nine o'clock in the morning
It is easy to make a problematic sacrifice of life , it is hard to walk without shrinking into a chamber of awful pain . From this ordeal these fourteen men did not shrink . `` They were headed by Griffin , the old caisson foreman , who had a record of having withstood the greatest pressure possible , a pressure of eight and a half atmospheres . They went down at nine o'clock in the morning . The pain must have been fearful , but they stuck to it to the end . One man went through the air-lock and got food , returning to his comrades . He had been down four hours , and his condition was so terrible that the doctor ordered him to stay out of the lock . ''