“All right Count—all right. That’s quite enough!” The McKay put up his hands in mock surrender. “I only wish to God that they were sending us to Dominica instead of to the Falklands. It’s a charming climate and I had a friend there once—but that’s another story.”
Count Axel smiled. “Well, believe me or not I am absolutely convinced that Atlantis once existed and that we are now floating above the site it occupied. We may find nothing. Thousands of tons of ashes and volcanic larva may have buried its great buildings before they sank. The ocean bed changes and shifts through submarine eruptions from time to time but if the Atlanteans had pyramids as large and solid as those of Egypt or Mexico the remains of such mighty structures can hardly have disappeared like the flimsy hutments of a native village or even Lisbon’s docks, so there is at least a fair chance of our finding them. In any case the search will serve to distract my mind from the damnable fate which appears to have been allotted to us for our very near future.”
“You’re right, and the descents will help to take Camilla’s thoughts off this devilish business of losing all her money too, I hope. However, I prefer to relieve my anxieties by an occasional swim with Sally.”
By half-past twelve, after a submergence of nearly three and a half hours, during nearly the whole of which period it had been travelling either down or up at the rate of a hundred feet every two minutes, the bathysphere reached the surface again.
To Doctor Tisch’s overwhelming joy it had withstood the gigantic pressure at 5,000 feet and showed no trace of the strain which must have been placed upon it. Round, solid, its fuzed quartz portholes projecting from its sides like a row of stumpy cannons, uncracked, unscarred, it appeared above the waterline exactly as it had been sent down. As soon as its weighty door had been lifted off a rapid survey of its interior revealed that all was well, and no more water had collected in its sump than was to be expected from the condensation natural during three and a half hour’s submergence.
Frantic with excitement the Doctor came forward to report his news; and his enthusiasm was so infectious that it galvanised the despondent prisoners into some display of interest.
He said that he was going down at once since he could suffer not a moment’s delay in making the first trip to the ocean bottom in this area that had so long held his imagination. That it was over 800 fathoms down and nearly twice the depth that any human being had ever been before troubled him not at all. If any of the others wished to accompany him Slinger had no objection to their doing so, he said; but they must make up their minds and be quick about it.
Camilla jumped up without the slightest hesitation. Her previous experience of the marvels to be seen on a deep sea dive had whetted her appetite for more. Count Axel stepped quickly to her side.
“Come on Sally—why don’t you,” Camilla cried. “It’s so utterly thrilling to see all the wonderful things down there that one just forgets to be frightened the second the ball’s beneath the surface.”
“All right,” Sally stood up a little slowly. “I’ll come.”
Vladimir shrugged his broad shoulders. “If we are to stand twiddling our toes instead of combating our distressers we can do it as well under sea, so I join you.”
“What about you, Nicky?” Camilla glanced at the slim handsome young man who was wearing again his startling sky blue flannel suit.
“No thanks.” Nicky shook his head. “If we’re going to start playing games again just as though we had no cause to worry ourselves sick I’d rather take on the McKay at deck tennis—if he still doesn’t care for the idea of going down.”
“I’m your man Nicky,” replied the McKay promptly. “Let’s go and see all these folk safely locked into their padded cell, then we’ll amuse ourselves by chucking bits of rope at each other—it’s less dangerous.”
“Come please,” said the Doctor impatiently.
Ten minutes later the two girls, Axel, Vladimir, the Doctor and his little seedy-looking telephonist Oscar were inside the bathysphere and the bolts which secured the heavy door were being hammered home.
The McKay and Nicky had been allowed aft by the gunmen for the purpose of seeing the others off, and now they were leaning side by side over the rail. No one else was near them and under cover of the din Nicky said suddenly:
“Look here. I’m worried stiff over this hold up. What d’you think the chances are of that bird Kate slipping up over the will?”
“Not a hope in hell,” replied the McKay tersely. He was not feeling too civil at the moment having just failed in an attempt to disuade Sally from going down in the bathysphere.
“Wish to God we could figure out some way of fixing Slinger,” Nicky went on meditatively.
“So do I, but as long as he always moves round with those two toughs in tow how the deuce can we get at him?”
“We’ve darn well got to start something before the week’s out. I got all the dope I could about these Falklands from a book in the ship’s library last night and it sounds just one hell of a place to me.”
“It is,” agreed the McKay. “Still I’d rather sit on the rocks there for six months than go down in that bathysphere.”
“Would you? By jingo I wouldn’t. The risk isn’t all that great.”
“I mean go down in it regularly as the Doctor, Axel, and Camilla propose to do. I wouldn’t jib at a single trip if I thought it would get us out of the clutches of these toughs. But sooner or later there’s going to be a hitch somewhere; it will bust or they won’t be able to get it up and I’d rather be smoking dried seaweed in the Falklands than in it when that happens.”
“Well—there she goes.” Nicky waved his hand as the great crane rattled and the bathysphere sank under the surface. “What about that game of deck tennis?”
The McKay grinned. “Right-ho! m’lad, such simple sports are infinitely preferable to an old man like me.”
