orridor, but in the passages branching from it
no light save that which streamed down, green and silvery, from the
windows which shut the still sea out. Oftentimes the seven with me
would draw all close together, awed by the fantastic spectacle these
glimpses of the sea's heart showed to them. At other times the nearer
alarm would set them quaking, and crying "Hist!" they would listen for
steps in the silence or other sounds than that of the engine's pulse
and the whirring fans. The very stillness, I think, made them afraid.
The horrors of the windows--above all, that horror of the nameless
fish--could frighten a man as no spectre of God's earth above. If I had
accustomed myself in part to these new sensations, if Czerny's house
seemed to me rather a refuge than a terror, none the less there were
moments when my step halted and my eyes were glued upon the sights I
saw. For here it would be a monstrous shark lying still in a glassy
pool; or there a very army of ferocious crabs, their eyes outstanding,
their claws crushing prey, their great shells shaped like fungi of the
deep; or going on a little way again I stopped before a giant porthole
and discovered a devil-fish and his nest in the deep and said that
nothing like to it had been heard or told of. Here lies a great basin
scooped out of the coral rock, and the green water is focused in it
until it looks like a prism, and everywhere, in nook and crevice, the
deadly tentacles, the frightful eyes of these unnameable creatures seem
to twist and stare, and threaten us. Such fish we counted, hundreds of
them, at the windows of the second cavern we entered; and, drawing back
from it affrighted, we went on like men who fear to speak of that which
they have seen.

"A madman's house; it could not be anything else," says Captain Nepeen,
as pale as any ghost; "unless I had seen it with my own eyes, Mr. Begg,
no story that ever was written would make me believe it. And yet it is
true, as Heaven is above us, it is true."

"No doubt of that," said I, "a madman's house, captain, and madmen to
people it. But of that we'll speak by-and-bye; for the shadows may
listen. Keep your gun ready; there will be others about besides
ourselves. Here's the first of them--stone-dead, by the Lord!"

They all came to a stand at my words, and saw that which my eyes
discovered for them--the figure of a dead man, lying full and plain to
be seen in the lamp's glare, and so fallen that no one might ask