“Eh, but it’s eerie!” we might say, were we of Scots descent. Sunlight is at once lost sight of, and twilight deepens fast.
A heavy cyclone may be raging above, but the troublous turmoil soon ceases to affect us. Stormy billows, with their showers of spray, cannot disturb the calm of these depths. As we sink lower, we find ourselves enwrapped in stillness. A creeping current is around us, yet with movement so gentle that we are not aware of it.
During the early part of our descent we come across innumerable sea-weeds; delicate floating red fronds, and long brown ribbons tangled together.
Presently we pass through a sticky slimy mass of Diatoms, reaching far to right and left, and of great depth. Untold millions of those tiny vegetables are living and growing together, in one enormous floating bank.
Now we have reached the “hundred-fathom limit,” and as we go beyond it, we find marked changes from the life we have known above.
No seasons here. No variations from summer to winter, from spring to autumn. Only one dead level of perpetual chill, becoming colder and colder.
No light here. No variations from night to day, from evening to morning. Nothing but continuous midnight blackness, unrelieved by the faintest gleam of sunshine.
No plant-life here. No ocean-weeds of any kind. Those things we have left behind us, far above.
Dead sea-weed fronds are indeed abundant, sinking slowly downward, in company with ourselves; and dead Diatoms, with dead microscopic creatures of many kinds, rain incessantly from the surface waters to the ocean’s bed. But they are far too minute for us to feel them, as they slip noiselessly past. Seeing anything, small or large, is out of the question.
No light; no waves; no colour; no beauty. Only unbroken stretches of silent water, with intense and penetrating cold.