368 THE ARCTURUS ADVENTURE 



ear. It was a lost chord vibrant with all the won- 

 der of past ages, before man or his kindred had 

 begun to evolve. 



During the successive glacial ages when time 

 after time the enormous masses of ice advanced 

 and retreated, the coast slowly sank and, before 

 the end of the Pleistocene Age, presented a con- 

 tour much like that of today. During all this 

 period the wild life of Manhattan and the ad- 

 jacent country was diversified and wholly differ- 

 ent from that of historical times. As the climate 

 alternated from Arctic to semi-tropical, successive 

 famias replaced one another. At Long Branch 

 there lived during widely separated times, such 

 unlike creatures as walruses and giant ground 

 sloths. Mastodons were abundant even on Man- 

 hattan, while not many miles from the Hudson 

 were wild horses, tapirs, peccaries, reindeer, musk- 

 oxen, bison and giant beavers. Most of these ani- 

 mals lived long before the first evidences of man- 

 kind, and the great submarine canyon was never 

 seen by any eye of man or his immediate forebears. 



And now instead of thinking back through time 

 forever lost to us, I was about to reach down 

 through space equally forbidden to living man — 

 into a region comparable to the ether beyond the 

 neighborhood of comfortable planets and world 

 sanctuaries, a region eternally cold, with ultimate 

 silences, and darkness and pressure beyond all hu- 

 man imagination. 



When our soundings revealed the fact that we 

 were actually floating over the deepest part of the 



