.
Swimming snails floated by, carrying their own phosphorescent
lanterns. Paper-thin transparent crustaceans swam into view, followed
by a few white shrimps, pale as ghosts. Then a mist of tiny fish swept
across his field of vision. Abbot cupped his face in his hands, and
stared out.

The incongruous thought flashed across his mind that thus he had often
sat by the window of his club in New York, and gazed out at the
passing motor traffic.

His searchlight cut a sharp swath through the blue muck. More than
once he thought he saw large moving fish-like forms far away.

"Speed up the generator," he called into his phone.

Immediately the shaft of light brightened. He set about trying to
focus upon one of those dim elusive shapes which had so intrigued him.

* * * * *

But suddenly the searchlight went out! Intent on repairing the
apparatus as rapidly as possible, Abbot snapped the button-switch,
which ought to have illuminated the interior of his diving-sphere; but
the lights did not go on. Then he noticed that the electric fan, on
which he depended to keep his air-supply properly mixed, had stopped.

He spoke into the telephone transmitter, which hung in front of his
mouth: "Hi, there, up on the boat! My electric power is cut off. I'm
down here with my fan stopped and my heat cut off. Hoist me up, and be
quick about it!"

"O.K., sir."

As the young man waited for the winch to get under way on the boat a
mile above him, he pulled out his electric pocket flashlight and sent
its feeble ray out through his quartz-glass window into the dim
royal-purple depths beyond, in one last attempt to get a look at those
mysterious fish-shapes which had so intrigued him.

And then he saw one of them distinctly.

Evidently they had swum closer when the glow of his searchlight had
stopped; and so the sudden flash of his pocket-light had taken them by
surprise.

For, as he snapped it on, he caught an instant's glimpse of a grinning
fish-face pressed close against the outside of his thick window-pane,
as though trying to peer in at him. The fish-face somewhat resembled
the head of a shark, except that the mouth was a bit smaller and not
quite so leeringly brutal, and the forehead was rather high and domed.

But what most attracted Abbot's attention, in the brief instant before
the startled fish whisked away in a swirl of phosphorescent foam, was
the fact that, from beneath each of the two pecto