But to what purpose? The deep sea animals, the vegetation of the deeps--it will all find its place in the history of the sea. It has no place here, for I am concerned only with the little parts my friends and I played in this great world crisis. Of what use dogmatically to explain that the great Pacific Basin is not altogether what the charts picture it? Why describe the steeply narrow ridge winding like a thin mountain chain up to eight hundred fathoms at its highest elevations, crossing and recrossing the fifteen parallel? Or mention, as its discoverer, what now they call the “Country of the Moon”? Jagged pits and tumbled crags over that plateau a hundred miles in westward extent? We found that it stretched barely fourteen hundred fathoms deep. Such things in detail would obtrude a pedantry into my tale. We were south of Hawaii, the midnight of August 12-13. We listened, as we had listened the previous midnight, for Arturo. But his wave-length still was dead. We crossed into the Eastern Hemisphere about midnight of August 13-14. Again no signal from Arturo. Why should there be? I asked it to myself; I could not dare to voice it to the anxious Polly and her father. Arturo had said he might signal. But when, or from where? Perhaps he might not wish to. Or he might be desperately anxious to do so, and could not. Futile, meaningless speculation. We had found that the Dolphin labored under the downward thrust; was difficult to hold level at the depths; and we slid up the incline when ascending with a speed too great for safety. I set down these random notes from my log. No sign, either of an enemy attack upon us, or of an enemy’s very existence. No indication of a rift in the ocean floor. We sometimes wondered if either one existed. Yet that too, was a futile question! We had followed a narrow line, like a thread across this small section of the ocean. More than four-fifths of the time, with the depth too great for us to see anything, we had shot up to the surface and run at a few fathoms of depth for the greater safety. We had seen only an infinitesimal part even of this tiny portion of the area in which our enemy might be lurking. The futility of it struck us at last. It occurred to Dr. Plantet, that the sub-marine slopes of the great rise crowned by the Societies and Tahiti might be worth investigating. Or the upper reaches of the Japan trench. Or, in fact, any of the continental shelves. I did not remind him that this latter had been my original idea. We were running north of the Marshalls at noon of August 14. At midnight, that night, again we listened for Arturo. And this time his signal came! His call, given in the code, repeated at intervals. We answered it, on our own wave-length which Dr. Plantet was sure the lad knew, if only he would remember. He did remember, and flashed: “Your position?” We told him. He sent us: