The Faber Book of Science (37 page)

CAMPING OUT
. The intention behind the oddness of the theme, however much it may fail, was not to be satirical but to show indifference to satire from outside. She gives the lake its pattern of reflected stars, now made of toothpaste, as God’s grace allows man virtues that nature wouldn’t; the mist and pale (pale light or boundary) of morning have made it unable to reflect real stars any longer.
Soap
tension
is meant to stand for the action of surface tension between
more and less concentrated soap solutions which makes the specks fly apart.
Their
frame
unties:
if any particle of matter got a speed greater than that of light it would have infinite mass and might be supposed to crumple up round itself the whole of space-time – ‘a great enough ecstasy makes the common world unreal.’

We were all ready and I looked around at the sea and sky, the boats and my friends, and not being able to think of any pithy saying which might echo down the ages, I said nothing, crawled painfully over the steel bolts, fell inside and curled up on the cold, hard bottom of the sphere. This aroused me to speech and I called for a cushion only to find that we had none on hand. Otis Barton climbed in after me, and we disentangled our legs and got set. I had no idea that there was so much room in the inside of a sphere only four and a half feet in diameter, and although the longer we were in it the smaller it seemed to get, yet, thanks to our adequate physique, we had room and to spare. At Barton’s suggestion I took up my position at the windows, while he hitched himself over to the side of the door, where he could keep watch on the various instruments. He also put on the ear-phones.

Miss Hollister on deck took charge of the other end of the telephone and arranged the duplicate control electric light so that she could watch it. Mr Tee-Van assumed control of the deck crew.

At our signal, the four-hundred-pound door was hoisted and clanged into place, sliding snugly over the ten great steel bolts. Then
the huge nuts were screwed on. If either of us had had time to be nervous, this would have been an excellent opportunity – carrying out Poe’s idea of being sealed up, not all at once, but little by little. For after the door was securely fastened, there remained a four-inch round opening in the center, through which we could see and talk and just slip a hand. Then this mighty bolt was screwed in place, and there began the most infernal racket I have ever heard. It was necessary, not only to screw the nuts down hard, but to pound the wrenches with hammers to take up all possible slack. I was sure the windows would be cracked, but having forcibly expressed our feelings through the telephone we gradually got used to the ear-shattering reverberations. Then utter silence settled down.

I turned my attention to the windows, cleaned them thoroughly and tested the visual angles which I could attain by pressing my face close to the surface. I could see a narrow sector of the deck with much scurrying about, and as we rolled I caught sight of the ultramarine sea and the
Gladisfen
[the sea-going tug that towed the
Ready
] dipping at the end of the slack tow rope. Faint scuffling sounds reached us now and then, and an occasional hollow beating. Then it seemed as if the steel walls fell away, and we were again free among our fellows, for a voice came down the half mile of hose coiled on the deck, and such is the human mind, that slender vocal connection seemed to restore physical as well as mental contact. While waiting for the take-off, Barton readjusted the phone, tested the searchlight, and opened the delicate oxygen valve. He turned it until we both verified the flow as two litres a minute – that being the amount suggested to us for two people. I remembered what I had read of Houdini’s method of remaining in a closed coffin for a long time, and we both began conscientiously regulating our breathing, and conversing in low tones.

