"I need not tell you of that work, for our own radio reports recorded the main features of it. We headed slowly southward, on the surface, using our trawls, and during the next three days we were amazed at the richness of the fields beneath us, the profusion of new forms and variations of old ones that our trawls brought up. It was late on the fourth day that we lost one of our trawls, as I reported. We drew up the steel cable, to find that it had been severed near its end, and though we were certain, of course, that it had broken when the trawl caught on a snag, it was no ragged break but a clean, sharp cut, as though done by giant shears. That it was which touched us first with a sense of mystery and awe. Around us was only the vast empty panorama of sea and sky, but beneath us were three miles and more of lightless waters, a vast gulf unpenetrated since the world's birth by man or the science of man. We worked on, southward, feeling as though under some strange spell. And then, shattering that spell, came the thing which one of our trawls brought up on the morning of the fifth day, the 11th. "It was not so much _in_ the trawl as _on_ it, hanging from a corner as though caught and brought up by the ascending trawl. It was a machine, or part of a machine, a thing of shining metal about a foot in each dimension. There was a framework of heavy metal rods, three of them; inside were a chain of little gears and six slender tubes of what seemed glass, with inside of each a red wire or thread. The framework's three thick pillars were broken off sharp at the bottom, as though the thing had been ripped by the trawl from some larger machine, yet in itself the thing was a complete mystery. It was totally unlike anything we had ever seen, the shining metal was a wholly unfamiliar one, and the glasslike tubes, we found, were not glass but a transparent metal of some sort. The thing was constructed, too, with a strength and heaviness unusual in so small a mechanism. No one on earth would construct it thus heavily; but suppose it had been actually constructed at the sea's bottom from whence we had dragged it, to resist the tremendous pressures there? What mysteries could be lurking in the three miles of water below us? "There was but one thing to do, to descend in the submarine for further exploration, and after sending off a last message in which I hinted of our discovery, without telling more lest the whole thing prove a hoax, we began excited preparations for the descent. The deck-fittings were dismantled, the heavy conning-tower doors clanged shut, and a moment later the submarine's electric motors began to hum and we slanted downward into the green waters, using both ballast-tanks and diving-planes for our descent, and moving downward in a great spiral. * * * * *