A DESCENT INTO PERPETUAL NIGHT 195 



see what overpuriiied air would breathe hke. So I had my- 

 self immolated one day from three to five o'clock, sealed 

 up tight, and breathed my best. The temperature, hu- 

 midity, and pressure did exactly what they should have 

 done, and at the end of two hours' time, with a combina- 

 tion of one-half litre of oxygen a minute, and trayfuls of 

 soda lime and calcium chloride, I emerged from a bathy- 

 sphere whose atmosphere was as fresh as that of the outside 

 world. One valuable thing learned was that the calcium 

 chloride, under the constant stream of air, deliquesced so 

 heartily that it dripped from its tray to the blower. So 

 we inverted the arrangement, placing the blower at the 

 top and fastening a pan beneath to catch the sticky, weak 

 acid emanation. Another important discovery we made 

 one day was that the old half mile of rubber hose had lost 

 its resiliency and could no longer be twisted into the stuf- 

 fing box without tearing. As this opening is the greatest 

 danger point of all, we reversed the hose and used at the 

 bathysphere end the new strip of 600 feet which I had 

 bought this year. When packed with ice to make its time 

 of greatest shrinkage coincide with its entry into the deep- 

 est, coldest zone, we felt that we had done all that was 

 humanly possible to make the descents safe. 



Again I threw my dice against unsettled weather and 

 again I won, and on Saturday, August eleventh, at half- 

 past nine in the morning I looked about from the deck of 

 the Ready and saw the long, low swell of a calm day. We 

 were well within the magic circle, six and a half miles 



