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Other parts of the line had been finished, the telegraph now stretched a thousand miles toward England, and New York was connected with St. John's. Desiring more detailed information of the ocean-bed along the proposed route, Field secured the assistance of the United States and British governments.
As we have said, the entire area of Illinois seems at one period to have been an ocean-bed, which has not since been disturbed by any considerable upheaval. The present irregularities of the surface are clearly traceable to the washing out and carrying away of the earth. The Illinois River has washed out a valley about two hundred and fifty feet deep, and from one and a half to six miles wide.
But all these ingenious devices failed, and it is probable that the deepest parts of the ocean-bed still remained untouched by man. At last an extremely simple and remarkably successful deep-sea sounding apparatus was invented by Mr Brooke, an American officer. It consisted of nothing more than thin twine for a sounding-line, and a cannon ball for a sinker.
"Ay, ay," assented an auditor, who had been a notorious skeptic until he had become a shipwrecked sailor, "had not mine own eyes beheld such a pearl in the ocean-bed, I should not have believed it." And so the medieval traveller would tell his enthralling tales.
Hence, when the ocean-bed was here and there raised to the surface when its strata of sediment with their contained organic fragments were torn up and long washed about by the breakers before being re-deposited when the re-deposits were again and again subject to this violent abrading action by subsequent small elevations, as they would mostly be; what few fragile organic remains they contained, would be in nearly all cases destroyed.
The first night had passed quietly, and upwards of eighty miles of the cable had gone out of the after-tank, over the big ship's stern, and down to its ocean-bed, when Robin Wright unable to sleep quietly slipped into his clothes, and went on deck. It was drawing near to dawn.
Our sorely laden train went swaying and pitching across the gaunt face of a high, broad plateau, bleak, hot, and monotonous in contour; underfoot the reddish granite pulverized by grinding tire and hoof, over us the pale bluish fiery sky without a cloud, distant in the south the shining tips of a mountain range, and distant below in the west the slowly spreading vista of a great, bared ocean-bed, simmering bizarre with reds, yellows and deceptive whites, and ringed about by battlements jagged and rock hewn.
Still, no pencil, no colours could represent the glorious, the magnificent tints in which the sea and sky, and the majestic varied-shaped icebergs, were bathed, as the sun, bursting forth from his ocean-bed, glided upwards in the eastern heavens.
He fell into a revery as he finished reading this last sentence. He thought of the dim and dread future, all the changes that it would bring to him, to all the living, to the face of the globe, to the order of earthly things. He saw men of a new race, alien to all that had ever lived, excavating with strange, vast engines the old ocean-bed now become habitable land.
This would seem to indicate, that although the ordinary heavy surf may be due to the swell of the great Southern Ocean confined in a narrow channel, combined with a peculiar form of bottom near the shore, yet the sudden heavy surfs and high tides that occur occasionally in perfectly calm weather, may be due to slight upheavals of the ocean-bed in this eminently volcanic region.
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