CHAPTER II
Untraveled Depths
How any of us chanced to survive is more than I can say. In the turbulence and vertigo of that last blind roaring moment, I had vaguely felt that we had reached the end of all things; hence it was almost with surprise that I found myself hazily regaining consciousness, and discovered that I could still move my limbs and open my eyes. At first, indeed, I had the dim sense that I was dead and embarking upon the Afterlife; and it was only the definite sensation of pain in my bruised arms and legs, and the definite sight of my comrades tumbled about in ungainly attitudes, which convinced me that I was still on the better known side of the grave.
“Sure, and I thought we went through the very gates of Hell!” came a familiar voice; and Stranahan rose unsteadily to his feet, lugubriously nursing a sprained wrist. “By all the saints in heaven, we must be a devilish lot! The devil himself didn’t seem able to get us!”
Cheered by sound of a human voice, I followed Stranahan’s example, and slowly and painfully arose. I was thankful to learn that, although badly battered, I had suffered no broken bones; and as my comrades one by one staggered up from the deck, I was glad to observe that none were gravely injured.
Our vessel had assumed a horizontal position again, but I felt that our surroundings were strangely altered. While a pale luminescence seemed to transfuse the waters on both sides and above us, yet below us the golden lights were no longer visible, and everything seemed impenetrably black.
Of course, the Captain again ordered the searchlights turned on--and this time with extraordinary results. Just beneath us, actually in contact with the bottom of the X-111, a flat, sandy reach of ground was visible--certainly, the bottom of the sea! But this fact was the least remarkable of all. On both sides of us, at distances possibly of two hundred yards, a high and geometrically regular embankment shot up precipitously, ending in a yellow illuminated patch of water whose nature we could scarcely surmise. The one thing apparent was that we were in a submarine channel, a sort of river bed in the bottom of the sea. This fact was made evident by a current which sent us skimming along the soft sands although our engines had long since ceased to supply us with power.
“I can’t understand it!” sighed Captain Gavison, shaking his head dolefully. “I can’t understand it at all! For twenty-five years I’ve studied the ocean currents, but I’ve never before heard of anything like this!”
Just at this point our searchlights showed us a long, lithe dark form gliding rapidly by through the waters perhaps fifty feet above. It was as large as the largest known shark, but was shaped like no fish I had ever seen, tapering to a slender, canoe-like point at both ends; and, as it passed, the water seemed to foam and bubble strangely in its wake.
“Perdition take me, if it ain’t a sea dragon!” ventured Stranahan, who had to have his say.
“Stranahan, be silent!” snapped the Captain, in high irritation. “You’re always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time!”
“Yes, sir,” admitted Stranahan, meekly, a grave expression in his pale blue eyes.
“If you want to make yourself useful, Stranahan,” continued the Captain severely, although with less asperity than before, “go forward, and find out how far we are beneath sea level.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” agreed Stranahan, remembering to salute.
“How far below were we at the last reading, sir?” I inquired of the Captain, after Stranahan had vanished through the small compartment door.
“Thirty-seven hundred feet,” returned the officer, abruptly. “But we’ve sunk considerably since then.”
It was at this juncture that Stranahan reappeared in the doorway, a stare of blank, incredulous astonishment on his lean, hardened face.
“Well?” the Captain demanded. “How far below are we now?”
Stranahan mopped his brow as if to wipe off an invisible perspiration. But he answered not a word.
“Stranahan,” growled the exasperated officer, somewhat after the manner of a schoolma’am to an unruly pupil, “do you hear me? I’m asking to know how far below we are now.”
“Well, sir,” drawled Stranahan, saluting mechanically, “wouldn’t I be telling you if I knew? But, saints in heaven, sir, that machine must be bewitched! Else I’m seeing things!”
“Didn’t you notice the reading?” bawled the Captain.
“Yes, sir,” Stranahan replied, humbly. “That’s what the trouble is, sir.”
“Then how far below are we?”
Stranahan hesitated as though he would rather not speak. “Forty-four feet,” he muttered, at length.
A murmur of suppressed excitement passed from end to end of the room. “Forty-four feet!” yelled the Captain. “You mean forty-four hundred!”
“No, sir,” maintained Stranahan, quietly. “I mean forty-four.”
* * * * *
The Captain’s anger became uncontrollable. “Stranahan, you must take me for a fool!” he shouted. “This is not the moment for practical jokes! At any other time I’d have you thrown in the brig!”
“But, sir----” Stranahan started to protest.
“That’s enough!” roared the officer, fairly shaking with fury. And, turning to one of the younger men, he commanded, “Ripley, see how far below water level we are!”
“Aye, aye, sir,” assented Ripley, and left the room.
A moment later he returned with a sheepish grin on his face.
“Well, how far below are we?” demanded the Captain.
But Ripley, like Stranahan, seemed reluctant to speak. He coughed, gasped, stammered out an unintelligible syllable or two, cleared his throat, stood gaping at us stupidly while we looked on expectantly, and finally blurted out, “Forty---- forty-three feet, sir!”
“Forty-three feet!” bellowed the Captain. “Has the whole crew gone crazy?”
And, without further ado, Gavison himself went lunging toward the door, and disappeared in the forward compartment.
It was several minutes before he returned. But when he rejoined us, his face wore a look of undisguised amazement. Furtively and almost shamefacedly he peered at us, like one who fancies he is losing his wits.
“Well, sir, how far below are we now?” I questioned.
The Captain cleared his throat, and hesitated perceptibly before replying. “I---- I really don’t know. I can’t understand---- I can’t understand it at all. If the instruments aren’t out of order, we’re exactly forty-two feet below!”
