one to stick a sonar device on an island like this?"

And there speculation stopped again, the question still unanswered.

They dove to the wreck and continued the hard labor of taking the aft
end of the ship apart. When they finally got the new area cleared of
rotted boards and timbers it was only to find a cabin already filled
with sand.

Rick borrowed the spear from Scotty's gun and thrust it down into the
sand. It slid in easily, meeting no obstruction. He probed with it but
found nothing except more sand.

Discouraged, he wrote on his belt slate, "Mybe no bottm. Flr of cbn my
be gne."

Scotty nodded. He lifted his hands in a gesture of inquiry. Now what?

Rick thought about it for a moment. Tony had been right! They probably
would have to remove every board in sight, carrying the ship away piece
by piece. But then what? There was the distinct possibility that the
statue was somewhere under sand, and they had no way of removing the
sand to see.

It was apparent that most of the ship was under the sand--if the
remainder of the ship was still intact. But Rick couldn't escape the
feeling that Captain Campion would have kept the statue close to him.
And that meant in the aft part of the ship, the part that was exposed.

Scotty hooted twice, pointing at his watch. It was time to surface. The
next dive would be their last for the day.

On the surface, Rick sounded discouraged as he said, "The cabin we
uncovered might not even have a deck. There may be nothing but a mile of
sand under it. And there isn't much of the aft part of the ship left to
explore, either. I guess tomorrow we can plan to take the captain's
cabin apart board by board."

"We'll need Tony and Zircon for hard labor like that," Scotty answered.
"Notice how quickly you get tired down there? Also, we use air a lot
faster when we work."

"Let's just sort of make a survey this time," Rick suggested. "We can
probe for any cracks we might have missed, and I'll take some over-all
shots of the wreck. Then we'll call it a day."

They followed Rick's plan. He took pictures of Scotty, with wrecking
bar, prying at likely places in the exposed part of the ship. But Scotty
uncovered nothing of interest. In one place his prying disturbed another
moray, who demonstrated his anger at the intruders by trying to fasten
his needle teeth in the wrecking bar.

A metallic clang caused them to lose interest in the eel suddenly. They
looked at each other, then turn