The Immense Journey

by Loren Eiseley

The fascination of lost worlds has long preoccupied humanity. It is inevitable that transitory man, student of the galaxies and computer of light-years, should entertain nostalgic yearnings for some island outside of time, some Avalon untouched by human loss. Even the scholar has not been averse to searching for the living past on islands or precipice-guarded plateaus. Jefferson repeated the story of a trapper who had heard the mammoth roaring in the Virginia woods; in 1823 a South American traveler imaginatively viewed through his spyglass mastodons grazing in remote Andean valleys.

  Nevertheless when the explorers had penetrated the last woodland, gazed on the last new animal-something they had pretty well accomplished by the middle of the nineteenth century—the past had been nowhere found. Only the great waters remained, the planetary expanse that, since the days of Thorfinn the Skull Cleaver, has received and, on occasion, swallowed the restless sails of men. Its surface was known, but its depths remained unplumbed. The treasure of countless piracies, the dead of innumerable battles had gone down into the green gloom of the mermaids’ kingdom. In return, men had had only the legendary glimpse of a white arm at evening or the voice of a siren singing from some isle that would be gone at daybreak. Later, as men’s youthful imaginations faded, only the rumor of sea monsters—serpents or archaic water beasts—survived from the abyss.

  From a belief that the great deeps were lifeless, scholars examining the growths on submarine cables and the scrapings brought up by newly devised dredges began to visualize something like Conan Doyle’s Lost World in reverse. By 1870 this conception had two aspects: first, a theory that the ocean depths were populated by the living marine fossils of past geological ages which had here escaped the disasters that had destroyed their kind in the shallow seas of the earlier world; second—and reflecting the materialistic philosophy which was beginning to arise under the stimulus of the Darwinian theory—a belief that widespread on the floor of the abyssal plain lay the “Urschleim,” a protoplasmic half-living matter representing that transition between the living and the nonliving out of which more complex life had, in the course of time, developed. The abyss, in other words, was thought to contain not only the living record of the past, but the ultimate secret of life itself; Creation might still be in process. Sir Charles Thomson in one enthusiastic statement in his Depths of the Sea even ventured to maintain: “The [depth] range of the various groups in modern seas corresponds remarkably with their vertical range in ancient strata.” Down at the bottom, of course, lay that living undifferentiated primordial ooze as deep in the sea as it lay deep in time.

  As the number of deep-sea soundings increased, as men slowly grasped the antiquity of that dark, cold world that is called the abyssal plain, a new idea arose: the notion, as I have hinted, of a lost world in reverse, a midnight city of refuge in which the present mingled and lived on with the past. It was, of course, the world of the uttermost depths, the place without light since the beginning, and whose extent no continent above the waters could ever fill.

  Of all the worlds of life the abyss alone remains unaltered. It is the one place on the planet where conditions remain as they have been since the beginning, where the five-mile pressures have not altered, where no suns have ever shone, where the cold is the same at the poles as at the equator, where the seasons are unchanging, where there is no wind and no wave to stir the ooze above which the glass sponges rise on graceful stems, or the abyssal sea squirts float like little balloons on strings above the mud. This is the sole world on the planet which we can enter only by a great act of the imagination. There has been, perhaps, only one greater imaginative effort—the attempt of nineteenth-century biology, intoxicated by its own successes, to observe on the sea floor life in the process of becoming, to glimpse in the abyssal oozes the crossing between life and death.

  The story begins with the laying of the first Atlantic cable in the sixties of the last century. It involves one of the most peculiar and fantastic errors ever committed in the name of science. It is useless to blame this error upon one man because many leading figures of the day participated in what was, and remains, one of the most curious cases of self-delusion ever indulged in by scholars. It was the product of an overconfident materialism, a vainglorious assumption that the secrets of life were about to be revealed.

  Haeckel in Germany and Huxley in England were proceeding to show that as one passed below the stage of nucleated single-celled organisms one arrived at a simple stirring of the abyssal slime wherein something that was neither life nor non-life oozed and fed without cellular individuality.

  This soft, gelatinous matter had been taken from the ocean bed during dredging operations. Examined and pronounced upon by Professor Huxley, it was given the name of Bathybius haeckelii in honor of his great German colleague. Speaking before the Royal Geographical Society in 1870, Huxley confidently maintained that Bathybius formed a living scum or film on the sea bed extending over thousands of square miles. Moreover, he expanded, it probably formed a continuous sheet of living matter girdling the whole surface of the earth.

  Sir Charles Thomson shared this view, commenting that the “organism” showed “no trace of differentiation of organs” and consisted apparently “of an amorphous sheet of a protein compound, irritable to a low degree and capable of assimilating food … a diffused formless protoplasm.” Haeckel conceived of these formless “monera” as arising from non-living matter, their vital phenomena being traceable to “physicochemical causes.” Here was the “Urschleim” with a vengeance, the seething, unindividualized ooze whose potentialities included the butterfly and the rose. Man was mud and mud was man. Mechanism was the order of the day.