I gasped stupidly; then suggested, “No doubt, sir, the instruments are out of order.”
“They are not!” denied the Captain. “I’ve tested them!”
Again the Captain hesitated briefly; then abruptly he resumed, “Besides, as you know, there are two instruments. They both record forty-two feet. Surely, they can’t both be wrong in exactly the same way.”
There ensued a moment of silence, during which we stared dully at one another, filled with mute questionings we would not dare to put into words.
“But how do you explain----” I at length started to inquire.
“I don’t explain at all!” interrupted the officer. “We’re simply running counter to all natural laws! According to all estimates, we should be nearly a mile deep by now!”
And the Captain stood stroking his chin in grave perplexity. Then turning suddenly to us all, he remarked, “I can’t see how it can be true, boys; but if we’re only forty-two feet deep, then maybe the engines will have life enough in them to pull us out. At least, it’s a chance worth taking.”
Half an hour later, after a few instructions and the assignment of the crew to duty, we had the pleasure of hearing once more the churning and throbbing of the engines. At first it promised to be a barren pleasure indeed, for the abused machinery gasped and sputtered as though determined upon a permanent strike; but finally after many vain efforts, we were greeted by the continuous buzzing of the motors. Then we found ourselves slowly moving, at first scarcely faster than the current, but with gradually increasing velocity; and by degrees we felt the deck taking on an upward slope as the nose of the vessel was pointed toward the surface of the waters. It was not an easy pull, for our three flooded compartments were powerfully inclined to hold us to the bottom; and in the beginning we made very little progress; several times we felt our hull scraping the ocean floor. Eventually, the engines, waxing to their full power, began to cleave the water at gratifying speed, and we found that we were moving definitely, though slowly upward.
Of course, hope came to us then in a powerful wave, accompanied by black flashes of despair, for what if impassable thousands of feet of water still rolled above us? Impatiently we fastened our eyes on the pressure gauges, and impatiently watched the registered distance dwindle from forty feet to thirty-five, from thirty-five to thirty, from thirty to twenty-five, and from twenty-five to twenty! And now, in a sudden wild burst of joy, we realized that probably we were saved! A pale but unmistakable radiance was seeping in through the glass ports, a radiance far more distinct and reassuring than the eerie luminescence we had noticed before. Certainly, this was the sunlight--and in a few moments we might bask again in the warmth of day!
And as we rose from twenty feet to fifteen, and from fifteen to ten, our hopes found increasing fuel. The light filtering in through the windows brightened at a rate that was more than heartening--and through the clear waters, even without the aid of the searchlights, we could distinguish a steep embankment, perhaps fifty or a hundred yards away. And just above us, almost within grasping distance, we thought we could notice the line where water met air!
But we had no intimation of the surprise that lay in store for us. Today, as I look back upon those events with clear perspective, it seems incredible to me that we could actually have expected to escape at once to the upper world. But hope had doubtless blinded our eyes and suffering blunted our perceptions, so that we could not understand that we were at the beginning, rather than at the end of our adventures.
* * * * *
Suddenly, with a furious lunge and an unwonted, violent burst of speed, we found ourselves launched upward toward the wavy, light-shot level that was our goal; and now a blinding brilliance was upon us, and for a moment we had to shade our eyes to shield them from the dazzling change. Then, when by degrees we were able to glance again about us, we found that we were on the surface of the waters, actually on the surface!--but where was this that we had come up? and in what strange and unmapped continent? There was scarcely one of us that could suppress a cry of astonishment--we were afloat, not upon the ocean, as we had expected, but rather on a wide and rapidly flowing river--a river that washed no shores, ever described by human tongue! Altogether, it was one of the weirdest and most magnificent lands imaginable; on both sides of the stream spread a flat plain, dotted with great sea shells and greenish boulders, which in their turn were interspersed with a mossy brown vegetation and pale, graceful flowers like waterlilies on solitary stalks. At measured intervals, as far as the eye could reach, were colossal stone columns, enriched with pastel tintings of pink and blue; and these shot upward hundreds of feet as though supporting some titanic dome, ending, unaccountably, in a dark, green sky from which glared several sun-like, golden orbs, which suffused the scene in a mellow, unearthly luster that was beautiful, yet terrifying and ghostly.
Rubbing our eyes, like children still not half awake, we gazed at this fantastic, lovely spectacle. Not a word did we speak; we could not have found language to voice our amazement. Only the Captain, out of the whole thirty-nine of us, retained some measure of self-possession; and though, as he afterwards confessed, he was so dazzled that he spoke and acted mechanically, he did retain the presence of mind to order our vessel steered to shore and anchored.
It is still a marvel to me that we had the energy to carry out these commands. Somehow we brought the X-111 to land; and somehow, after several false starts, we managed to moor the ship to a large boulder in a sort of miniature bay.
And then Stranahan proved again that he possessed an original mind. Not only was he the first to force himself out of the opening door of the submarine, but he carried out a large American flag, which he planted in the ground among the brown weeds between the boulders, while with sedate and ceremonious gestures, he proclaimed, “In the name of the United States of America, I take possession of this land!”
But the rest of us gave no heed to his words. We were taking deep, refreshing breaths of the pure, clean air, which came to us almost like a mercy from heaven after the suffocating atmosphere of the submarine. And before we had had half the needed time to revive our starving lungs, an astounding phenomenon, as unexpected as the very discovery of this spectral region, was to drive Stranahan from our thoughts at the same time that it flooded our minds with terror. For the golden lights above suddenly flickered, gave out a fugitive spark or two, and with meteor swiftness went out. We found ourselves mantled in a starless and impenetrable blackness, more mysterious and dreadful than the loneliest watery abysses from which we had just escaped.
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