"034 (B014) - The Fantastic Island (1935-12) - Ryerson Johnson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

"I don't like this," Ham said, uneasily. "There should be no harbor at all near us, least of all a lighted harbor, even a lighted channel. But there is nothing else to do."



"Why not?" Monk demanded. "We don't have to go in that channel, do we? --if there is a channel."



Ham snapped, "It's worth investigating. That is what I mean."



It looked as if their perpetual quarrel were going to break out again.



Pat solved the problem by turning the Seven Seas toward the channel markers.





THE yacht was caught in a choppy cross-current now, and the wind was rising. It no longer sighed like men at death's door. It wailed and howled.



Ham went to the end of the bridge and clung to the railing to keep from being pitched off the violently tilting craft into the boil of black water around them. In spite of the wind, the night was oppressive, muggy, with a faint sulphurous smell. Suddenly a flickering glow, as of sheet lightning, sprang into life, tinging the low-hanging clouds.



Ham made a mistake. He dismissed it at first as ordinary lightning. Then he saw that there was something different about these luminous flashes. They were weird, unearthy. They stained the low-hanging clouds a bloody red.



Ham heard a rasped breath behind him and was startled into whirling. It was Monk.



"Red lightnin'," Monk uttered, hanging on against the fetid, sulphurous wind at the deck tip. "That's funny-lookin', ain't it?"



Again the gory light mushroomed out under the clouds. It was more sustained, brighter this time, and it showed them things. Off to one side bulked a shore line; but this did not strike them with terror. Pat called attention to the thing that did.



"Look!" she screamed. "Look! All around us!"