The lieutenant stood in front of the steel sphere and gnawed a piece of
pine splinter. “What do you think of it, Steevens?” he asked.
“It’s an idea,” said Steevens, in the tone of one who keeps an open
mind.
“I believe it will smash—flat,” said the lieutenant.
“He seems to have calculated it all out pretty well,” said Steevens,
still impartial.
“But think of the pressure,” said the lieutenant. “At the surface of the
water it’s fourteen pounds to the inch, thirty feet down it’s double
that; sixty, treble; ninety, four times; nine hundred, forty times; five
thousand three hundred—that’s a mile—it’s two hundred and forty times
fourteen pounds; that’s—let’s see—thirty hundredweight—a ton and a half,
Steevens; _a ton and a half_ to the square inch. And the ocean where
he’s going is five miles deep. That’s seven and a half—”
“Sounds a lot,” said Steevens, “but it’s jolly thick steel.”
The lieutenant made no answer, but resumed his pine splinter. The object
of their conversation was a huge globe of steel, having an exterior
diameter of perhaps eight feet. It looked like the shot for some Titanic
piece of artillery. It was elaborately nested in a monstrous scaffolding
built into the framework of the vessel, and the gigantic spars that were
presently to sling it overboard gave the stern of the ship an appearance
that had raised the curiosity of every decent sailor who had sighted it,
from the pool of London to the Tropic of Capricorn. In two places, one
above the other, the steel gave place to a couple of circular windows of
enormously thick glass, and one of these, set in a steel frame of great
solidity, was now partially unscrewed. Both the men had seen the
interior of this globe for the first time that morning. It was
elaborately padded with air cushions, with little studs sunk between
bulging pillows to work the simple mechanism of the affair. Everything
was elaborately padded, even the Myer’s apparatus which was to absorb
carbonic acid and replace the oxygen inspired by its tenant, when he had
crept in by the glass manhole, and had been screwed in. It was so
elaborately padded that a man might have been fired from a gun in it
with perfect safety. And it had need to be, for presently a man was to
crawl in through that glass manhole, to be screwed up tightly, and to be
flung overboard, and to sink down—down—down, for five miles, even as the
lieutenant said. It had taken the strongest hold of his imagination; it
made him a bore at mess; and he found Steevens, the new arrival aboard,
a godsend to talk to about it, over and over again.
“It’s my opinion,” said the lieutenant, “that that glass will simply
bend in and bulge and smash, under a pressure of that sort. Daubrée has
made rocks run like water under big pressures—and, you mark my words—”
“If the glass did break in,” said Steevens, “what then?”
“The water would shoot in like a jet of iron. Have you ever felt a
straight jet of high pressure water? It would hit as hard as a bullet.
It would simply smash him and flatten him. It would tear down his
throat, and into his lungs; it would blow in his ears—”
“What a detailed imagination you have,” protested Steevens, who saw
things vividly.
“It’s a simple statement of the inevitable,” said the lieutenant.
“And the globe?”
“Would just give out a few little bubbles, and it would settle down,
comfortably against the day of judgment, among the oozes and the bottom
clay—with poor Elstead spread over his own smashed cushions like butter
over bread.”
He repeated this sentence as though he liked it very much. “Like butter
over bread,” he said.
“Having a look at the jigger?” said a voice behind them, and Elstead
stood behind them, spick and span in white, with a cigarette between his
teeth, and his eyes smiling out of the shadow of his ample hat-brim.
“What’s that about bread and butter, Weybridge? Grumbling as usual about
the insufficient pay of naval officers? It won’t be more than a day now
before I start. We are to get the slings ready to-day. This clean sky
and gentle swell is just the kind of thing for swinging off twenty tons
of lead and iron; isn’t it?”
“It won’t affect you much,” said Weybridge.
“No. Seventy or eighty feet down, and I shall be there in a dozen
seconds, there’s not a particle moving, though the wind shriek itself
hoarse up above, and the water lifts halfway to the clouds. No. Down
there—.” He moved to the side of the ship and the other two followed
him. All three leant forward on their elbows and stared down into the
yellow-green water.
