Dr. Plantet said awkwardly: “I wouldn’t--I’d rather not take her below eighteen hundred, Jeff. Not at first.” Seventeen hundred. The water seemed darker, more turgid, as though down here the sediment of dead organisms were settled in it like a fog. Eighteen hundred! “Enough, Jeff; hold us. Watch for elevations of the floor.” I could imagine from the aspect of the water that we might be near the ocean floor. We slid ahead. Our chart showed in this region of the Pacific an estimated depth of two thousand five hundred to three thousand five hundred fathoms. But it was not so at this particular point. Even with all the patient thousands of soundings, how could they chart with any detailed accuracy the wide-spread ocean basins! We turned one of the Franklin lights downward. A rising slope lay close beneath us, dark and cold, and seemingly black or dark-red ooze. The ocean floor! Smooth in its contours, almost level along here, with a gentle rise before us. Protected by the water from the rapid, sub-aërial erosion which sharpens the features of the land, piled by the regular accumulation of deposits, it stretched heavy-featured, morose, mysterious. I could imagine the cold waters from the frozen poles flowing in sluggish, heavy currents along this bottom. But it was not all so uniform. We had of lighted region ahead of us barely half a mile. A rounded cliff came sweeping at us. I turned us aside; the cliff went up and backward to merge with a dome. Then presently we found ourselves in a furrow, with elevations on both sides. We passed, when the furrow widened, over a great black caldron. The lip of it rose to a thousand fathoms. It was forty miles across--a pit of blackness, possibly four thousand fathoms or more in its depth, as though here were some giant crater, filled and immersed. We went to two thousand fathoms in it, and then rose and surmounted its opposite rim. * * * * * But there is no one now to whom the physical conformations of our ocean basins need be a mystery. And such details here are out of place. We ran directly west on the fifteenth North Parallel. We made, each twenty-four hours, some twelve hundred to fourteen hundred miles. I give, not the nautical, but the statute measurements. The nautical now, is turning to be a thing of history. It was midnight of August 14-15 when our westward searching voyage was ended. Four days, during which we saw enough details to fill a weighty volume confirming or denying the groping research and speculations of science.