pretended that it was a long, weary trek through the most poisonous jungles to the coast of Peru; and when Greg walked right into a spider’s web with a huge yellow spider gloating in the middle of it, he said he’d been bitten by a tarantula.  We told him that we should have to leave him there to die, for we must press on to the sea, but he cured himself by eating a magic sweet-fern leaf and came running after us, tripping over his sash.  The trekking took a long time, and when we reached the end of the point we were quite exhausted and flung our weary frames down on the tropic sand to rest.  All at once Jerry clutched my arm and said: 

“Look yonder, Hole!  Does not yon strange form appear to you like the topper-most minaret of a sunken tower?”

He was pointing at the Sea Monster, and it really did look much more like a rough sort of dome than a monster’s head.  There was a lot of haze in the air, which made it look bluish and mysterious instead of rocky.

“It do indeed, sir,” I said.  “Could it be that city we be seeking?”

“Would that we had a boat!” said Greg, which might have been quite proper if he’d been somebody else, instead of Baroo.

We’d been sprawling on the sand again for quite a while, when Jerry suddenly jumped up and shouted: 

“Glory!  Look, Chris!” not at all like Terry Loganshaw.

I did look, and saw what he had seen.  It was an empty boat, a sort of dinghy, bobbing and butting along beside the rocks a little way down the shore.  We all ran helter-skelter, and Jerry pulled off his shoes like a flash and waded out and pulled the boat in.

“It’s one of those old tubs from around the ferry-landing,” he said.  “It must have got adrift and come down with the tide.  Oars in it and all.”

We stood there silently, Jerry in the water holding the boat, and we were all thinking the same thing.  It was Greg who said it first, quite solemnly.

“We could go out to the Sea Monster.”

Of course it was then that I ought to have said that we couldn’t, but Jerry pulled the boat up the beach and ran back to the end of the point to see how high the waves were before I could say it.  It was too late to say it afterwards, because when we saw that there was not even the faintest curl of white foam around the Sea Monster, it did seem as though we could do it.

“It’ll only take about five minutes to row out there,” Jerry said, “and then we’ll have seen it at last.  It couldn’t be a better time.  Why, a newly hatched duckling could swim out there to-day.”

It did look very near, and the water was calm and shiny, with just a long, heaving roll now and then, as if something underneath were humping its shoulders.

So I said, “All right; let’s,” and we climbed into the boat.  Jerry rows very well, and he pulled both the oars while I bailed with an old tin can that I found under the stern thwart.  The boat didn’t leak badly enough to worry about, but I thought it might be just as well to keep it bailed.  We talked in a very nautical way, though Jerry kept forgetting he was Terry Loganshaw and mixing up “Treasure Island” and Captain Moss.  But I didn’t feel so much like being Chris Hole, anyway, even to please the boys, and I didn’t say much.