Either way, it is a marvellous tale. Thousands of miles of solid reef-rocks; hundreds of substantial inhabited islands, all reared, inch after inch, by a mere “gelatinous slime,” by soft-bodied jelly-like creatures, first cousins to the dull though pretty anemone of our shores! The thing sounds incredible! A stranger from some far-off world--a stranger even from polar regions on our Earth, unlearned in the lore of warmer oceans--might scout the story as absurd. Yet no fact in Natural History is better attested, or stands on a firmer foundation. There is a good deal more in the philosophy of this small world than appears at first sight. CHAPTER XVII. OVER THE OCEAN-BED “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, O’er the great grey level plains of ooze, where the shell-burred cables creep.”--RUDYARD KIPLING. By way of variety, shall we take a little excursion together, you and I, into those under-sea regions of which so much has been said in past chapters? Regions which the foot of man has never trod; which the eye of man has never seen; which, except in death, the hand of man has never touched. Shall we leave behind the fair Earth that we love, the sunshine, the bright sky, the fields and hedgerows, the blue sparkles of Ocean’s surface, and go down and down, through a waste of lonely waters, till our feet rest upon firm ground below? “Eh, but it’s eerie!” we might say, were we of Scots descent. Sunlight is at once lost sight of, and twilight deepens fast. A heavy cyclone may be raging above, but the troublous turmoil soon ceases to affect us. Stormy billows, with their showers of spray, cannot disturb the calm of these depths. As we sink lower, we find ourselves enwrapped in stillness. A creeping current is around us, yet with movement so gentle that we are not aware of it. During the early part of our descent we come across innumerable sea-weeds; delicate floating red fronds, and long brown ribbons tangled together. Presently we pass through a sticky slimy mass of Diatoms, reaching far to right and left, and of great depth. Untold millions of those tiny vegetables are living and growing together, in one enormous floating bank. Now we have reached the “hundred-fathom limit,” and as we go beyond it, we find marked changes from the life we have known above. No seasons here. No variations from summer to winter, from spring to autumn. Only one dead level of perpetual chill, becoming colder and colder. No light here. No variations from night to day, from evening to morning. Nothing but continuous midnight blackness, unrelieved by the faintest gleam of sunshine. No plant-life here. No ocean-weeds of any kind. Those things we have left behind us, far above.