It's cool bazool down here in the children's room of the Atlanta Public Library. You may hear the faint gurgle of water and the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" music.
It's all thanks to Daniel Griekspoor. He's the one who created the underworld waterscape some 15 years ago.
But the sunken feeling comes from more than paintings on the walls.
First, you have to descend some steep steps to get here. It's also a little humid because there is a real underground spring gurgling beneath the building. One used to hear it through an iron grate in the floor.
But it is the blue and watery ceiling and walls, decorative fish and fish netting, divers and submarine gadgetry scattered all around that convinces you. This is a library basement like no other.
On the walls of this strange and imaginary ship are pictured Greek legendary heroes and gods, English rock star musicians, space-age scientific laboratories, comic characters, Spanish galleons and works of modern artists such as Matisse.
Librarian Jackie Icenhower turned Griekspoor loose back in 2006 after asking him to paint a sunken Spanish galleon to start the project and was tickled with the result.
Thereafter, Greikspoor came nights and weekends for seven to eight months to paint to his contentment.
"It was not only fun but therapy," he said.
He's retired now but then was employed with the Atlanta District of the Texas Department of Transportation and worked to illustrate many of the training manuals used throughout the state.
He's earned awards in state contests for illustrators and also writes poetry and children's stories. One of the comic characters on the wall is a creature from his writing, Mister Dillybody, who is a fish that swims around with an umbrella in case it rains.
While Daniel did most of the painting, he did have some help from Mary Lou Hudson and the library staff of Icenhower and Tammie Davidson, who were the ones to first paint the walls from gray to blue.
The result won a 2006 Library Project of the Year award from the Northeast Texas Library System for libraries serving under 12,000 patrons.
Atlanta's library is multi-faceted. On the top floor is the genealogical and rare books section, while the first floor has the newspapers, magazines, books and computers for those interested in what's going on in the outer world.
It's the basement children's room where the past and future seem combined. And when children are here with their parents and friends, the town of Atlanta above seems perfect as if it were a submerged world.