ted motionless, or nearly
so. And throughout the whole of this soul-shaking experience the stars
beamed calmly down upon us with undimmed splendour.

For a few seconds we three men stood staring at each other in awestruck
silence; then Gurney spoke, with a curious little quaver in his voice.

"That was no squall, Mr Troubridge," said he. "It was a submarine
earthquake, and of extraordinary violence, too. I should not be in the
least surprised if you find that its effects have been powerful and
widespread enough to make your chart of these seas absolutely useless to
you. For instance, we are supposed to be a long way off soundings here,
are we not? Yet what are we to make of those shocks that we felt just
now; were they merely the result of the earth tremor communicated to the
water, and through it to the hull of the ship; or were we actually swept
violently over the surface of a shoal? I should like, just for
curiosity's sake, to take a cast of the--"

He paused suddenly. While speaking, his eyes had been fixed intently
upon something that he seemed to see over my shoulder, away out on the
port side of the ship; and now, without attempting to finish his
sentence, he abruptly walked to the rail and stood staring out over it.

"What is the matter, Gurney; what do you think you see?" I demanded,
going to his side, and somehow thrilled by the queerness of his manner.

"Come up on the poop," he said; "we shall see better from there."

He led the way, and I followed; and as I drew to his side he slowly
stretched forth his arm in a pointing attitude, and, sweeping his hand
slowly right round the horizon, said, in a low, impressive voice that
was almost a whisper, the single word:

"Look!"

Then, for the first time, I saw the explanation of his strangeness of
manner. While he had been voicing his anticipations as to the possible
effects of the earthquake, I had been looking at him, meanwhile merely
catching a suggestion out of the corner of my eye, as it were, of the
fact that the disturbance of the ocean's surface around us was very
rapidly subsiding, but without grasping the significance of it all; for
I was listening to what he was saying, and turning it over in my mind.
But now, as we stood together on the poop and gazed out in every
direction round about us, I saw, to my unspeakable awe and
consternation, that what, a quarter of an hour earlier, had been, to the
best of my knowledge and belief, an unfathom