e shrub abounded. This was instantly recognized by Percival, who
proclaimed it to be the algaroba, a plant commonly found on the Gran
Chaco in Argentina. While the woodland was thick there was nothing about
it to suggest the tropical jungle with its impenetrable fastnesses.

The keel of the half-sunken Doraine was scraping ominously on the bed
of the channel. She shivered and swerved from frequent contact with
submerged rocks, but held her course with uncanny steadiness, while
every soul on board gazed with stark, despairing eyes at the land which
mocked them as they passed. Far on ahead loomed the lofty hills, and
beyond them lay--What? The ocean?

Gradually the passage widened. Its depth also increased. The ship no
longer scraped the bottom, she no longer caromed off the sunken rocks.
On the other hand, water poured into her interior with increasing force
and volume, indicating a disastrous rent forward. She was sloshing along
toward the centre of a basin which appeared to be half a mile wide and
not more than a mile long. Directly ahead of her the hills came down
to meet the water. A dark narrow cut, with towering sides, indicated an
outlet for the tiny, inland sea. This gorge, toward which the Doraine
was being resistlessly drawn, appeared to be but little wider than the
ship itself.

Almost in the shadow of the hills, and within a dozen ship-lengths of
the sinister opening, the worn, exhausted, beaten Doraine came to rest
at the end of her final voyage. She shivered and groaned under the
jarring impact, forged onward half her length, heeled over slightly--and
died! She was anchored for ever in the tiny landlocked sea, proud
leviathan whose days had been spent in the boundless reaches of the open
deep.

And here for the centuries to come would lie the proud Doraine, guided
to her journey's end by the pilot Chance, moored for all time in the
strangest haven ever put into by man.

Behind the stranded vessel stretched centuries incalculable, and in all
these centuries no man had entered here. Screened from the rest of
the world, untended by chortling tugs, unheralded by raucous sirens,
welcomed only by primeval solitude, the Doraine had come to rest.

She settled down on her bed of rocks to sleep for evermore, a mottled
monster whose only covering was the night; indifferent to storm and
calm, to time and tide, to darkness and light, she sat serene in her
little sea. Her lofty walls towered high above the waves th