No rain morning fine weather. Ah Sam preparing to die have not seen him since 9th. Ferrier more cheerful self not feeling at [all] well.
Have not seen any boats of any description (No water nearly dead with thirst).
The log ends there. The final word “thirst” stands out clearly among its faded companions; it may be that the bleaching action of time and water has passed it by, but it almost seems as if the letters have been forced onto the paper by a last effort of the writer.
Mary Watson had finished her diary. She left no parting message to her husband or to the world, but took in her arms the little son who was never to see his first birthday. There was a loaded revolver by her side, but she did not use it. She lay down in the ungainly craft that had brought her forty miles across the sea, delivering her from one peril to another, and waited for the end.
XX
A Chapter of Accidents
Heron Island had been my first introduction to the Great Barrier Reef; it seemed appropriate that here I should say farewell to it. When Mike and I had flown back to Brisbane from Thursday Island, we decided to make another attempt to find the combination of sunshine, clear water, and windless days that was essential for underwater photography. We had visited Heron at the wrong time of the year, so everyone told us; now the weather would be more stable, though we could not expect the water to be so warm in the depths of the winter. Realizing this, Mike promptly acquired a rubber suit which covered him to knees and elbows; I decided to rely on my natural layer of blubber.
By removing the back seat of the car, we were able to stow all our equipment aboard without having to use the trailer. This made it a good deal easier to drive and, as it turned out, probably saved us from getting into serious trouble when we made an ill-fated halt at the little town of Maryborough, two hundred miles north of Brisbane.
We had stopped to refill with gas and to have a chat with a garage proprietor who had been helpful to us each time we had passed this way before. After a five-minute pause, we pulled away and had just reached the end of the block when a small Austin Utility came storming out of the intersection. There was nothing that Mike could do but slam on the brakes; fortunately we were not going fast and at the moment of our impact our speed had probably been reduced to a few miles an hour. The Austin proceeded serenely on straight across the road, making no effort to slow down or deviate. We nudged it nearly amidships, and what followed was in the best tradition of stock-car racing. The Utility rolled over a couple of times, and came to rest upside down, with an ominous tinkling of glass, at the side of the road. It was astonishing that such a gentle impact—we never felt the shock—could have produced such spectacular results.
I am quite sure that, as I climbed out of our car (which had had its nose pushed in but otherwise showed no sign of damage), I was much more worried about the problem of continuing our journey than I was about the fate of the man in the overturned Austin. At any rate, it was Mike who reached him first; he was curled up in the cab, laughing softly. The door seemed a trifle stiff, so Mike pulled it off its hinges and extricated the driver. His first words were, “Where’s my other shoe?”
The inevitable crowd (in one of his more sinister stories, Ray Bradbury maintains that it is always the same crowd) had now sprung up from nowhere. On the principle that, since this looked like costing us a lot of money, we might at least get some good pictures, I recorded the sorry scene with the Leica. (I have a strong suspicion that I took the first photo immediately after stepping out of the car, before giving a thought to the other driver.) Two very helpful policemen and an ambulance were on the spot within three minutes; luckily the ambulance was not needed, for the only damage to the driver of the Austin, despite his remarkable acrobatics in rather confined quarters, was a grazed arm.
Quite apart from our skid marks, we were able to give the police convincing proof that we had brought our car almost to a halt at the moment of impact. Seven heavy compressed-air bottles, and one oxygen cylinder, had not moved a fraction of an inch from the positions where they had been resting in the back of the car. I could not help thinking what a contribution their ton-to-the-square-inch contents might have made had there been a really severe crash followed by a fire. . . .
Once we had arranged for our car to be towed to the nearest garage, and had given the police all the information they needed, we had to face the problem of transporting ourselves and our several hundredweights of heavy yet delicate equipment to Gladstone in time to catch the Capre. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the Capre left on Tuesday morning. There was just one train that would get us there in time; we received the news gratefully, though we were not so happy to hear that it left Maryborough at two o’clock on Monday morning. We did look into the possibility of hiring a cab, but that worked out a little expensive as the round trip involved was some 440 miles. . . .
