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Farnum nodding, the boat was rowed in to the shore and Andrews and his men were put aboard the "Pollard" at the platform deck. Captain Jack Benson unlocking the door to the conning tower, was himself the first to disappear down below. When he came back he carried a line to which was attached a heavy sounding-lead.
"What I have found is nothing; even a camera shows nothing, and when I look down through the glass I see nothing. It is just what the Artesian ray showed me; it is nothing at all!" "I should think," said she, speaking very slowly, "that if your sounding-lead had gone down into nothing, it would have continued to go down indefinitely. What was there to stop it if there is nothing there?"
The sea-bottom was composed of neither rock, mud, sand, nor shells; the sounding-lead brought up nothing but a kind of metallic dust, which glittered with a strange iridescence, and the nature of which it was impossible to determine, as it was totally unlike what had ever been known to be raised from the bed of the Mediterranean.
The end of the line, which Mr Macdougall held ready with a sounding-lead attached to it to make it swing further, was then hove ashore. It fell short, some ten feet out in the midst of the eddy caused by the backwash, but the leading hand of the long-boat's crew, after one or two dives in the surf, in which he got knocked down and rolled over, succeeded finally in grasping the sounding-lead.
I wondered how much warmth could be gained by going below the surface I had been down an hour and five minutes when you began to signal with that sledgehammer " "Sounding-lead," Jack corrected him. "Well, it sounded like a sledge-hammer, anyway," grinned young Somers. "While I was down below I found that the temperature rose four degrees."
For, as we have seen, these polypes cannot live at a greater depth than about twenty-five fathoms; and actual observation has shown that while, down to this depth, the sounding-lead will bring up branches of live coral from the outer wall of such a reef, at a greater depth it fetches to the surface nothing but dead coral and coral sand.
At the first glance he divined my interior trouble, and I hated him for his clairvoyance. While he inquired after my health in hypocritically honeyed accents, he constantly kept his two great yellow lion-eyes fixed upon me, and plunged his look into my soul like a sounding-lead.
The word "reef" is Welsh, from rhevu, to thicken or fold; "tack" and "sheet" are both Italian; "deck" is German. Other words are the result of contractions. Few would trace in "dipsey," a sounding-lead, the words "deep sea"; or in "futtocks" the combination "foot-hooks," the name of the connecting-pieces of the floor-timbers of a ship. "Breast-hook" has escaped contraction.
Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and sounding-line; and, ultimately, marine-surveying, which is the recording of the form of coasts and of the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon charts.
At daybreak on the following morning the Flying Cloud was once more hove about and headed for the land under the same canvas which she had carried during the night, one hand being sent into the main-chains with the sounding-lead.
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