No skipper would venture into that tangle; no boat could move through it; almost it seemed that one could walk on it; yet Howard knew that any one trusting to that deceptive firmness would drown, and drown without even a chance to swim. The weeds would coil round him, soft, slimy, but strong, and drag him down. Like all who have sailed these waters, Howard had heard many tales of the great Sargasso Sea, and had whiled away many an hour listening to the sailors’ yarns of the haven of dead ships buried far within those tangled confines--a haven in the middle of the ocean, a haven without a harbor, a haven where the ships, dropping to pieces at last by slow decay, must sink for two miles or more before they reached the floor of the ocean. And into this haven the Queen was drifting, slowly but surely. Nothing but sinking could prevent her from moving onward till she reached the innermost haven. What would it be like? he wondered. Would the wrecks really be crowded together so that one could pass from one to the other? That there had been plenty of them borne in to make a very continent of ships he did not doubt, but had they floated long enough to accumulate to any great extent? The sailors declared that the sea was as large as Europe; that the weed was impenetrable over an area larger than France; that there might well be an area of massed wreckage two or three hundred miles in diameter. But these were sailors’ tales. Would they prove true? “Well?” Howard turned around. Dorothy and Jackson had come up behind him and were staring curiously over the weedy sea. “Well?” reiterated the latter. Howard hesitated. “I fear it is not well,” he answered at last. “Our chances of escape for the present seem practically nil.” Miss Fairfax paled, but Jackson flushed darkly. “What are you givin’ us?” he demanded, roughly. “The ship ain’t going to sink, is she?” “No. That is not the danger. Look around you.” He waved his hand to the weed-strewn horizon. Jackson looked again. “Well! What of it?” he demanded. “This! You see how thick the weed is--thicker even than it was an hour ago. I’ve sailed these seas long enough to know what that means. It means that we have been blown a long way inside the Sargasso Sea.” “No ships come here; sailing ships would lose nearly all their speed, and steamers would lose all of it, for their screws would soon be hopelessly fouled. No vessel will come to rescue us. If we are ever to leave the Queen, it must be by our own efforts.” “What can we do?” asked Dorothy, quietly.