sea. Crags lifted from it. Atolls and hills jutted into the faint fringes of light, crawling with weeds, blanketed with undersea growth. But the great plain and the valleys were in shadow.

Anchored by glowing ropes that vanished in darkness below, swung latticed spheres of light. There were dozens of them, like shining toy balloons expanding in size as the Swimmer swept nearer and nearer. Across the lattices a troubled whirling ran, shaking vortices of darkness that made the spheres fade and brighten like lanterns, and then pulse into dimness again.

The Swimmer’s headlong sweep, like flight through green air, carried Gresham straight toward the nearest globe. Between the lattices an opening like a shutter widened, gaped, closed.

And this was a city of the underseas.

For five days Gresham’s body lay all but motionless in his bunk on the Albacore, while the ship drove forward over fathomless abysses where Gresham’s mind moved among mysteries. Dr. Black spent as much time as he could spare beside the cataleptic sleeper, watching the vague shadows of expression that moved now and again across his face—wonder, sometimes revulsion, sometimes strain and dread. But only the shadows of the real emotions which Gresham’s mind knew, far away.

On the fifth day he woke.

Black saw his hands rise quickly to the bandaged eyes, and Gresham sat up abruptly, making an inarticulate sound in his throat. His face for a moment was wild with dismay and horror.

“It’s all right,” Black said quietly. “It’s all right, Gresham. You’ve been asleep and dreaming, but you’re safe now. Wake up!”

“Safe!” Gresham said bitterly. “Blind again, you mean. And—” His face convulsed once in a grimace of revolt; then he had himself under control and his hands which had been clawing futilely at the bandage as if they could pull away blindness from his eyes, fell quietly to the blanket.

“What was it?” Black asked. “You were dreaming? Would you like to tell me?”

It did not come all at once. The story covered many days in fragmentary sessions, but in the end Gresham told.

“You’ll find a diagnosis to cover it,” he said to Black. “You’ll have to decide I’m a schizophrenic—is that the word—and I’m having hallucinations. It doesn’t matter to me. I know what happened. There were 

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