204 A DESCENT INTO PERPETUAL NIGHT 



wholly new to science, seen by one or both of us, the proof 

 of whose existence, other than our word, must await the 

 luck of capture in nets far more effective than those we 

 now use in our oceanographic work. First, a quartet of 

 slender, elongate fish passed through the electric light 

 literally like arrows, about twenty inches long, whether 

 eels or not I shall never know; then a jelly, so close that it 

 almost brushed the glass. Finally, without my seeing how 

 it got there, a large fish swung suspended, half in, half out 

 of the beam (Fig. ii6). It was poised with only a slow 

 waving of fins. I saw it was something wholly unknown, 

 and I did two things at once; I reached behind for Mr. 

 Barton, to drag him away from his camera preparations 

 to the windows, to see and corroborate, and I disregarded 

 Miss Hollister's insistent questions in my ears. I had to 

 grunt or say something in reply to her, for I had already 

 exceeded the five seconds which was our danger duration 

 of silence throughout all the dives. But all this time I sat 

 absorbing the fish from head to tail through the wordless, 

 short-circuiting of sight, later to be materialized into 

 spoken and written words, and finally into a painting dic- 

 tated by what I had seen through the clear quartz. 



The strange fish was at least two feet in length, wholly 

 without lights or luminosity, with a small eye and good- 

 sized mouth. Later, when it shifted a little backwards I 

 saw a long, rather wide, but evidently filamentous pec- 

 toral fin. The two most unusual things were first, the 

 color, which, in the light, was an unpleasant pale, olive 



