us how
mistaken that notion was!

For a time we gazed spellbound at the nightmare assortment of
grotesqueries that gradually assembled around us, attracted no doubt by
our light. The things were mainly sightless and of indescribable shape.
Most of them were phosphorescent, and they avoided collisions in a way
that suggested that they had some buried sense of light perception.

As time passed the Professor emptied his camera, refilled it several
times and groaned that he had no more film. Twice as we drifted along I
raised us to keep us clear of a gradual upward slope of the smooth
floor.

Stanley removed his mouthpiece long enough to suggest that we go back to
the surface: we had been submerged for nearly four hours now. But before
we could reply a violent movement was felt.

The ball rocked and twirled so that we were forced to cling to the
circular bench to avoid being thrown to the floor. It was as though a
hurricane of wind had suddenly penetrated the unruffled depths.

"Earthquake?" called Stanley.

"Don't know," answered the Professor. He swung the searchlight in an arc
and focussed it at length on something that appeared only as a field of
blurred movement. He wiped the moisture from the wall before the lens,
and there was revealed to us a sight that makes my heart pound even now
when I recall it to memory.

Something vast and serpentine had ventured too near the bottom--and had
been caught by the death traps there!

The creature was a writhing mass of gigantic coils. It was impossible
even to guess at its length, but its girth was such that the
mound-shaped monsters that had fastened to it could not entirely
encircle it.

There it twined and knotted: a mighty serpent of the deepest ocean,
snapping its awful length and threshing its powerful tail in an effort
to dislodge the giant leeches that were flattened against it. And every
time it touched the bottom in its blind frenzy, more of the teeming
deathtraps attached themselves to it, crawling over their fellows in an
effort to find unoccupied areas.

* * * * *

Soon the sea-serpent was a distorted, creeping mass. For one appalling
instant its head came into our view....

It resembled the head of a crocodile, only it was ten times larger and
covered with scale like the armor plate of a destroyer. The jaws, wide
open and slashing with enormous, needle-shaped teeth at the huge
parasites, were large enough to have held