by Various
Jetta of the Lowlands
BEGINNING A THREE-PART NOVEL
By Ray Cummings
_Foreword_
_Have you ever stood on the seashore, with the breakers rolling at yourfeet, and imagined what the scene would be like if the ocean water weregone? I have had a vision of that many times. Standing on the AtlanticCoast, gazing out toward Spain, I can envisage myself, not down at thesea-level, but upon the brink of a height. Spain and the coast ofEurope, off there upon another height._
[Sidenote: Fantastic and sinister are the Lowlands into which PhilipGrant descends on his dangerous assignment.]
_And the depths between? Unreal landscape! Mysterious realm which now wecall the bottom of the sea! Worn and rounded crags; bloated mud-plains;noisome reaches of ooze which once were the cold and dark and silentocean floor, caked and drying in the sun. And off to the south thelittle fairy mountain tops of the West Indies rearing their verduredcrowns aloft._
"Look around, Chief. See where I am?"]
_If the ocean water were gone! Can you picture it? A new world, greaterin area than all the land we now have. They would call the formersea-level the zero-height, perhaps. The depths would go down as farbeneath it as Mount Everest towers above it. Aeroplanes would fly downinto them._
_And I can imagine the settlement of these vast new realms: New littlenations being created, born of man's indomitable will to conquer everyadverse condition of inhospitable nature._
_A novel setting for a story of adventure. It seems so to me. Can yousay that the oceans will never drain of their water? That an earthquakewill not open a rift--some day in the future--and lower the water intosubterranean caverns? The volume of water of all the oceans is no moreto the volume of the earth than a tissue paper wrapping on an orange._
_Is it too great a fantasy? Why, reading the facts of what happened in1929, it is already prognosticated. The fishing banks off the Coast ofNewfoundland have suddenly sunk. Cable ships repairing a broken cable,snapped by the earthquake of November 18th, 1929, report that fordistances of a hundred miles on the Grand Banks the cables havedisappeared into unfathomable depths. And before the subterraneancataclysm, they were within six hundred feet of the surface. And all thebottom of that section of the North Atlantic seems to have caved in. Tenthousand square miles dropped out of the bottom of the ocean! Fact, notfancy._
_And so let us enlarge the picture. Let us create the Lowlands--twentythousand feet below the zero-height--the setting for a tale ofadventure. The romance of the mist-shrouded deeps. And the romance oflittle Jetta._