought up one
of his modeling boards. Spreading on it a lump of clay, he smoothed
it out and began the story of the formation and changes of the great
inland sea.
“At first the world was all fire, all fire,” he said, spreading his
hands above the board, “thick hot mists, so dense that the sun could
not shine through, so hot that the rain could not fall as water, but
was turned to steam as it came near the white-hot earth. There was
no land, and no sea, then. The earth was without form, and void. So
hundreds of millions of years went by.
“After a long time, so long a time that we cannot even guess how
long, the earth began to get a little cooler, and a crust was formed.
This was the beginning of land. As yet it was only a shell that
vibrated like a boiler-skin, a land bordered on every side by oceans
that hissed and steamed.”
Antoine swept his hand across the clay, until only the thinnest layer
lay on the surface of the board.
“So land began,” he repeated. “But the crust was very thin. Even the
attraction of the moon, which causes the tides, would rip the crust
across, the molten rock would well up through the fissures, and the
whole world was a glare with fire shining red and reflected on the
low-hung clouds of swirling steam. Every century the skin of land
grew slightly thicker, though wrinkled and crumpled by the constant
wrench and cleavage, first by the daily tides, then by the spring
tides, and at last it remained steadfast, save when the frequent
volcanic eruptions and earthquakes cracked the crust across.”
“It must have been awfully thin!” exclaimed the listener.
“Compared with the size of the earth, that first crust was thinner
than a tissue made of spiders’ webs around a baseball,” was Antoine’s
reply. “Little by little it grew thicker, however, until parts of it
were strong enough to resist the tides. Over these stretches of land,
which were the first continents, the radiation of heat grew less,
and when the mist from the upper air condensed into rain, it was
allowed to fall, instead of being turned into steam, and reached the
earth at last, to lie there a bubbling and seething body of water,
almost boiling hot. These were the first river and lake systems of
the world. All, of course, have gone; the world has been made over,
many, many times.”
“There was no life then, I suppose?” hazarded the boy.
“Not at first, no, no. But, even to-day, tiny one-celled plants have
been found living in hot springs (170°) that are not far from boiling
point, and it must have been at some early time in that ocean, as it
grew cooler, that life began.”
“And whereabouts was that first continent?”
“No one knows, no one,” was the answer. “The largest outcrop of the
oldest or Archæan rocks is in Canada, where the great Laurentian
Range tells the story of the fire-made earth in its granite and
gneiss deposits. All that had been deposited upon those rocks has
been washed away and the old formation is laid bare. Then, as the
land and seas cooled further, the hot steaming mists condensed the
water that for so many millions of years had hung in clouds of
vapor over the earth and torrential rains began to fall. Thus the
huge shallow oceans spread over the globe, leaving very little land.
This was the Cambrian Period, the oldest of the six divisions of the
Paleozoic Era. You know what ‘paleozoic’ means, Perry?”
“Sure,” answered the boy, “the oldest life.”
“Right, right. Now, in the Cambrian Period, all the present
Mediterranean was upheaved, part of an early continent that included
all of Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. Western Europe was a shallow
sea. In the next Period, the Ordovician, there was a further change
and leveling. The Atlantic reached as far as what is now Italy, while
Greece and Asia Minor were its coast lands. Siberia was sea, then,
Perry, and the Indian Ocean was land.”
The lad passed his hand in a puzzled way across his forehead.
“It’s hard enough to remember geography now,” he said, “but it would
be fierce if a chap had to know all that ancient stuff as well!”
Antoine laughed and swept his hand again across the clay.
“You wouldn’t have to learn much geography around this part of the
world during the next stage, the Silurian Period,” he said, “because
it was all sea. But,” and his fingers modeled a plateau, “at the
end of the Silurian Period the land rose again, and when all these
changes were complete, two things had happened. Fish had evolved in
the sea, and plants had appeared on the land.
“Then,” he continued, “came the Devonian Period, when the Old Red
Sandstone was laid down under the sea. Curiously enough, Perry,
except for a small range of hills in Scotland and for parts of
Norway, the only high land in Europe was the part that is now the bed
of the Mediterranean Sea, the very land over which we are at present
sailing,” and he pointed over the vessel’s side.
“All through the Devonian Period and the next, that of the Coal
Forests or the Carboniferous, the sea ate steadily into the land, the
big Mediterranean island was cut in two, and nearly all the world
became a dull, hot, dank marsh, with mosses a hundred feet high and
huge horse-tails five feet in circumference. There were no seasons
then, summer and winter were the same. There was no movement except
the sluggish crawling of a giant salamander or the flight of a large
primitive insect. Not a spot of color existed, not the song of a
single bird. The Carboniferous Period ended with the whole of Europe
one sinister and gloomy marsh, the giant vegetation of which became
the coal we use to-day.”
“Is that why we sometimes find things that look like fern-leaves in
coal?” queried Perry.
“Yes, yes, they are fern leaves, for in the Coal Forests were many
kinds of primitive ferns.
“Then came the Permian revolution,” and Antoine’s nimble fingers
began to put the clay in great masses on his board. “Real mountain
ranges began. The swamps awoke from the dark sleep of the Coal-Forest
time and reared themselves into plateaus, the shallow seas were
hurled into deeper beds, and though the Mediterranean again became a
sea, yet there was even more land surface then than there is to-day.
“With this upheaving, came the First Age of Cold. The coal-forests
died, the pine-trees took their places. The marshes became plains.
