We shot up the two thousand feet to the surface with the speed almost of a diving plane. I leveled us off and we raced at a fathom’s depth. The attacking light had vanished. The depths beneath us were dark. We sped away, shoreward. Presently we lay awash on a starlit glassy sea, with Maui’s green-brown heights staring down at us. And the blessed stars in a canopy above. CHAPTER VIII. MYSTERY OF THE SEA. Dr. Plantet would have landed at once upon Maui, and warned them, but Arturo dissuaded him. “It is not necessary, father. That has been going on down there for weeks. There is no hurry that way. Besides--” He checked himself suddenly. “What?” his father demanded. “Arturo, if there is anything more--” But Arturo remained silent. He had conveyed the impression of having other vital knowledge; I think now, looking back upon it, that he did it knowingly, cleverly bending his father to his further purpose. “What?” demanded Dr. Plantet again. “Father, won’t you trust me? I brought you here and showed you what I could--” I said: “Arturo, look here, you’re not telling us that you want us to keep this thing secret? That would be dastardly!” He turned those solemn dark eyes upon me. He was only eighteen, this lad; but at that moment he seemed older than I. “No, Jeff, of course not. When you--when we get back, father can discuss it fully with the authorities. If you like, father, you might try now to call Washington. Tell them, briefly, that with your own eyes you have confirmed your theories--your worst fears. Tell them that there may be warfare such as this world has never imagined. But I hardly think I would specifically name this threat against Maui. It might cause--if news of it leaked out--a panic in the Hawaiians. And from its remoteness to Europe it might make those people over there less earnest in preparing. No good in that, and besides--” He paused, and then as though having decided to finish, he added: “Besides, I am not--we are not, Nereid and I--altogether sure that the main threat is against Maui. There may be other localities.” “Well, what do you want us to do?” asked Dr. Plantet. He told us then, with a simple directness. Run the Dolphin to ten degrees one minute five seconds N., one hundred and fifty-eight degrees four minutes eighteen seconds E. I looked it up on the chart. Open sea. A point in Micronesia, not far from the island where Arturo had found Nereid--some fifty miles to the northeast of it. We had to go there, lie on the surface for a night, and wait. Arturo, for all his quiet force, turned to sudden pleading. “Oh, father dear, won’t you trust me? Please believe Nereid and I are thinking only to do what is best!”