The Maracot Deep (1929)

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Kothar Bishop:
The Maracot Deep (1929)
Author:     Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Chapter 1

Since these papers have been put into my hands to edit, I will begin
by reminding the public of the sad loss of the steamship _Stratford_,
which started a year ago upon a voyage for the purpose of oceanography
and the study of deep-sea life. The expedition had been organized by
Dr. Maracot, the famous author of Pseudo-Coralline Formations and The
Morphology of the Lamellibranchs. Dr. Maracot had with him Mr. Cyrus
Headley, formerly assistant at the Zoological Institute of Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and at the time of the voyage Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.
Captain Howie, an experienced navigator, was in charge of the vessel,
and there was a crew of twenty-three men, including an American
mechanic from the Merribank Works, Philadelphia.

This whole party has utterly disappeared, and the only word ever heard
of the ill-fated steamer was from the report of a Norwegian barque
which actually saw a ship, closely corresponding with her description,
go down in the great gale of the autumn of 1926. A lifeboat marked
_Stratford_ was found later in the neighbourhood of the tragedy,
together with some deck gratings, a lifebuoy, and a spar. This,
coupled with the long silence, seemed to make it absolutely sure that
the vessel and her crew would never be heard of more. Her fate is
rendered more certain by the strange wireless message received at the
time, which, though incomprehensible in parts, left little doubt as to
the fate of the vessel. This I will quote later.

There were some remarkable points about the voyage of the _Stratford_
which caused comment at the time. One was the curious secrecy observed
by Professor Maracot. He was famous for his dislike and distrust of
the Press, but it was pushed to an extreme upon this occasion, when he
would neither give information to reporters nor would he permit the
representative of any paper to set foot in the vessel during the weeks
that it lay in the Albert Dock. There were rumours abroad of some
curious and novel construction of the ship which would fit it for
deep-sea work, and these rumours were confirmed from the yard of
Hunter and Company of West Hartlepool, where the structural changes
had actually been carried out. It was at one time said that the whole
bottom of the vessel was detachable, a report which attracted the
attention of the underwriters at Lloyd's, who were, with some
difficulty, satisfied upon the point. The matter was soon forgotten,
but it assumed an importance now when the fate of the expedition has
been brought once more in so extraordinary manner to the notice of the
public.

So much for the beginning of the voyage of the _Stratford_. There are
now four documents which cover the facts so far as they are known. The
first is the letter which was written by Mr. Cyrus Headley, from the
capital of the Grand Canary, to his friend, Sir James Talbot, of
Trinity College, Oxford, upon the only occasion, so far as is known,
when the _Stratford_ touched land after leaving the Thames. The second
is the strange wireless call to which I have alluded. The third is
that portion of the log of the Arabella Knowles which deals with the
vitreous ball. The fourth and last is the amazing contents of that
receptacle, which either represent a most cruel and complex
mystification, or else open up a fresh chapter in human experience the
importance of which cannot be exaggerated. With this preamble I will
now give Mr. Headley's letter, which I owe to the courtesy of Sir
James Talbot, and which has not previously been published. It is dated
October 1st, 1926.

I am mailing this, my dear Talbot, from Porta de la Luz, where we have
put in for a few days of rest. My principal companion in the voyage
has been Bill Scanlan, the head mechanic, who, as a fellow-countryman
and also as a very entertaining character, has become my natural
associate. However, I am alone this morning as he has what he
describes as 'a date with a skirt'. You see, he talks as Englishmen
expect every real American to talk. He would be accepted as the true
breed. The mere force of suggestion makes me 'guess' and 'reckon' when
I am with my English friends. I feel that they would never really
understand that I was a Yankee if I did not. However, I am not on
those terms with you, so let me assure you right now that you will not
find anything but pure Oxford in the epistle which I am now mailing to
you.

