3
Young Ernest Stevens, on that fateful night of the 7th which saw the climax of the world’s fear, had found himself in the vicinity of Piccadilly when the first rush of the panic began. He had seen for himself the sudden rise of the waters of the Thames which had taken place during the preceding few days, and had also read the newspaper accounts of the extraordinary and unexplainable heightening of the sea’s level, but was still so much centered on the strange passing of Clinton and his expedition as to give the subject of general interest but small attention. On this night, however, when the publication of that epochal last message from the Portsmouth station sent the first crowds hastening through the streets, Stevens realized his own position and started off across the city toward his lodgings.
Before he had gone far the first great mobs were rushing through the streets, beginning the vast exodus from the city, and disrupting all the ordinary means of transportation. Already, too, salt floods were creeping through the streets, adding to the panic of the crowds, and as Stevens walked on, the lights of the city around him were beginning to fail, fanning the flames of fear higher in the already panic-mad crowds. By the time Stevens finally stumbled up the steps of his lodging-house, the street on which it stood was wholly dark, and covered by a few inches of water through which the fugitives along its length were splashing.
He found the house itself deserted, and going to his own rooms quickly gathered the most necessary of his belongings into a small bundle, which he formed into a rough knapsack or pack. This done he turned toward the door, then paused a moment at the window. Before him stretched away the roofs and steeples of the vast city, all their sparkling lights vanished now and darkened. From the west, though, came a flickering red light, and he could see there a mighty uprush of flames. The street outside, the waters in it slowly rising, was alive with hurrying figures, many with great bundles or barrows, all pressing on to escape from the city, and shouting hoarsely to one another.
Stevens turned toward the door, but as he did so he stopped suddenly short. The door had swung open, and in its opening stood a man, a dark, slender figure. The red glow of light from the window fell full upon his face, and as Stevens saw it he cried out.
“Clinton!” he cried. “Good God!—Clinton!”
The other came swiftly toward him, and grasped his arm. “I thought I might find you here, Stevens,” he said, quietly. “It was a thousand-to-one chance, but I came.”
Stevens stumbled with him to the red-lit window, like a man in a dream. “Clinton!” he exclaimed again. “Where in God’s name have you been, while this horror has been rising on the world? When did you come back?”
Clinton pushed him back into the chair by the window, and silenced his questions with an upraised hand. “I came back but a few hours ago, Stevens,” he said, “and I came here for you because I sail again in an hour, and want you with me.”
“Sail?” repeated Stevens, stupefied. “To where?”
“To the bottom of the Atlantic,” said Clinton, calmly.
As the younger man stared at him he dropped into a chair beside him. “To the bottom of the Atlantic,” he repeated, his voice suddenly pregnant with dread knowledge, “where I have been for weeks, where there is a secret which I first of all men discovered, where the work of untold ages is whirling now to its climax and sending this mighty flood rolling out to drown our world!”
He was silent a moment, gazing out over the red-lit city while Stevens stared at him in stunned amazement, and then went on. “You were to have been of our expedition, Stevens, and you know what my plans were. You know how we sailed in our submarine to penetrate the deeps that had never yet been penetrated by man. Out of the English Channel, out into the open Atlantic we sailed, west and northwest, until we had reached at last the northern boundary of the Nelsen Deeps. And there our work began.
“I need not tell you of that work, for our own radio reports recorded the main features of it. We headed slowly southward, on the surface, using our trawls, and during the next three days we were amazed at the richness of the fields beneath us, the profusion of new forms and variations of old ones that our trawls brought up. It was late on the fourth day that we lost one of our trawls, as I reported. We drew up the steel cable, to find that it had been severed near its end, and though we were certain, of course, that it had broken when the trawl caught on a snag, it was no ragged break but a clean, sharp cut, as though done by giant shears. That it was which touched us first with a sense of mystery and awe. Around us was only the vast empty panorama of sea and sky, but beneath us were three miles and more of lightless waters, a vast gulf unpenetrated since the world’s birth by man or the science of man. We worked on, southward, feeling as though under some strange spell. And then, shattering that spell, came the thing which one of our trawls brought up on the morning of the fifth day, the 11th.
