short, here is another riddle not easy to solve, and it is much
easier to point out the impossibility of false explanations, than to
discover the true one.

"Is it possible that a submarine boat is being experimented with
beneath the lake? Such boats are no longer impossible today. Some
years ago, at Bridgeport, Connecticut, there was launched a boat, The
Protector, which could go on the water, under the water, and also
upon land. Built by an inventor named Lake, supplied with two motors,
an electric one of seventy-five horse power, and a gasoline one of
two hundred and fifty horse power, it was also provided with wheels a
yard in diameter, which enabled it to roll over the roads, as well as
swim the seas.

"But even then, granting that the turmoil of Lake Kirdall might be
produced by a submarine, brought to a high degree of perfection,
there remains as before the question how could it have reached Lake
Kirdall? The lake, shut in on all sides by a circle of mountains, is
no more accessible to a submarine than to a sea-monster.

"In whatever way this last puzzling question may be solved, the
nature of this strange appearance can no longer be disputed since the
twentieth of June. On that day, in the afternoon, the schooner
"Markel" while speeding with all sails set, came into violent
collision with something just below the water level. There was no
shoal nor rock near; for the lake in this part is eighty or ninety
feet deep. The schooner with both her bow and her side badly broken,
ran great danger of sinking. She managed, however, to reach the shore
before her decks were completely submerged.