Deep-sea explorers remark on the eerie red glow in the gloom of the ocean abyss given off by volcanic vents called "black smokers".
The film director has long exhibited a fascination with the deep sea, making "The Abyss" (1989), "Titanic" (1997) and a number of documentaries about lost ships, including "Bismarck" (2002) and "Ghosts of the Abyss" (2003), a 3-D tour of the Titanic's interior.
Like the overwhelming rapture that leads deep-sea divers into the abyss, the sweep of the wilderness is irrepressible and unfathomable.
Pym finds himself approaching at breakneck speed a cataract that seems to fall from the heavens, creating below it a whirling abyss in the sea.
In 1360, a British friar, returning from the north, reported seeing a tremendous vortex in its farthest waters: a place where the "4 arms of the sea were drawn toward the abyss with such violence that no wind is strong enough to bring vessels back again".
"Presumably it [Neopilina] originated from an ancestor inhabiting shallow water Cambrian-Devonian epicontinental seas and has been conserved in the abyss up to this day in a reasonably unchanged form".
Obsessed by the sea since making his unprecedentedly expensive films, The Abyss and Titanic, the Canadian has led a series of underwater explorations of wrecks and of strange life forms in his spare time, usually turning them into documentaries.
In a misty abyss depicted in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, allights an alluring symbol of modern civilization: McDonald's golden arches.
The Revelation to John refers to this figure as "the Beast from the Abyss" (11 7) and "the Beast from the Sea" (13 1).
There is no drop of water in the sea — not even in the deepest part of the abyss — that does not respond to the mysterious forces that create the tides.
I dipped my toes into waters that sometimes held hidden hazards and shrieking sea monsters that threatened to pull me into the abyss.
