The Coast of Coral

by Arthur C. Clarke

  We had chosen a favorite spot—a fantastic grotto on the edge of really deep water—at which to dive, our main object being to test the new Ektachrome color film we had just obtained from New York, at vast trouble and expense. I had already mapped out a series of carefully planned shots, with and without flash, to discover just what this new film could do. Nothing—but nothing—would be al­lowed to distract us from taking these test shots; on three earlier occasions we had been diverted or conditions had conspired against us, but this time....

  When we reached our selected site, there was such a powerful current flowing that we decided to move on to quieter waters, by rowing further around the reef. Mike took the oars, not trusting me with them, though I had expressed my willingness to try and experiment—like the man who wanted to find out if he could play the violin. While Mike provided the motive power, and bemoaned for the (n + 1)th time the fact that we had no outboard motor, I kept a careful watch on the undersea landscape that flowed slowly past beneath us. We were moving above new and unexplored territory, and at any moment we might see some attractive coral vista that would demand to be pho­tographed with all the different combinations of flash and filter we could muster.

  The glass-bottomed box through which I was surveying the sea bed gave a rather restricted view, so I kept swinging it from side to side, scanning the zone over which we were passing. Although we had traveled not more than a hun­dred yards from familiar territory, I had already seen sev­eral new types of fish, including one with a long, pointed nose that had obviously been designed for cruising at su­personic speeds. The scenery below us was not spectacu­lar—an almost continuous thicket of staghorn coral, with occasional patches of clear sand.

  Through the surface of the water, distorted by a mo­mentary ripple, I caught a glimpse of something large and white. I swung the viewing box toward it—and gave an involuntary yelp of astonishment. There beneath us, and looking quite as large as our dinghy, was a magnificent manta ray. The gleam that had attracted my attention was the pallid white flesh on the inner sides of the two horns or palps extending ahead of the creature’s mouth. It was cruising very slowly around in wide circles, its great tri­angular wings—more than ten feet from tip to tip—flipping with lazy grace. A couple of pilot fish were keeping ac­curate station beneath its belly, mimicking every move­ment it made, while above it swam several smaller satellites. Indeed, it seemed to have almost as big an en­tourage as a prize fighter.

  I had seen many photographs of mantas, but it was quite a different matter to find one of these weird beasts swimming immediately below me, looking like nothing that had any right to exist in this world. To have come across it under conditions of such perfect visibility seemed too good to be true; very gently, without making a sound, we lowered the oars into the boat and gingerly let down the anchor. Gone were all thoughts of my carefully worked-out test exposures; we were desperately anxious to get some pictures—any pictures—of this splendid apparition before it took fright and vanished out to sea.

  Moving with catlike caution, we put on our flippers and face masks, glancing over the side every few seconds to see if we still had company. There was no need to use the viewing box, for the manta’s startlingly white palps re­vealed its presence immediately. It continued its slow or-biting, each circuit taking it a little further along the edge of the reef. Apparently it was feeding on the stream of minute organisms being swept along by the current.

  With the camera round his neck, Mike slipped overboard and I followed a moment later, easing myself into the water so gently that I made scarcely a ripple. Now we could see the manta clearly; now, indeed, we were two more parasites trying to join its retinue. Mike swam down to within five feet of it and shot off a couple of pictures; it did not seem to mind in the least, even when a flash bulb exploded right in its face. We could not have hoped for a more tractable subject. It knew that we were there, for it kept a watchful eye on us, and once when Mike swam straight toward it, it deviated from its orbit just enough to avoid him. I have known human subjects who were much less cooperative.

  When we had used half the roll of color film, I decided to switch to black-and-white as an insurance policy, and Mike climbed back into the boat to change the film while I remained in the water. I was reluctant to miss any chance of observing this strange creature, which bore such an un­canny resemblance to a modern deltawinged bomber. The upper half of its body was a dark blue-black, but its underside was a ghostly white, broken by the parallel slits of its gill openings. Its back had been scarred by numerous scratches or lash marks, perhaps caused by the whiplike tails of its companions.

