The thing sounds incredible! A stranger from some far-off world—a stranger even from polar regions on our Earth, unlearned in the lore of warmer oceans—might scout the story as absurd.
Yet no fact in Natural History is better attested, or stands on a firmer foundation. There is a good deal more in the philosophy of this small world than appears at first sight.
CHAPTER XVII.
OVER THE OCEAN-BED
“The wrecks dissolve above us: their dust drops down from afar;—
Down to the dark, the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
O’er the great grey level plains of ooze, where the shell-burred cables creep.”
Rudyard Kipling.
BY way of variety, shall we take a little excursion together, you and I, into those under-sea regions of which so much has been said in past chapters? Regions which the foot of man has never trod; which the eye of man has never seen; which, except in death, the hand of man has never touched.
Shall we leave behind the fair Earth that we love, the sunshine, the bright sky, the fields and hedgerows, the blue sparkles of Ocean’s surface, and go down and down, through a waste of lonely waters, till our feet rest upon firm ground below?