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Mustering in the early light like a swarm of giant white-winged moths, the fishing-boats raced forth with the flowing tide, urged by sweep and sail and lusty sinews. Paying out their hundred-fathom nets, they drifted over the banks like flocks of resting sea-gulls, only to come ploughing back again deep laden with their spoils.
Geologically, we are still on the mainland when we reach the isles of Scilly; they belong to the axis of the Cornish peninsula, and are in what may still be called, comparatively, the narrow seas. The hundred-fathom line lies far beyond them; these waters, though thoroughly oceanic in character, are not oceanic in depth.
Now was the time to try Dave's last trick. Sending three men to stretch a hundred-fathom cable from the submarine, and to anchor its farther end to a great ice-pan, he dropped below to return at once with a package. Cautioning the men not to follow him, he walked away seventy-five yards, bent over the center of an ice-pan, seemingly to adjust certain things and put others in order.
But so it is; as we gather our curiosities at low-tide mark, or haul the dredge a mile or two out at sea, we may allow our fancy to range freely out to the westward, and down over the subaqueous cliffs of the hundred-fathom line, which mark the old shore of the British Isles, or rather of a time when Britain and Ireland were part of the continent, through water a mile, and two, and three miles deep, into total darkness, and icy cold, and a pressure which, in the open air, would crush any known living creature to a jelly; and be certain that we shall find the ocean-floor teeming everywhere with multitudinous life, some of it strangely like, some strangely unlike, the creatures which we see along the shore.
The United States had shown no signs of having profited by the telepathic powers of Fran and his companions. No spies were seized. A submarine installation that could lob missiles into New York from the edge of the hundred-fathom line was not depth-bombed. There were other failures to act on information obtained through the children.
They were surrounded by lights of outgoing and incoming craft, and they knew by soundings taken that day, when the steamer had slowed down for the same purpose, that they were within the hundred-fathom curve, close to the mouth of the Channel, but not within the three-mile limit.
The seas that wash the long Cornish peninsula, therefore, though they are thoroughly oceanic in character, especially on the north, are not oceanic in depth; we have to pass far beyond Scilly to cross the hundred-fathom line.
They put the brig on the starboard tack, and took hourly soundings with the deep-sea lead. As they hauled it in for the fourth time, the men called that the water was cold; and on the next sounding the lead reached bottom at ninety fathoms. "We're inside the Stream and the hundred-fathom curve, Angel. The barometer's rising now.
But before experimenting it will always be necessary to repeat the words 'Bakra naka taksomana, and to swallow a pill, composed of two drachms of Derhens Voskry, one drachm of Karka Voli and one drachm of saffron. Derhens Voskry and Karka Voli are a crimson and white species of seaweed, that grows on the hundred-fathom level, thirty miles west-southwest of the Aran Islands, Galway Bay. Mr.
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