Another glance through my porthole showed Tee-Van looking for a signal from old Captain Millet. I knew that now it was actually a propitious wave or rather a propitious lack of one for which they waited. Soon Millet waved his hand, and exactly at one o’clock the winch grumbled, the wire on the deck tightened, and we felt our circular home tremble, lean over, and lift clear. Up we went to the yard-arm, then a half-score of the crew pulled with all their might and swung us out over the side. This all between two, big, heaving swells. We were dangling in mid-air and slowly we revolved until I was facing in toward the side of the
Ready.
And now our quartz windows played
a trick on us. Twice already, in an experimental test submergence, we had not gauged correctly the roll of the ship or the distance outboard and the sphere had crashed into the half-rotten bulwarks. Now as I watched, I saw us begin to swing and my eyes told me that we were much too close, and that a slightly heavier roll would crash us, windows first, into the side of the vessel. Barton could not see the imminent danger, and the next message I got was ‘Gloria wants to know why the Director is swearing so.’ By this time we had swung far out, and I realized that every word which we spoke to each other in our tiny hollow chamber was clearly audible at the other end of the wire. I sent up word that any language was justifiable at such gross neglect as to allow our window to swing back and forth only a yard from the boat. And very decisively the word came back that fifteen feet was the nearest it had ever been, and we were now twenty-five feet away. Barton looked out with me and we could not believe our eyes. Fused quartz, as I have said, is the clearest, the most transparent material in the world, and the side of the
Ready
seemed only a yard away. My apologies must have cost us several litres of good oxygen.

To avoid any further comment on our part, profane or otherwise, we were lowered 20 feet. I sensed the weight and sturdy resistance of the bathysphere more at this moment than at any other time. We were lowered gently but we struck the surface with a splash which would have crushed a rowboat like an eggshell. Yet within we hardly noticed the impact, until a froth of foam and bubbles surged up over the glass and our chamber was dimmed to a pleasant green. We swung quietly while the first hose clamp was put on the cable. At the end of the first revolution the great hull of the barge came into view. This was a familiar landscape, which I had often seen from the diving helmet – a transitory, swaying reef with waving banners of seaweed, long tubular sponges, jet black blobs of ascidians and tissue-thin plates of
rough-spined
pearl shells. Then the keel passed slowly upward, becoming one with the green water overhead.

With this passed our last visible link with the upper world; from now on we had to depend on distant spoken words for knowledge of our depth, or speed, or the weather, or the sunlight, or anything having to do with the world of air on the surface of the Earth.

A few seconds after we lost sight of the hull of the
Ready,
word came down the hose that we were at 50 feet, and I looked out at the brilliant bluish-green haze and could not realize that this was almost my limit
in the diving helmet. Then ‘100 feet’ was called out, and still the only change was a slight twilighting and chilling of the green. As we sank slowly I knew that we must be passing the 132-foot level, the depth where Commander Ellsberg labored so gallantly to free the men in the Submarine S-57. ‘200 feet’ came and we stopped with the slightest possible jerk and hung suspended while a clamp was attached – a double gripping bit of brass which bound the cable and hose together to prevent the latter from breaking by its own weight. Then the call came that all was clear and again I knew that we were sinking, although only by the upward passing of small motes of life in the water.

We were now very far from any touch of Mother Earth; ten miles south of the shore of Bermuda, and one and a half miles from the sea bottom far beneath us. At 300 feet, Barton gave a sudden exclamation and I turned the flash on the door and saw a slow trickle of water beneath it. About a pint had already collected in the bottom of the sphere. I wiped away the meandering stream and still it came. There flashed across my mind the memory of gentle rain falling on a window pane, and the first drops finding their way with difficulty over the dry surface of the glass. Then I looked out through the crystal clear quartz at the pale blue, and the contrast closed in on my mind like the ever deepening twilight.

We watched the trickle. I knew the door was solid enough – a mass of four hundred pounds of steel – and I knew the inward pressure would increase with every foot of depth. So I gave the signal to descend quickly. After that, the flashlight was turned on the door-sill a dozen times during our descent, but the stream did not increase.

Two minutes more and ‘400 feet’ was called out; 500 and 600 feet came and passed overhead, then 700 feet where we remained for a while.

