"They really know where they're going, father?" the engineer asked at length. "It all looks alike to me. How can they tell?"
"Verily, I cannot explain that to you," the old man made answer. "We know, that is all."
"But--"
"Had I been always blind you could not expound sight to me. A deaf man cannot understand sound."
"You mean you've developed some new sense, some knowledge of direction and location that we haven't got?"
"Yea, it must be so. In all these many centuries among the dark mists we have to know. And this gloom, this night, are the same to us as you have told me a lake on the surface would be to you in the brightness of that sun which none of use have ever yet beheld."
"Is that so? Well, hanged if I get it! However, no matter about that just so they locate the place. Can they find the exact spot, father?"
"Perhaps not so. But they will come near to it, my son. Only have patience; you shall see!"
Stern and the girl relapsed into silence again, and for perhaps a quarter-hour the boats moved steadily forward through the vapors in a kind of crescent, the tips of which were hidden by the mist.
Then all at once a sharp cry rang from a boat off to the right, a cry taken up and echoed all along the line. The paddles ceased to ply; the canoes now drifted idly forward, their wakes trailing out behind in long "slicks" of greasy blackness flecked with sparkles from the reflected light of all those many torches.
Another word of command; the boatmen slowed their craft.
"Drop the iron here, son, and drag the bottom," said the patriarch.
"Good!" answered Stern, thrilled with excitement and wonder.
He pitched the dredge into the jetty sea. It sank silently as he payed out the cable. At a depth he estimated--from the amount of cable still left in the boat--as about thirty fathoms, it struck bottom.
He let out another five fathoms.
"All right, father!" he exclaimed sharply. "Tell our boatmen to give way!"
The old man translated the order: "Ghaa vrouaad, m'yaun!" (Go forward, men.) The paddles dipped again and Stern's canoe moved silently over the inky surface.
Every sense alert, the engineer at the gunwale held the cable. For a few seconds he felt nothing as the slack was taken up; then he perceived a tug and knew the grapple was dragging.
Now intense silence reigned, broken only by the sputter of the smoking torches. The canoes, spaced over the foggy sea, seemed floating in a void of nothingness; each reflected light quivered and danced with weird and tremulous patterns.