from 2 miles off, came up at full speed. The dinghy won. Salvio con- 

 nected the telephone and established contact : 



' Hallo ! Everything all right ? How far down ? ' 



'More than 550 fathoms.* 



The compressed-air hose on board the Tenace was connected to the 

 tubing of the tower and the air entering the shaft drove out the water. 

 We could see the level going down outside the rear porthole. When 

 the lock was empty, they opened the hatches, and we climbed up the 

 ladder and got out on to the deck. A longboat came alongside and 

 took us to the Tenace. In its turn the Fenice came up, bringing the 

 journalists : in the calm sea it could come almost side by side with the 

 Tenace. 



One sceptical spirit demanded proof of our depth, but if our word 

 was not enough, the recording indicators came to our aid as reliable 

 witnesses, as a naval officer had sealed them with a lead seal when we 

 set off. Twenty-one years ago, at Dubendorf, the meteorologist 

 Berger, steward for the Swiss Aero- Club, had sealed the two baro- 

 graphs in the stratospheric balloon in the same way. 



Did they want us to go and get the recording instruments from the 

 Trieste so that the reporters could themselves verify the depth 

 reached? I very much wanted to suggest that they should go down 

 themselves to see the imprint that our cabin had left in the mud. At 

 that moment Bûcher, one of the divers, hailed us. He was holding out 

 a handful of grey-blue clay. 



' I picked it off the cabin ! ' 



At the spot where we were, the marine chart showed the depth 

 to be from 550 to 605 fathoms: there it was, the proof they 

 wanted ! 



At the beginning of this chapter I told why we had closed the out- 

 flow opening of the front ballast tank : the back tank alone was work- 

 ing. The bathyscaphe had thus been thrown slightly out of equilibrium 

 and, now that it was on the surface, it was lying slightly low by the 

 bow. We did not think of pointing it out to the journalists. A few 

 days later, opening the newspapers, I learned with some astonishment 

 that we had been next door to catastrophe ! It appears that a compart- 

 ment of petrol had leaked and that we had just managed to come up 

 again by throwing overboard all our ballast. I ought by rights to be 

 trembling to think of the perils which, it seems, we had just escaped 

 from! 



[«23] 



