And then at last, quite softly and gently, we came to rest. So delicate was the impact that we should hardly have known of it had it not been that the light when turned on showed great coils of the hawser all around us. The wire was a danger to our breathing tubes, for it might foul them, and at the urgent cry of Maracot it was pulled taut from above once more. The dial marked eighteen hundred feet. We lay motionless on a volcanic ridge at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Chapter 2
For a time I think that we all had the same feeling. We did not want to do anything or to see anything. We just wanted to sit quiet and try to realize the wonder of it — that we should be resting in the plumb centre of one of the great oceans of the world. But soon the strange scene round us, illuminated in all directions by our lights, drew us to the windows.
We had settled upon a bed of high algae (‘Cutleria multifida,” said Maracot), the yellow fronds of which waved around us, moved by some deep-sea current, exactly as branches would move in a summer breeze. They were not long enough to obscure our view, though their great flat leaves, deep golden in the light, flowed occasionally across our vision. Beyond them lay slopes of some blackish slag-like material which were dotted with lovely coloured creatures, holothurians, ascidians, echini and echinoderms, as thickly as ever an English spring time bank was sprinkled with hyacinths and primroses. These living flowers of the sea, vivid scarlet, rich purple and delicate pink, were spread in profusion upon that coal-black background. Here and there great sponges bristled out from the crevices of the dark rocks, and a few fish of the middle depths, themselves showing up as flashes of colour, shot across our circle of vivid radiance. We were gazing enraptured at the fairy scene when an anxious voice came down the tube:
“Well, how do you like the bottom? Is all well with you? Don’t be too long, for the glass is dropping and I don’t like the look of it. Giving you air enough? Anything more we can do?”
“All right, Captain!” cried Maracot, cheerily. “We won’t be long. You are nursing us well. We are quite as comfortable as in our own cabin. Stand by presently to move us slowly forwards.”
We had come into the region of the luminous fishes, and it amused us to turn out our own lights, and in the absolute pitch-darkness — a darkness in which a sensitive plate can be suspended for an hour without a trace even of the ultra-violet ray — to look out at the phosphorescent activity of the ocean. As against a black velvet curtain one saw little points of brilliant light moving steadily along as a liner at night might shed light through its long line of portholes. One terrifying creature had luminous teeth which gnashed in Biblical fashion in the outer darkness. Another had long golden antennae, and yet another a plume of flame above its head. As far as our vision carried, brilliant points flashed in the darkness, each little being bent upon its own business, and lighting up its own course as surely as the nightly taxicab at the theatre-hour in the Strand. Soon we had our own lights up again and the Doctor was making his observations of the sea-bottom.
“Deep as we are, we are not deep enough to get any of the characteristic Bathic deposits,” said he. “These are entirely beyond our possible range. Perhaps on another occasion with a longer hawser-’
“Cut it out!” growled Bill. “Forget it!”
Maracot smiled. “You will soon get acclimatized to the depths, Scanlan. This will not be our only descent.”
“The Hell you say!” muttered Bill.
“You will think no more of it than of going down into the hold of the Stratford. You will observe, Mr. Headley, that the groundwork here, so far as we can observe it through the dense growth of hydrozoa and silicious sponges, is pumicestone and the black slag of basalt, pointing to ancient plutonic activities. Indeed, I am inclined to think that it confirms my previous view that this ridge is part of a volcanic formation and that the Maracot Deep,” he rolled out the words as if he loved them, “represents the outer slope of the mountain. It has struck me that it would be an interesting experiment to move our cage slowly onwards until we come to the edge of the Deep, and see exactly what the formation may be at that point. I should expect to find a precipice of majestic dimensions extending downwards at a sharp angle into the extreme depths of the ocean.”
The experiment seemed to me to be a dangerous one, for who could say how far our thin hawser could bear the strain of lateral movement; but with Maracot danger, either to himself or to anyone else, simply did not exist when a scientific observation had to be made. I held my breath, and so I observed did Bill Scanlan, when a slow movement of our steel shell, brushing aside the waving fronds of seaweed, showed that the full strain was upon the line. It stood it nobly, however, and with a very gentle sweeping progression we began to glide over the bottom of the ocean, Maracot, with a compass in the hollow of his hand, shouting his direction as to the course to follow, and occasionally ordering the shell to be raised so as to avoid some obstacle in our path.
“This basaltic ridge can hardly be more than a mile across,” he explained. “I had marked the abyss as being to the west of the point where we took our plunge. At this rate, we should certainly reach it in a very short time.”
We slid without any check over the volcanic plain, all feathered by the waving golden algae and made beautiful by the gorgeous jewels of Nature’s cutting, flaming out from their setting of jet. Suddenly the Doctor dashed to the telephone.
“Stop her!” he cried. “We are there!”
A monstrous gap had opened suddenly before us. It was a fearsome place, the vision of a nightmare. Black shining cliffs of basalt fell sheer down into the unknown. Their edges were fringed with dangling laminaria as ferns might overhang some earthly gorge, but beneath that tossing, vibrating rim there were only the black gleaming walls of the chasm. The rocky edge curved away from us, but the abyss might be of any breadth, for our lights failed to penetrate the gloom which lay before us. When a Lucas signalling lamp was turned downwards it shot out a long golden lane of parallel beams extending down, down, down until it was quenched in the gloom of the terrible chasm beneath us.
“It is indeed wonderful!” cried Maracot, gazing out with a pleased proprietary expression upon his thin, eager face. “For depth I need not say that it has often been exceeded. There is the Challenger Deep of twenty-six thousand feet near the Ladrone Islands, the Planet Deep of thirty-two thousand feet off the Philippines, and many others, but it is probable that the Maracot Deep stands alone in the declivity of its descent, and is remarkable also for its escape from the observation of so many hydrographic explorers who have charted the Atlantic. It can hardly be doubted-’
He had stopped in the middle of a sentence and a look of intense interest and surprise had frozen upon his face. Bill Scanlan and I, gazing over his shoulders, were petrified by that which met our startled eyes.
Some great creature was coming up the tunnel of light which we had projected into the abyss. Far down where it tailed off into the darkness of the pit we could dimly see the vague black lurchings and heavings of some monstrous body in slow upward progression. Paddling in clumsy fashion, it was rising with dim flickerings to the edge of the gulf. Now, as it came nearer, it was right in the beam, and we could see its dreadful form more clearly. It was a beast unknown to Science, and yet with an analogy to much with which we are familiar. Too long for a huge crab and too short for a giant lobster, it was moulded more upon the lines of the crayfish, with two monstrous nippers outstretched on either side, and a pair of sixteen-foot antennae which quivered in front of its black dull sullen eyes. The carapace, light yellow in colour, may have been ten feet across, and its total length, apart from the antennae, must have been not less than thirty.
“Wonderful!” cried Maracot, scribbling desperately in his notebook. “Semi-pediculated eyes, elastic lamellae, family crustacea, species unknown. Crustaceus Maracoti — why not? Why not?”
“By gosh, I’ll pass its name, but it seems to me it’s coming our way!” cried Bill. “Say, Doc, what about putting our light out?”
“Just one moment while I note the reticulations!” cried the naturalist. “Yes, yes, that will do.” He clicked off the switch and we were back in our inky darkness, with only the darting lights outside like meteors on a moonless night.
“That beast is sure the world’s worst,” said Bill, wiping his forehead. “I felt like the morning after a bottle of Prohibition Hoosh.”
“It is certainly terrible to look at,” Maracot remarked, “and perhaps terrible to deal with also if we were really
