■JO THE KINGDOM OF THE HELMET 



Finally, as a border to your marine plantation, collect 

 a score of small, rounded brain corals all thickly covered 

 with tube worms. When you lay them in place, they will 

 be of a drab, dirty white. It is their momentary winter, 

 but wait patiently and in five minutes you can see spring 

 approach, and a host of pastel buds appear; and in an- 

 other five minutes full summer arrives and your ivory 

 mounds are ablaze with scarlet, mauve, blue, yellow, and 

 green animal blossoms. All are in motion, though there 

 is no current, and we feel that there would be nothing 

 remarkable in their suddenly saying, like Alice's Tiger-lily, 

 "We can talk, when there's anybody worth talking to." 



The wise diver will refrain from written descriptions 

 of his experiences. What I have published of under-sea- 

 scapes has aroused commendation on the part of fireside 

 and dry land readers. The moment, however, one of them 

 puts on a helmet and goes to see for himself, thereafter, 

 all words and phrases, similes, and superlatives will be- 

 come for him hopelessly inadequate. Just as the colors 

 under-sea are nameless in the gamut of terrestrial hues, 

 so our language becomes thin and vague when we try to 

 fashion from it adequate submarine imagery. Even the 

 commonest fishes and other organisms of our shallows 

 are like different creatures when viewed from their own 

 element and their own level, instead of from a man's ver- 

 tical height above water: our human friends as we see 

 them from a second story window are strangely unlike 

 them face to face! 



