“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.
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 exposed to those monstrous claws. But inside our steel case we can afford to examine him in safety and at our ease.”
He had hardly spoken when there came a rap as from a pickaxe upon our outer wall. Then there was a long drawn rasping and scratching, ending in another sharp rap.
“Say, he wants to come in!” cried Bill Scanlan in alarm. “By gosh! we want «No Admission» painted on this shack.” His shaking voice showed how forced was his merriment, and I confess that my own knees were knocking together as I was aware of the stealthy monster closing up with an even blacker darkness each of our windows in succession, as he explored this strange shell which, could he but crack it, might contain his food.
“He can’t hurt us,” said Maracot, but there was less assurance in his tone. “Maybe it would be as well to shake the brute off.” He hailed the Captain up the tube.
“Pull us up twenty or thirty feet,” he cried.
A few seconds later we rose from the lava plain and swung gently in the still water. But the terrible beast was pertinacious. After a very short interval we heard once more the raspings of his feelers and the sharp tappings of his claws as he felt us round. It was terrible to sit silently in the dark and know that death was so near. If that mighty claw fell upon the window, would it stand the strain? That was the unspoken question in each of our minds.
But suddenly an unexpected and more urgent danger presented itself. The tappings had gone to the roof of our little dwelling, and now we began to sway with a rhythmic movement to and fro.
“Good God!” I cried. “It has hold of the hawser. It will surely snap it.”
“Say, Doc, it’s mine for the surface. I guess we’ve seen what we came to see, and it’s home, sweet home for Bill Scanlan. Ring up the elevator and get her going.”
“But our work is not half done,” croaked Maracot. “We have only begun to explore the edges of the Deep. Let us at least see how broad it is. When we have reached the other side I shall be content to return.” Then up the tube: “All well, Captain. Move on at two knots until I call for a stop.”
We moved slowly out over the edge of the abyss. Since darkness had not saved us from attack we now turned on our lights. One of the portholes was entirely obscured by what appeared to be the creature’s lower stomach. Its head and its great nippers were at work above us, and we still swayed like a clanging bell. The strength of the beast must have been enormous. Were ever mortals placed in such a situation, with five miles of water beneath — and that deadly monster above? The oscillations became more and more violent. An excited shout came down the tube from the Captain as he became aware of the jerks upon the hawser, and Maracot sprang to his feet with his hands thrown upwards in despair. Even within the shell we were aware of the jar of the broken wires, and an instant later we were falling into the mighty gulf beneath us.
As I look back at that awful moment I can remember hearing a wild cry from Maracot.
“The hawser has parted! You can do nothing! We are all dead men!” he yelled, grabbing at the telephone tube, and then, “Good-bye, Captain, good-bye to all.” They were our last words to the world of men.
We did not fall swiftly down, as you might have imagined. In spite of our weight our hollow shell gave us some sustaining buoyancy, and we sank slowly and gently into the abyss. I heard the long scrape as we slid through the claws of the horrible creature who had been our ruin, and then with a smooth gyration we went circling downwards into the abysmal depths. It may have been fully five minutes, and it seemed like an hour, before we reached the limit of our telephone wire and snapped it like a thread. Our air tube broke off at almost the same moment and the salt water came spouting through the vents. With quick, deft hands Bill Scanlan tied cords round each of the rubber tubes and so stopped the inrush, while the Doctor released the top of our compressed air which came hissing forth from the tubes. The lights had gone out when the wire snapped, but even in the dark the Doctor was able to connect up the Hellesens dry cells which lit a number of lamps in the roof.
“It should last us a week,” he said, with a wry smile. “We shall at least have light to die in.” Then he shook his head sadly and a kindly smile came over his gaunt features. “It is all right for me. I am an old man and have done my work in the world. My one regret is that I should have allowed you two young fellows to come with me. I should have taken the risk alone.”
I simply shook his hand in reassurance, for indeed there was nothing I could say. Bill Scanlan, too, was silent. Slowly we sank, marking our pace by the dark fish shadows which flitted past our windows. It seemed as if they were flying upwards rather than that we were sinking down. We still oscillated, and there was nothing so far as I could see to prevent us from falling on our side, or even turning upside down. Our weight, however, was, fortunately, very evenly balanced and we kept a level floor. Glancing up at the bathymeter I saw that we had already reached the depth of a mile.
