THE EDGE OF THE EDGE 377 



downwards. It was an overwhelmingly empty space. Down, 

 down into the terrifying blur of out-of-focusness the sand 

 sloped away. There was nothing down there but deepness, 

 empty dark and cold. 



Like an invisible wall a chill feeling hung on the edge of the 

 cliff. I stirred one of my feet. A little pile of sand drifted loose, 

 gathered volume and in a creeping slithering landslide, oozed 

 its way down the slope. A faint cloud of powdery silt arose, 

 gently spread apart and slowly disappeared. There was some- 

 thing so serpentine, so creeping about that landslide. None of 

 the rush and tumble of a slide on land— only a slow gentle fall- 

 ing into the depths. I imagined how horrible it must be to shde 

 helplessly to death, should one be unable to free the helmet 

 weights and lose the stabilizing hose and line, to drift oozily 

 down, inch by inch, foot by foot, with the pressure increasing 

 in a crushing horrible grip. And I could imagine the increasing 

 darkness that would come before unconsciousness would make 

 it complete, a gradual deepening of color, ultramarine, azure, 

 deep azure, blue-black— and then utter darkness. 



Clickety-click, clickety-click— the faint sound of the air 

 pump brought me back to reality. I reasoned that I was per- 

 fectly safe, and curiosity began to replace the sensations of 

 panic. I wondered what lay below and what held the soft edge 

 so evenly in place. I looked back. In a long even plain, seamed 

 with fissures and crevasses, the sand and rocks sloped gently 

 towards the surface, a rise that was so gradual as to be almost 

 imperceptible. 



I reached down and picked up some of the sand, tightly 

 clenching it in my palm to keep it from oozing from between 

 my fingers. Holding it close to the helmet I examined it care- 

 fully. It was foraminiferous sand, not the hard quartz sand of 

 American beaches, but sand formed from the dead and de- 

 cayed shells of numberless sea creatures. In incredible billions 



