he dark
sea-bottom, deep in the covering gloom.

Nearer and nearer, while the distant blur of yellow light grew. Nearer
and nearer to the long-trapped men, while the consciousness that he
had succeeded intoxicated him. He alone had found them! Sealmen or no
sealmen, he had found the _Peary_! And found her with lights lit and
life inside! Nearer and nearer....

And then suddenly Ken halted the torpoon and stared with wide, alarmed
eyes. For the submarine was now plainly visible in detail--and he saw
her real plight and with it knew the answer to the mystery of her long
silence and the non-appearance of her men on the ice field above.

* * * * *

The _Peary_ was a spectacle of fantastic beauty. It was as if a huge,
rounded piece of amber, mellow, golden, lay in the murk of the
sea-floor. Not steel, hard and grim, but of transparent, shimmering
stuff she was built, all coated a soft yellow by her lights, clearly
visible inside. Ken had known something of her radical construction;
knew that a substance called quarsteel, similar to glass and yet fully
as tough as steel, had been used for her hull, making her a perfect
vehicle for undersea exploration. Her bow was capped with steel, and
her stern, propellers, diving rudders; her port-locks, for the
releasing of torpoons, were also of steel, as were the struts that
braced her throughout--but the rest was quarsteel, glowing and golden
as the heart of amber.

Beautiful with a wild yet scientific beauty was the _Peary_, but she
was not free. She was trapped. She was fastened to the mud of the
gloomy sea-floor.

Ropes held her down; and Ken Torrance knew those ropes of old. They
were tough and strong, woven of many strands of seaweed, and twenty or
thirty of them striped the _Peary's_ two hundred feet of hull.
Unevenly spaced, stretched clear over the ship from one side to the
other, they were caught around her up-jutting conning tower, fastened
through her rudders, and holding tight in a score of places. They held
the submarine down despite all the buoyancy of her emptied tanks and
the power of her twin propellers.

And the sealmen swam around her.

* * * * *

Restless dark shadows against the golden hull, they wavered and darted
and poised, totally unafraid. Another in Kenneth Torrance's place
would have put them down as some strange school of large seals,
inordinately curious but nothing more; but the tor