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there and was in an understandably foul mood for the rest of the day. Finally Bob Wass' turn came. Wass, 40, was an American commercial diver from upstate New York who had never been under sea ice. He had brought a surface-supply air system connected to an air tank and to a microphone that allowed him to speak to the crew in the tent. He also brought an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) housing a video camera. It was directed from a console in the tent and connected to a TV monitor. When he went in, we huddled in the tent to watch him on the monitor and listen to his reactions. "I've never seen anything like this in my life, it's like a chandelier under a person. On my previous expedition, I had an old Russian shotgun tied to the top of my sled and I kept cartridges in my pockets. I knew that on this trip, no one had brought a rifle. Luckily, there was no bear. When I got back, the first two divers were getting ready to go down. Sobered by Rozhkov's death the year before, Safonov had radically modified the plan. No one would dive below 70 feet or go more than six feet horizontally under the 10-foot-thick ice pack. And, of course, every diver in the water would be tied to a rope held by a team mate on the surface. Safonov went first with another diver. We tracked their progress by the dark spots their bubbles created under the paper-thin ice that was beginning to form. A half-hour later, they emerged, elated. Everything had gone well. Safonov reported seeing a jellyfish the size of an orange and put visibility at a remarkable 225 feet. The next pair of divers went in, including Bozhok, the survivor of last year's dive. He seemed calm and collected. After he reemerged, grinning and holding up a thumb, he said that his weight belt had slipped off seconds before and we wondered aloud how long it would take to travel the 13.410 feet to the bottom. The next dives went well, except that one of the foreigners , an Australian named Brett Cormick, had improperly tied his weight belt and it slipped off as he entered the water. He was offered another one, but declined and aborted the dive: putting on a 40-pound belt with gloves is nearly impossible. He had paid $8,000 to be here. It's so beautiful," Wass enthused through the tinny loudspeaker. Looking at the images on the screen, I had to agree. The semi-transparent ice with its myriad trapped bubbles made for ghostly shapes from another world. Then his voice rose sharply. "Man, I can't believe this, I can see light coming up. This is really wild!" We tried to get the ROV to point to the mysterious light, but we couldn 't see it. It was the same light that Bozhok had seen during Rozhkov's last dive. The ROV's recorder had frozen, so as we stared at the first video images of the top of the world seen from below, we knew they would never be seen again. When Wass came back up, bearing a couple of inch-long shrimp he had caught as they clung to the ice, he explained that although he knew perfectly well that the sun was in the opposite direction the strange light seemed to be coming up from under where we stood. We never did understand how the light came to be refracted in such a manner, but at least we felt we could discount the already far-fetched submarine theory as the cause of Rozhkov's heart attack. Safonov distributed glasses of vodka and lumps of black bread and, following Russian tradition, placed one of each on the snow for Rozhkov. As we held up our glasses, he said gravely, "Let us drink to Andrei's memory. We have realized his dream and shown that ultimately he was right." We downed the shots in silence and meditatively chewed the hard bread. The record does not show when the ghost of Andrei Rozhkov took a sip from his glass. •