ked tramp
steamer. There was a crumpled gash in the bow. From this ragged hole
suddenly appeared a great, serpentine form....

The Professor clutched at his camera, pointed it, and clenched his hands
in a frenzy of disappointment. The serpent shape had disappeared back
into the hull. A little later and we had drifted slowly past the wreck.

"Damn it!" the Professor snatched away his mouthpiece to exclaim: "If we
could only _stop_."

The bottom changed character shortly after we had passed the hulk. We
began to creep over low, gently rounded mounds.

These were so regular in form that they were puzzling. About fifty feet
across and ten in altitude, they looked artificial in their
symmetry--like great saucers set on the ocean floor bottom side up. They
took on a dirty black hue as our light struck them, and glowed with a
faint phosphorescence as they stretched away into the darkness.

A twelve-foot monstrosity, all toad-like head and eyes, swam into the
light beam and bumped blindly against the glass ball. For an instant it
goggled crazily at us. The Professor took its picture. It blundered
away. As it reached the darkness beyond the beam it, too, showed
phosphorescent. A belt of blue-white spots like the portholes of a
liner extended down its ugly sides.

Along the bottom, between the curious mounds, writhed a wormlike thing.
But it was too huge to be described as truly wormlike--it was eighteen
or twenty feet long and a foot thick. It was blood red, almost blunt
ended and patently without eyes.

I took my gaze off it for an instant. When I looked again it had
disappeared. I blinked at this seeming miracle and then discovered a
foot or so of its tail protruding from under the edge of one of the
mounds. It was threshing furiously about.

* * * * *

It was at this instant that I suddenly found increased difficulty, and
glanced at Stanley.

He had stopped pumping and was clutching at the Professor's arm with one
hand while he pointed down with the other. The Professor motioned him
toward the pump, and began to click pictures furiously with the camera
pointed at the nearest mound.

Wondering at the urgency of Stanley's gesture and the frantic clicking
of the camera shutter, I looked more closely at the curious, saucerlike
hump.

Under closer inspection something remarkably like a huge, mud-colored
eye was revealed! And as we drifted along, twenty feet away on the
farther slope,