“It was not so much in the trawl as on it, hanging from a corner as though caught and brought up by the ascending trawl. It was a machine, or part of a machine, a thing of shining metal about a foot in each dimension. There was a framework of heavy metal rods, three of them; inside were a chain of little gears and six slender tubes of what seemed glass, with inside of each a red wire or thread. The framework’s three thick pillars were broken off sharp at the bottom, as though the thing had been ripped by the trawl from some larger machine, yet in itself the thing was a complete mystery. It was totally unlike anything we had ever seen, the shining metal was a wholly unfamiliar one, and the glasslike tubes, we found, were not glass but a transparent metal of some sort. The thing was constructed, too, with a strength and heaviness unusual in so small a mechanism. No one on earth would construct it thus heavily; but suppose it had been actually constructed at the sea’s bottom from whence we had dragged it, to resist the tremendous pressures there? What mysteries could be lurking in the three miles of water below us?
“There was but one thing to do, to descend in the submarine for further exploration, and after sending off a last message in which I hinted of our discovery, without telling more lest the whole thing prove a hoax, we began excited preparations for the descent. The deck-fittings were dismantled, the heavy conning-tower doors clanged shut, and a moment later the submarine’s electric motors began to hum and we slanted downward into the green waters, using both ballast-tanks and diving-planes for our descent, and moving downward in a great spiral.
“Gazing through the little port-holes in the control room, Dr. Lewis, Captain Evans, the submarine’s commander, and I watched the sunlit waters outside darkening as we sank downward. In those waters there turned and flashed the shoals of surface fishes, but as we dropped on, these disappeared, giving way to other forms that we could but vaguely make out in the darkening waters. By the time the bathometric dial registered five hundred feet the darkness about us was all but absolute, and a word of command turned on the great under-sea searchlights, from which long lanes of golden light cut out through the gloom about us.
“Still down we sank, in that great spiral course, until we had reached a thousand feet, two thousand, a mile, a mile and a half. Now and then we glimpsed great sea-creatures that blundered into the glow of our lights, cephalopods and gasteropods, and now and then one of the larger deep-sea crustaceans. Most of these, however, seemed to flee from the brilliance of our lights, though in one case we caught sight of a long, snaky form that could only have belonged to the hydrophis family, though it was of unprecedented thickness and length.
“The dial now registered a two-mile depth, and we snapped off the submarine’s lights, for in the waters about us were glowing the phosphorescent creatures that lurk in these great depths. Floating by in the darkness went here and there a Brisinga elegans, or luminous starfish, its nineteen long tentacles glowing with misty light. The snakelike stomias boa flashed past, the double rows of luminous disks on the sides of its long body adding to the phosphorescent brilliance. We made out, too, a squat, flat creature fully fifteen feet in length, with great fanged mouth and luminous tail and fins, quite unknown to the science of zoology, while scores of the rare malacosteus niger, with its two headspots of greenish-gold light, could be seen around us. Then, as we sank still farther downward, the glowing phosphorescent forms about us thinned and vanished, while about us lay a dark and almost lifeless region of waters.
“I turned to order the lights snapped on again, but stopped short at a sudden cry from Lewis, at the port-hole beside me. He could not speak, only pointing down in utmost excitement through the glass, and as I too gazed down, awe and astonishment fell on me. For glimmering up toward us from far below, through the dark waters, was a faint white light, a strange, cold radiance that was growing rapidly stronger as we dropped down toward it. In stunned silence we watched, as our craft dipped down, and now at last we began to see its source.
“A thousand feet below us there stretched an unimaginable scene. It was the ocean’s floor, a level, somewhat rolling plain, and on it, within this vast region of white radiance, were grouped scores, hundreds, thousands of strange structures, great globes of shining metal, pierced by doorways, which were of uniform size, each being fully three hundred feet in diameter. They were ranged in long streets or avenues with mathematical precision. Away into the distance as far as the eye could reach stretched this mighty city of globes, and I saw that on the top of each globe was a small squat mechanism, like that which our trawl had brought up but larger, and while these mechanisms were not themselves luminous or shining, there sprang from them in some way rays of white light which made it plain that it was these which produced the strange white light that bathed all this gigantic city.
