upon each foot and my
{172} whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen underclothing.
One moment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head; the
next, I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As
that intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could have found it in my
heart (only for shame's sake) to cry off from the whole enterprise. But
it was too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the
air to whistle through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window of
the vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing
there in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature
deaf and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of his
own. Except that I could move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a
catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation; the
weights were hung upon my back and breast, the signal rope was thrust
into my unresisting hand; and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the
ladder, I began ponderously to descend.

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw
a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around,
except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green
gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds
lower, I stepped off on the _pierres perdues_ of the foundation; a dumb
helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of
encouragement; and looking in at the creature's window, I beheld the face
of Bain. There we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) eye to
eye; and either might have burst himself with shouting, and not a {173}
whisper come to his companion's hearing. Each, in his own little world
of air, stood incommunicably separate.

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes' drama at the
bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He
was down with another, settling a stone of the sea-wall. They had it
well adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone
set home; and it was time to turn to something else. But still his
companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or only
raised himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs unknown to
the vocabulary of the diver. There, then, these two stood for a while,
like the dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate thou