At first the rest was pleasant. Julia closed her eyes to protect them from the bright sun, and enjoyed bobbing slowly on the small waves.
Suddenly, her body started slowly sinking into the sea, against her will. She could not cry – the water had already covered her face. Her friends were baking in the sun behind the man-made levee, and nobody saw her. Soon she heard the same voice. It calmed her:
«Don’t worry, you’ll be OK!»
Her sinking was gradually quickening. The sun turned into a small spot, hardly seen through the water above her, and, in an instant, disappeared at all. Her body was swung around and dragged into the depths at a great pace.
Julia was rushing along under the water with the speed of an express train. Fish, like fearful birds, scattered different ways. Larger fish and sea animals swerved to avoid collision.
Her travel was going on above a steep slope, ending abruptly into a fathomless pit. She was sweeping past ship and plane wrecks, which caught hold of the eroded rocky surface of the slope. Julia had no time to descry smaller details of the constructions on the slope.
Her physical state was very strange – she could see, but her body did not feel anything. Moving was fast and painless.
The first fear ceased, and Julia could already examine her surroundings more attentively. The slope ended, but her fall into a fathomless pit was going on.
Lower, the walls of the pit were upright and smooth, with rare bushes of underwater plants, which, by a miracle, caught hold of small hollows or cracks to survive.
Fish and sea animals she met on her way seemed to be brought here from some fantasy novel.
A huge squid, of the size of a carriage, was also plunging into the depth nearby. It was a slow and grand plunging – at least so it seemed to Julia. A sheet of water it let out sharply speeded its motion, tentacles stretched along its body, and the squid was plunging, in splendid solitude, until its motion was slowed down again. Then the whole process was repeated.
Some fish glowed in the darkness; others had only one or several lights, which twinkled in bottomless depths. It would seem amusing to Julia if she weren’t carried past one such visible light. It appeared the light was over a huge large-toothed mouth with prodigious lower jaw, decorated with several rows of sharp large teeth, which stuck out every way. The monster’s body was so long that Julia didn’t see its end. It was lost in the terrifying darkness of this underwater bottomless abyss.