346 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



glimmer could I perceive. Just as I was about to 

 give it up I saw a dull glow from what I took to 

 be some one-celled organism, perhaps a dying Noc- 

 tiltLca. To my astonishment it increased in size, 

 and, bringing near the illumined face of my watch, 

 I saw the source of the fiery flow was the prawn 

 itself. The light now took the form of a liquid 

 pouring out into the water, and soon the entire 

 contents of the aquarium was aglow, while, swim- 

 ming about in it, the prawn could be seen as a 

 black, inchoate mass. Suddenly the significance of 

 this occurred to me — ^this red crustacean was play- 

 ing the same trick as the squid, but adapted to the 

 darkness of six hundred fathoms. The squid had 

 its cloud of smoke by day, the prawn its pillar of 

 fire by night. 



In any consideration of the sea from surface to 

 bottom we must not omit color, and it is possible 

 to distinguish several very generalized zones, often 

 ill-defined or overlapping. In the sunlit strata we 

 have the ultramarine and the transparent creatures, 

 such as flyingfish and the shelless Glaucus, the 

 strange Leptocephalus eel-lets and the infant lob- 

 ster ghosts. Then there comes the silver zone where 

 live many fishes gleaming like molten thisel. Next 

 the area of pink colored life, and last of all the be- 

 ings clad in scarlet and in black. Red, of course, can 

 be a color only in light, but as a matter of mere 

 pigmental economy we find a host of scarlet ani- 

 mals living alongside the jet black ones. Now and 

 then there comes up a stray fish or worm or sea- 

 cucumber as pallid as a sunless plant. 