  Mike handed the now reloaded camera over the side and I went into action again. We had brought one of our Por­poise compressed-air breathing units with us, and when Mike rejoined me in the water he had put this on in the hope that he would be able to take his time getting into position for a real studio portrait. If you are free diving down to twenty feet, you do not have a great deal of sur­plus breath and there is time for no more than a couple of shots before you have to start climbing back for air.

  It was now that we had our first momentary qualms about sharing the water with this large and powerful beast. Manta rays have a fondness for rubbing their horns against anchor lines or divers’ air hoses, just as a dog may scratch itself against a chair—and for much the same reason. The ocean has its fleas, or their equivalents. Unfortunately, this habit sometimes has disastrous consequences; mantas get entangled in moorings, become frightened, and may tow a small boat for miles. The results can be even more serious when a diver is involved, and there have been several deaths from this cause. This has not helped the manta’s reputation, already somewhat damaged by its popular name of “devil ray.”

  I became distinctly anxious when I noticed the manta showing a great curiosity in our anchor line. It would be a long swim back if we lost the dinghy, though we had no objection to the ray rubbing itself on our property as long as it did not overdo matters. When it had got to within a yard or so of the line, however, the arrival of Mike made it abruptly change its mind.

  Until now it had taken little notice of us—we were just a couple more hangers-on following it around. By now Mike was emitting clouds of bubbles as the air gushed out of his Porpoise exhaust valve. The manta gave one look at him, and reared up in the water exactly like a startled horse. It banked round in a great circle, its pilot fish scat­tering in confusion. Then it drove off downstream with powerful beats of its great black wings, and we knew that we would have no chance of catching it again.

  It did not matter; we had been luckier than we had any right to expect, and the final flurry of action had given us some dramatic pictures. We had been literally face to face with one of the most hideous and, to the ancients, most feared of all the creatures of the sea. At one time it was believed that manta rays would wrap their great wings around a man and crush him to death; today we know that for all their ugliness and unfortunate nickname, they are perfectly inoffensive beasts. They do not even possess the barbed spikes which make the sting rays, their smaller rel­atives, much more dangerous creatures to approach.

  And is it really true to call the manta hideous? At first sight, perhaps, its appearance is diabolical, even terrifying. Yet it is doubtful if anything in Nature is really ugly. Ug­liness, like beauty, exists only in the mind of the beholder; it is a purely human conception. At no time did I feel, as I was swimming around the manta, that there was anything in the least repellent about its form. It seemed rather to me that it possessed the whimsical grotesqueness of an amus­ing gargoyle.... Indeed, as I grew to appreciate the grace of its movements and the fitness for purpose of its design, it began to acquire a starkly functional beauty.

  Fishermen sometimes amuse themselves by spearing mantas and letting the terrified great beasts tow their boats—often for miles—before they are exhausted. Why quite decent men will perpetrate on sea creatures atrocities which they would instantly condemn if inflicted upon land ani
mals (has anyone ever harpooned a horse to make it tow his car?) is a question which is not hard to answer. Fish live in an alien element, and many of them have out­landish shapes; therefore we feel none of the sympathy, none of the kinship, for them which often links us to the creatures of the land. Few of us overcome the reaction that classes anything strange as automatically dangerous.

  Let us hope that we will not always retain this primitive behavior, and will ultimately learn to base our judgments on something more than mere appearance. For one day, when the frontiers of space are down, we may meet crea­tures who are much more hideous than the manta—and much more intelligent than Man.

  XIII

  The Wolf Pack

  The scene of our encounters with the manta ray and the two sharks became our favorite area of the reef, and whenever conditions allowed it we would row out and drop an­chor here, very quickly following the anchor overboard ourselves. We never knew what we would meet and we hoped that if we came back here often enough, we would eventually run into everything that was worth meeting... even up to and including whales.