Nearly all species of life belonging to that warm age died. The
Empire of the Fishes and Amphibians ended. The Mediterranean slowly
diminished in size and again became an inland sea, while in Europe
to the north, Africa to the south and in America, beyond the
Atlantic, the Empire of the Reptiles began.
“The Middle Ages of the Earth had come, known as the Mesozoic Era.
The Mediterranean held its place as an inland sea, as one might
well expect, since it was sea during the Permian times when most of
the world was high, but all through the Triassic—which is the first
Period of the Mesozoic Era—the land began to fall, and before it was
over, the Mediterranean joined the Atlantic once again. Slowly the
land fell further, the sea spread out vast arms of warm water; plants
and animals increased. By the Jurassic Period there was marsh again
from Norway to Africa and the huge dinosaurs became the masters of
the world, living on the islands and peninsulas in the midst of that
shallow tropical sea.
“Yet the slow death of cold which had awaited the Fishes and
Amphibians in the Permian Revolution was awaiting the Reptiles also.
The Second Age of Cold was near. After the Cretaceous Period, the
land began to rise, until, when hundreds of thousands of years had
elapsed, the northern part of Europe was elevated, the Mediterranean
lost its opening to the ocean, and became once more an inland sea.
Then came the Second Ice Age, the second cataclysm of want and death.
The Pterodactyls died away completely, the huge reptile monsters fell
by thousands and all the giant Saurians had to give place to the
warmer-blooded mammals.
“So came the Age of New Life, the Cenozoic Era, of which only the
first portion or the Tertiary Period concerns us now. During the
Eocene Epoch began the leveling and wearing away of the land raised
at the end of the Age of Chalk. Almost to the Equator, Africa was
flooded. Italy, Turkey, Southern Russia and Asia Minor sank. The
Atlantic and the Pacific joined then, as they would not be joined
again for millions of years to come, when Man should pierce an
isthmus at Panama.
“Then, after the Oligocene Epoch, the mountains of to-day began to
rise. Through the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, the Atlas Mountains,
the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Apennines and the Caucasus rose above the
plain, and the floor of the Eocene ocean is found to-day ten thousand
feet above sea-level in the Alps, fifteen thousand feet above
sea-level in the Himalayas, and twenty thousand feet above sea-level
in Thibet. And, Perry, as the land rose at the end of the Pliocene
Epoch, and the Pleistocene Epoch began, tropical beasts and plants
fled to the Equator, snow gathered on the newly made mountain ranges,
glaciers glittered on their flanks. The Third Ice Age had come, the
beginning of the Quarternary or Modern Period. Nor is the Third Ice
Age yet past, for it is only recently that the shrinking of the ice
has allowed Man to stand on the North and South Poles of the globe.”
“Perry!” suddenly rang out a cry, with a note of strident urgency,
“get me my field-glass, quick!”
Wondering, but realizing the note of haste in the command, the boy
jumped into full stride along the deck and down the companion way.
He was back in half a minute, taking the glass out of the case as he
ran. Already the rail was crowded with figures, but they made way for
him. He handed the field-glass breathlessly to the professor, and
looked, with an intensity that made his eyes burn, in the direction
whither the binocular was pointing.
“It’s a boat,” he said, “a little boat; no, two boats; no, three—”
He clutched his uncle’s arm.
“Those aren’t boats—” he began, and stopped.
About a quarter of a mile away, the even blue ripples of the great
inland sea were broken by something black that seemed to be advancing
on the ship, moving on a line that converged upon the vessel’s
course. Excitement sent the boy’s heart thumping like the engines
of the steamer, and when, a moment later, without a word, his uncle
handed the glass to him, his hands shook so much that he could hardly
focus the instrument.
There leaped into view, in the field of the glass, a broad head,
something like that of a seal, but poised upon a thick, long neck. He
could have sworn there were long coils behind, but he could not see
them.
“The _Dædalus_—” he half panted.
“My camera!” came a second crisp order.
Perry handed back the glass, which the professor almost snatched from
his grasp.
If the boy had hurried the first time for the binocular, he made
the decks burn on his second trip. He knew that the professor’s big
camera would take valuable time to unpack, so he fairly raced along
the stateroom corridors to his own cabin for his own small camera,
and he thanked his lucky stars, as he ran, that he had put in a new
roll of film that morning.
He could not have gone faster, but, when he returned, his uncle was
sweeping the horizon with the glass in a way that showed all too
plainly that the object of search was no longer in view.
“Gone!” he cried, in apprehension.
“Yes,” said the professor, “gone!”
“But it must be there! We both saw it!”
“I thought I saw—”
“There! Uncle George! Over there! There it is again!”
Perry pointed almost directly abeam of the vessel.
The scientist looked, and shook his head.
“You try,” he said, and handed the glass to the boy.
The lad rested his elbows on the rail to steady his shaking hands,
but whatever the object was that he thought he had seen, he could not
find in the glass.
“If I’d only had my camera with me!” he mourned.
“It was too far away for anything to have shown on the plate,” his
uncle responded, “and, perhaps, there was nothing there to show.
Light plays some strange tricks sometimes. The records of the sea
are full of just such appearances as this. But they are never near
enough, or exact enough, for science to use. Still, you’re beginning
young, Perry, and maybe you’ll be the first to catch him.”
“He might come up again,” the lad cried eagerly.
“He might,” was the guarded reply.
But, though from that time Perry scarcely left the ship’s rail,
even for meals, until the ship was docked, and though he slept with
field-glass and camera within his grasp, the sea-serpent, if such it
was, was seen no more.