Word: lightless
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...light to catch distant realities upon a collodion wet plate and bear them home in velvet-lined boxes to London or New York. It was a cumbersome wizardry that they practiced, lumbering across Mexico or Africa in darkroom wagons. In desert heat they crawled under layers of blankets, into lightless black bags, to change their photographic plates. When a photographer named Captain Payer was taking pictures in Egypt for the Viceroy in 1863, the fellahin thought that his camera was a Pandora's box, and-that his black bellows contained cholera; they smashed the whole instrument. But the rewards...
Intensive study of the creatures has provided some tantalizing hints about the bizarre life processes in this lightless world. On the earth's surface, all life, with minor exceptions, stems from the sun. Green plants, synthesizing sugars and other carbohydrates out of water and carbon dioxide in a sunlight-powered process called photosynthesis, provide sustenance for virtually all other living things. But in the world of the deep sea vents, there is no sun. How then do its inhabitants survive...
Dunn recently went beyond his depth, though, while trying to help a 7-ft.-long shark at San Francisco's Steinhart Aquarium. The shark, a creature of the lightless deep, was in pain near the surface. Dunn tried a pair of colored contacts that did not help, and the fish died between fittings. But Dunn still has the lenses and is hoping to find another shark...
...CHALLENGE such an overwritten characterization? Not really, though Golding descends to verbose depths more than once, at one point calling his Hell the "inchoate unorchestra of the lightless spaces." He gets away with such a weird combination of words and images only because it parallels the confusion and discomfort that his characters express in their infernal discoveries...
...Hoppe's syndicated newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution and the Boston Herald Traveler, refused to print the column. Hoppe had obviously touched a nerve. He wrote of his love for his country in World War II and his feeling now that "I have come to the dank and lightless bottom of the well." Of the 941 letters that Hoppe had received last week about the column, 923 praised it. Wrote a housewife in Hollister, Calif.: "I asked my 12-year-old son to read it aloud and had to quickly leave the room because some kids cannot understand what...