“_Peace_,” said Elstead, finishing his thought aloud.
“Are you dead certain that clockwork will act?” asked Weybridge,
presently.
“It has worked thirty-five times,” said Elstead. “It’s bound to work.”
“But if it doesn’t?”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t go down in that confounded thing,” said Weybridge, “for
twenty thousand pounds.”
“Cheerful chap you are,” said Elstead, and spat sociably at a bubble
below.
“I don’t understand yet how you mean to work the thing,” said Steevens.
“In the first place I’m screwed into the sphere,” said Elstead, “and
when I’ve turned the electric light off and on three times to show I’m
cheerful, I’m swung out over the stern by that crane, with all those big
lead sinkers slung below me. The top lead weight has a roller carrying a
hundred fathoms of strong cord rolled up, and that’s all that joins the
sinkers to the sphere, except the slings that will be cut when the
affair is dropped. We use cord rather than wire rope because it’s easier
to cut and more buoyant—necessary points as you will see.
“Through each of these lead weights you notice there is a hole, and an
iron rod will be run through that and will project six feet on the lower
side. If that rod is rammed up from below it knocks up a lever and sets
the clockwork in motion at the side of the cylinder on which the cord
winds.
“Very well. The whole affair is lowered gently into the water, and the
slings are cut. The sphere floats—with the air in it, it’s lighter than
water; but the lead weights go down straight and the cord runs out. When
the cord is all paid out, the sphere will go down too, pulled down by
the cord.”
“But why the cord?” asked Steevens. “Why not fasten the weights directly
to the sphere?”
“Because of the smash down below. The whole affair will go rushing down,
mile after mile, at a headlong pace at last. It would be knocked to
pieces on the bottom if it wasn’t for that cord. But the weights will
hit the bottom, and directly they do the buoyancy of the sphere will
come into play. It will go on sinking slower and slower; come to a stop
at last and then begin to float upward again.
“That’s where the clockwork comes in. Directly the weights smash against
the sea bottom, the rod will be knocked through and will kick up the
clockwork, and the cord will be rewound on the reel. I shall be lugged
down to the sea bottom. There I shall stay for half an hour, with the
electric light on, looking about me. Then the clockwork will release a
spring knife, the cord will be cut, and up I shall rush again, like a
soda-water bubble. The cord itself will help the flotation.”
“And if you should chance to hit a ship?” said Weybridge.
“I should come up at such a pace, I should go clean through it,” said
Elstead, “like a cannon ball. You needn’t worry about that.”
“And suppose some nimble crustacean should wriggle into your clockwork—”
“It would be a pressing sort of invitation for me to stop,” said
Elstead, turning his back on the water and staring at the sphere.
* * * * *
They had swung Elstead overboard by eleven o’clock. The day was serenely
bright and calm, with the horizon lost in haze. The electric glare in
the little upper compartment beamed cheerfully three times. Then they
let him down slowly to the surface of the water, and a sailor in the
stern chains hung ready to cut the tackle that held the lead weights and
the sphere together. The globe, which had looked so large on deck,
looked the smallest thing conceivable under the stern of the ship. It
rolled a little, and its two dark windows, which floated uppermost,
seemed like eyes turned up in round wonderment at the people who crowded
the rail. A voice wondered how Elstead liked the rolling. “Are you
ready?” sang out the Commander. “Aye, aye, sir!” “Then let her go!”
The rope of the tackle tightened against the blade and was cut, and an
eddy rolled over the globe in a grotesquely helpless fashion. Some one
waved a handkerchief, some one else tried an ineffectual cheer, a middy
was counting slowly: “Eight, nine, ten!” Another roll, then with a jerk
and a splash the thing righted itself.
It seemed to be stationary for a moment, to grow rapidly smaller, and
then the water closed over it, and it became visible, enlarged by
refraction and dimmer, below the surface. Before one could count three
it had disappeared. There was a flicker of white light far down in the
water, that diminished to a speck and vanished. Then there was nothing
but a depth of water going down into blackness, through which a shark
was swimming.
