The _Peary_ was a spectacle of fantastic beauty. It was as if a huge, rounded piece of amber, mellow, golden, lay in the murk of the sea-floor. Not steel, hard and grim, but of transparent, shimmering stuff she was built, all coated a soft yellow by her lights, clearly visible inside. Ken had known something of her radical construction; knew that a substance called quarsteel, similar to glass and yet fully as tough as steel, had been used for her hull, making her a perfect vehicle for undersea exploration. Her bow was capped with steel, and her stern, propellers, diving rudders; her port-locks, for the releasing of torpoons, were also of steel, as were the struts that braced her throughout--but the rest was quarsteel, glowing and golden as the heart of amber. Beautiful with a wild yet scientific beauty was the _Peary_, but she was not free. She was trapped. She was fastened to the mud of the gloomy sea-floor. Ropes held her down; and Ken Torrance knew those ropes of old. They were tough and strong, woven of many strands of seaweed, and twenty or thirty of them striped the _Peary's_ two hundred feet of hull. Unevenly spaced, stretched clear over the ship from one side to the other, they were caught around her up-jutting conning tower, fastened through her rudders, and holding tight in a score of places. They held the submarine down despite all the buoyancy of her emptied tanks and the power of her twin propellers. And the sealmen swam around her. * * * * * Restless dark shadows against the golden hull, they wavered and darted and poised, totally unafraid. Another in Kenneth Torrance's place would have put them down as some strange school of large seals, inordinately curious but nothing more; but the torpooner knew them as men--men remodeled into the shape of seals; men who, ages ago, had forsaken the land for the old home of all life, the sea; who, through the years, had gradually changed in appearance as their flesh had become coated with layers of cold-resisting blubber; whose movements had become adapted to the water; whose legs and arms had evolved into flippers; but whose heads still harbored the now faint spark of intelligence that marked them definitely as men. Emotions similar to man's they had, though dulled; friendliness, curiosity, anger, hate, and--Ken knew and feared--even a capacity for vengeance. Vengeance! An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth--the old law peculiar to man! Chanley Beddoes had slain one of them; if only the _Peary's_ crew had not killed more! If only that, there might be hope!