TO DAVY JONES S LOCKER 121 



ductor. Twice it swam back to the delectable bait and 

 three times returned to where it almost diametered my 

 circular outlook. Then I knew what the trouble was — it 

 was the ghost of a pilot-fish — pure white with eight wide, 

 black, upright bands. At 200 feet a pilot-fish could not 

 be the color he is at the surface, and, like Einstein's half- 

 sized world, here was a case where only the faulty, tran- 

 sient memory of man sealed up in a steel sphere had any 

 right to assert that under different conditions the fish 

 would show any colors other than the dark upright bands. 

 I am certain that the fish itself aided this pale appearance, 

 for it has considerable power of color change, but this 

 was very different from the mere expansion and contrac- 

 tion of dermal chromatophores. At 250 feet I saw the 

 pilot-fish going upward. 



There was a similarity between two- and three-hundred- 

 foot levels in that most of the fish seen were carangids, 

 such as pilot-fish and Psenes (this has no human or Chris- 

 tian name, but its technical one is so interesting to pro- 

 nounce that this can be excused!) . Long strings of siphon- 

 ophores drifted past, lovely as the finest lace, and schools 

 of jellyfish throbbed on their directionless but energetic 

 road through life. Small vibrating motes passed in clouds, 

 wholly mysterious until I could focus exactly and knew 

 them for pteropods, or flying snails, each of which lived 

 within a delicate, tissue shell, and flew through life with 

 a pair of flapping, fleshy wings (Fig. 45) . 



At 400 feet there came into view the first real deep- 