Dusk had fallen when we finally got all our luggage and equipment to the railway station. By further good luck, there was a hotel immediately opposite, so it would not be too far to walk when we staggered out of our beds in the dreariest hour of the night. We borrowed a battered alarm clock, prayed that it would not let us down, and crept beneath the sheets not only in search of sleep but also in search of warmth. I had no idea that it grew so cold in Queensland, even in the winter. And it was to grow a lot colder before the night was out.
When I have to get up early, which fortunately is not often, my helpful subsconscious always makes a point of rousing me every hour, on the hour, all through the night, just to take a time check. I was not very much refreshed, therefore, when the alarm clock went off at 1 A.M. and it was time to creep shivering out of bed. We packed the few effects we had brought across to the hotel with us, and tiptoed downstairs. Had anyone seen us leaving, they would have drawn the worst conclusions. However, we had paid our bills the evening before; the management had seen to that.
We staggered blearily across the station and supervised the loading of our dozens of boxes, air cylinders, spear guns, and all the other equipment which we often wished weighed as little above water as it did below. In response to our anxious inquiries, we were told that no First Class sleepers were available, so we would have to spend the night trying to catch a few winks while propped up against the frugal upholstery. It would not have been so bad could we have obtained a compartment to ourselves, but the train was full and as we each had to share a seat there was no chance of sprawling outright.
It was now extremely cold, and it looked as if we would have a miserable night ahead of us. However, our spirits revived considerably when the guard told us that though the First Class sleeping berths were full, there were still some Second Class ones available. We followed him down the train, noting without much surprise that in one compartment a gang of diggers had lit a spirit stove in the middle of the floor and were brewing the traditional billy of tea.
When we arrived at the sleeping car, the anticlimax was considerable. It was a six-bunk affair, the upper two bunks on either side folding into the wall. The whole atmosphere was so bleak, the standard of comfort so near the irreducible minimum, that it reminded me of a scene from the Riot in Cell Block 11 kind of film. Yet worse—much worse—was yet to come.
While I unpacked my pajamas for the second time that night, Mike chased after the guard to get sheets and blankets. He came back a few minutes later with devastating news. Only First Class sleeping berths possessed such luxuries.
The shiny leather couches had all the welcoming comfort of a mortuary slab. We wrapped ourselves up in every scrap of warm clothing we could muster—which was not a great deal, since we were heading into the tropics. As I put on my pajamas over my clothes, I felt fairly warm from the knees up, but my exposed extremities soon began to freeze. Wrapping towels around my feet didn’t help; I lay on the couch, wracked by frequent uncontrollable shudders, and thought wistfully of our snug sleeping bags, which were safely (and inaccessibly) stowed away in the luggage van at the end of the train.
The train continued to jolt through the night as if it were running along a dirt road, not on a set of metal rails. Every jolt was transferred with high-fidelity realism through the bunks, which before very long felt like leather-covered wooden planks. I tried to hasten the weary miles by picturing what a Third Class sleeping berth would be like, but my imagination was unequal to the task.
After about an hour of jolting, freezing misery on this Trans-Siberian Branch of the Queensland Railways, we began to wonder if we would still be alive by morning. Then deliverance came. The train stopped, and a voice shouted out of the night: “Bundaberg—ten minutes for refreshments.” It took some time for the import of the message to sink in, and a few more minutes for our stiffened frames to react to it. Then we walked like a pair of badly oiled robots to the refreshment room, where about forty people were trying to get tea and toast from the two girls on duty. After we had stood in line for a while, Mike said: “You grab the tea—I’ll see if I can get our sleeping bags.” He darted off down the platform, and just as the inspector was shouting “All aboard!” I managed to seize two cups of tea and a plate of fresh toast. I carried this back in triumph to our refrigerated hearse, and never did railway food taste so good. Here at least someone deserves a word of credit; I wonder at how many British railway stations it is possible to get tea at three in the morning.