You met Maracot at the Mitre, so you know the dry chip of a man that
he is. I told you, I think, how he came to pitch upon me for the job.
He inquired from old Somerville of the Zoological Institute, who sent
him my prize essay on the pelagic crabs, and that did the trick. Of
course, it is splendid to be on such a congenial errand, but I wish it
wasn't with such an animated mummy as Maracot. He is inhuman in his
isolation and his devotion to his work. 'The world's stiffest stiff,'
says Bill Scanlan: And yet you can't but admire such complete
devotion. Nothing exists outside his own science. I remember that you
laughed when I asked him what I ought to read as a preparation, and he
said that for serious study I should read the collected edition of his
own works, but for relaxation Haeckel's Plankton-Studien.

I know him no better now than I did in that little parlour looking out
on the Oxford High. He says nothing, and his gaunt, austere face--the
face of a Savonarola, or rather, perhaps, of a Torquemada--never
relapses into geniality. The long, thin, aggressive nose, the two
small gleaming grey eyes set closely together under a thatch of
eyebrows, the thin-lipped, compressed mouth, the cheeks worn into
hollows by constant thought and ascetic life, are all uncompanionable.
He lives on some mental mountaintop, out of reach of ordinary mortals.
Sometimes I think he is a little mad. For example, this extraordinary
instrument that he has made ... but I'll tell things in their due
order and then you can judge for yourself.

I'll take our voyage from the start. The _Stratford_ is a fine seaworthy
little boat, specially fitted for her job. She is twelve hundred tons,
with clear decks and a good broad beam, furnished with every possible
appliance for sounding, trawling, dredging and tow-netting. She has,
of course, powerful steam winches for hauling the trawls, and a number
of other gadgets of various kinds, some of which are familiar enough,
and some are strange. Below these are comfortable quarters with a
well--fitted laboratory for our special studies.

We had the reputation of being a mystery ship before we started, and I
soon found that it was not undeserved. Our first proceedings were
commonplace enough. We took a turn up the North Sea and dropped our
trawls for a scrape or two, but, as the average depth is not much over
sixty feet and we were specially fitted for very deep-sea work, it
seemed rather a waste of time. Anyhow, save for familiar table fish,
dog-fish, squids, jelly-fish and some terrigenous bottom deposits of
the usual alluvial clay-mud, we got nothing worth writing home about.
Then we rounded Scotland, sighted the Faroes, and came down the
Wyville-Thomson Ridge, where we had better luck. Thence we worked
south to our proper cruising-ground, which was between the African
coast and these islands. We nearly grounded on Fuert-Eventura one
moonless night, but save for that our voyage was uneventful.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0603271.txt

Kothar Bishop:
During these first weeks I tried to make friends with Maracot, but it
was not easy work. First of all, he is the most absorbed and
absent-minded man in the world. You will remember how you smiled when
he gave the elevator boy a penny under the impression that he was in a
street car. Half the time he is utterly lost in his thoughts, and
seems hardly aware of where he is or what he is doing. Then in the
second place he is secretive to the last degree. He is continually
working at papers and charts, which he shuffles away when I happen to
enter the cabin. It is my firm belief that the man has some secret
project in his mind, but that so long as we are due to touch at any
port he will keep it to himself. That is the impression which I have
received, and I find that Bill Scanlan is of the same opinion.

'Say, Mr. Headley,' said he one evening, when I was seated in the
laboratory testing out the salinity of samples from our hydrographic
soundings, 'what d'you figure out that this guy has in his mind? What
d'you reckon that he means to do?'

'I suppose,' said I, 'that we shall do what the Challenger and a dozen
other exploring ships have done before us, and add a few more species
to the list of fish and a few more entries to the bathymetric chart.'

'Not on your life,' said he. 'If that's your opinion you've got to
guess again. First of all, what am I here for, anyhow?'

'In case the machinery goes wrong,' I hazarded.

'Machinery nothing! The ship's machinery is in charge of MacLaren, the
Scotch engineer. No, sir, it wasn't to run a donkey-engine that the
Merribank folk sent out their star performer. If I pull down fifty
bucks a week it's not for nix. Come here, and I'll make you wise to
it..'

He took a key from his pocket and opened a door at the back of the
laboratory which led us down a companion ladder to a section of the
hold which was cleared right across save for four large glittering
objects half-exposed amid the straw of their huge packing-cases. They
were flat sheets of steel with elaborate bolts and rivets along the
edges. Each sheet was about ten feet square and an inch and a half
thick, with a circular gap of eighteen inches in the middle.

