Off Langness, people said, there was a city under the water. On a clear calm day, it was said, you could see it through the water. Morrison says Finn MacCool drowned it, angry with its people, turning them to granite and stamping the ground so hard that the sea rushed in.
Waldron heard a story of a treasure-hunting expedition about forty or fifty years before his time. A diver went down in a machine of glass and leather on the end of a rope. He passed the fish and went on into water as clear as crystal, and at the bottom he found a world: streets paved with coral, pyramids of crystal, buildings of mother-of-pearl, and a great hall with a table of amber and floors of diamonds, emeralds, rubies and pearls. Jewelled chains hung on jasper walls. Mermaids and handsome mermen fled at the sight of him.
He was reaching for the chains when the rope ran out and they hauled him back up. He could never forget what he had seen, and nothing on land could please him afterwards. He pined and, the story says, died of longing for the world under the sea. A mathematician on the expedition, adding to the absurdity, calculated that he had been let down twice as far as the distance to the moon.
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