"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour

about things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight

up or down the channel. Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond

a lump of rocks towards the line of the sea.



"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.



"I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling

so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing.

I was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always,

'there's her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale,

I caught up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought

the boat round. When the windows were screwed and everything was

all right, I shut the valve from the air belt in order to help

my sinking, and jumped overboard, feet foremost--for we hadn't

a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down

into the water after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and

blackness that lay about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the most

cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a lookout

at such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.



"Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving.

None of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get

the way of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels

damnable. Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt

yourself yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten

times worse. And a pain over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a

feeling like influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your

lungs and things. And going down feels like the beginning of a lift,

only it keeps on. And you can't turn your head to see what's above you,

and you can't get a fair squint at what's happening to your feet

without bending down something painful. And being deep it was dark,

let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud that formed the bottom.

It was like going down out of the dawn back into the night, so to speak.



"The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot of

fishes, and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack I came

with a kind of dull bang on the deck of the Ocean Pioneer, and the

fishes that had been feeding on the dead rose about me like a swarm of

flies from road stuff in summer time. I turned on the compressed air

again--for the suit was a bit thick and mackintoshery after all, in

spite of the rum--and stood recovering myself. It struck coolish down

there, and that helped take off the stuffiness a bit.



"When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was

an extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind

of reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed

that floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just

a moony, deep green-blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight



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