“Our craft was slanting downward, toward and across the city as we watched in awe, and as it did so we made out two things. The first was that far away there was a spot at the city’s heart where were no globes, a vast, smooth-walled pit that seemed to sink down into the sea’s floor for an unguessable distance, and which I judged was fully two miles in diameter. Near its edge there soared up above the globes of the city, for fully two thousand feet, a slender tower of the same shining metal, at whose tip was a small, bulb-like room. I seemed to see, also, vague, great shapes that moved about this tower, but at that moment my attention was shifted suddenly by Lewis’ exclamation to the city beneath us, and I saw for the first time the people of that city.
“Through the streets, but a few hundred feet below us, now, there moved countless numbers of black forms, creeping along the smooth, metal-paved avenues like great black slugs. And as we dropped closer toward them we saw that that was what they were—great slug-people, their bodies thick cylinders of dark flesh, perhaps eight feet in length and three in thickness, on which they crawled forward like giant worm-things, their only limbs two short, thick flippers near the head, their only sense-organs that we could see being two great, dark, shining eyes like the eyes of an octopus—great slug-creatures, inhabitants of the waters here at the sea’s bottom, crawling through this strange and awful city whose existence men have never dreamed—a city at the bottom of the sea, a city glowing with white, unearthly radiance, a city peopled by unhuman creatures, but reared into being by more than human power!
“We stared down upon it, in indescribable awe and wonder, and then Evans, the commander, uttered a sudden exclamation. A group of the strange slug-creatures had collected in the street just below us, gazing up through the waters toward us with their strange, dark eyes, and now we saw that across the city toward us was striding an erect, gigantic shape. It came from the direction of the great pit and tower, where there could be glimpsed others like it—an erect, vast shape of metal, striding toward us on two mighty limbs or columns which must have measured a thousand feet in height, and which supported at their top a small disk-platform on which were grouped two or three of the slug-creatures, operating their vast mechanism. From below this platform, too, there projected a great jointed limb, or arm, of almost the same length as the two great legs, and as the vast thing strode toward us over the city of globes this mighty arm was reaching out toward our craft.
“I uttered a shout, and heard a hoarse order from Evans shouted through the speaking-tube, and a moment later the submarine shot upward with all the power of its motors. But as it did so there came a jarring shock and clash of metal, and then our craft was pulled downward, its propellers spinning in vain. The great upraised arm of the giant striding machine had gripped us and held us as a child might hold a toy.
“Now, with that great arm circling the submarine and holding it tightly, the vast mechanism began to stride back across the city, and a moment later had halted, and was lowering our craft to the city’s floor. Below us, we saw, was a group of three of the globe-buildings set apart from the others in a small clearing, and before one of these the arm that held our craft placed it, still holding it tightly. We saw the great door of the globe-building, fifty feet across and twice that in height, opening by sliding down into the metal pavement below. Ten feet inside was another similar door which was opening likewise, both great doors being quite transparent, though apparently of immense strength. In a moment our craft had been pushed inside, into the bare, white-lit interior of the great metal globe, and then both great doors rolled back up and closed tightly. Our submarine, with all in it, was prisoned in the waters inside.
“The next moment, though, there came the throb of great pumps, and swiftly the waters inside the globe began to sink, while a strange hissing began. A glance at the dials explained it, for as the waters sank they were being replaced by air, at a pressure the same as at sea-level. In a moment more the waters had disappeared entirely, and cautiously we opened the conning-tower doors and stepped out. The air, we found, was quite pure and breathable, though with a strange odor of chemicals, and had it not been for the vast white-lit city of globes lying beneath the waters outside our transparent doors, one might have thought himself in some room on earth’s surface.
“I knew, though, as the submarine’s startled occupants stepped out into our strange prison, how far we were from earth’s surface, how unfathomably far from the life of humanity in this city of the sea’s dark depths, this white-lit town of the trackless ocean’s floor. For I knew now how far from humanity were these strange and fearful slug-creatures who were of more than human intelligence, but with no human point of view, who could capture men and put them in this prison of air at the sea’s bottom as we of earth would capture some creatures of the sea and imprison them in a prison of water, or aquarium, on earth!