'What in thunder is it?' I asked.

Bill Scanlan's queer face--he looks half-way between a vaudeville
comic and a prize-fighter--broke into a grin at my astonishment.

'That's my baby, sir,' he quoted. 'Yes, Mr. Headley, that's what I am
here for. There is a steel bottom to the thing. It's in that big case
yonder. Then there is a top, kind of arched, and a great ring for a
chain or rope. Now, look here at the bottom of the ship.'

There was a square wooden platform there, with projecting screws at
each corner which showed that it was detachable.

'There is a double bottom,' said Scanlan. 'It may be that this guy is
clean loco, or it may be that he has more in his block than we know,
but if I read him right he means to build up a kind of room--the
windows are in storage here--and lower it through the bottom of the
ship. He's got electric searchlights here, and I allow that he plans
to shine 'em through the round portholes and see what's goin' on
around.'

'He could have put a crystal sheet into the ship, like the Catalina
Island boats, if that was all that was in his mind,' said I.

'You've said a mouthful,' said Bill Scanlan, scratching his head. 'I
can't figger it out nohow. The only one sure thing is, that I've been
sent to be under his orders and to help him with the darn fool thing
all I can. He has said nothin' up to now, so I've said the same, but
I'll just snoop around, and if I wait long enough I'll learn all there
is to know.'

So that was how I first got on to the edge of our mystery. We ran into
some dirty weather after that, and then we got to work doing some
deep-sea trawling north-west of Cape Juba, just outside the
Continental Slope, and taking temperature readings and salinity
records. It's a sporting proposition, this deep-sea dragging with a
Peterson otter trawl gaping twenty feet wide for everything that comes
its way--sometimes down a quarter of a mile and bringing up one lot
of fish, sometimes half a mile and quite a different lot, every
stratum of ocean with its own inhabitants as separate as so many
continents. Sometimes from the bottom we would just bring up half a
ton of clear pink jelly, the raw material of life, or, maybe, it would
be a scoop of pteropod ooze, breaking up under the microscope into
millions of tiny round reticulated balls with amorphous mud between. I
won't bore you with all the brotulids and macrurids, the ascidians and
holothurians and polyzoa and echinoderms--anyhow, you can reckon that
there is a great harvest in the sea, and that we have been diligent
reapers. But always I had the same feeling that the heart of Maracot
was not in the job, and that other plans were in that queer high,
narrow Egyptian mummy of a head. It all seemed to me to be a try-out
of men and things until the real business got going.

I had got as far as this in my letter when I went ashore to have a
last stretch, for we sail in the early morning. It's as well, perhaps,
that I did go, for there was no end of a barney going on upon the
pier, with Maracot and Bill Scanlan right in the heart of it. Bill is
a bit of a scrapper, and has what he calls a mean wallop in both
mitts, but with half a dozen Dagoes with knives all round them things
looked ugly, and it was time that I butted in. It seems that the
Doctor had hired one of the things they call cabs, and had driven half
over the island inspecting the geology, but had clean forgotten that
he had no money on him. When it came to paying, he could not make
these country hicks understand, and the cabman had grabbed his watch
so as to make sure. That brought Bill Scanlan into action, and they
would have both been on the floor with their backs like pin-cushions
if I had not squared the matter up, with a dollar or two over for the
driver and a five-dollar bonus for the chap with the mouse under his
eye. So all ended well, and Maracot was more human than ever I saw him
yet. When we got to the ship he called me into the little cabin which
he reserves for himself and he thanked me.

'By the way, Mr. Headley,' he said, 'I understand that you are not a
married man?'

'No,' said I, 'I am not.'

'No one depending upon you?'

'No.'

