that night that five years later he would go down too, but to 1680 

 fathoms, in a perfected bathyscaphe, the building of which he had 

 himself directed ! 



We went on rising till we came to the level of the deck. The crane 

 swung round; under us the hold was open: on all sides the sailors 

 held the machine by ropes so that it would not knock the sides of 

 the hold. The final phase : we were lowered into the hold. I saw our 

 comrades, who were eager to join us as soon as possible. At last 

 the FNRS 2 came to rest on its cradle. It was three in the morning 

 when the door was opened. All went well, but with an incomprehen- 

 sible slowness. We had been shut up twelve hours. The same Draeger 

 apparatus, which on the 27th May 1931 allowed us to live for seventeen 

 hours in the stratosphere, had furnished us with breathable air during 

 all this time. 



The FNRS 2 itself behaved very well. There was no reason then 

 for not going on with our programme. 



For the first serious dive I had contemplated going down with one of 

 our biologists, or, if M. Cosyns wanted it, with him, to 550 fathoms. 

 From the beginning it had been laid down that the bathyscaphe would 

 not go down with a crew to more than two-thirds of the greatest depth 

 previously reached without a crew. In other words, we were applying 

 here the classic rule of the engineer who requires an overload of 50% 

 before any mechanism is accepted. (With the cabin of the Trieste 

 made of forged steel, this precaution was unnecessary in 1953 when it 

 was only a question of going down to 1650 fathoms.) That implied 

 then an empty descent of the bathyscaphe to 825 fathoms. 



FOGO 



The Elie-Monnier had picked out a place suitable for the tests, 

 behind the Island of Fogo, which is another one of the Cape Verde 

 group. In Portuguese, fogo means fire. In fact a volcano dominates 

 this little island. It is a cone of remarkable symmetry which rises to 

 nearly 9900 ft. For me and for several of my comrades who had never 

 seen a volcano from near at hand, to approach this was something of an 

 event. At the moment of our arrival the volcano was dormant : it was 

 almost the sleep of the Sleeping Beauty, for the last eruption had taken 

 place in 1857. Great lava-beds transformed into grey rock reached down 

 to the sea and showed the route which the destructive fire had taken 



[60] 



