72 THE KINGDOM OF THE HELMET 



fathoms down we enter the home of the beautiful basket 

 starfish, hinting of the crinoids which have now almost 

 vanished from the earth. 



We take our seat upon a mat of seaweed and watch 

 the life of mid-water. Shrimps come in great numbers, 

 drifting past like ghosts of living beings; the first squid 

 seen, head on, will never be forgotten, nor will a galaxy of 

 ctenophore jellyfish when the sunlight sets their cilia 

 ablaze. Whelks and small, curious crabs clamber upon our 

 canvas shoes, and suddenly a thousand comets dash past — 

 a school of herrings in search of spawning grounds. Only 

 an impatient jerk on the hose will remind us that we have 

 long overstayed our allotted time. 



At the first dive in the tropics, say in the West Indies, 

 we are impressed by the great increase in amount of life 

 and the unbelievable brilliancy of color. Off New York 

 we perhaps picked up a tiny crumb-of -bread sponge and 

 on a clam shell found a bubble of coral the size of a marble. 

 Here, in the midst of a tropical reef, corals form boulders 

 six and eight feet across, or branched arborescent growths 

 into which we can climb. Anemones and fish are rainbow- 

 tinted — harlequin angelfish and large-eyed scarlet squirrels. 

 Horny corals send up unearthly purple branches like noth- 

 ing conceivable above water, and the joy of it all is that 

 everything that moves has little or no fear of us. We are 

 made to feel at home — returning natives, not intruding 

 strangers. 



When many dives have been made at one place, so that 



