exposed to those monstrous claws. But inside our steel case we can afford to examine him in safety and at our ease.”
He had hardly spoken when there came a rap as from a pickaxe upon our outer wall. Then there was a long drawn rasping and scratching, ending in another sharp rap.
“Say, he wants to come in!” cried Bill Scanlan in alarm. “By gosh! we want «No Admission» painted on this shack.” His shaking voice showed how forced was his merriment, and I confess that my own knees were knocking together as I was aware of the stealthy monster closing up with an even blacker darkness each of our windows in succession, as he explored this strange shell which, could he but crack it, might contain his food.
“He can’t hurt us,” said Maracot, but there was less assurance in his tone. “Maybe it would be as well to shake the brute off.” He hailed the Captain up the tube.
“Pull us up twenty or thirty feet,” he cried.
A few seconds later we rose from the lava plain and swung gently in the still water. But the terrible beast was pertinacious. After a very short interval we heard once more the raspings of his feelers and the sharp tappings of his claws as he felt us round. It was terrible to sit silently in the dark and know that death was so near. If that mighty claw fell upon the window, would it stand the strain? That was the unspoken question in each of our minds.
But suddenly an unexpected and more urgent danger presented itself. The tappings had gone to the roof of our little dwelling, and now we began to sway with a rhythmic movement to and fro.
“Good God!” I cried. “It has hold of the hawser. It will surely snap it.”
“Say, Doc, it’s mine for the surface. I guess we’ve seen what we came to see, and it’s home, sweet home for Bill Scanlan. Ring up the elevator and get her going.”
“But our work is not half done,” croaked Maracot. “We have only begun to explore the edges of the Deep. Let us at least see how broad it is. When we have reached the other side I shall be content to return.” Then up the tube: “All well, Captain. Move on at two knots until I call for a stop.”
We moved slowly out over the edge of the abyss. Since darkness had not saved us from attack we now turned on our lights. One of the portholes was entirely obscured by what appeared to be the creature’s lower stomach. Its head and its great nippers were at work above us, and we still swayed like a clanging bell. The strength of the beast must have been enormous. Were ever mortals placed in such a situation, with five miles of water beneath — and that deadly monster above? The oscillations became more and more violent. An excited shout came down the tube from the Captain as he became aware of the jerks upon the hawser, and Maracot sprang to his feet with his hands thrown upwards in despair. Even within the shell we were aware of the jar of the broken wires, and an instant later we were falling into the mighty gulf beneath us.
As I look back at that awful moment I can remember hearing a wild cry from Maracot.
“The hawser has parted! You can do nothing! We are all dead men!” he yelled, grabbing at the telephone tube, and then, “Good-bye, Captain, good-bye to all.” They were our last words to the world of men.
We did not fall swiftly down, as you might have imagined. In spite of our weight our hollow shell gave us some sustaining buoyancy, and we sank slowly and gently into the abyss. I heard the long scrape as we slid through the claws of the horrible creature who had been our ruin, and then with a smooth gyration we went circling downwards into the abysmal depths. It may have been fully five minutes, and it seemed like an hour, before we reached the limit of our telephone wire and snapped it like a thread. Our air tube broke off at almost the same moment and the salt water came spouting through the vents. With quick, deft hands Bill Scanlan tied cords round each of the rubber tubes and so stopped the inrush, while the Doctor released the top of our compressed air which came hissing forth from the tubes. The lights had gone out when the wire snapped, but even in the dark the Doctor was able to connect up the Hellesens dry cells which lit a number of lamps in the roof.
“It should last us a week,” he said, with a wry smile. “We shall at least have light to die in.” Then he shook his head sadly and a kindly smile came over his gaunt features. “It is all right for me. I am an old man and have done my work in the world. My one regret is that I should have allowed you two young fellows to come with me. I should have taken the risk alone.”
I simply shook his hand in reassurance, for indeed there was nothing I could say. Bill Scanlan, too, was silent. Slowly we sank, marking our pace by the dark fish shadows which flitted past our windows. It seemed as if they were flying upwards rather than that we were sinking down. We still oscillated, and there was nothing so far as I could see to prevent us from falling on our side, or even turning upside down. Our weight, however, was, fortunately, very evenly balanced and we kept a level floor. Glancing up at the bathymeter I saw that we had already reached the depth of a mile.
“You see, it is as I said,” remarked Maracot, with some complacency. “You may have seen my paper in the Proceedings of the Oceanographical Society upon the relation of pressure and depth. I wish I could get one word back to the world, if only to confute Bulow of Giessen, who ventured to contradict me.”
“My gosh! If I could get a word back to the world I wouldn’t waste it on a square-head highbrow,” said the mechanic. “There is a little wren in Philadelphia that will have tears in her pretty eyes when she hears that Bill Scanlan has passed out. Well, it sure does seem a darned queer way of doing it, anyhow.”
“You should never have come,” I said, putting my hand on his.
“What sort of tin-horn sport should I have been if I had quitted?” he answered. “No, it’s my job, and I am glad I stuck it.”
“How long have we?” I asked the Doctor, after a pause.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“We shall have time to see the real bottom of the ocean, anyhow,” said he. “There is air enough in our tubes for the best part of a day. Our trouble is with the waste products. That is what is going to choke us. If we could get rid of our carbon dioxide-’
“That I can see is impossible.”
“There is one tube of pure oxygen. I put it in in case of accidents. A little of that from time to time will help to keep us alive. You will observe that we are now more than two miles deep.”
“Why should we try to keep ourselves alive? The sooner it is over the better,” said I.
“That’s the dope,” cried Scanlan. “Cut loose and have done with it.”.
“And miss the most wonderful sight that man’s eye has ever seen!” said Maracot. “It would be treason to Science. Let us record facts to the end, even if they should be for ever buried with our bodies. Play the game out.”
“Some sport, the Doc!” cried Scanlan. “I guess he has the best guts of the bunch. Let us see the spiel to an end.”
We sat patiently on the settee, the three of us, gripping the edges of it with strained fingers as it swayed and rocked, while the fishes still flashed swiftly upwards athwart the portholes.
“It is now three miles,” remarked Maracot. “I will turn on the oxygen, Mr. Headley, for it is certainly very close. There is one thing,” he added, with his dry, cackling laugh, “it will certainly be the Maracot Deep from this time onwards. When Captain Howie takes back the news my colleagues will see to it that my grave is also my monument. Even Bulow of Giessen-” He babbled on about some unintelligible scientific grievance.
We sat in silence again, watching the needle as it crawled on to its fourth mile. At one point we struck something heavy, which shook us so violently that I feared that we would turn upon our side. It may have been a huge fish, or conceivably we may have bumped upon some projection of the cliff over the edge of which we had been precipitated. That edge had seemed to us at the time to be such a wondrous depth, and now looking back at it from our dreadful abyss it might almost have been the surface. Still we swirled and circled lower and lower through the dark green waste of waters. Twenty-five thousand feet now was registered upon the dial.
“We are nearly at our journey’s end,” said Maracot. “My Scott’s recorder gave me twenty-six thousand seven hundred last year at the deepest point. We shall know our fate within a few minutes. It may be that the shock will crush us. It may be — ’
And at that moment we landed.
There was never a babe lowered by its mother on to a feather-bed who nestled down more gently than we on to the extreme bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The soft thick elastic ooze upon which we lit was a perfect buffer, which saved us from the slightest jar. We hardly moved upon our seats, and it is as well that we did not, for we had perched upon some sort of a projecting hummock, clothed thickly with the viscous gelatinous mud, and there we were balanced rocking gently with nearly half our base projecting and unsupported. There was a danger that we
