...of Mindanao Deep

The deeps of the sea were driving Mr Aaron Tefft to the brink of insanity. On the marine charts papering the walls of his study in Salem, the deeps were marked in tints of mounting stridence, from the quiet blue star encircling Sigsbee Deep, a mere 12,425 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico to the blood-red figure out of the cabbala which circumscribed the world's abyss, the centre of Mr Tefft's nightmares, Mindanao Deep, 35,400 feet below the glint of the sun. Not that Mr Tefft looked often at the map on which this final pit was so manifestly charted. His brain reeled at the thought of that funnel of night in which Everest would pass unnoticed, its snow plume choked six thousand feet under the silence of the sea.

[The Deeps of the Sea, Steiner, G.]