  The water here was about thirty feet deep, but the bot­tom very rapidly sloped down to depths of sixty feet or more as one swam away from the reef. Great pinnacles of coral, some of them as large as houses, soared toward the surface, reaching within five or ten feet of it. One supported a huge overhanging bulge on a massive vertical column, so that it seemed a copy in stone of the Abomb’s mushroom cloud.

  Though on the whole Mike and I preferred to go diving by ourselves, believing that too many people in the water at one time would scare away the fish, our most crowded— and most hair-raising—day off the reef occurred when we had company. Two high-school boys—typical young Aus­tralians already pushing the six-foot mark—had come along with us to give us a hand with the equipment and to see how we operated. The sea was very calm, but there was a good deal of cloud and the sun broke through only at rare intervals.

  Our private underwater sanctuary was about half a mile from the island, and we usually located it by lining up a couple of trees and then rowing out until we recognized the coral beneath us. Today, for some reason, we could not hit our target, and after rowing round in circles for ten minutes in the general area, decided not to waste any more time searching but to anchor where we were and start div­ing. We could not be more than a hundred feet from our favorite pinnacles and grottoes, and would be bound to run into them as soon as we started exploring.

  Mike went in first, with the spear gun. We wanted fish for dinner, and it took Mike only a minute to find and spear a large cod. Unfortunately it was a bad shot—and an expensive one—for the cod broke the nylon line and promptly disappeared into the distance with the spear and the de­tachable warhead which Mike had spent a great deal of effort perfecting.

  However, it was soon clear that the shot had produced an unexpected bonus. The struggles of the injured fish had attracted company, and almost at once a fleet of several dozen barracuda appeared. Splendid, five-foot beasts with long, needle-toothed jaws, they came cruising in out of deep water, staring at Mike and his companion Irvin with coldly appraising eyes. While this was happening, I was in the dinghy with the other neophyte diver, pressurizing the camera cases with a bicycle pump—a routine we always carried out conscientiously, to reduce the danger of leaks. From time to time Mike or Irvin would pop up to the sur­face and give us a running commentary.

  The magic word “Shark!” shouted by Mike during one of his appearances made us redouble our efforts to get the cameras ready. The barracuda, it seemed, were not hunting alone; a rather plump six-foot shark was swimming in the middle of the pack. A few seconds later two more materi­alized; that is the only word for it—you may see a shark leaving, but never arriving.

  Mike treaded water while I handed him the Robot camera, which had just been returned to us after a major repair. Irvin also bobbed up, yelling to his mate to join him. “Come and see these sharks!” he enthused. “They’re real beauts!” In a few seconds the dinghy was quite deserted.

  Mike swam round the sharks, photographing them from all angles—even from below—until they decided that they were wasting their time and disappeared into the distant blue haze along the reef. The barracuda also departed; we were rather sorry to see them go, though in a few minutes we were to be much sorrier to see them come back.

  Throughout all this, the two boys were having the time of their lives, though, I could not help wondering what their parents would have thought had they known what their offspring were doing. It was the first time they had ever dived in deep water, and the reef had certainly put on its best display for them. Like most skin divers being in­troduced to sharks, they were much too excited and inter­ested to be at all frightened. There is something about the sheer beauty and grace of large sharks which, when you are watching them in action, suppresses thoughts of per­sonal danger.

  We continued swimming around for another ten minutes, always keeping in sight of each other but quar­tering a large area of the reef. In one of my circuits over deep water I came across a flotilla of sting rays, slowly cruising round and round a huge coral boulder. Their backs were covered with a beautiful and intricate pattern of white spots, and they trailed long, thin whips on which the dan­gling barbs could be clearly seen. One of the rays had a broken tail; there was a sharp kink halfway along it, so that the slender whip drooped away disconsolately.

  Rays are fascinating creatures to watch, as they flap through the water like enormous butterflies, and it is hard to resist photographing them. I took a deep breath, and dived as swiftly as I could toward the dimly seen creatures circling down there in the gloom. Keeping well clear of those dan­gerous whips, I took one shot—but the flash bulb failed to operate and I knew that the picture would be a failure.