“You see, it is as I said,” remarked Maracot, with some complacency. “You may have seen my paper in the Proceedings of the Oceanographical Society upon the relation of pressure and depth. I wish I could get one word back to the world, if only to confute Bulow of Giessen, who ventured to contradict me.”
“My gosh! If I could get a word back to the world I wouldn’t waste it on a square-head highbrow,” said the mechanic. “There is a little wren in Philadelphia that will have tears in her pretty eyes when she hears that Bill Scanlan has passed out. Well, it sure does seem a darned queer way of doing it, anyhow.”
“You should never have come,” I said, putting my hand on his.
“What sort of tin-horn sport should I have been if I had quitted?” he answered. “No, it’s my job, and I am glad I stuck it.”
“How long have we?” I asked the Doctor, after a pause.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“We shall have time to see the real bottom of the ocean, anyhow,” said he. “There is air enough in our tubes for the best part of a day. Our trouble is with the waste products. That is what is going to choke us. If we could get rid of our carbon dioxide-’
“That I can see is impossible.”
“There is one tube of pure oxygen. I put it in in case of accidents. A little of that from time to time will help to keep us alive. You will observe that we are now more than two miles deep.”
“Why should we try to keep ourselves alive? The sooner it is over the better,” said I.
“That’s the dope,” cried Scanlan. “Cut loose and have done with it.”.
“And miss the most wonderful sight that man’s eye has ever seen!” said Maracot. “It would be treason to Science. Let us record facts to the end, even if they should be for ever buried with our bodies. Play the game out.”
“Some sport, the Doc!” cried Scanlan. “I guess he has the best guts of the bunch. Let us see the spiel to an end.”
We sat patiently on the settee, the three of us, gripping the edges of it with strained fingers as it swayed and rocked, while the fishes still flashed swiftly upwards athwart the portholes.
“It is now three miles,” remarked Maracot. “I will turn on the oxygen, Mr. Headley, for it is certainly very close. There is one thing,” he added, with his dry
, cackling laugh, “it will certainly be the Maracot Deep from this time onwards. When Captain Howie takes back the news my colleagues will see to it that my grave is also my monument. Even Bulow of Giessen-” He babbled on about some unintelligible scientific grievance.
We sat in silence again, watching the needle as it crawled on to its fourth mile. At one point we struck something heavy, which shook us so violently that I feared that we would turn upon our side. It may have been a huge fish, or conceivably we may have bumped upon some projection of the cliff over the edge of which we had been precipitated. That edge had seemed to us at the time to be such a wondrous depth, and now looking back at it from our dreadful abyss it might almost have been the surface. Still we swirled and circled lower and lower through the dark green waste of waters. Twenty-five thousand feet now was registered upon the dial.
“We are nearly at our journey’s end,” said Maracot. “My Scott’s recorder gave me twenty-six thousand seven hundred last year at the deepest point. We shall know our fate within a few minutes. It may be that the shock will crush us. It may be — ’
And at that moment we landed.
There was never a babe lowered by its mother on to a feather-bed who nestled down more gently than we on to the extreme bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The soft thick elastic ooze upon which we lit was a perfect buffer, which saved us from the slightest jar. We hardly moved upon our seats, and it is as well that we did not, for we had perched upon some sort of a projecting hummock, clothed thickly with the viscous gelatinous mud, and there we were balanced rocking gently with nearly half our base projecting and unsupported. There was a danger that we would tip over on our side, but finally we steadied down and remained motionless. As we did so Dr. Maracot, staring out through his porthole, gave a cry of surprise and hurriedly turned out our electric light.
To our amazement we could still see clearly. There was a dim, misty light outside which streamed through our porthole, like the cold radiance of a winter morning. We looked out at the strange scene, and with no help from our own lights we could see clearly for some hundred yards in each direction. It was impossible, inconceivable, but none the less the evidence of our senses told us that it was a fact. The great ocean floor is luminous.
The Maracot Deep Page 3