But I am proud to say that, though Tom had not been to Cambridge--for if he had he would have certainly been senior wrangler--he was such a little dogged, hard, gnarly, foursquare brick of an English boy, that he never turned his head round once all the way from Peacepool to the Other-end-of-Nowhere; but kept his eye on the dog, and let him pick out the scent, hot or cold, straight or crooked, wet or dry, up hill or down dale; by which means he never made a mistake, or had to retrace a single step. CHAPTER VIII AND LAST Now, as soon as Tom had left Peacepool, he came to the white lap of the great sea mother, ten thousand fathoms deep; where she makes world-pap all day long, for the steam giants to knead, and the fire giants to bake, till it has risen and hardened into mountain-loaves and island- cakes. And there Tom was very near being kneaded up in the world-pap, and turned into a fossil water baby; which would have astonished the Geological Society of New Zealand some hundreds of thousands of years hence. For as he walked along in the silence of the sea twilight, on the soft white ocean floor, he was aware of a hissing, and a roaring, and a thumping, and a pumping, as of all the steam engines in the world at once. And when he came near, the water grew boiling hot; not that that hurt him in the least; but it also grew as foul as gruel; and every moment he stumbled over dead shells, and fish, and sharks, and seals, and whales, which had been killed by the hot water. And at last he came to the great sea serpent himself, lying dead at the bottom; and as he was too thick to scramble over, Tom had to walk round him three quarters of a mile and more, which put him out of his path sadly; and when he had got round, he came to the place called Stop. And there he stopped, and just in time. For he was on the edge of a vast hole in the bottom of the sea, up which was rushing and roaring clear steam enough to work all the engines in the world at once; so clear, indeed, that it was quite light at moments, and Tom could see almost up to the top of the water above, and down below into the pit for nobody knows how far. But as soon as he bent his head over the edge, he got such a rap on the nose from pebbles, that he jumped back again; for the steam, as it rushed up, rasped away the sides of the hole, and hurled it up into the sea in a shower of mud and gravel and ashes; and then it spread all around, and sank again, and covered in the dead fish so fast, that before Tom had stood there five minutes he was buried in silt up to his ankles, and began to be afraid that he should have been buried alive. And perhaps he would have been, but that while he was thinking, the whole piece of ground on which he stood was torn up and blown upwards, and away flew Tom a mile up through the sea, wondering what was coming next. At last he stopped--thump! and found himself tight in the legs of the most wonderful bogy which he had ever seen.