e to depict those hollow
passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon
chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime
horror of great darkness.

It is to the animal and vegetable coral the sea owes its arborescent
and floriform scenery, the counterpart of the forest and phaenogamous
beauty that adorns the land. The home of these wonderful creatures
must be visited to realize the beauty of their dwellings and the
wonderful structures they produce. A diver who explored the serene sea
about the Hayti banks gives a beautiful description of the splendors
of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible from the
surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant floor the
filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually flecked with
sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular clearness of
the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a
pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But
the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the
prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and
the play of light and shadow. The structures, the work of astraea,
madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to
fabrications of the architect. One massive dome or archway, a hundred
feet in diameter, rises to the surface. Its front is carved in
elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and
flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture. Looking through
this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades,
light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the
paly-golden, lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple,
spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious
enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of
art and labor. Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it
seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass. To understand the
magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in
mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water--the
frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion,
reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color. He
must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae
or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters
it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver