Within the warmth and darkness, the valley seethed with life. The rock itself seemed to live, festooned with porous knobs and slimed crevasses, red-black tubes of cold lava-stone coiling like snakes, phallic chimneys of precipitated minerals gleaming copper-green with verdigris. Pale crabs with legs as long as a man’s arm kicked daintily across the slopes. Jet-black abyssal fish, grown fat on unexpected bounty, moved with slick languor through the clustered stalks of the tubeworms. Bright yellow jellies, like severed flowerheads, floated in thick eddies of bacterial soup.