CHAPTER X

"LAKE SHIVER"


Steadily the Dipsey worked her way northward, and as she moved on
her course her progress became somewhat slower than it had been
at first. This decrease in speed was due partially to extreme
caution on the part of Mr. Gibbs, the Master Electrician.

The attenuated cable, which continually stretched itself out
behind the little vessel, was of the most recent and improved
pattern for deep-sea cables. The conducting wires in the centre
of it were scarcely thicker than hairs, while the wires forming
the surrounding envelope, although they were so small as to make
the whole cable not more than an eighth of an inch in diameter,
were far stronger than the thick submarine cables which were used
in the early days of ocean telegraphy. These outer wires were
made of the Swedish toughened steel fibre, and in 1939, with one
of them a little over a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, a
freight-ship of eleven thousand tons had been towed through the
Great New Jersey Canal, which had then just been opened, and
which connected Philadelphia with the ocean.

But notwithstanding his faith in the strength of the cable, Mr.
Gibbs felt more and more, the farther he progressed from the
habitable world, the importance of preserving it from accident.
He had gone so far that it would be a grievous thing to be
obliged to turn back.