Down to the dark, the utter dark...Caught, if not in flagrante then certainly in fumante, the wizard’s concubine and amanuensis were sentenced by their master to submersion in a sphere of giant crystal, for he was performing certain experiments wherein he had hesitated to risk servants of the necessary perspicuity. These two, however, he could simply sacrifice, telling them that if, ante mortem, they made notes that proved of service to him, he would ease their passage in the afterlife by his spells; and contrariwise, impede it. Wherefor, sailing out two days from his palace of rhombic bricks, he poised the sphere for its plunge and issued his final instructions. How palely both received them, how puzzledly gazed forth from the unbroken sphere when inserted therein, shaking heads that spun still from the strangeness of the insertion, and how pitifully cried out, seen but not heard, as the sphere was released and fell into the dark and deep ocean.Rudyard Kipling, “The Deep-Sea Cables” (from Verses 1889-1896).
Light faded swiftly in the sphere, whereover sea-water sighed with a steady sibilance, but ’twas many minutes before, throwing both off their feet, it lodged in the ooze of the abysmal floor. They clung together weeping some moments, shocked at last into full realization of their doom, then struggled apart to stand and begin the experiment wherein each had been instructed. While the girl fumbled for and seized the malleolus and keys of a xylophone, the youth did same for a lamp. This lit, they saw that dendrites of breath-frost were stretching to sheath the sphere’s inner curves, sealing them off from the lightless waters beyond, and were glad of the furs they had donned and cordials swallowed in that ended life above. But ere the frost-sheath was complete, the girl played a phrase on the xylophone and it fell away in silver grains like a dusting of snow, allowing them vision to all points of the compass.
Another phrase the girl played now, exciting the spheric crystal to flashes of bare-glimpsed light, which she repeated after some seconds’ lapse; and again; and again; tirelessly and faultlessly; and then the youth trimmed and quenched the lamp, for the first of the abysmals she had summoned were glowing and glittering from the freezing dark. New phrases the girl played, and the youth took notes with a gently luminous quill, recording the responses that flashed back in scarlet and gold, green and white from fish of a surpassing strangeness and horridity. Long she played and long he scribed, long after the spheric air should have thickened and fouled to inspirability, and then he frowned up at her, for she had departed the wizard’s script and played phrases he understood not.
“What dost, thou fool? Dost wish us delayed in the afterlife?”
“No afterlife need take us yet, my love, when the trap can be evaded. Nay, hush! I asked and they answer.”
And she watched the fish, stranger than aught she or he had glimpsed before, awake or adream, flash back their phrases, and laughed on a sudden for joy and relief.
“’Tis so, my love, ’tis as I guessed! They know the wizard’s dimension and will fetch a cephalopod which hath power of plucking us thereto.”
“And the notes?”
“Burn them, my love. Leave him naught but ash to retrieve, where he expects his notes and our corpses, starven at last with cold.”
And he, obeying though he understood not her talk of wizard’s dimensions or plucking cephalopods, took and lit the notes with lamp-flame, that the retrieved sphere, as she foretold, contained naught but ashes, astonishingly, when the wizard’s spell raised it from the abyss.