THE FLOOR OF THE SEA
Who is there among us that has ever seen a lake, a pond, or a river-bed laid dry that has not felt an almost childish interest and curiosity in the aspect of a portion of earth’s surface hitherto concealed from our gaze? The feeling is probably universal, arising from the natural desire to penetrate the unknown, and also from a primitive anxiety to know what sort of an abode the inhabitants of the water possess, since we almost always consider the water-folk to live as do the birds, really on land with the water for an atmosphere. But if this curiosity be so general with regard to the petty depths mentioned above, how greatly is it increased in respect of the recesses of the sea. For there is truly the great unknown, the undiscoverable country of which, in spite of the constant efforts of deep-sea expeditions, we know next to nothing. Here imagination may (and does) run riot, attempting the impossible task of reproducing to our minds the state of things in the lightless, silent depths where life, according to our ideas of it, is impossible,—the true valley of the shadow of death.
Suppose that it were possible for some convulsion of Nature to lay bare, let us say, the entire bed of the North Atlantic Ocean. With one bound the fancy leaps at the prospect of a rediscovery of the lost continent, the fabled Atlantis whose wonders have had so powerful an effect upon the imaginations of mankind. Should we be able to roam through those stupendous halls, climb those towering temple heights reared by the giants of an elder world, or gaze with stupefied wonder upon the majestic ruins of cities to which Babylon or Palmyra with all their mountainous edifices were but as a suburban townlet! Who knows? Yet maybe the natural wonders apparent in the foundations of such soaring masses as the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, or the Canaries; or, greater still, the altitude of such remote and lonely pinnacles as those of the St. Paul’s Rocks, would strike us as more marvellous yet. To thread the cool intricacies of the “still vext Bermoothes” at their basements and seek out the caves where the sea-monsters dwell who never saw the light of day, to wander at will among the windings of that strange maze of reefs that cramp up the outpouring of the beneficent Gulf Stream and make it issue from its source with that turbulent energy that carries it, laden with blessings, to our shores; what a pilgrimage that would be! Imagine the vision of that great chain of islands which we call the West Indies soaring up from the vast plain 6000 feet below, with all the diversity of form and colour belonging to the lovely homes of the coral insects, who build ceaselessly for themselves, yet all unconsciously rear stable abodes for mankind.
It would be an awful country to view, this suddenly exposed floor of the sea. A barren land of weird outline, of almost unimaginable complexity of contour, but without any beauty such as is bestowed upon the dry earth by the kindly sun. For its beauty depends upon the sea, whose prolific waters are peopled with life so abundantly that even the teeming earth is barren as compared with the ocean. But at its greatest depths all the researches that man has been able to prosecute go to prove that there is little life. The most that goes on there is a steady accumulation of the dead husks of once living organisms settling slowly down to form who knows what new granites, marbles, porphyries, against the time when another race on a reorganised earth shall need them. Here there is nothing fanciful, for if we know anything at all of prehistoric times, it is that what is now high land, not to say merely dry land, was once lying cold and dormant at the bottom of the sea being prepared throughout who can say what unrealisable periods of time for the use and enjoyment of its present lords. Not until we leave the rayless gloom, the incalculable pressures and universal cold of those tremendous depths, do we find the sea-floor beginning to abound with life. It may even be doubted whether anything of man’s handiwork, such as there is about a ship foundering in mid-ocean, would ever reach in a recognisable form the bottom of the sea at a depth of more than 2000 fathoms. There is an idea, popularly current among seafarers, that sunken ships in the deep sea only go down a certain distance, no matter what their build or how ponderous their cargo. Having reached a certain stratum, they then drift about, slowly disintegrating, derelicts of the depths, swarming with strange denizens, the shadowy fleets of the lost and loved and mourned. In time, of course, as the great solvent gets in its work they disappear, becoming part of their surroundings, but not for hundreds of years, during which they pass and repass at the will of the under-currents that everywhere keep the whole body of water in the ocean from becoming stagnant and death-dealing to adjacent shores. A weird fancy truly, but surely not more strange than the silent depths about which it is formulated.
In his marvellously penetrative way, Kipling has touched this theme while singing the “Song of the English”:—
“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,