The bottom of the world arrived with a soft, muffled sigh, like the settling of a heavy book onto an altar of velvet.
Black glass Diving Bell Number Three touched down upon the stone floor of Entry hall 950 at exactly the sixth bell of the morning watch. The two massive runner-skids of stone-hard hardwood mounted beneath the keel sliced through six inches of grey diatomaceous silt before coming to rest with a gentle, solid thud against the dressed coarse grey rock flags of the ancient floor. A great cloud of fine, flour-like dust billowed outward from the landing tracks, swirling past the forward quartz portholes like a blizzard of pale ash before being swept away by the slow, smooth-flowing currents of the deep safe hall.
Inside the bell, the motion ceased fully.
For the first time in six hours, the mid-air cable above their heads went slack. The faint, high-hum of stretching wire died away, replaced by the deep, unmoving balance of bedrock. The sphere sat upon the floor of the deep pit under two hundred and eighty-four deep-water lengths of lightless, light-swallowing black salt water, holding at bay a water-pressure load of over five crushing deep-sea pressure. A crushing pressure of more than seven thousand pounds upon every square inch of the faceted black glass hull. The four inches of meteor-iron and fiery glass held the ocean at bay without a creak, silent as a mountain buried under a lake of ice.