'Good!' said he. 'I have not spoken of the object of this voyage
because I have, for my own reasons, desired it to be secret. One of
those reasons was that I feared to be forestalled. When scientific
plans get about one may be served as Scott was served by Amundsen. Had
Scott kept his counsel as I have done, it would be he and not Amundsen
who would have been the first at the South Pole. For my part, I have
quite as important a destination as the South Pole, and so I have been
silent. But now we are on the eve of our great adventure and no rival
has time to steal my plans. Tomorrow we start for our real goal.'

'And what is that?' I asked.

He leaned forward, his ascetic face all lit up with the enthusiasm of
the fanatic.

'Our goal,' said he, 'is the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.'

And right here I ought to stop, for I expect it has taken away your
breath as it did mine. If I were a story-writer, I guess I should
leave it at that. But as I am just a chronicler of what occurred, I
may tell you that I stayed another hour in the cabin of old man
Maracot, and that I learned a lot, which there is still just time for
me to tell you before the last shore boat leaves.

'Yes, young man,' said he, 'you may write freely now, for by the time
your letter reaches England we shall have made the plunge.'

This started him sniggering, for he has a queer dry sense of humour of
his own.

'Yes, sir, the plunge is the right word on this occasion, a plunge
which will be historic in the annals of Science. Let me tell you, in
the first place, that I am well convinced that the current doctrine as
to the extreme pressure of the ocean at great depths is entirely
misleading. It is perfectly clear that other factors exist which
neutralize the effect, though I am not yet prepared to say what those
factors may be. That is one of the problems which we may settle. Now,
what pressure, may I ask, have you been led to expect under a mile of
water?' He glowered at me through his big horn spectacles.

'Not less than a ton to the square inch,' I answered. 'Surely that has
been clearly shown.'

'The task of the pioneer has always been to disprove the thing which
has been clearly shown. Use your brains, young man. You have been for
the last month fishing up some of the most delicate Bathic forms of
life, creatures so delicate that you could hardly transfer them from
the net to the tank without marring their sensitive shapes. Did you
find that there was evidence upon them of this extreme pressure?'

'The pressure,' said I, 'equalized itself. It was the same within as
without.'

'Words--mere words!' he cried, shaking his lean head impatiently.
'You have brought up round fish, such fish as Gastro-stomus globulus.
Would they not have been squeezed flat had the pressure been as you
imagine? Or look at our otter-boards. They are not squeezed together
at the mouth of the trawl.'

'But the experience of divers?'

'Certainly it holds good up to a point. They do find a sufficient
increase of pressure to influence what is perhaps the most sensitive
organ of the body, the interior of the ear. But as I plan it, we shall
not be exposed to any pressure at all. We shall be lowered in a steel
cage with crystal windows on each side for observation. If the
pressure is not strong enough to break in an inch and a half of
toughened double-nickelled steel, then it cannot hurt us. It is an
extension of the experiment of the Williamson Brothers at Nassau, with
which no doubt you are familiar. If my calculation is wrong--well,
you say that no one is dependent upon you. We shall die in a great
adventure. Of course, if you would rather stand clear, I can go
alone.'

Kothar Bishop:
It seemed to me the maddest kind of scheme, and yet you know how
difficult it is to refuse a dare. I played for time while I thought it
over.

'How deep do you propose to go, sir?' I asked.

He had a chart pinned upon the table, and he placed the end of his
compasses upon a point which lies to the south-west of the Canaries.

'Last year I did some sounding in this part,' said he.

'There is a pit of great depth. We got twenty-five thousand feet
there. I was the first to report it. Indeed, I trust that you will
find it on the charts of the future as the "Maracot Deep".'

'But, good God, sir!' I cried, 'you don't propose to descend into an
abyss like that?'

'No, no,' he answered, smiling. 'Neither our lowering chain nor our
air tubes reach beyond half a mile. But I was going to explain to you
that round this deep crevasse, which has no doubt been formed by
volcanic forces long ago, there is a varied ridge or narrow plateau,
which is not more than three hundred fathoms under the surface.'

'Three hundred fathoms! A third of a mile!'

'Yes, roughly a third of a mile. It is my present intention that we
shall be lowered in our little pressure-proof look-out station on to
this submarine bank. There we shall make such observations as we can.
A speaking-tube will connect us with the ship so that we can give our
directions. There should be no difficulty in the mater. When we wish
to be hauled up we have only to say so.'

