Staggering to my feet, I joined them, and in a moment shared in their agitation. The lights beneath us were now far brighter--they no longer formed a vague shimmering screen, but were concentrated brilliantly in a score of golden globes of the apparent size of the sun. “Could it be that the ocean too has its suns?” I asked myself, as when one asks dazed questions in a dream. And looking at those spectral lights that wavered and gleamed through the pale translucent waters, I felt that this was surely but a nightmare from which I should soon awaken. Fantastic fish, with triangular glowing red heads and searchlight eyes projected on slender tubes, darted before our windows in innumerable schools; but these seemed almost familiar now by comparison with those eerie golden lights below; and it was upon the golden illumination that my gaze was riveted as we settled slowly down and down. Soon it became apparent that the great central globes were not the only source of the radiance, for smaller points of light gradually became visible, some of them moving, actually moving as though borne by living hands!--and even the spaces between the lights seemed to wear an increasing golden luster! Yet with the golden was mingled a singular tinge of green, a green that seemed scarcely of the waters; and the mysterious depths were no longer black, but olive-hued, as though the light came filtering to us through some solid dark-green medium. But a more imminent peril was to distract our attention from the weird lights. For some minutes I had been vaguely aware of something peculiar in the aspect of our compartment; yet, in my stupefied condition, I had not been able to determine just what was wrong. But full realization came to me when Stranahan, pointing upward, wide-eyed with horror, suddenly exclaimed, “Heaven preserve us, look at the ceiling!” We all looked. The ceiling was bulging inches downward, as though the terrific pressure of the waters were already bursting the tough steel envelope of the X-111. And at the same time we observed that the deck we stood on was bulging upward, and that the bulkheads were being twisted and distorted like iron rails warped by an earthquake. * * * * * But now came the greatest surprise of all. “By all the saints and little devils!” burst forth the irrepressible Stranahan, pointing downward and forgetting the aspect of the bulkheads and deck. “There’s a city under the sea!” “A city under the sea!” we echoed, in stupefied amazement. And from one corner of the room came a burst of hysterical laughter, which wavered and broke and then died out, sounding uncannily like a fiend’s derision. “But I tell you, there is a city under the sea!” insisted Stranahan, noting the incredulous stares with which we regarded him. “The Lord strike me dead if I didn’t see its streets and houses!”