Then suddenly the screw of the cruiser began to rotate, the water was
crickled, the shark disappeared in a wrinkled confusion, and a torrent
of foam rushed across the crystalline clearness that had swallowed up
Elstead. “What’s the idee?” said one A. B. to another.
“We’re going to lay off about a couple of miles, ’fear he should hit us
when he comes up,” said his mate.
The ship steamed slowly to her new position. Aboard her almost every one
who was unoccupied remained watching the breathing swell into which the
sphere had sunk. For the next half hour it is doubtful if a word was
spoken that did not bear directly or indirectly on Elstead. The December
sun was now high in the sky, and the heat very considerable.
“He’ll be cold enough down there,” said Weybridge. “They say that below
a certain depth sea-water’s always just about freezing.”
“Where’ll he come up?” asked Steevens. “I’ve lost my bearings.”
“That’s the spot,” said the Commander, who prided himself on his
omniscience. He extended a precise finger south-eastward. “And this, I
reckon, is pretty nearly the moment,” he said. “He’s been thirty-five
minutes.”
“How long does it take to reach the bottom of the ocean?” asked
Steevens.
“For a depth of five miles, and reckoning—as we did—an acceleration to
two foot per second, both ways, is just about three-quarters of a
minute.”
“Then he’s overdue,” said Weybridge.
“Pretty nearly,” said the Commander. “I suppose it takes a few minutes
for that cord of his to wind in.”
“I forgot that,” said Weybridge, evidently relieved.
And then began the suspense. A minute slowly dragged itself out, and no
sphere shot out of the water. Another followed, and nothing broke the
low oily swell. The sailors explained to one another that little point
about the winding-in of the cord. The rigging was dotted with expectant
faces. “Come up, Elstead!” called one hairy-chested salt, impatiently,
and the others caught it up, and shouted as though they were waiting for
the curtain of a theatre to rise.
The Commander glanced irritably at them.
“Of course, if the acceleration’s less than two,” he said, “he’ll be all
the longer. We aren’t absolutely certain that was the proper figure. I’m
no slavish believer in calculations.”
Steevens agreed concisely. No one on the quarter-deck spoke for a couple
of minutes. Then Steevens’s watch-case clicked.
When, twenty-one minutes after, the sun reached the zenith, they were
still waiting for the globe to reappear, and not a man aboard had dared
to whisper that hope was dead. It was Weybridge who first gave
expression to that realisation. He spoke while the sound of eight bells
still hung in the air. “I always distrusted that window,” he said quite
suddenly to Steevens.
“Good God!” said Steevens, “you don’t think—”
“Well!” said Weybridge, and left the rest to his imagination.
“I’m no great believer in calculations myself,” said the Commander,
dubiously, “so that I’m not altogether hopeless yet.” And at midnight
the gunboat was steaming slowly in a spiral round the spot where the
globe had sunk, and the white beam of the electric light fled and halted
and swept discontentedly onward again over the waste of phosphorescent
waters under the little stars.
“If his window hasn’t burst and smashed him,” said Weybridge, “then it’s
a cursed sight worse, for his clockwork has gone wrong and he’s alive
now, five miles under our feet, down there in the cold and dark,
anchored in that little bubble of his, where never a ray of light has
shone or a human being lived, since the waters were gathered together.
He’s there without food, feeling hungry and thirsty and scared,
wondering whether he’ll starve or stifle. Which will it be? The Myer’s
apparatus is running out, I suppose. How long do they last?
“Good Heavens!” he exclaimed, “what little things we are! What daring
little devils! Down there, miles and miles of water—all water, and all
this empty water about us and this sky. Gulfs!” He threw his hands out,
and as he did so a little white streak swept noiselessly up the sky,
travelling more slowly, stopped, became a motionless dot as though a new
star had fallen up into the sky. Then it went sliding back again and
lost itself amidst the reflections of the stars, and the white haze of
the sea’s phosphorescence.