'And the air?'

'Will be pumped down to us.'

'But it will be pitch-dark.'

'That, I fear, is undoubtedly true. The experiments of Fol and Sarasin
at the Lake of Geneva show that even the ultra-violet rays are absent
at that depth. But does it matter? We shall be provided with the
powerful electric illumination from the ship's engines, supplemented
by six two-volt Hellesens dry cells connected together so as to give a
current of twelve volts. That, with a Lucas army signalling lamp as a
movable reflector, should serve our turn. Any other difficulties?'

'If our air lines tangle?'

'They won't tangle. And as a reserve we have compressed air in tubes
which would last us twenty--four hours. Well, have I satisfied you?
Will you come?'

It was not an easy decision. The brain works quickly and imagination
is a mighty vivid thing. I seemed to realize that black box down in
the primeval depths, to feel the foul twice-breathed air, and then to
see the walls sagging, bulging inwards, rending at the joints with the
water spouting in at every rivet-hole and crevice and crawling up from
below. It was a slow, dreadful death to die. But I looked up, and
there were the old man's fiery eyes fixed upon me with the exaltation
of a martyr to Science. It's catching, that sort of enthusiasm, and if
it be crazy, it is at least noble and unselfish. I caught fire from
his great flame, and I sprang to my feet with my hand out.

'Doctor, I'm with you to the end,' said I.

'I knew it,' said he. 'It was not for your smattering of learning that
I picked you, my young friend, nor,' he added, smiling, 'for your
intimate acquaintance with the pelagic crabs. There are other
qualities which may be more immediately useful, and they are loyalty
and courage.'

So with that little bit of sugar I was dismissed, with my future
pledged and my whole scheme of life in ruins. Well, the last shore
boat is leaving. They are calling for the mail. You will either not
hear from me again, my dear Talbot, or you will get a letter worth
reading. If you don't hear you can have a floating headstone and drop
it somewhere south of the Canaries with the inscription :

'Here, or Hereabouts, lies all that the fishes have left of my friend,
CYRUS J. HEADLEY.'

The second document in the case is the unintelligible wireless message
which was intercepted by several vessels, including the Royal Mail
steamer Arroya. It was received at 3 p.m. October 3rd, 1926, which
shows that it was dispatched only two days after the _Stratford_ left
the Grand Canary, as shown in the previous letter, and it corresponds
roughly with the time when the Norwegian barque saw a steamer founder
in a cyclone two hundred miles to the south-west of Porta de la Luz.
It ran thus :

Blown on our beam ends. Fear position hopeless. Have already lost
Maracot, Headley, Scanlan. Situation incomprehensible. Headley
handkerchief end of deep sea sounding wire. God help us! S. S.
_Stratford_

This was the last, incoherent message which came from the ill-fated
vessel, and part of it was so strange that it was put down to delirium
on the part of the operator. It seemed, however, to leave no doubt as
to the fate of the ship.

The explanation--if it can be accepted as an explanation--of the
matter is to be found in the narrative concealed inside the vitreous
ball, and first it would be as well to amplify the very brief account
which has hitherto appeared in the Press of the finding of the ball. I
take it verbatim from the log of the Arabella Knowles, master Amos
Green, outward bound with coals from Cardiff to Buenos Aires :

'Wednesday, Jan. 5th, 1927. Lat. 27.14, Long. 28 West. Calm weather.
Blue sky with low banks of cirrus clouds. Sea like glass. At two bells
of the middle watch the first officer reported that he had seen a
shining object bound high out of the sea, and then fall back into it.
His first impression was that it was some strange fish, but on
examination with his glasses he observed that it was a silvery globe,
or ball, which was so light that it lay, rather than floated, on the
surface of the water. I was called and saw it, as large as a football,
gleaming brightly about half a mile off on our starboard beam. I
stopped the engines and called away the quarter-boat under the second
mate, who picked the thing up and brought it aboard.

