Hinc via, Tartanii quae fert Acherontis ad undas.
A swinging ladder, whose foot was clear of the floor, led down into the recesses. A diver, having completed his task, ascended the treacherous staircase to escape, and found the hatch blocked up. A floating chest or box had drifted into the opening, and, fitting closely, had firmly corked the man up in that dungeon, tight as a fly in a bottle. From his doubtful perch on the ladder he endeavored to push the obstacle from its insertion. Two or more equal difficulties made this impossible. The box had no handle, and it was slippery with the ooze and mucus of the sea. The leverage of pushing only wedged it faster in the orifice. The inconstant ladder swayed from it as a fulcrum. Again and again by art and endeavor and angle of push he essayed, and the ladder made sport of it. It was deadly sport, that swing and seesaw on the slippery rungs in the immeasurable loneliness of the silent, shrouded cabin. It was no rush of air, sending life tingling in the blood made brilliant with carmine of oxidation, but the dense, mephitic sough of the thick wool of water. He descended and sat upon the floor to think. Feasible methods had failed, and the sands of his life were running out like the old physician's. Now to try the impracticable. There are heaps of wisdom in the wrong way sometimes, which, I suppose, is the reason some of us like it. The box was out of his reach, choked in the gullet of that life-hole. No spring or leap from floor or ladder could reach its slippery side or bear it from its fixture. The sea had caught him prowling in its mysteries, and blocked him up, as cruel lords of ancient days walled up the intruder on their domestic privacy. Wit after brute force: man and Nature were pitted against each other in the uncongenial gloom—life the stake.
He groped about his prison, glutinous with infusoriae and the oily consistence of the sea. Here a nail, there a block or lever, shaped out mentally by the touch, theorized, studied upon and thrown down. Now a hatchet, monkey-wrench, monkey's-tail, or gliding fish or wriggling eel, companions of his imprisonment. At last the cold touch of iron: the hand encloses and lifts it; its weight betrays its length; he feels it to the end—blunt, square, useless. He tries the other end—an edge or spike. That will do. Standing under the hatch, guided by the ladder to the position, and with a strong swinging, upward blow, the new tool is driven into the soft, fibrous and adhesive pine bottom of the box. On the principle on which your butler's practiced elbow draws the twisted screw sunk into the cobwebbed seal of your '48 port, he uncorks himself. The box pulled out of the hatch, the sea-gods threw up the sponge, that zoophyte being handy.
These few incidents, strung together at random, and embracing only limited experiences out of many in one enterprise, are illustrative, in their variety and character, of this hardy pursuit, and the fascination of danger which is the school of native hardihood. But they give the reader a very imperfect idea of the nature and appearance of the new element into which man has pushed his industry. The havoc and spoil, the continued danger and contention, darken the gloom of the submarine world as a flash of lightning leaves blacker the shadow of the night and storm.
The first invention to promote subaqueous search was the diving-bell, a clumsy vessel which isolates the diver. It is embarrassing, if not dangerous, where there is a strong current or if it rests upon a slant deck. It limits the vision, and in one instance it is supposed the wretched diver was taken from the bell by a shark. It permits an assistant, however, and a bold diver will plunge from the deck above and ascend in the vessel, to the invariable surprise of his companion. An example of one of its perils, settling in the mud, occurred, I think, in the port of New York. A party of amateurs, supported by champagne flasks and a reporter, went down. The bell settled and stuck like a boy's sucker. One of the party proposed shaking or rocking the bell, and doing so, the water was forced under and the bell lifted from the ooze.
But a descent in submarine armor is the true way to visit the world under water. The first sensation in descending is the sudden bursting roar of furious, Niagarac cascades in the ears. It thunders and booms upon the startled nerve with the rush and storm of an avalanche. The sense quivers with it. But it is not air shaken by reflected blows: it is the cascades driven into the enclosing helmet by the force-pump. As the flexile hose has to be stiffly distended to bear an aqueous gravity of twenty-five to fifty pounds to the square inch, the force of the current can be estimated. The tympanum of the ear yields to the fierce external pressure. The brain feels and multiplies the intolerable tension as if the interior was clamped in a vice, and that tumultuous, thunderous torrent pours on. Involuntarily the mouth opens: the air rushes in the Eustachian tube, and with sudden velocity strikes the intruded tension of the drum, which snaps back to its normal state with a sharp, pistol-like crack. The strain is momently relieved to be renewed again, and again relieved by the same attending salutes.
In your curious dress you must appear monstrous, even to that marine world, familiar with abnormal creations. The whale looks from eyes on the top of his head; the flat-fish, sole, halibut have both eyes on the same side; and certain Crustacea place the organ on a foot-stalk, as if one were to hold up his eye in his hand to include a wider horizon. But the monster which the fish now sees differs from all these. It has four great goggle eyes arranged symmetrically around its head. Peering through these plate-glass optics, the diver sees the curious, strange beauty of the world around him, not as the bather sees it, blurred and indistinct, but in the calm splendor of its own thallassphere. The first thought is one of unspeakable admiration of the miraculous beauty of everything around him—a glory and a splendor of refraction, interference and reflection that puts to shame the Arabian story of the kingdom of the Blue Fish. Above him is that pure golden canopy with its rare glimmering lustrousness—something like the soft, dewy effulgence that comes with sun-breaks through showery afternoons. The soft delicacy of that pure straw-yellow that prevails everywhere is crossed and lighted by tints and glimmering hues of accidental and complementary color indescribably elegant. The floor of the sea rises like a golden carpet in gentle incline to the surface; but this incline, experience soon teaches, is an ocular deception, the effect of refraction, such as a tumbler of water and a spoon can exhibit in petty. It is perhaps the first observable warning that you are in a new medium, and that your familiar friend, the light, comes to you altered in its nature; and it is as well to remember this and "make a note on it."
Raising your eyes to the horizontal and looking straight forward, a new and beautiful wealth of color is developed. It is at first a delicate blue, as if an accidental color of the prevailing yellow. But soon it deepens into a rich violet. You feel as if you had never before appreciated the loveliness of that rich tint. As your eye dwells upon it the rich lustrous violet darkens to indigo, and sinking into deeper hues becomes a majestic threat of color. It is ominous, vivid blue-black—solid, adamantine, a crystal wall of amethyst. It is all around you. You are cased, dungeoned in the solid masonry of the waters. It is beauty indeed, but the sombre and awful beauty of the night and storm. The eye turns for relief and reassurance to the paly-golden lustrous roof, and watches that tender penciling which brightens every object it touches. The hull of the sunken ship, lying slant and open to the sun, has been long enough submerged to be crusted with barnacles, hydropores, crustacea and the labored constructions of the microscopic existences and vegetation that fill the sea. The song of Ariel becomes vivid and realistic in its rich word-power:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;