IN THE DEPTHS 



57 



too, the washings of the land, the admixture of 

 silt and rock with the sea muds make a differ- 

 ent bottom from that found in the deep-sea 

 troughs. And growing up from these sunlit 

 bottoms are all forms of sea life and shore life. 

 Along the continental benches are vast hill- 

 sides covered with algce as with an olive-green 

 carpet, wide meadows where kelp slowly swings 

 in the blue-green light, and out from the 

 cliffs long slips and slides of rock (taluses 

 leading downward into the sea), where float 

 trailing green-and-opal ribbons, thin trunks 

 and cylinders that stand like tiny sahuaros 

 casting out living arms for food, and groves 

 of dull green branches that have neither fruit 

 nor foliage and never change hue nor place. 



Impressive, indeed, to the sponge-gatherer 

 and the pearl-diver are these gardens and for- 

 ests of the shore that undulate only to the slow 

 ebb and flow of tides; but they are merely the 

 fringe to the mantle as compared with the bar- 

 rens of the deep. Once the abrupt breaks of 

 the shore-bench are passed the ocean bed shelves 

 off into dark shoals that correspond to elevated 

 tablelands, and are followed by depths that lie 

 flat like inland basins. These latter are cut 

 through by long trenches, not very different 

 from the deep arroyos of the desert or the 



Shore beds 

 and their 

 boUoms. 



Along the 



shore 



benches. 



Dark- 

 trenches. 



