I stood at the valve and pump controls, while Sam busied himself in seeing to the torpedo tube and the machine gun, and in adjusting his electric arc weapon. Then he brought out a grotesque suit of steel submarine armor he had had made, with oxygen tanks and electric searchlight, etc., attached. Swiftly we were dropping into the Mangar Deep! CHAPTER X The Depths of Fear In the deep sea the temperature is just above freezing; the darkness is absolute; the pressure is many tons to the square inch. But still, life has been found, even in the greatest depths. It is strange life, to be sure, for the organisms must be developed to withstand the great pressure, and to generate their own light. It is an odd truth of nature that there is some form of life adapted for each locality. There are the mosses and reindeer of the frigid north, the cactus and lizards of the burning deserts, the blind creatures of the Mammoth Cave, the stranger things of the deepest seas! May it not be that there are entities living out in space, or in the earth's interior, of which we may never know? Such were my thoughts as we dropped to meet the menace that had risen from under the sea! We sank swiftly, and steadily the manometer climbed. The water was dark but for the bright beams of the searchlights, and very cold, though, with the insulation and the electric heaters, we felt no discomfort. The pressure on the plates must have been terrific beyond conception. It seemed impossible that metal--even our cleverly braced plates of the wonderful beryllium bronze--could withstand so much, when even the rocks of the ocean floor "creep" and bend beneath the water's weight! Thousands upon thousands of feet we sank, and still the sea was dark and cold! In our wild plunge downward I caught fleeting glimpses of many of the weirdly grotesque creatures of the deep, flashing past in the gleam of our lights. At last Sam had completed his preparations for the emergency that might arise when we reached our goal. He came into the conning-tower. I looked at the manometer--in fact, I had been looking at it most of the time. "Pressure four thousand pounds!" I read. "That means we are nearly eight thousand feet down! I wonder how much longer--" "Remember," Sam said softly. "Remember that we have to go ten miles down--fifty thousand feet!" "Fifty thousand feet! Every cubic foot of water weighs sixty-five pounds. Fifty thousand times sixty-five, divided over one hundred and forty-four square inches. That is--about twenty-two thousand pounds to the square inch! Eleven tons!" "Somewhat more, I fancy, say 23,800 pounds," Sam observed calmly. "What's the difference? Nothing could live or move under such a weight!" "The thing we have come to investigate lives there, if it is a living thing at all."