At the sight he stopped, arm extended and mouth open. He shut his mouth,
opened it again and waved his arms with an impatient gesture. Then he
turned, shouted, “Elstead ahoy,” to the first watch, and went at a run
to Lindley and the search light. “I saw him,” he said. “Starboard there!
His light’s on and he’s just shot out of the water. Bring the light
round. We ought to see him drifting, when he lifts on the swell.”
But they never picked up the explorer until dawn. Then they almost ran
him down. The crane was swung out and a boat’s crew hooked the chain to
the sphere. When they had shipped the sphere they unscrewed the manhole
and peered into the darkness of the interior (for the electric light
chamber was intended to illuminate the water about the sphere, and was
shut off entirely from its general cavity).
The air was very hot within the cavity, and the india-rubber at the lip
of the manhole was soft. There was no answer to their eager questions
and no sound of movement within. Elstead seemed to be lying motionless,
crumpled up in the bottom of the globe. The ship’s doctor crawled in and
lifted him out to the men outside. For a moment or so they did not know
whether Elstead was alive or dead. His face, in the yellow glow of the
ship’s lamps, glistened with perspiration. They carried him down to his
own cabin.
He was not dead they found, but in a state of absolute nervous collapse,
and besides cruelly bruised. For some days he had to lie perfectly
still. It was a week before he could tell his experiences.
Almost his first words were that he was going down again. The sphere
would have to be altered, he said, in order to allow him to throw off
the cord if need be, and that was all. He had had the most marvellous
experience. “You thought I should find nothing but ooze,” he said. “You
laughed at my explorations, and I’ve discovered a new world!” He told
his story in disconnected fragments, and chiefly from the wrong end, so
that it is impossible to re-tell it in his words. But what follows is
the narrative of his experience.
It began atrociously, he said. Before the cord ran out the thing kept
rolling over. He felt like a frog in a football. He could see nothing
but the crane and the sky overhead, with an occasional glimpse of the
people on the ship’s rail. He couldn’t tell a bit which way the thing
would roll next. Suddenly he would find his feet going up and try to
step, and over he went rolling, head over heels and just anyhow on the
padding. Any other shape would have been more comfortable, but no other
shape was to be relied upon under the huge pressure of the nethermost
abyss.
Suddenly the swaying ceased; the globe righted, and when he had picked
himself up, he saw the water all about him greeny-blue with an
attenuated light filtering down from above, and a shoal of little
floating things went rushing up past him, as it seemed to him, towards
the light. And even as he looked it grew darker and darker, until the
water above was as dark as the midnight sky, albeit of a greener shade,
and the water below black. And little transparent things in the water
developed a faint glint of luminosity, and shot past him in faint
greenish streaks.
And the feeling of falling! It was just like the start of a lift, he
said, only it kept on. One has to imagine what that means, that keeping
on. It was then of all times that Elstead repented of his adventure. He
saw the chances against him in an altogether new light. He thought of
the big cuttle-fish people knew to exist in the middle waters, the kind
of things they find half-digested in whales at times, or floating dead
and rotten and half eaten by fish. Suppose one caught hold and wouldn’t
leave go. And had the clockwork really been sufficiently tested? But
whether he wanted to go on or go back mattered not the slightest now.
In fifty seconds everything was as black as night outside, except where
the beam from his light struck through the waters, and picked out every
now and then some fish or scrap of sinking matter. They flashed by too
fast for him to see what they were. Once he thought he passed a shark.
And then the sphere began to get hot by friction against the water. They
had underestimated this, it seems.
The first thing he noticed was that he was perspiring, and then he heard
a hissing, growing louder, under his feet, and saw a lot of little
bubbles—very little bubbles they were—rushing upward like a fan through
the water outside. Steam! He felt the window and it was hot. He turned
on the minute glow lamp that lit his own cavity, looked at the padded
watch by the studs, and saw he had been travelling now for two minutes.
It came into his head that the window would crack through the conflict
of temperatures, for he knew the bottom water was very near freezing.