Ever since the beginnings of human history, when first the Phœnicians dared to sail the open sea, thousands upon thousands of human beings had reached the depth at which we were now suspended, and had passed on to lower levels. But all of these were dead, drowned victims of war, tempest, or other Acts of God. We were the first living men to look out at the strange illumination: And it was stranger than any imagination could have conceived. It was of an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world, and it excited our optic nerves in a most confusing
manner. We kept thinking and calling it brilliant, and again and again I picked up a book to read the type, only to find that I could not tell the difference between a blank page and a colored plate. I brought all my logic to bear, I put out of mind the excitement of our position in watery space and tried to think sanely of comparative color, and I failed utterly. I flashed on the searchlight, which seemed the yellowest thing I have ever seen, and let it soak into my eyes, yet the moment it was switched off, it was like the long vanished sunlight – it was as though it had never been – and the blueness of the blue, both outside and inside our sphere, seemed to pass materially through the eye into our very beings. This is all very unscientific; quite worthy of being jeered at by optician or physicist, but there it was. I was excited by the fishes that I was seeing perhaps more than I have ever been by other organisms, but it was only an intensification of my surface and laboratory interest: I have seen strange fluorescence and ultra-violet illumination in the laboratories of physicists: I recall the weird effects of color shifting through distant snow crystals on the high Himalayas, and I have been impressed by the eerie illumination, or lack of it, during a full eclipse of the sun. But this was beyond and outside all or any of these. I think we both experienced a wholly new kind of mental reception of color impression. I felt I was dealing with something too different to be classified in usual terms.

All our remarks were recorded by Miss Hollister and when I read them later, the repetition of our insistence upon the brilliance, which yet was not brilliance, was almost absurd. Yet I find that I must continue to write about it, if only to prove how utterly inadequate language is to translate vividly, feeling and sensations under a condition as unique as submersion at this depth.

The electric searchlight now became visible. Heretofore we could see no change whatever in the outside water when it was turned on, but now a pale shaft of yellow – intensely yellow – light shot out through the blue, very faint but serving to illuminate anything which crossed it. Most of the time I chose to have it cut off, for I wanted more than anything else to see all that I could of the luminescence of the living creatures.

After a few minutes I sent up an order, and I knew that we were again sinking. The twilight (the word had become absurd, but I could coin no other) deepened, but we still spoke of its brilliance. It seemed to me that it must be like the last terrific upflare of a flame before it is
quenched. I found we were both expecting at any moment to have it blown out, and to enter a zone of absolute darkness. But only by shutting my eyes and opening them again could I realize the terrible
slowness
of the change from dark blue to blacker blue. On the earth at night in moonlight I can always imagine the yellow of sunshine, the scarlet of invisible blossoms, but here, when the searchlight was off, yellow and orange and red were unthinkable. The blue which filled all space admitted no thought of other colors.

We spoke very seldom now. Barton examined the dripping floor, took the temperatures, watched and adjusted the oxygen tank, and now and then asked, ‘What depth now?’ ‘Yes, we’re all right.’ ‘No, the leak’s not increasing.’ ‘It’s as brilliant as ever.’

And we both knew it was not as brilliant as ever, but our eyes kept telling us to say so. It actually seemed to me to have a brilliance and intensity which the sunshine lacked; sunshine, that is, as I remembered it in what seemed ages ago.

‘800 feet’ now came down the wire and I called a halt. There seemed no reason why we should not go on to a thousand; the leak was no worse, our palm-leaf fan kept the oxygen circulating so that we had no sense of stuffiness and yet some hunch – some mental warning which I have had at half a dozen critical times in my life – spelled
bottom
for this trip. This settled, I concentrated on the window for five minutes.

The three exciting internal events which marked this first trip were, first, the discovery of the slight leak through the door at 300 feet, which lessened as we went down; next, the sudden short-circuiting of the electric light switch, with attendant splutterings and sparks, which was soon remedied. The third was absurd, for it was only Barton pulling out his palm-leaf fan from between the wall of the sphere and the wire lining of the chemical rack. I was wholly absorbed at the time in watching some small fish, when the sudden shrieking rasp in the confines of our tiny cell gave me all the reactions which we might imagine from the simultaneous caving in of both windows and door! After that, out of regard for each other’s nerves, we squirmed about and carried on our various duties silently.