which Bowen J. Tyler, Jr., had taken passage for France to join

the American Ambulance was a well-known fact, and I had further

substantiated by wire to the New York office of the owners, that

a Miss La Rue had been booked for passage. Further, neither she

nor Bowen had been mentioned among the list of survivors; nor had

the body of either of them been recovered.

Their rescue by the English tug was entirely probable; the capture

of the enemy U-33 by the tug's crew was not beyond the range

of possibility; and their adventures during the perilous cruise

which the treachery and deceit of Benson extended until they found

themselves in the waters of the far South Pacific with depleted

stores and poisoned water-casks, while bordering upon the

fantastic, appeared logical enough as narrated, event by event, in

the manuscript.

Caprona has always been considered a more or less mythical land,

though it is vouched for by an eminent navigator of the eighteenth

century; but Bowen's narrative made it seem very real, however many

miles of trackless ocean lay between us and it. Yes, the narrative

had us guessing. We were agreed that it was most improbable; but

neither of us could say that anything which it contained was beyond

the range of possibility. The weird flora and fauna of Caspak were

as possible under the thick, warm atmospheric conditions of the

super-heated crater as they were in the Mesozoic era under almost

exactly similar conditions, which were then probably world-wide.

The assistant secretary had heard of Caproni and his discoveries,

but admitted that he never had taken much stock in the one nor the

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