The surface waters had not escaped. Over the drowned lands of the continental margins, rafts of rotting moss and algae, the ocean’s equivalents of weeds, festered in choking profusion. But the abyssal depths were undisturbed. In the crushing blackness of the abyss, larger in area than all the continents combined, conditions scarcely varied from pole to pole. The denizens of this vast realm were poorly known. No human being had ever invented a way to wring advantage from them.