He had stopped pumping and was clutching at the Professor's arm with one hand while he pointed down with the other. The Professor motioned him toward the pump, and began to click pictures furiously with the camera pointed at the nearest mound.
Wondering at the urgency of Stanley's gesture and the frantic clicking of the camera shutter, I looked more closely at the curious, saucerlike hump.
Under closer inspection something remarkably like a huge, mud-colored eye was revealed! And as we drifted along, twenty feet away on the farther slope, another appeared!
Paralyzed, I stared at the edges of the thing. They were waving almost imperceptibly up and down, creeping!
The mounds were living creatures! Acres and acres of them lying lethargically on the bottom waiting for something to crawl within range of their monstrous edges!
Involuntarily I pressed the key to raise us. But we had gone only a few feet when the Professor called to me.
"Down again, Martin. I don't think these things will bother us unless we scrape against them. Anyway they can't hurt the shell."
I lowered the ball to our former twenty-foot level, and there we swung just over the monsters' backs.
The Professor had said that the giant inverted saucers would probably not bother us if we did not come in contact with them. It soon became apparent that, in a measure, he was right. The creatures either could not or would not lift their enormous bulks from the sea floor.