  Unfortunately for this beautiful theory wistfully remembered by one writer as “explaining so much,” Bathybius proved to be what the microscopists call an artifact; that is, it did not exist. A certain unfeeling Mr. Buchanan of the Challenger Expedition discovered, as he tried to investigate the nature of Bathybius, that he could produce all the characters of that indescribable animal by the simple process of adding strong alcohol to sea water. It was not necessary to drink the potion. One simply examined a specimen under the lens and observed that sulphate of lime was precipitated in the form of a gelatinous ooze which clung around particles as though ingesting them, thus lending a superficial protoplasmic appearance to the solution.

  Mr. Huxley’s original specimen had apparently been treated in this manner when it was sent to him. Huxley took the episode in good grace, but it was a severe blow to the materialists. The structureless protoplasmic “Urschleim” was a projective dream of scientists striving to build an evolutionary family tree upon existing organisms. Being nineteenth-century zoologists they unfortunately forgot the world of microscopic plant life, its basic position in the nourishment of living things, and the fact that it must have sunlight in order to perform its mysterious green miracles.

  The abyss, it was now to be learned, whatever might roam its waters or slither wetly through its midnights, was not the original abode of life. If there was a past on the black plain far beneath us, if indeed the strange life of remote eras lingered there, it was not stacked with the layered neatness of geological strata as some oceanographers had imagined. The floating heads with their starveling bodies, the squid which emitted clouds of luminescent ink and vanished in their own bright explosions, were all a part of one of life’s strangest qualities—its eternal dissatisfaction with what is, its persistent habit of reaching out into new environments and, by degrees, adapting itself to the most fantastic circumstances.

  Once long ago as a child I can remember removing the cover from an old well. I was alone at the time and I can still anticipate, with a slight crawling of my scalp, the sight I inadvertently saw as I peered over the brink and followed a shaft of sunlight many feet down into the darkness. It touched, just touched in passing, a rusty pipe which projected across the well space some twenty feet above the water. And there, secretive as that very underground whose mystery had lured me into this adventure, I
saw, passing surely and unhurriedly into the darkness, a spidery thing of hair and many legs. I set the rotting cover of boards back into place with a shiver, but that unidentifiable creature of the well has stayed with me to this day.

  For the first time I must have realized, I think, the frightening diversity of the living; something that did not love the sun was down there, something that could walk through total darkness upon slender footholds over evil waters, something that had come down there by preference from above. It was in this way that the oceanic abyss was entered: by preference from above. Life did not arise on the bottom; the muds of the deep waters did not compound it. Instead, with its own pale lanterns or with the delicate, strawlike feelers of blindness, it has groped its way down into the dark.

  The four-year voyage of the Challenger under the auspices of the British Admiralty, beginning in 1872, was the most ambitious project to investigate the ocean depths that men had ever attempted. The vessel was equipped with floating laboratories and a staff of naturalists. She traveled sixty-nine thousand nautical miles, took hundreds of soundings, and the observations of her staff of investigators occupy, fifty huge volumes.

  When the Challenger left port oceanography was still essentially a speculative science. Her biological director, Sir Charles Wyville Thomson, the same zoologist who had dredged the little red sea urchin out of the North Atlantic, believed along with many of his colleagues that the deep recesses of the ocean, unchanging through the ages, would reveal “living fossils,” actual missing links in the history of life. Thomas Huxley, then at the height of his powers, proclaimed with characteristic vigor:

  It may be confidently assumed that … the things brought up will … be zoological antiquities which in the tranquil and little changed depths of the ocean have escaped the causes of destruction at work in the shallows and represent the predominant population of a past age.

  This view was enthusiastically shared by the great Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, who contended that in deep waters “we should expect to find representatives of earlier geological periods.” Agassiz went even further and observed that it was the deep waters which today most closely approximated the conditions under which life had originally emerged. It was, he said, the depths of the ocean alone which could place animals under a pressure such as he believed corresponded to the heavy atmosphere of a young world.

  These were the excited dreams of science in 1872 as the Challenger steamed out of port. Sixty-nine thousand miles and four years later her weary scientists came home. They had rocked sickeningly in all seas, had dragged with cumbersome and ill-devised apparatus the very bowels of Creation. They had handled rare forms of life, looked on things denied to ordinary men, and, above all, they had laid the foundations of a true science of the sea. Nevertheless, their eyes were empty.

  The great globe-girdling carpet of the living ooze was gone—that evolutionary base in which the German scholars had seen “an infinite capacity for improvement in every conceivable direction.” “Our ardor,” wearily confessed Moseley, the coral specialist, “abated somewhat … as the same tedious animals kept appearing from the depths in all parts of the world.”

  In the beginning even the cabin boys had crowded to see what four miles of rope would bring up from the bottom. Gradually, however, as the novelty wore off, the spectators became fewer. Even members of the scientific staff were not always present, particularly when the dredge arrived during the dinner hour.

  The great hopes of the beginning were fading in disappointment, but Moseley gives an unforgettable picture of Sir Charles Thomson’s sturdy persistence and enthusiasm in the face of the collapse of his theories. “To the last,” he writes, “every cuttlefish which came up in our deep sea net was squeezed to see if it had a belemnite’s bone in its back, and trilobites were eagerly looked out for.” Either of these events would have found the world of the Paleozoic floundering alive on the deck of the Challenger. To the despair of Sir Charles they never appeared. It is true that here and there a few animals were recovered that were believed to be extinct and to exist only as fossils, but these were only such discoveries as might be expected when any vast unexplored region is first investigated, whether it be land or sea.