'On examination it proved to be a ball made of some sort of very tough
glass, and filled with a substance so light that when it was tossed in
the air it wavered about like a child's balloon. It was nearly
transparent, and we could see what looked like a roll of paper inside
it. The material was so tough, however, that we had the greatest
possible difficulty in breaking the ball open and getting at the
contents. A hammer would not crack it, and it was only when the chief
engineer nipped it in the throw of the engine that we were able to
smash it. Then I am sorry to say that it dissolved into sparkling
dust, so that it was impossible to collect any good-sized piece for
examination. We got the paper, however, and, having examined it and
concluded that it was of great importance, we laid it aside with the
intention of handing it over to the British Consul when we reached the
Plate River. Man and boy, I have been at sea for five-and-thirty
years, but this is the strangest thing that ever befell me, and so
says every man aboard this ship. I leave the meaning of it all to
wiser heads than mine.'

So much for the genesis of the narrative of Cyrus J. Headley, which we
will now give exactly as written :

Whom am I writing to? Well, I suppose I may say to the whole wide
world, but as that is rather a vague address I'll aim at my friend Sir
James Talbot, of Oxford University, for the reason that my last letter
was to him and this may be regarded as a continuation. I expect the
odds are a hundred to one that this ball, even if it should see the
light of day and not be gulped by a shark in passing, will toss about
on the waves and never catch the eye of the passing sailor, and yet
it's worth trying, and Maracot is sending up another, so, between us,
it may be that we shall get our wonderful story to the world. Whether
the world will believe it is another matter, I guess, but when folk
look at the ball with its vitrine cover and note its contents of
levigen gas, they will surely see for themselves that there is
something here that is out of the ordinary. You at any rate, Talbot,
will not throw it aside unread.

If anyone wants to know how the thing began, and what we were trying
to do, he can find it all in a letter I wrote you on October 1st last
year, the night before we left Porta de la Luz. By George! If I had
known what was in store for us, I think I should have sneaked into a
shore boat that night. And yet--well, maybe, even with my eyes open I
would have stood by the Doctor and seen it through. On second thoughts
I have not a doubt that I would.

Well, starting from the day that we left Grand Canary I will carry on
with my experiences.

The moment we were clear, of the port, old man Maracot fairly broke
into flames. The time for action had come at last and all the
damped-down energy of the man came flaring up. I tell you he took hold
of that ship and of everyone and everything in it, and bent it all to
his will. The dry, creaking, absent-minded scholar had suddenly
vanished, and instead there emerged a human electrical machine,
crackling with vitality and quivering from the great driving force
within. His eyes gleamed behind his glasses like flames in a lantern.
He seemed to be everywhere at once, working out distances on his
chart, comparing reckonings with the skipper, driving Bill Scanlan
along, setting me on to a hundred odd jobs, but it was all full of
method and with a definite end. He developed an unexpected knowledge
of electricity and of mechanics and spent much of his time working at
the machinery which Scanlan, under his supervision, was now carefully
piecing together.

'Say, Mr. Headley, it's just dandy,' said Bill, on the morning of the
second day. 'Come in here and have a look. The Doc. is a regular
fellow and a whale of a slick mechanic.'

Kothar Bishop:
I had a most unpleasant impression that it was my own coffin at which
I was gazing, but, even so, I had to admit that it was a very adequate
mausoleum. The floor had been clamped to the four steel walls, and the
porthole windows screwed into the centre of each. A small trapdoor at
the top gave admission, and there was a second one at the base. The
steel cage was supported by a thin but very powerful steel hawser,
which ran over a drum, and was paid out or rolled in by the strong
engine which we used for our deep-sea trawls. The hawser, as I
understood, was nearly half a mile in length, the slack of it coiled
round bollards on the deck. The rubber breathing-tubes were of the
same length, and the telephone wire was connected with them, and also
the wire by which the electric lights within could be operated from
the ship's batteries, though we had an independent instalment as well.

