In his marvellously penetrative way, Kipling has touched this theme while singing the “Song of the English”:--
“The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar-- Down to the dark, the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are. There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep, On the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth, Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat-- Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth-- For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.”
Surely the imagination must be dead indeed that does not throb responsive to the thought of that latter-day workmanship of wire and rubber descending at the will of man into the vast void, and running its direct course over mountain ranges, across sudden abysses of lower depth, through the turbulence of up-bursting submarine torrents where long-pent-up rivers compel the superincumbent ocean to admit their saltless waters; until from continent to continent the connection is made, and man holds converse with man at his ease as though distance were not. Recent investigations go to prove that chief among the causes that make for destruction of those communicating cables are the upheavals of lost rivers. In spite of the protection that scientific invention has provided for the central core of conducting wire, these irresistible outbursts of undersea torrents rend and destroy it, causing endless labour of replacement by the never-resting cable-ships. But this is only one of the many deeply interesting features of oceanography, a science of comparatively recent growth, but full of gigantic possibilities for the future knowledge of this planet. The researches of the _Challenger_ expedition, embodied in fifty portly volumes, afford a vast mass of material for discussion, and yet it is evident that what they reveal is but the merest tentative dipping into the great mysterious land that lies hidden far below the level surface of the inscrutable sea.
That veteran man of science, Sir John Murray, has in a recent paper (_Royal Geographical Society’s Journal_, October 1899) published his presidential address to the geographical section of the British Association at Dover, and even to the ordinary non-scientific reader his wonderful _résumé_ of what has been done in the way of exploring the ocean’s depths must be as entrancing as a fairy tale. The mere mention of such a chasm as that existing in the South Pacific between the Kermadecs and the Friendly Islands, where a depth of 5155 fathoms, or 530 feet more than five geographical miles, has been found, strikes the lay mind with awe. Mount Everest, that stupendous Himalayan peak whose summit soars far above the utmost efforts of even the most devoted mountaineers, a virgin fastness mocking man’s soaring ambition, if sunk in the ocean at the spot just mentioned would disappear until its highest point was 2000 feet below the surface. Yet out of that abyss rises the volcanic mass of Sunday Island in the Kermadecs, whose crater is probably 2000 feet above the sea-level. But in no less than forty-three areas visited by the _Challenger_, depths of over 3000 fathoms have been found, and their total area is estimated at 7,152,000 square miles, or about 7 per cent. of the total water-surface of the globe. Within these deeps are found many lower deeps, strangely enough generally in comparatively close proximity to land, such as the Tuscarora Deep, near Japan, one in the Banda Sea, that is to say, in the heart of the East India Archipelago, &c. Down, down into these mysterious waters the ingenious sounding-machine runs, taking out its four miles and upwards of pianoforte wire until the sudden stoppage of the swift descent marks the dial on deck with the exact number of fathoms reached. And yet so vast is the ocean bed that none can say with any certainty that far greater depths may not yet be found than any that have hitherto been recorded, amazing as they are.