Inside the sphere, Sally clenched her hands and held her breath for ten seconds as the circular chamber slid under water. Staring upwards through one of the portholes she caught a glimpse of the surface from below. It looked infinitely calmer seen thus than from above where the wavelets chopped and splashed even on this calm day—just a quilted canopy of palish green dappled by constantly shifting patches of bright sunshine—then they slid downwards halting for the first tie to be made, attaching the hose containing the electric wires to the cables, at fifty feet.
The silence seemed uncanny. Somehow she had expected to hear the constant rippling and splashing of the waves down there but there was not a sound. Strange as she felt it to be, too, the water did not seem to be wet any more. It was just as though she was staring into a solid block of pale greeny blue glass. Not a ripple or refraction gave the faintest suggestion of moisture and it was diamond clear instead of cloudy as she had imagined it to be.
Suddenly a three foot barracuda, that devil of the shallows, for whose attacks on bathers sharks are so often blamed, swam into the orbit of her vision. He paused for a moment to stare at the bathysphere and not the faintest movement except the slow champing of his horrid hinged jaws showed that he was alive instead of frozen into a great block of transparent, light greeny-blue ice. One flick of his tail and he was gone, yet no tremor of the water that he thrust from him with such vigour disturbed the glassy blankness in his wake.
Just as the bathysphere moved again two green moray eels slid by, then they passed a cloud of sea snails and a big jelly. As Camilla had done before her Sally forgot her fears and sat, her eyes rivetted on the window, enthralled by this ever changing panorama of life and colour.
The red and orange had faded from the light. Only a palish tinge of yellow now suggested the sunshine above the surface and the green was already being displaced by the vivid brilliant blue. After their third stop, at 450 feet, no colour remained but the unearthly bluish radiance which filled them all with a strange feeling of vitality and lent their senses abnormal powers of vivid perception.
The Doctor adjusted the oxygen
flow a trifle, to exactly six litres a minute, a litre per head for each person in the bathysphere. The weedy telephonist muttered into his instrument keeping in constant touch with his opposite number above in the ship.
As they descended a constant procession of living creatures seemed to be sailing upward before the windows; prawns, squids, clouds of fry, jellies, strings of syphonophores, shrimps, sea snails and beautifully coloured fish of every size and variety.
Gradually the intense blue light darkened to violet, then a deep navy blue, blue black, and black only tinged with grey. Fish, jellies and squids carrying their own illuminations made the portholes like the eye of a kaleidoscope at the end of which were constantly shifting dots of many colours. At 1,200 feet the Doctor switched on the searchlight. Its powerful beam cut an arc of weak yellow light through the dark waters and at its extremity there seemed to be a turquoise coloured cap. A scimitar mouth was outlined in the very centre of the beam, it remained there absolutely immobile, as though it was only a painted plaster cast, showing as little reaction to the sudden blinding light as if it had no consciousness of it.
When the bathysphere hung steady at 1,850 feet for one of the ties to be attached above, a school of Rainbow Gars came swimming by. They were small slim fish no more than four inches from nose to tail with long snapper-like jaws. Their elongated heads were a brilliant scarlet, behind the gills their bodies turned to a bright blue which merged through a suggestion of green into clear yellow at the tail. No cloud of brilliant hued butterflies fluttering through a tropical forest could have been more beautiful.
At 2,050 feet the Doctor switched out the light. “We enter now,” he said, “the region where it is forever night.”
Not the faintest suspicion of greyness now lightened the appalling blackness of the waters. It was night indeed, but night such as they had never known. They felt that never again would the darkness of the upper world be real darkness as they understood it now. This was the utter solid blackness of the pit; that final blotting out of the life rays without which every plant and tree and animal and human must surely die.
“Put on the light—put on the light,” cried Camilla suddenly, and for a second, before the Doctor found the switch, the fear which vibrated in her voice stirred a responsive chord in the emotions of them all, for they were now in one of those inexplicable patches, quite blank of life, so no glimmer from any luminous fish came to bring them reassurance. Land life cannot live below high water mark; or the shore life of seaweeds, shell fish, and rock dwellers, below the limit of the water covered slopes where the sun’s light still penetrates; but living things, and those the strangest to us in all creation, still grew, and generated and fought and died by the million all about them and, when they dropped still further and passed the 2,200 level a fantastic variety of fresh wonders held their gaze.
The path of the searchlight had now lost its yellow tone and become a luminous grey; the cap of turquoise colour at its extremity seemed brighter and nearer in, yet they judged that they could see by its concentrated power of 3,000 watts a good sixty feet from the portholes. Outside its edge a variety of coloured lights moved constantly while hatchet fish, anglers, and fearsome looking squids with waving tentacles, pulsed slowly through the path of the electric rays.
As they were passing 2,500 feet a queer lightless brute, the colour of dead, water-soaked flesh, toothless and with high vertical fins on its hinder part but only a round knob for a tail, came into view.
