The creature was a writhing mass of gigantic coils. It was impossible even to guess at its length, but its girth was such that the mound-shaped monsters that had fastened to it could not entirely encircle it. There it twined and knotted: a mighty serpent of the deepest ocean, snapping its awful length and threshing its powerful tail in an effort to dislodge the giant leeches that were flattened against it. And every time it touched the bottom in its blind frenzy, more of the teeming deathtraps attached themselves to it, crawling over their fellows in an effort to find unoccupied areas. * * * * * Soon the sea-serpent was a distorted, creeping mass. For one appalling instant its head came into our view.... It resembled the head of a crocodile, only it was ten times larger and covered with scale like the armor plate of a destroyer. The jaws, wide open and slashing with enormous, needle-shaped teeth at the huge parasites, were large enough to have held our glass sphere. One eye appeared. It was at least three feet across and of a shimmering amethyst color. One of the deadly saucers wrapped itself around the great head. The entire mass of attackers and attacked settled slowly to the bottom. But before it completely succumbed the beaten monster gave one last, convulsive flick of its tail.... "Good God!" cried Stanley, shrinking away from the pump and staring upward. I followed his gaze with my own eyes. In the faint reflected glow of the searchlight I could see row on row of large cups flattened against the top of the ball. As I watched these flattened still more and the big sphere quivered perceptibly. In its death struggle the mighty serpent had flicked one of the huge leeches against us. It now clung there with blind tenacity, covering nearly two-thirds of our shell with the underside of its body. I reached for the control key to send us to the surface. "Don't!" snapped the Professor. "The weight--" He needed to say no more. My hand recoiled as though the key had been red hot. The three-quarter-inch cable above us was now sustaining, in addition to its own huge weight, our massive glass ball and the appalling tonnage of this grim blanket of flesh that encircled us. Could it further hold against the strain of lifting that combined tonnage through the press of the water? Almost certainly it could not! There was nothing we could do but hang there and discover at first hand exactly what happened to things that were clamped in those mighty, living vises! * * * * * The Professor turned on the interior bulb. The result was ghastly. It showed every detail of the belly of the thing that gripped us.