Then suddenly the floor of the sphere seemed to press against his feet,
the rush of bubbles outside grew slower and slower and the hissing
diminished. The sphere rolled a little. The window had not cracked,
nothing had given, and he knew that the dangers of sinking, at any rate,
were over.
In another minute or so, he would be on the floor of the abyss. He
thought, he said, of Steevens and Weybridge and the rest of them five
miles overhead, higher to him than the very highest clouds that ever
floated over land are to us, steaming slowly and staring down and
wondering what had happened to him.
He peered out of the window. There were no more bubbles now, and the
hissing had stopped. Outside there was a heavy blackness—as black as
black velvet—except where the electric light pierced the empty water and
showed the colour of it—a yellow-green. Then three things like shapes of
fire swam into sight, following each other through the water. Whether
they were little and near, or big and far off, he could not tell.
Each was outlined in a bluish light almost as bright as the lights of a
fishing-smack, a light which seemed to be smoking greatly, and all along
the sides of them were specks of this, like the lighted portholes of a
ship. Their phosphorescence seemed to go out as they came into the
radiance of his lamp, and he saw then that they were indeed fish of some
strange sort, with huge heads, vast eyes, and dwindling bodies and
tails. Their eyes were turned towards him, and he judged they were
following him down. He supposed they were attracted by his glare.
Presently others of the same sort joined them. As he went on down he
noticed that the water became of a pallid colour, and that little specks
twinkled in his ray like motes in sunbeam. This was probably due to the
clouds of ooze and mud that the impact of his leaden sinkers had
disturbed.
By the time he was drawn down to the lead weights he was in a dense fog
of white that his electric light failed altogether to pierce for more
than a few yards, and many minutes elapsed before the hanging sheets of
sediment subsided to any extent. Then, lit by his light and by the
transient phosphorescence of a distant shoal of fishes, he was able to
see under the huge blackness of the super-incumbent water an undulating
expanse of greyish-white ooze, broken here and there by tangled thickets
of a growth of sea lilies, waving hungry tentacles in the air.
Farther away were the graceful translucent outlines of a group of
gigantic sponges. About this floor there were scattered a number of
bristling flattish tufts of rich purple and black, which he decided must
be some sort of sea-urchin, and small, large-eyed or blind things,
having a curious resemblance, some to woodlice, and others to lobsters,
crawled sluggishly across the track of the light and vanished into the
obscurity again, leaving furrowed trails behind them.
Then suddenly the hovering swarm of little fishes veered about and came
towards him as a flight of starlings might do. They passed over him like
a phosphorescent snow, and then he saw behind them some larger creature
advancing towards the sphere.
At first he could see it only dimly, a faintly moving figure remotely
suggestive of a walking man, and then it came into the spray of light
that the lamp shot out. As the glare struck it, it shut its eyes,
dazzled. He stared in rigid astonishment.
It was a strange, vertebrated animal. Its dark purple head was dimly
suggestive of a chameleon, but it had such a high forehead and such a
brain-case as no reptile ever displayed before; the vertical pitch of
its face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.
Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon
fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its
little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill covers,
and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments, almost
like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess.
But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about
the creature. It was a biped, its almost globular body was poised on a
tripod of two frog-like legs and a long thick tail, and its fore limbs,
which grotesquely caricatured the human hand much as a frog’s do,
carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper. The colour of the
creature was variegated: its head, hands, and legs were purple; but its
skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes might do, was a
phosphorescent grey. And it stood there, blinded by the light.
At last this unknown creature of the abyss blinked its eyes open, and,
shading them with its disengaged hand, opened its mouth and gave vent to
a shouting noise, articulate almost as speech might be, that penetrated
even the steel case and padded jacket of the sphere. How a shouting may
be accomplished without lungs Elstead does not profess to explain. It
then moved sideways out of the glare into the mystery of shadow that
bordered it on either side, and Elstead felt rather than saw that it was
coming towards him. Fancying the light had attracted it, he turned the
switch that cut off the current. In another moment something soft dabbed
upon the steel, and the globe swayed.
