a restoration of a tiny little equus was looking up like
an inquisitive mouse at a huge ruined painting by Rosa Bonheur.

Thousands upon thousands of relics of the world above--some taken from the
jetsam of the sea and others taken by exploring parties from Opal during
those long glad years when the inner-world was as comfortable as Eden and
almost as happy. Gems by the millions, gold and silver coins, trappings
inlaid with diamonds, furs, silks, bone instruments and ivory carvings. A
Stradivarius was warping apart, and a Gutenberg was swollen to twice its
size, its moldy pages curling away from the parent-book. The books had
fared worse. Great stacks of leather-covered libraries were turning into
moldy, starchy mounds. Papyrus and lambskin scrolls were falling apart.
Once, when they stopped for Wolden to thrust some moldy folds of Hindu
thread-of-gold weaving from their path, Odin stopped and picked up the
cover of a book. It was soggy and faded. But he could make out the title:
"Poems by a Bostonian."

So they had gone on, but slower now than on their first journey into the
tunnel which led to the floor of the Gulf. An odor of dankness and decay
hung over everything. The air was cold and damp. And everywhere were the
footprints and handprints of Death who had spared this galley for so long,
but who had come back with his flashing scythe to claim his own. The
stinking carcass of a hammer head shark, washed in by the flood, lay
sprawled across the sodden sarcophagus of an Egyptian princess.

And a gloomy sickness fell upon Jack Odin there in the tunnel as he thought
of all the splendor that had died here, and the ages and ages of sweat and
blood that had gone into these treasures. A thousand, thousand treasures
were trying to whisper their stories to him, but the dripping water was
drowning them out. Thousands of men, some slaves and some kings, were
trying to tell him what the jewels and books, and swords and cradles had
meant to them--but the drip-drip-drip of the water choked the echoes of
their voices. The darkness that was ever crowding in seemed to be filled
with the shadows of beautiful women in fine laces, with flashing jewels
about their throats, and pendants brushing their half-covered breasts. They
were trying to smile out of the dark, but a cold fog was creeping from the
walls of the tunnel, settling about the shadows, and driving them back,
farther and farther into all pervading nothingness.

*