We unrolled the sleeping bags that Mike had pilfered from the luggage van, and climbed thankfully into them. Soon we were warm again—probably the only people on the train who were. The jolting of the carriage on its saw-toothed rails still prevented us from sleeping, but that was a minor discomfort. The bliss of being warm once more was so great that I wanted to stay awake to enjoy it.
After about three hours of semislumber, we saw the sun rising like a bloodshot eye over the mangrove swamps soth of Gladstone. The grass was dusted with frost—something which I thought could never happen at sea level on the Tropic of Capricorn. But we had arrived safely, with all our belongings, and as the day warmed up around us we soon forgot the anxieties and discomforts of the previous twenty-four hours.
After a quiet day, recuperating from the trip and doing a little shopping, we loaded our gear once more upon the Capre. As the launch pulled out of Gladstone harbor, we felt like a couple of old salts who had spent half their lives among these islands, and could tell all the open-mouthed tourists from the South what the Reef was really like. It was a fairly rough trip, and some of the passengers were not particularly anxious to have our information; but we gave it just the same.
When we arrived at Heron Island, we had something of a shock. The Research Station was crowded with Fulbright scholars—two, to be exact, but as the place still had very limited accommodation that meant that there was no room for us. A cable had been sent to the mainland warning us of this state of affairs, but it had never reached us. To make matters worse, the tourist settlement was also full, and for a while it looked as if death from exposure and starvation faced us. After some fast talking, however, we persuaded the management of the resort to let us have an unused cabin, and were soon comfortably installed among all our cameras, air cylinders, and processing kits.
The non-receipt of that telegram was one of the luckiest accidents of our entire expedition. If it had arrived safely, when we had made all our plans for our return visit to Heron Island, we should have been thrown into vast confusion—though admittedly we should have avoided that unpleasantness at Maryborough. As it was, we went sublimely ahead, and were lucky enough to reach the island just when the long spell of bad weather was coming to its end. It was true that the water was cold—though not so cold that we could not stay in it without protection for an hour at a time. But after the first few days of our second visit, the wind died away to a dead calm, the sun came out in a cloudless sky, and the waves which had seemed to march forever against the reef lost their momentum. There was a stillness which sometimes appeared quite uncanny; over the rocks which were normally submerged by boiling foam, the glassy water lay in motionless sheets, mirroring the low islands on the far horizon. When we rowed out across the reef, we sometimes seemed suspended in midair above a fantastic landscape of faery trees, and to speak in more than a whisper verged upon sacrilege.
These were the conditions of which we had always dreamed, but which had eluded us so often that we had begun to imagine that they existed nowhere outside the travel brochures. We were determined to make the best of them before taking our final farewell of the Great Barrier Reef and returning to the world of newspapers and cinemas, of traffic lights and hurrying crowds—the world, above all, of clocks and calendars.
XXI
The Turtle Hunt
During our first visit to Heron Island, we had seldom used our breathing gear because we had only a limited supply of air, and felt that we ought to save it for emergencies. We were so ultra-careful, in fact, that we carried most of our compressed air back to the mainland again—a mistake which we were determined not to make a second time. As soon as weather conditions allowed, we used our Porpoise units to revisit the spots which, until now, we had inspected only on brief dives whose endurance had been limited by the capacity of our lungs.
It was a wonderful sensation to sink slowly, without haste or strain, down the faces of the coral cliffs which we had never before had time to examine at leisure. We could crawl into caves which were alive with the most fantastic colors, so that their walls often seemed covered with exotic tapestries. Some of these colors—the blues and yellows—were visible to the naked eye as soon as it had time to adapt itself to the gloom. The reds and crimsons, however, were revealed only during the momentary explosion of light from the camera flash bulbs, and until we processed the film we had little idea of the hidden beauty that had surrounded us.