Then the shouting was repeated, and it seemed to him that a distant echo
answered it. The dabbing recurred, and the globe swayed and ground
against the spindle over which the wire was rolled. He stood in the
blackness, and peered out into the everlasting night of the abyss. And
presently he saw, very faint and remote, other phosphorescent
quasi-human forms hurrying towards him.
Hardly knowing what he did, he felt about in his swaying prison for the
stud of the exterior electric light, and came by accident against his
own small glow lamp in its padded recess. The sphere twisted, and then
threw him down; he heard shouts like shouts of surprise, and when he
rose to his feet he saw two pairs of stalked eyes peering into the lower
window and reflecting his light.
In another moment hands were dabbing vigorously at his steel casing, and
there was a sound, horrible enough in his position, of the metal
protection of the clockwork being vigorously hammered. That, indeed,
sent his heart into his mouth, for if these strange creatures succeeded
in stopping that his release would never occur. Scarcely had he thought
as much when he felt the sphere sway violently, and the floor of it
press hard against his feet. He turned off the small glow lamp that lit
the interior, and sent the ray of the large light in the separate
compartment out into the water. The sea floor and the manlike creatures
had disappeared, and a couple of fish chasing each other dropped
suddenly by the window.
He thought at once that these strange denizens of the deep sea had
broken the wire rope, and that he had escaped. He drove up faster and
faster, and then stopped with a jerk that sent him flying against the
padded roof of his prison. For half a minute perhaps he was too
astonished to think.
Then he felt that the sphere was spinning slowly, and rocking, and it
seemed to him that it was also being drawn through the water. By
crouching close to the window he managed to make his weight effective
and roll that part of the sphere downward, but he could see nothing save
the pale ray of his light striking down ineffectively into the darkness.
It occurred to him that he would see more if he turned the lamp off and
allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the profound obscurity.
In this he was wise. After some minutes the velvety blackness became a
translucent blackness, and then far away, and as faint as the zodiacal
light of an English summer evening, he saw shapes moving below. He
judged these creatures had detached his cable and were towing him along
the sea bottom.
And then he saw something faint and remote across the undulations of the
submarine plain, a broad horizon of pale luminosity that extended this
way and that way as far as the range of his little window permitted him
to see. To this he was being towed, as a balloon might be towed by men
out of the open country into a town. He approached it very slowly, and
very slowly the dim irradiation was gathered together into more definite
shapes.
It was nearly five o’clock before he came over this luminous area, and
by that time he could make out an arrangement suggestive of streets and
houses grouped about a vast roofless erection that was grotesquely
suggestive of a ruined abbey. It was spread out like a map below him.
The houses were all roofless inclosures of walls, and their substance
being, as he afterwards saw, of phosphorescent bones, gave the place an
appearance as if it were built of drowned moonshine.
Among the inner caves of the place waving trees of crinoid stretched
their tentacles, and tall, slender, glassy sponges shot like shining
minarets and lilies of filmy light out of the general glow of the city.
In the open spaces of the place he could see a stirring movement as of
crowds of people, but he was too many fathoms above them to distinguish
the individuals in those crowds.
Then slowly they pulled him down, and as they did so the details of the
place crept slowly upon his apprehension. He saw that the courses of the
cloudy buildings were marked out with beaded lines of round objects, and
then he perceived that at several points below him in broad open spaces
were forms like the encrusted shapes of ships.
Slowly and surely he was drawn down, and the forms below him became
brighter, clearer, were more distinct. He was being pulled down, he
perceived, towards the large building in the centre of the town, and he
could catch a glimpse ever and again of the multitudinous forms that
were lugging at his cord. He was astonished to see that the rigging of
one of the ships, which formed such a prominent feature of the place,
was crowded with a host of gesticulating figures regarding him, and then
the walls of the great building rose about him silently, and hid the
city from his eyes.
And such walls they were, of water-logged wood, and twisted wire rope
and iron spars, and copper, and the bones and skulls of dead men.
The skulls ran in curious zigzag lines and spirals and fantastic curves
over the building; and in and out of their eye-sockets, and over the
whole surface of the place, lurked and played a multitude of silvery
little fishes.
