174 AT THE END OF THE SPECTRUM 



mental concept, no matter how our physicists and chem- 

 ists continue to discover new elements, to dismember 

 atoms, and to recognize such invisible phenomena as neu- 

 trons. I have seen and felt the heat of molten, blazing 

 stone gushing out of the heart of our Earth; I have climbed 

 three and a half miles up the Himalayas and floated in a 

 plane still higher in the air, but nowhere have I felt so 

 completely isolated as in this bathysphere, in the black- 

 ness of ocean's depths. I realized the unchanging age of 

 my surroundings; we seemed like unborn embryos with 

 unnumbered geological epochs to come before we should 

 emerge to play our little parts in the unimportant shifts 

 and changes of a few moments in human history. Man's 

 recent period of strutting upon the surface of the earth 

 would have to be multiplied half a million times to equal 

 the duration of existence of this old ocean. 



We reached the surface and blazing sunlight, and 

 crawled out, cramped and rather battered, but very happy, 

 at 4:08 P.M. 



Scientific facts, more often than is known, are learned 

 by accident. Witness the young, healthy Bermudian lob- 

 ster which I wrapped in cheesecloth and tied above the 

 central window of the bathysphere. Langouste was to be 

 a sacrifice upon the altar of oceanography, and I antici- 

 pated that the increasing pressure would cause a quick 

 death and distribute his delectable juices broadcast in the 

 darkness, thereby attracting strange "denizens of the 

 deep." 



