It made the humans in the bathysphere realise more than anything else had done how completely cut off they were from that gay world of flowers and trees and sunshine thousands of feet above. They were staggered at their own temerity and momentarily appalled at the thought that they had dared to invade this vast kingdom of the unknown, far greater than all the land surfaces of the earth together, with no more promise of security than the single thin thread of t.f.a.—e 129 cable, stretching now to nearly a mile in length, from which they dangled.
Their thoughts were so occupied that they hardly noticed their descent of the last fifty fathoms. A sudden unexpected jar caused them to start from their seats in panic, but the Doctor's voice reassured them.
'We have made bottom—5,180 feet!'
They stared out through the fused quartz windows hoping to see something although they hardly knew what. Not temples and palaces of course but perhaps a great section of wall or part of a pyramid and they were vaguely disappointed when they saw that the strong beam of blue light revealed nothing except a barrel shaped fish and part of a mushroom like jelly with a trailing yellow skirt.
The bathysphere had landed on a gentle slope and so was tilted at an angle throwing the beam slightly up. The Doctor moved the lighting apparatus so that the long turquoise finger moved down towards the ground. Then they saw that they had landed on barren calcareous rock. There were no long waving fronds of seaweed, sea anemones, sponges or crustaceans to be seen. No trace at all of any undersea vegetation, for the multiform life of the beaches ceases entirely at a far lesser depth than that to which they had come being, like all vegetation dependent for existence on the light which filters down to it from the sun.
'The bottom is of volcanic rock as I expected,' muttered the Doctor. 'We will now proceed further. Oscar, tell them we ascend to five-thousand feet and then to move forward the ship one quarter mile.'
'Why go up so high?' asked Camilla. 'We couldn't possibly see the bottom from there. Can't they tow us along about six feet up?'
'A necessary precaution Gnddige Hertzogin. If we came suddenly to a submerged cliff face as the ship drags our sphere they would not have time to lift us over it owing to the length of the cable by which we hang. The sphere would crash against it and windows perhaps smash. This way our search will take much longer, but it is safer.'
They were already rising and, after what seemed a long wait, felt the sphere begin to move gently forward through the ever changing constellations of coloured lights. It veered round to a new angle through the pressure on its big fixed rudder which ensured it travelling with its windows to the front, so that they could see what was ahead, whenever it made any lateral movement. They knew from the direction in which it had turned that they were being drawn over the downward slope of the rocky platform below and when, a few moments later, they were lowered again they landed upon a completely different type of bottom at 5,230 feet.
A mist of tiny white particles rose like a cloud when the sphere came to rest as softly as though upon a bed of down and, as it cleared, the beam showed the reason. They were now in an undersea valley bottom into which the currents of the ocean floor had carried millions upon millions of shells, octopus beaks and teeth of long dead fish. They lay there white and even like a snowy carpet as far as the light beam carried the vision of the watchers in the sphere.
'So! Here you, see chalk deposits in formation,' remarked the Doctor and he swivelled the searchlight from side to side, but the shell carpet was unbroken by any huge monolith rounded by countless years of passing currents such as he had hoped to find.
Suddenly a big squid inside the beam gave a violent jerk with all its tentacles and flicked away. At the same moment every light outside the searchlight's path vanished and that frightening empty blackness supervened. The beam was broken by a large round knob and, as they realised what it was, they were utterly overcome by shock and amazement. A human face was staring in at them through the window,
The Empire of Perpetual Night
'Up!' shouted the Doctor, 'up!' and a second after Oscar had spoken the one word 'Emergency' into his mouthpiece the cable tightened jerking them away from the sea floor.
'Oh God! what was it,' cried Camilla.
'The Devil—the Devil himself!' exclaimed Vladimir making the sign of the Cross.
Sally put her hand before her eyes. 'That face!' she said. 'That face! I've never seen anything more awful!'
Count Axel sighed. 'Yes, I have only once looked upon a grimmer thing and that was the head of a man who had had his face burned to the bone when I was studying medicine many years ago, but, after all, whatever it was it could not have harmed us in this little steel fortress of ours so I think it a great pity that we did not remain down there to examine it more closely.'
The others shook their heads. They were in entire sympathy with Doctor Tisch who, scientist as he was, had been so repelled by that incredibly evil countenance that he had given way to the overwhelmingly powerful impulse to escape from its baleful gaze without a second's delay. Now, he told Oscar to report all well and ask for them to be brought up in the usual stages; otherwise there would have been no time for the people on deck to coil down the hose containing the electric wires as it came in, and, as they slashed the ties, it would have slid down in a tangled coil while the cable was wound on to the drums.
'I haf heard of such things,' the Doctor said huskily as he mopped the perspiration from his broad forehead with a big silk handkerchief. 'But I did not believe. It was one such as we saw before who hunted after the big fish.'
'Did you see its hands?' asked Sally with a shudder. 'Ugh, they were horrible.'
'And its teeth,' said Camilla shakily. 'That vicious receding jaw full of pointed fangs, I could almost feel them snapping into me. I wanted to scream but I was too terrified. What was it, a special sort of fish or an unknown type of human which has adapted itself to living under water?'
'It was a fish from the waist down and it had a thick scaly brownish tail,' Sally announced—'I saw it.'
'So did I,' agreed Axel, 'but it was a mammal, didn't you notice its breasts? They were round and full as though moulded from a perfectly proportioned cup, and the only beautiful thing about it. The head seemed to me like that of a monkey.'
'Yes, in a way. It had the same receding forehead but a monkey's teeth don't protrude like that, and this thing seemed to possess some horrible intelligence. Despite that flattened nose with the gaping nostrils it was more like the face of some unutterably depraved human.'
'Undoubtedly it was a species which took to the water in the early stages of mammalian evolution,' remarked the Doctor who had now recovered from that unreasoning fear which had gripped them all, sufficiently to be thrilled by their discovery.
'If you had told me of this thing I would have said "Go and tell it to the mariners",' declared Vladimir. 'But by Crikey I was here and saw it with my own look.'
In the hour and three-quarters which it took them to ascend to the surface, lights came and went, a hundred varieties of sea creatures swam through the beam or later became visible by natural light in the upper levels, yet the party could think and talk of nothing but this ferocious race of fish men who lived and hunted a mile below the water-line unknown and undreamed of by modern science.
The McKay and Nicky were allowed aft again to meet their friends when the bathysphere had been hoisted on to its steel supports, and Sally, who was first out of the sphere ran up the ladder towards them. Her eyes were bright with excitement and her cheeks flaming.
'We've seen a mermaid!' she panted breathlessly.