And now he was at such a level that he could see these strange people of
the abyss plainly once more. To his astonishment, he perceived that they
were prostrating themselves before him, all save one, dressed as it
seemed in a robe of placoid scales, and crowned with a luminous diadem,
who stood with his reptilian mouth opening and shutting as though he led
the chanting of the worshippers.
They continued worshipping him, without rest or intermission, for the
space of three hours.
Most circumstantial was Elstead’s account of this astounding city and
its people, these people of perpetual night, who have never seen sun or
moon or stars, green vegetation, nor any living air-breathing creatures,
who know nothing of fire, nor any light but the phosphorescent light of
living things.
Startling as is his story, it is yet more startling to find that
scientific men, of such eminence as Adams and Jenkins, find nothing
incredible in it. They tell me they see no reason why intelligent,
water-breathing, vertebrated creatures inured to a low temperature and
enormous pressure, and of such a heavy structure, that neither alive nor
dead would they float, might not live upon the bottom of the deep sea,
and quite unsuspected by us, descendants like ourselves of the great
Theriomorpha of the New Red Sandstone age.
We should be known to them, however, as strange meteoric creatures wont
to fall catastrophically dead out of the mysterious blackness of their
watery sky. And not only we ourselves, but our ships, our metals, our
appliances, would come raining down out of the night. Sometimes sinking
things would smite down and crush them, as if it were the judgment of
some unseen power above, and sometimes would come things of the utmost
rarity or utility or shapes of inspiring suggestion. One can understand,
perhaps, something of their behaviour at the descent of a living man, if
one thinks what a barbaric people might do, to whom an enhaloed shining
creature came suddenly out of the sky.
At one time or another Elstead probably told the officers of the
_Ptarmigan_ every detail of his strange twelve hours in the abyss. That
he also intended to write them down is certain, but he never did, and so
unhappily we have to piece together the discrepant fragments of his
story from the reminiscences of Commander Simmons, Weybridge, Steevens,
Lindley, and the others.
We see the thing darkly in fragmentary glimpses—the huge ghostly
building, the bowing, chanting people, with their dark, chameleon-like
heads and faintly luminous forms, and Elstead, with his light turned on
again, vainly trying to convey to their minds that the cord by which the
sphere was held was to be severed. Minute after minute slipped away, and
Elstead, looking at his watch, was horrified to find that he had oxygen
only for four hours more. But the chant in his honour kept on as
remorselessly as if it was the marching song of his approaching death.
The manner of his release he does not understand, but to judge by the
end of cord that hung from the sphere, it had been cut through by
rubbing against the edge of the altar. Abruptly the sphere rolled over,
and he swept up, out of their world, as an ethereal creature clothed in
a vacuum would sweep through our own atmosphere back to its native ether
again. He must have torn out of their sight as a hydrogen bubble hastens
upwards from our air. A strange ascension it must have seemed to them.
The sphere rushed up with even greater velocity than, when weighed with
the lead sinkers, it had rushed down. It became exceedingly hot. It
drove up with the windows uppermost, and he remembers the torrent of
bubbles frothing against the glass. Every moment he expected this to
fly. Then suddenly something like a huge wheel seemed to be released in
his head, the padded compartment began spinning about him, and he
fainted. His next recollection was of his cabin, and of the doctor’s
voice.
But that is the substance of the extraordinary story that Elstead
related in fragments to the officers of the _Ptarmigan_. He promised to
write it all down at a later date. His mind was chiefly occupied with
the improvement of his apparatus, which was effected at Rio.
It remains only to tell that on February 2d, 1896, he made his second
descent into the ocean abyss, with the improvements his first experience
suggested. What happened we shall probably never know. He never
returned. The _Ptarmigan_ beat about over the point of his submersion,
seeking him in vain for thirteen days. Then she returned to Rio, and the
news was telegraphed to his friends. So the matter remains for the
present. But it is hardly probable that any further attempt will be made
to verify his strange story of these hitherto unsuspected cities of the
deep sea.