246 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



Every time I looked at Nuez from the Arcturus 

 there came to mind Bockhn's Toten Insel. 



I anchored the flat-bottomed diving boat fifty 

 feet off shore in the quietest spot I could find and 

 then submerged in about thirty feet. Visibility 

 was remarkably good and I could see clearly for 

 one hundred feet in every direction. On one side 

 enormous boulders piled themselves up higher and 

 higher until they crashed through into the air and 

 on up the slopes of this isle of death. In other di- 

 rections the bottom sloped gently but steadily 

 downward until it was lost in mysterious blue 

 depths toward the abysses of the sea. 



The swell was heavy and the end of my sway- 

 ing ladder reached alternately from twenty to 

 within ten feet of the bottom, as the boat rose and 

 fell on the surface. I knew my leaping ability in 

 this gravitationless medium so I did not hesitate to 

 drop from the lowest rung at the moment when it 

 was nearest the coral floor. I landed on a table 

 of lava and was at once the center of a school of 

 great grazing fish, triggers, parrots and surgeons, 

 the largest I had yet seen, with now and then a unit 

 of swift carangids, gleaming like purplish jade as 

 they shot past. Out of the blue distance there ma- 

 terialized a man's-length of white-finned shark, 

 then another and another, until sixteen were miU- 

 ing slowly about between me and the surface. This 

 was a new habit and an unexpected formation of 

 these fish and I must admit that the ladder looked 

 very long and very high above me. I was so un- 

 certain of the significance of this gathering that for 