It was on the evening of that day that the engines were stopped. The
glass was low, and a thick black cloud rising upon the horizon gave
warning of coming trouble. The only ship in sight was a barque flying
the Norwegian colours, and we observed that it was reefed down, as if
expecting trouble. For the moment, however, all was propitious and the
_Stratford_ rolled gently upon a deep blue ocean, white-capped here and
there from the breath of the trade wind. Bill Scanlan came to me in my
laboratory with more show of excitement than his easy-going
temperament had ever permitted him to show.

'Look it here, Mr. Headley,' said he, 'they've lowered that
contraption into a well in the bottom of the ship. D'you figure that
the Boss is going down in it?'

'Certain sure, Bill. And I am going with him.'

'Well, well, you are sure bughouse, the two of you, to think of such a
thing. But I'd feel a cheap skate if I let you go alone.'

'It is no business of yours, Bill.!

'Well, I just feel that it is. Sure, I'd be as yellow as a Chink with
the jaundice if I let you go alone. Merribanks sent me here to look
after the machinery, and if the machinery is down at the bottom of the
sea, then it's a sure thing that it's me for the bottom. Where those
steel castings are--that's the address of Bill Scanlan--whether the
folk round him are crazy or no.'

It was useless to argue with him, so one more was added to our little
suicide club and we just waited for our orders.

All night they were hard at work upon the fittings, and it was after
an early breakfast that we descended into the hold ready for our
adventure. The steel cage had been half lowered into the false bottom,
and we now descended one by one through the upper trap-door, which was
closed and screwed down behind us, Captain Howie with a most
lugubrious face having shaken hands with each of us as we passed him.
We were then lowered a few more feet, the shutter drawn above our
heads, and the water admitted to test how far we were really
seaworthy. The cage stood the trial well, every joint fitted exactly,
and there was no sign of any leakage. Then the lower flap in the hold
was loosened and we hung suspended in the ocean beneath the level of
the keel.

It was really a very snug little room, and I marvelled at the skill
and foresight with which everything had been arranged. The electric
illumination had not been turned on, but the semi--tropical sun shone
brightly through the bottle-green water at either porthole. Some small
fish were flickering here and there, streaks of silver against the
green background. Inside there was a settee round the little room,
with a bathymetric dial, a thermometer, and other instruments ranged
above it. Beneath the settee was a row of pipes which represented our
reserve supply of compressed air in case the tubes should fail us.
Those tubes opened out above our heads, and the telephonic apparatus
hung beside them. We could all hear the mournful voice of the captain
outside.

'Are you really determined to go?' he asked.

'We are quite all right,' the Doctor answered, impatiently. 'You will
lower slowly and have someone at the receiver all the time. I will
report conditions. When we reach the bottom, remain as you are until I
give instructions. It will not do to put too much strain upon the
hawser, but a slow movement of a couple of knots an hour should be
well within its strength. And now "Lower away!" '

He yelled out the two words with the scream of a lunatic. It was the
supreme moment of his life, the fruition of all his brooding dreams.
For an instant I was shaken by the thought that we were really in the
power of a cunning, plausible monomaniac. Bill Scanlan had the same
thought, for he looked across at me with a rueful grin and touched his
forehead. But after that one wild outburst our leader was instantly
his sober, self-contained self once more. Indeed, one had but to look
at the order and forethought which showed itself in every detail
around us to be reassured as to the power of his mind.

But now all our attention was diverted to the wonderful new experience
which every instant was providing. Slowly the cage was sinking into
the depths of the ocean. Light green water turned to dark olive. That
again deepened into a wonderful blue, a rich deep blue gradually
thickening to a dusky purple. Lower and lower we sank--a hundred
feet, two hundred feet, three hundred. The valves were acting to
perfection. Our breathing was as free and natural as upon the deck of
the vessel. Slowly the bathymeter needle moved round the luminous
dial. Four hundred, five hundred, six hundred. 'How are you?' roared
an anxious voice from above us.

'Nothing could be better,' cried Maracot in reply. But the light was
failing. There was now only a dim grey twilight which rapidly changed
to utter darkness. 'Stop her!' shouted our leader. We ceased to move
and hung suspended at seven hundred feet below the surface of the
ocean. I heard the click of the switch, and the next instant we were
flooded with glorious golden light which poured out through each of
our side windows and sent long glimmering vistas into the waste of
waters round us. With our faces against the thick glass, each at our
own porthole, we gazed out into such a prospect as man had never seen.