With our relative freedom of the deeps, we were also able to help the Heron Island management to cope with a minor emergency. The chains linking the Capre’s mooring buoys with their heavy anchorages on the sea bed had become entangled in a snarl of metal links sixty feet down, and Mike volunteered to sort matters out. It seemed a fairly simple job, though the powerful current running round the edge of the reef made swimming difficult.
It was late afternoon when Mike put on his rubber suit, switched on his air, and fell over the side into the clear though dimly lit water. We saw his ascending bubbles being swept away by the current, but as he had gone hand-over-hand down the anchor line he was able to stay in position without too much trouble. Once on the bottom, he found a hopeless snarl of heavy chains and forty-gallon oil drums, which had become flooded and were therefore no longer very effective as buoys. The links of the chains were about four inches long, and even working under normal conditions, on the surface, it would have required a good deal of effort to disentangle them. After Mike had been wrestling for ten minutes, pushing and pulling and using the current to its best advantage, the main mooring drum moved ponderously in a tight circle, untangling—except for the lower portion—the whole Gordian knot. When Mike had reached the sea bed, some sixty feet down, he started to unravel the remainder of the tangle, and had partly succeeded when a large wave on the surface struck the ship moored above him and tightened the entire system of chains. This, combined with the force of the current and the weight of the flooded buoy, caused the thick chains to tighten around Mike’s wrist, holding him trapped a few feet above the sea bed. The current kept the heavy buoy out of his reach, so that he was unable to pull it toward him and release himself.
He had about thirty minutes of air left in his cylinder; as he looked up along the stream of bubbles rising to the distant surface, he thought to himself: “Well, no one can see me down here—and if they could, there’s nothing they could do to help me.”
Like all good divers (and unlike me) Mike always carries a knife when he is underwater. Partly by luck and partly by good judgment, he had with him on this dive a big German hunting knife—a diabolical weapon with a massive nine-inch blade. He had taken it down thinking
that he might have to saw through some ropes; instead, he found himself using it as a lever. Prying the blade between the twisted links, he managed to open them sufficiently to release his hand. Then he finished the job of untangling the moorings, and joined us back on the surface. It was not until a long time later that anyone discovered just why he had been delayed on the bottom.
That was not the only salvage job we did during our stay on the island—I say we, for on the next occasion I became involved as well. Had we been professional divers, our bill for services rendered would have been considerable. As it was, we had the free use of a dinghy during our stay, so everyone was satisfied. It is impossible to do any effective diving around a coral reef without some kind of boat, notwithstanding the solo performance described in the next chapter, which should be regarded as an exception rather than the rule.
Only about a mile from Heron Island, but separated from it by a channel of water whose deeper blue always contrasts vividly with the light green of the shallows around the island, is the Wistari Reef. Completely submerged at high tide, Wistari rises from the waves twice a day, to reveal miles of coral boulders surrounding an extensive lagoon. Only on a very calm day is it safe to make a landing on the reef, and then one has to make sure that one can get away before the tide returns. It would not be a pleasant experience to be marooned on Wistari, with the water rising inexorably and the coral boulders disappearing one by one. This actually happened to one distinguished visitor, when the boat that should have taken him off forgot to return. He was rescued at dusk, standing on the last exposed lump of coral, while sharks circled inquisitively round him.
We were lucky enough to borrow an outboard motor on a day when the sea was exceptionally calm, and soon had put-putted across the channel until we were skirting the now-exposed edge of the reef. On our right, extending like a low, irregular wall almost as far as the eye could reach, was the line of massive boulders which countless storms had tossed on to the edge of Wistari, as upon the weather side of every reef. These blocks of dead coral, often weighing several tons, are known as niggerheads or bommies, and still dot the sea like rows of little islands long after the reef around them has been totally submerged.
The Coast of Coral Page 18