  On my second dive, the flash operated correctly. I was already well on my way back to the surface when I glanced at the depth gauge strapped to my wrist and saw that I was just passing the 30-foot mark. This was probably the deep­est dive I had ever made without breathing gear, though the 40-foot level I had just managed to attain was barely a third of the way toward Raimondo Bucher’s astonishing record of 128 feet in the Mediterranean.

  Only a few minutes later, as I was cruising high above an isolated patch of coral, I noticed a perfectly good anchor lying beneath me. This was an immediate challenge, for no diver can resist the opportunity of making the sea give up some of the wealth it has stolen from mankind. A lost anchor is not quite as glamorous, or as valuable, as a brass-bound chest full of pirates’ treasure, but one has to make a beginning somewhere.

  The boys had now climbed back into the dinghy, but Mike was still in the water and I called him over to have a look at my discovery. At first he was not particularly interested, but presently he made a quick reconnaissance dive to see if the anchor was worth recovering. He dwin­dled swiftly toward the bottom until he seemed no more than a small doll far below me; the modest forty feet which was the best I had done immediately shrank to insignifi­cance in my mind. When Mike had climbed back and recovered his breath, he informed me that the anchor was in good condition, had a long chain attached to it which had become embedded in the coral—and was, according to his depth gauge, sixty feet down. There was no question of being able to raise it by free diving, but there was a Por­poise unit in the dinghy which would make the job a sim­ple one. I remained in the water, marking the position of the anchor, while Mike swam to the dinghy and collected his breathing gear. The cylinder was dropped over the side while he trod water and adjusted the harness—a much eas­ier and simpler procedure than climbing back into the boat and then staggering out again with the heavy equipment on your shoulders.

  Mike submerged in a long slanting dive, after telling the boys to follow his bubbles with the dinghy and then to lower a line to him when he gave the signal. He reached the isolated clump of coral and, without much difficulty, unraveled the chain that had become wrapped around it. Then I saw him shoulder the ancho
r and trudge across the sea bed, stirring up a great cloud of sand as he did so.

  Meanwhile, from the dinghy above, our own anchor on the end of its line was being slowly lowered. The whole operation was beautifully timed; when Mike looked up, the big metal hook was just descending toward him and he merely had to loop the chain over it. Unfortunately for his peace of mind—and for mine, for I was a good fifty feet further away from the dinghy—he was now being intently watched by a very large crowd of spectators.

  The barracuda had come back. What was more, they had brought reinforcement. Although the sharks had gone, there were now at least a hundred ’cuda in the pack, some of them up to six feet in length. They formed such a com­pact ceiling above Mike that he could no longer see the boat, sixty feet above his head. He waved his arms and blew bubbles out of his exhaust valve in the recommended fashion, but the fish took not the slightest notice.

  “This is it,” he thought, as the anchor began to move upward through the almost solid mass of sleek, ferociously fanged beasts. He had grabbed the anchor line, so that the boys in the boat would save him the trouble of swimming up to the surface. Now he began to wonder if they would find anything on the end of the line apart from two an­chors and a rather chewed-up Porpoise unit.

  The barracuda followed him all the way up, eying him as if trying to make up their minds. They were, luckily, still undecided by the time he had reached the dinghy. To give himself time to climb aboard, Mike gave a final blast of bubbles and made a short dart at the circling ’cuda. They retreated for a few feet, and before they could come back Mike—air cylinder, lead weights, and all—was out of the water like a flying fish and into the dinghy.

  I saw all this from fifty feet away as I swam around just under the surface, but took little notice because I “knew” that barracuda were quite harmless. I had met doz­ens—though never ones so large—while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico and the Straits of Florida, and had photographed speared ones at close quarters while they were still struggling on the harpoon. They had been inquisitive and fearless, but had never shown any signs of aggressiveness. When a friend of mine had cut his hand open within sight of twenty or thirty of them, and had stained a cubic yard of water with blood, they had shot toward him—and then turned away, apparently uninterested.