In the Abyss: A Short Story by H. G. Wells
‘In the Abyss’ is a captivating short story penned by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first appearing in Pearson’s Magazine in August 1896. This tale is part of Wells’s tradition of fabulous voyages, where an adventurous inventor embarks on a journey to explore the depths of the ocean and its enigmatic marine life.
Summary
The narrative of ‘In the Abyss’ revolves around an inventor named Elstead, who has ingeniously created a robust steel sphere designed to be lowered into the sea, eventually reaching the ocean floor. To ensure a controlled descent, heavy lead weights, attached to the sphere by cables, strike the seabed first, moderating the fall.
Elstead’s ambitious plan is to explore the ‘abyss’ situated five miles beneath the surface, where he intends to observe the peculiar marine life using a powerful electric light. He explains his daring mission to the crew of the Ptarmigan, the vessel that will assist in his descent and subsequent retrieval. He is scheduled to remain submerged for half an hour, but as the time approaches for his return, there is no sign of him, causing mounting anxiety among the crew.
After a prolonged wait, twelve hours later, Elstead’s sphere finally resurfaces, and he is rescued. Upon his emergence, he is drenched in sweat and so shaken by his experiences that it takes him a week to recount the details. Eventually, in a fragmented yet vivid manner, he shares his extraordinary encounters from ‘in the abyss’ with the narrator.
During his underwater adventure, Elstead encounters a variety of bizarre fish and other marine creatures, which Wells describes with striking detail:
Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill-covers, and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments, almost like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess.
The narrator elaborates further:
But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about the creature. It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a tripod of two frog-like legs and a long thick tail, and its fore limbs, which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog’s do, carried a long shaft of bone tipped with copper. The creature’s coloration was variegated; its head, hands, and legs were purple, while its skin, hanging loosely like garments, exhibited a phosphorescent grey hue. And it stood there, momentarily blinded by the light.
Following these encounters, Elstead finds himself being drawn along the ocean floor to a mysterious underwater city, which Wells depicts with vivid wonder:
It was nearly five o’clock before he came over this luminous area, and by that time he could make out an arrangement suggestive of streets and houses grouped around a vast roofless structure that was grotesquely reminiscent of a ruined abbey. It spread out like a map beneath him. The houses were all roofless enclosures, and their substance, composed of phosphorescent bones, gave the place an ethereal appearance as if it were constructed from drowned moonlight.
This description echoes the early science-fiction writers’ portrayals of desolate cities on distant planets or moons, reminiscent of George Griffith’s Stories of Other Worlds, which detail the desolation of the lunar landscape.
Wells’s narrator continues:
Among the inner caverns of this place, waving trees of crinoid extended their tentacles, and tall, slender, glassy sponges shot upward like shining minarets and lilies of filmy light out of the general glow of the city. In the open spaces, he could discern a stirring movement akin to crowds of inhabitants, though he was too many fathoms above to distinguish any individual figures.
The creatures residing in this underwater city perceive Elstead as a divine figure. Eventually, he must sever the cable to allow his sphere to ascend back to the ocean’s surface, a moment that occurs fortuitously when the cable brushes against the abbey structure.
Analysis
‘In the Abyss’ exemplifies the quintessential style of H. G. Wells, exploring oceanic frontiers in a manner similar to his later works on space travel, such as The First Men in the Moon. Indeed, in many respects, we possess greater knowledge about our solar system than about the myriad forms of life inhabiting our oceans. Elstead embodies the spirit of exploration akin to Cavor from ‘The First Men in the Moon’, venturing into uncharted territories and expanding the horizons of human understanding.
However, ‘In the Abyss’ also implicitly critiques religious belief and the nature of divinity. At one juncture, the narrator reflects on how Elstead must have appeared to his aquatic hosts, those ‘bowing, chanting beings with their dark chameleon-like heads and faintly luminous garments’:
Abruptly, the sphere rolled over, and he ascended, exiting their world like an ethereal entity escaping through our atmosphere back to its native ether. To them, his sudden departure must have seemed akin to a hydrogen bubble racing upwards from the depths of our air.
This passage draws parallels to the ‘cargo cults’ formed by isolated tribes upon encountering Western explorers armed with advanced technology, arriving by boat or plane on remote islands.