“This inhabitant of deep seas Dr. William Beebe has named the Palid Sailfin,” announced Doctor Tisch.
At 2,800 feet a monster passed. Twenty-five feet in length at least, oval in shape, monochrome in colour, and lacking both eyes and fins, a strange beast, unnamed, unknown to science.
A moment later the sphere was halted for its next tie and the searchlight came to rest on an unbelievably gorgeous creature. It was an almost round fish with high continuous vertical fins, a big eye and a medium mouth. Its skin was brownish but along the sides of the body ran five fantastically beautiful lines of light, one equatorial and the others curved two above and two below. Each line was composed of a series of large, pale yellow lights and every one of these was surrounded by a circle of very small but intensely purple photophores. It turned and showed a narrow profile like a turbot, then swam away.
“Schön—schön,” murmured the Doctor. “That beauty Doctor Beebe has named the Fivelined Constellation Fish.”
At 3,200 feet the path cut by the searchlight had changed again. The turquoise cap had come right down to the very windows of the sphere yet they could still see distinctly for a considerable distance by its bright blue light. Along each side of the sharply marked beam appeared a broad border of rich velvety dark blue and outside this an indescribable blackness, which could almost be felt, made straining eyes as useless as total blindness.
“Lower than this no human has ever been,” Doctor Tisch announced with satisfaction yet just a touch of awe. “William Beebe has only reached 3,028 feet. He is the pioneer who has made this journey possible for us and others who will come after. Later, perhaps, men will gather from the ocean beds fortunes of great size. Cortez brought home to Spain the wealth of Mexico. Pizzaro also brought back for his country the riches of Peru, but these names are not to us as the name of Christopher Columbus who was the first discoverer of the New World. When many years have gone the name of William Beebe will receive much honour and retain it for such time as our civilisation shall last. He also has opened up a New World for mankind. The pressure here is more than half a ton on each square inch of bathysphere but our instruments show all is as it should be. Where Beebe led we have follow satisfactorily—now we ourselves pass on. Oscar we are ready to go lower again.”
The little telephonist muttered into his mouthpiece. The bathysphere sank further into the depths.
Suddenly the Prince leaned forward in his seat behind Camilla and kissed her on the curve of the neck.
“Vladimir!” she exclaimed with a start.
He chuckled. “Am I Columbus—no. Am I Beebe—no, but I am the first to make kissings with the so beautiful lady I love at such deeps under sea.”
Camilla preened herself a little. “You are a dear,” she murmured, “but you shouldn’t you know. Just look at those marvellous lights.”
Irregular formations of every hue were playing in the dark areas outside the beam and Doctor Tisch cut it off. For a further 800 feet they remained in the tense black darkness watching the fascinating display which now lit the windows. Angler fish came and went each with one to five lanterns bobbing from long rod-like fins upon their heads and sides. Stylophthalmas passed with luminous eyes on stalks one third as long as their entire bodies. Once Sally started back with a little cry of fright as some unknown organism collided with the port through which she was watching and burst like a firework into a thousand sparks, but immediately afterwards her entire attention was distracted by a single large dull green light as big as a cricket ball which went slowly past.
At 4,000 feet the Doctor switched on the light again and they saw their first great octupus, a parrot beaked creature with huge unwinking eyes and waving tentacles more than twenty feet in length. Instantly Tisch snapped out the light.
“He will not see us without lights,” he remarked with unnatural calm. “Specimens of such size might be a danger if they believe our sphere to be some dead organism.”
For a moment Count Axel’s vivid imagination conjured up the picture of a giant octupus wrapping its tentacles round the bathysphere and, by its added weight making it impossible for the machinery of the crane ever to draw them up again, but second thought reassured him. When the creature found the steel ball too solid for its beak and quite inedible it would drop off and he knew from conversations with the Doctor that the cable could withstand twenty times the bathysphere’s submerged weight. Nothing but the terrific jerk of flinging the crane into reverse when the sphere was running out at full speed, which it was never allowed to
do, could possibly snap it, so they were safe enough unless attacked by some monster of undreamed of size.
When they had slipped down another few hundred feet the light was put on once more and nothing more terrifying appeared than a large eel with a couple of its slim transparent ghost-like larvae. Then at 4,800 feet the extremity of the light beam seemed to dim and they realised with a sudden tightening of their muscles that some gigantic fish was passing. Unlit, the colour of dead water-soaked flesh, like the Palid Sailfin it glided by, its shape unguessed since the searchlight showed no more of it than a rapid glimpse of its side, which appeared like the hull of some great battleship.
It seemed a Brontesaurus of the deep and the Doctor craned forward eagerly to watch it but his hands began to tremble with even greater excitement as he saw what followed in its wake. A school of strange roundheaded fishes with forefins which curved outward like clutching hands. They swam with malevolent carnivorous rapidity after the monster fish evidently in chase. There was something strangely horrifying in the sight of those sinister creatures never before looked upon by man, hunting their prey in a world of utter, forever unbroken silence, through the eternal night of the great deep.
They Found Atlantis Page 14