Up to now we had known these strata by the sight of the few fish which
had been too slow to avoid our clumsy trawl, or too stupid to escape a
drag-net. Now we saw the wonderful world of water as it really was. If
the object of creation was the production of man, it is strange that
the ocean is so much more populous than the land. Broadway on a
Saturday night, Lombard Street on a week-day afternoon, are not more
crowded than the great sea spaces which lay before us. We had passed
those surface strata where fish are either colourless or of the true
maritime tints of ultramarine above and silver below. Here there were
creatures of every conceivable tint and form which pelagic life can
show. Delicate leptocephali or eel larva shot like streaks of
burnished silver across the tunnel of radiance. The slow snake-like
form of muroena, the deepsea lamprey, writhed and twisted by, or the
black ceratia, all spikes and mouth, gaped foolishly back at our
peering faces. Sometimes it was the squat cuttlefish which drifted
across and glanced at us with human sinister eyes, sometimes it was
some crystal-clear pelagic form of life, cystoma or glaucus, which
lent a flower--like charm to the scene. One huge caranx, or horse
mackerel, butted savagely again and again against our window until the
dark shadow of a seven-foot shark came across him, and he vanished
into its gaping jaws. Dr. Maracot sat entranced, his notebook upon his
knee, scribbling down his observations and keeping up a muttered
monologue of scientific comment. 'What's that? What's that?' I would
hear. 'Yes, yes, chimoera mirabilis as taken by the Michael Sars. Dear
me, there is lepidion, but a new species as I should judge. Observe
that macrurus, Mr. Headley; its colouring is quite different to what
we get in the net.' Once only was he taken quite aback. It was when a
long oval object shot with great speed past his window from above, and
left a vibrating tail behind it which extended as far as we could see
above us and below. I admit that I was as puzzled for the moment as
the Doctor, and it was Bill Scanlan who solved the mystery.

'I guess that boob, John Sweeney, has heaved his lead alongside of us.
Kind of a joke, maybe, to prevent us from feeling lonesome.'

'To be sure! To be sure!' said Maracot, sniggering. 'Plumbus
longicaudatus--a new genus, Mr. Headley, with a piano-wire tail and
lead in its nose. But, indeed, it is very necessary they should take
soundings so as to keep above the bank, which is circumscribed in
size. All well, Captain!' he shouted. 'You may drop us down.'

Kothar Bishop:
And down we went. Dr. Maracot turned off the electric light and all
was pitch-darkness once more save for the bathymeter's luminous face,
which ticked off our steady fall. There was a gentle sway, but
otherwise we were hardly conscious of any motion. Only that moving
hand upon the dial told us of our terrific, our inconceivable,
position. Now we were at the thousand-foot level, and the air had
become distinctly foul. Scanlan oiled the valve of the discharge tube
and things were better. At fifteen hundred feet we stopped and swung
in mid-ocean with our lights blazing once more. Some great dark mass
passed us here, but whether swordfish or deep-sea shark, or monster of
unknown breed, was more than we could determine. The Doctor hurriedly
turned off the lights. 'There lies our chief danger,' said he; 'there
are creatures in the deep before whose charge this steel-plated room
would have as much chance as a beehive before the rush of a
rhinoceros.'

'Whales, maybe,' said Scanlan.

'Whales may sound to a great depth,' the savant answered. 'A Greenland
whale has been known to take out nearly a mile of line in a
perpendicular dive. But unless hurt or badly frightened no whale would
descend so low. It may have been a giant squid: They are found at
every level.'

'Well, I guess squids are too soft to hurt us. The laugh would be with
the squid if he could claw a hole in Merribanks' nickel steel.'

'Their bodies may be soft,' the Professor answered, 'but the beak of a
large squid would sheer through a bar of iron, and one peck of that
beak might go through these inch-thick windows as if they were
parchment.'

'Gee Whittaker!' cried Bill, as we resumed our downward journey.

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.

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