helmet, and I clutched frantically for the knife at my belt, with the intention of hacking away the stuff at my ankles. My panic was short-lived, however, for no sooner had I reached for the weed than it uncoiled itself of its own free will, seeming actually to recoil at the dull gleam of my weapon.
Then, in two strides, I was at Dr. Tyrrel's side, intending to shake him back to a realization of our danger. Twice I grasped his shoulder before he paid the slightest attention to me, absorbed as he was in his contemplation of the smiling beauty in her crystal tomb. Finally, on my last somewhat rough importunity, he turned suddenly about and struck at me angrily with his hand. Almost immediately he must have regretted this act, for he signed to me that he was sorry, that he had forgotten himself for the moment.
I told him our oxygen was getting low, and pointed to the seaweed on his body, expecting him to be as horror-stricken as I had been. Oddly enough, however he did not seem to mind it, for he got to his feet and then, to my profound astonishment, the weed slowly unfolded and left him free.
With a last glance at our recumbent beauty we started from the hall, the seaweed drawing apart before our steps until a wide lane extended before us to the door. Outside on the terrace we prepared to loose our weights for our journey to the surface, but here a new and greater horror struck me.
Glancing down from our high point of vantage before the temple doors I saw in the mass of seaweed to the right and left of the staircase the ribs, the broken stumps, the twisted stern-plates, the battered superstructures, of many sunken ships. There must have been at least a hundred of them piled together helter-skelter, and heaven knows how many more lay farther down in the valley, where the rays of the sun did not penetrate!
I do not know how long we would have paused there gazing upon this scene of desolation had it not been that the increased difficulty of breathing warned us we could tarry no longer. Accordingly we slipped our weights and arose slowly to the surface, the rose-and-nile green of the Atlantean spires dropping slowly behind us. Only once did I look down in our journey, and not until then did I realize that the seaweed from the Atlantean temple had followed us—was in fact dogging our very heels! The stuff hovered there on the surface for a minute after we had climbed aboard the Nautilus, and then, as if pulled by some unseen hand from below, it slowly sank from sight.
I come now to a point in my story where I am loath to continue, for it must reveal in me an atavistic strain, the existence of which, until this last accursed cruise of the Nautilus, I had never suspected. As may be guessed from the preceding narrative, neither Dr. Tyrrel nor myself had ever married, our labors and researches having provided us with a diversity of experience which rendered unnecessary a venture into other fields of existence. Up until the time of the last cruise of the Nautilus, I can say with certainty that no woman, nor even any thought of woman, has ever disturbed the quiet tenor of my emotional life. For my colleague I think I can say the same. Hence it was somewhat a shock to me when I awoke during that night to find the lovely, sensual face of the exquisite Wynona haunting me, there in the darkness of my cabin.
For a time the sensation was a pleasant one: I felt a warm invigoration of my being, a sensuous flow of hot blood in my body which, although slightly tempestuous, was not without