  The secret and remote abysses were yielding not the protected remnants of the very earliest world, but a scattering of later antique types along with a more modern abyssal fauna obviously related to, and descended from, the swarming creatures of the shallow seas and upper waters. Such ancient forms as survive in the abyss represent adaptations and migrations that took place in antiquity from the continental shoals far above. In that sense the midnight timeless city does indeed exist, for in those depths the ages overlap and some few elements of the older world, losing out in competition with more highly evolved and modern types, have chosen to slip by degrees into the freezing cold of the abyss. Here in the unchanging mud and comforting darkness they have survived. After them in time have come others, groping into that enormous cellar with lanterns or light-magnifying eyes—clever adaptations possible to squids and higher vertebrates.

  Even among the mammals, the great sperm whale has come sounding down into the fearful pressures of the kraken’s world, the last of all to enter, and capable of enduring only moments on what is actually the upper edge of the abyss. If it is a place of refuge it is also, we know now, a famine world. There is no vegetable life below there. All that lives preys on others or on the dead raining down from above. This is the reason for the curiously abbreviated bodies of many of the fishes and their enormous jaws; this is the reason why we know that life came relatively late to the abyss.

  According to the biochemists the conditions under which cellular life is possible are very restricted, nor have they changed in any marked degree since life began. At first glance this statement seems absurd. Life has crept upward from the waters, it crawls in the fields, it penetrates the air, it is not unknown even in the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. Surely this enormous diversity is the very reverse of restriction.

  The answer, of course, lies in that modest little phrase “the conditions of cellular life.” All of the tremendous differences between living forms have been achieved only by the elaboration of devices for the maintenance of that inner nourishing liquidity in which cells can live and grow within a certain narrow range of tolerance. Not for nothing has the composition of mammalian blood led to our description as “walking sacks of sea water.” Not for nothing did the great French physiologist Bernard comment that “the stability of the interior environment is the condition of free life.”

  The drifting cell masses of the early ocean lived in a nutrient solution. Salt and sun and moisture were accessible without great mechanical elaboration. It was the reaching out that changed this pattern, the reaching out that forced the cells to bring the sea ashore with them, to elaborate in their own bodies the very miniature of that all-embracing sea from which they came. It was the reaching out, that magnificent and agelong groping that only life—blindly and persistently among stones and the indifference of the entire inanimate universe—can continue to endure and prolong.

  Men have worked in many places. They have seen this sea-born protoplasm creeping upward in the shape of lichens, among the howling winds of snow-clad mountains. They have seen it in the delicate “snowshoe” feet of desert lizards devised for running over sand. From some unknown spot, most probably along the shoals above the continental shelf, it has reached out into lakes and grasslands, edged stealthily into deserts, learned even to endure the heat of boiling springs or to hatch eggs, like the emperor penguin, in the blizzards by the southern pole. It has similarly found its way into the downward coursing streams of the abyss. It has solved the pressures of the ocean bottom as it has survived the rarefied air of the highest mountains. In these difficult surroundings life thins a little; the inventions that support it grow more difficult to produce and the intrusions are apt to be late, because life has experimented last in these bleak planetary wastelands.

 
Nevertheless the reaching out that began a billion years ago is still in process. The cells, so carefully transferring their limited range of endurance through astounding extremes of heat and frost and pressure, show no inclination toward content. Content is a word unknown to life; it is also a word unknown to man.

  In 1949, on the White Sands proving grounds, a Wac Corporal rocket reached an altitude of 250 miles and, on the verge of outer space, paused and fell back. Somehow I like to think of those rockets, pounding year after year at that ocean of air, roaring away into an immensity from which, before long, one will not come back. Sometimes, walking in the star-sprinkled evenings, I think of that almost forgotten theory of Arrhenius that the spores of life came originally from outer space.

  Perhaps that explains it, I think wistfully—life reaching out, groping for a billion years, life desperate to go home.

  The nineteenth-century mechanists, at least, did not find our origins in the abyss, and every bubble of the chemist’s broth has left the secret of life as inscrutably remote as ever. The ingredients are known; they are to be had on any drug-store shelf. You can take them yourself and pour them and wait hopefully for the resulting slime to crawl. It will not. The beautiful pulse of streaming protoplasm, that unknown organization of an unstable chemistry which makes up the life process, will not begin. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen you have mixed, and the same dead chemicals they remain.

  Shape of sea water and carbon rings, yet simultaneously a perplexed professor on a village street, I look up across the moon and Venus—outward, outward into that blue-white glitter beyond the galaxy. And as I look and shiver I feel the voice in every fiber of my being: Have we come from elsewhere? By these our instruments shall we go home? Whatever the beginning, and by whatever mechanical extensions, life is about to cross into the open domain of space. Has not the great 200-inch reflector upon Mount Palomar already spied out the prospect?