342 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



precipice in upper air, but a slow, awful rolling, 

 with an unhasting death from cold, pressure and 

 blackness. All this terror was wholly needless, but 

 obvious methods of escape, of safety, were erased 

 for the moment, and any agonized mind was occu- 

 pied only with dread of this cosmic peril. My rea- 

 son for all this apparent personal digression is to 

 try, by every means in my power, to make real and 

 vivid to the mind of the reader, the unearthliness 

 of the depths of the sea, and to prepare the back- 

 ground for the strangest backboned animals living 

 on this planet today. 



The simile between interstellar space and the 

 ocean depths might be carried to any lengths. 

 Coupled with our inability actually to penetrate 

 either of these regions, we find ourselves of neces- 

 sity mere peerers in the first instance and blind 

 gropers in the second. In mid-ocean, whether we 

 skim the surface with nets or draw them at a half- 

 mile depth, or drag our dredge slowly over the bot- 

 tom, the result is a gamble, and may be nothing or 

 the richest of hauls. The merest tyro yachtsman 

 has quite as good a chance of capturing wonderful 

 new creatures as the most experienced ocean- 

 ographers in the world. 



As I have said in the preceding chapter we 

 spent ten days at Station Seventy-four, in mid- 

 Pacific, one degree or sixty miles south of Cocos. 

 Throughout all the time that I was collecting and 

 studying the surface creatures, I was fishing and 

 trawling and dredging deep down — making the 

 most of every piece of apparatus to learn about 



