THE KINGDOM OF THE HELMET 75 



plants — in appearance dead stumps and shredded, skeleton- 

 ized fronds — which actually are living corals and sea- 

 plumes whose thousands of tiny architects live happy lives 

 in their cubicles of horny branches and marble monoliths. 



For contrast let us turn swiftly northward again, to 

 colder regions where we must encase ourselves in heated, 

 wool-lined suits if we would dive in helmets beneath the 

 surface. Seaweeds are small or absent, but snails, anemones, 

 crabs, squids, and shrimps still hold their own, while giant 

 Arctic jellies sometimes a hundred feet in length throb 

 through the icy waters. Sharks are not Arctic as a race 

 but have been found well within the area of floating ice- 

 bergs, and there is always an abundance of food for them 

 in the great schools of fish which haunt these waters. 



Another shift to another contrast — from this land of 

 whiteness to the blackest seascape I have ever seen through 

 my helmet glass. The black lava shores of the Galapagos 

 slope down to the water's edge and on out through the 

 shallows with very little change, except that the cleans- 

 ing liquid has washed away all aerial dust. Great ebony 

 cliffs and terraces reveal gaping caves and grottos, and 

 now and then a flat stretch of bottom, covered with sand, 

 black as jet, affords shelter to a field of waving seaweed. 

 The tenants of the black cliffs are of astonishing variety. 

 Some seem especially appropriate, autochthonous as the 

 lava itself, such as a great dusky octopus which slides out 

 of its cave, perceives me, and, with a change of emotion, 

 shifts its color to brick red and then to mottled red and 



