AT THE END OF THE SPECTRUM l6l 



and then down the telephone. My hundreds of dives in a 

 helmet had made familiar the sight of water outside the 

 window, but there was nothing to make evident to eye 

 or mind the quality of pressure. When at looo feet a voice 

 reminded me that there were twenty-three hundred tons 

 of water pressing in on the bathysphere, and the window 

 against which I had my face was withstanding six and 

 one-half tons, it meant very little. I watched a delicate 

 sea creature swimming slowly along and all sense of the 

 terrific pressure was absent. So these things had to be in- 

 tellectually admitted. The compensation was the perfect 

 realization of where I was, which is far from being always 

 the case when under temporarily unique conditions. Pic- 

 card in his aluminium car, like a mote of Stardust high in 

 air, could not have felt a smaller, less important atom in 

 the universe than I in my tiny chamber dangling in mid- 

 ocean. 



At 500 feet we had an elaborate and careful rehearsal 

 of light signals. These were of the greatest importance, for 

 if anything should happen to our sole line of communica- 

 tion — the telephone wires — a single flickering of the light 

 on deck would indicate at least that we were still alive, 

 and a triple signal would cause us to be drawn up as 

 rapidly as possible. 



At 500 feet we were informed that the sky had become 

 partly overcast, and the Freedom- was rolling more, a mo- 

 tion which was only too evident to us. I took a careful 

 spectroscope reading and could see about eighty per cent 



