e.

Down and down we went, for an interminable length of time--till at
length we reached the abysmal level where the sun never shone and the
eyes of man had never gazed till now.

* * * * *

Words were made to describe familiar articles. I find now when I am
faced with the necessity of portraying events and objects beyond the
range of normal human experience that I cannot conjure up words to fit.
I despair of trying to make you see what we saw, and feel what we felt.

But try to picture yourself in the glass ball with us:

All is profound blackness save for a streak of white, dying about fifty
feet away, which is the beam of our searchlight. Twenty feet below is a
bare floor of flinty lava and broken shell. This is unrelieved by
sea-weed of any kind, appearing like an imagined fragment of Martian or
lunar landscape.

The ball sways idly to the push of some explicable submarine current. It
is like being in a captive balloon, except that the connecting cable
extends stiffly upward instead of downward.

There is a realization, an instinctive _feel_ of awful pressure around
you. Logic tells you how you are clamped about, but deeper than logic is
the intuition that the glass walls are pressing in on themselves--at the
point of collapse. Your ears, tingle with the feel of it: your head
rings with it.

You are breathing in through your nose--thin, unsatisfying gulps of air
that cause your lungs to labor at their task; and you are exhaling
through, your mouth, with difficulty, into the barrel of the powerful
pump. No bubbles arise from the tiny hole where the used air is forced
into the water. The pressure is too enormous for that. Only a thin,
milky line marks its escape from the sphere.

In a ghostly way you see Stanley turning the pump handle. With a handful
of waste which he has borrowed from the _Rosa's_ engine room, the
Professor wipes from the section of wall through which the searchlight
plays the moisture that constantly collects there. I sit with my hand
near the key, peering downward and ahead like an engineer in a
locomotive cab, ready to raise the shell or lower it as occasion
warrants.

And always the suffocating awareness of pressure....

* * * * *

Strange and mystic journey as the tortured glass sphere floated over the
bottom, following the slow drift of the _Rosa_ far above!

The finger of light played along the tilted side of a wrec