THE IMPENETRABLE SEA 



he had to revise his opinion later when swarms of Hving 

 creatures passed the porthole again. 



By 1 1.30 a.m. they were over a mile down, and a few 

 moments later they passed the greatest depth they had 

 attained during previous descents. Above them on the 

 surface the Elie Monnier was receiving their signals, and 

 the men on her realized, with rising excitement, that 

 they had broken their own record. Using the second 

 floodlight, Houot saw seething clouds of plankton, and 

 realized that he had previously been led to believe that 

 life had ceased because myriads of the living creatures 

 were too small to be seen with the one searchlight. But 

 now they were seeing slightly bigger ones — what seemed 

 to be red shrimps, with long antennae, drifted upwards in 

 vast shoals. 



They had slowed down a little. By noon they were 

 down to nearly ten thousand feet, but still about three 

 thousand feet from the bottom. At that depth they halted 

 their queer craft for a while. The ''rain" had stopped. 

 The tremendous pressure of the water now crushing them 

 down was forcing the hemispheres tightly together. 



The silence was broken only by the hissing of the 

 oxygen and the humming of the transformers. They had 

 no need to start the bathyscaphe descending again — it 

 started to move downwards of its own accord as the 

 temperature of the outer waters affected the petrol within 

 the tanks. 



The pressure gauges at last registered a depth of two 

 miles — no one in human history had ever gone so far 

 down into the ocean. 



At that depth they again saw great swarms of shrimps 

 and siphonophores — or, as Houot described them, desir- 

 ing greater accuracy: "Organisms resembling siphono- 

 phores." 



Several hundred feet lower they saw a swarm of 

 medusae : those fantastic jellyfish which resemble minia- 

 ture umbrellas with short shafts (with mouths at the end 



16 



