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17 That Was Then Drifting towards the bottom, Jacques Piccard recalls the sky R. A. Villanueva Hour #4, Hadal zone—Forgive me. I can only think of chainmaille for a fitting match to this die-cast shade of black outside our porthole. It is far more deep a nothingness than that. So pure a cold that our floodlights appear to burn as stars do. What words can render void, this nova of mercury bulbs through the clear abyss? Our descent was marked by medusae, clouds of shrimp, luminescent matter adrift on ambient currents. No such flares and flashes at these fathoms. Don says we passed the basement of twilight hours ago, likens the dark to a murder of crows. * Bathyscaphe Trieste, Mariana Trench, 23 Jan.—I have heard how Iceland’s sunlight trickles away by minutes each fall so that, by the solstice, darkness spans 8/10 of the day. I cannot divine living without sight of the sky for so long and here must admit relief that fine fissures now run the face of our window. It means we must cut our stay at the Deep to minutes in case the pressures decide 18 A Face to Meet the Faces to gnaw at the hull itself. It means we should thank the Good Lord for lime-hydroxide, for Father’s gondola lifted miles above Augsberg, breaching the air, buoyant as doves. * 13:06, gauges mark seven miles deep—To settle here atop the trench floor is to kick up grackles from their perches, to run headlong into rooks on the tor and to watch their wings overcome the sky. All around us seems an empire at the height of its forces, a tuber of night and ooze, bone fog and soot we come to love because we can. Don and I lack the room to embrace. We arrive without cornet or flag. There is something like an anthem in my marrow so let us sound this last fathom out with it. Let us trawl the dark for whale fall, sing of our ballast like larks. ...

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