We had soon lost all sense of distance, and although we knew we were traveling in a more or less straight line it was impossible to tell how far from the island we were—or how much further we had to go before we would come to the edge of the reef. Our progress over the dead and often treacherous coral, which was not easy to walk upon even in the daylight, became painfully slow.
Quite abruptly we came to an area of phosphorescence; with every step, stars burst out beneath our feet. Even if we stood in one spot, the slightest movement produced sparkles of light as the ripples spread out across the pool. When we switched on our torches, the beams destroyed the magic and gave no clue as to its cause—they revealed nothing but empty water and a lifeless, sandy bottom. Yet as soon as out lights were turned off, the constellations flashed out again, twinkling all around our feet and matching those in the sky above, so that we seemed to be walking upon stars.
The water was deepening; it was now up to our knees, and my promise of finding any exposed coral seemed unlikely to be fulfilled. We were a long way from the beach, and by this time the tide had begun to turn. My companions did not seem to be enjoying themselves as much as I had hoped. They knew that when the tide came in, sharks were likely to come with it. Once we heard, in the darkness far ahead of us, a distant, muffled crash, as of a great body falling back into the water. The whales were moving north to their breeding grounds, so that the calves would be born in the warm equatorial waters. One of them must have jumped out there in the night—or perhaps a big ray was trying to dislodge the parasites that worried it.
I was leading the party, because I knew the way (or thought I did; though by this time I was becoming a little doubtful) and because it was my idea in the first place. According to my calculations, at any moment now we should find ourselves on a firm, flat rampart of living coral, where walking would be much easier and safer and we would have a chance of seeing the exposed polyps to the best advantage. It was highly disconcerting, therefore, when the ground suddenly fell away beneath me and I found myself standing at the very brink of a deep pool, full of strange and mysterious shapes which the beams of our torches were quite unable to elucidate. In the bright light of day, a coral pool is a place of beauty, but when darkness falls it becomes as sinister as the enchanted garden of any demon king. Here might Kastcheï have imprisoned the Firebird and concealed the magic egg which held the secret of his power.
The companions joined me at the side of the pool, and I had to confess that my navigation had proved unequal to the task. True, I had got them safely to the edge of the reef, but not in the place I had expected. Instead of a nice, solid rampart we were confronted with six feet of water, and the tide was now swiftly rising. We could, of course, get to the place I was aiming at by working along the margin of the reef, but I was not quite sure whether we should aim to the right or the left. And whichever way we went, except backward, we were likely to come across more of these unexpected and ominous pools.
The decision as to what to do next was quickly made for us. From the darkness beyond the reef came a sudden steady splashing. It was quite near at hand, and had an indescribably purposeful suggestion about it, as if something was determined to waste no time, but had made up its mind to reach us as quickly as it could.
As far as the boys were concerned, this was the last straw. For some time Harry had expressed an urgent desire to return to more solid ground, and now the others added their pleas to his. Faced with this regrettable lack of support, I was compelled to start the retreat. Naturally, since I had to lead the way, this implied placing Harry, Peter, and Norman between me and whatever it was that seemed so eager to reach the reef.
We retired in fairly good order, though Harry twice jumped out of the water shouting, “Something hit me!” and was only slightly relieved to discover that it had been Norman’s spear. And Peter, misjudging his footing in the darkness, immersed himself several times in his haste to get back to the island. We all breathed a little more freely when the water level dropped to below our knees, and we knew that we were now unlikely to meet any sharks more than five or six feet long.
At last the rocks bordering the shore loomed up ahead of us, and we shook the rising waters from our feet. As we scrambled across the flat but treacherous stone, I expressed my regret that our mission had been a failure, and that none of us had actually seen the corals in their nocturnal beauty. “Now tomorrow night,” I said, “the tide will be a bit better, and if we time it right—”
I had to move quickly to get away.
XXV
The Reef is Waiting
It was a dismal and cloudy morning when we went aboard the Capre for the last time. After several days of calm, a gusty wind had come up and it almost seemed as if the weather, which had been so good to us, had waited until we were leaving before letting itself go again. We did not look forward to the five-hour trip back to the mainland.
Luckily, our fears were groundless. As we watched Heron Island sink astern and gradually merge itself into the Wistari Reef, the clouds began to break. Vast spokes of light from the high but still-hidden sun slowly cartwheeled across the horizon, then merged together in one blaze as the sun at last burst through. It was a spectacular farewell, and as I caught my last glimpse of the island I felt sad, but wholly content.
The sea was calmer than we had ever known it. As smoothly as if traveling on rails, the Capre roared into the west, without the slightest trace of rolling or pitching. It was almost uncanny; could they have seen us now, those Heron Islanders who had gleefully commiserated with us for the rough crossing we were going to have would be most surprised—and disappointed.
Since there was now nothing to see, I settled down to do some quiet reading. We were halfway to the mainland when, several miles away, a column of smoke suddenly materialized out of the water, then slowly dispersed. A moment later there was another—then a third. A school of whales was moving up the coast, running the gantlet of the long, narrow lagoon formed by the Great Barrier Reef and the Australian mainland. Many of their companions must have been taken by the whaling ships operating further south; others would be destroyed by their natural enemies before they could return with their newborn calves to the rich pastures of the Antarctic seas.
It was awe-inspiring to watch the huge, dark bodies sliding through the water. Ever and anon there would be a sudden flash of white, as the great flukes emerged and smashed against the surface with a crack which we could sometimes hear even above the noise of our engines. There was no way of telling whether the whales were merely playing, or whether they were being attacked. Often one would rear completely out of the water, its whole incredible body momentarily balanced upon its flukes. Then it would fall back into the sea with a slow-motion leisureliness which, from our distant vantage point, was the clearest and most striking proof of its real size.
No one, I thought, could watch these gigantic beasts—the largest creatures that have ever moved on the surface of this planet since time began—without a sense of wonder. I knew now how Herman Melville felt when for the first time he saw the sea furrowed by a glistening back as large as an overturned ship, and conceived in the image of Moby Dick a symbol of the dark forces that lie behind the Universe.
Soon the whales were astern, the clear blue water over which we had been sailing turned to a muddy green, and we were skirting the mangrove-covered island which guards the port of Gladstone from the sea. Then came the long and tedious business of getting all our equipment from the dockside to the station—and Round Two of our bout with the Queensland Government Railways.
Our car, now repaired, was still in Maryborough, two hundred miles to the south. We had booked tickets on the Gladstone-Maryborough train, and when we had transported our small mountain of baggage to the station we were assured that there was plenty of time to have a meal before weighing in. We had just ordered a large lunch at a nearby cafe´ when we received the devastating news that the train was already here, and would be leaving in te
n minutes.
Throwing our steak and eggs into a cardboard box, we raced to the station. But there was nothing we could do; it was impossible to get some twenty items of assorted baggage weighed and ticketed in the time available. We had to sit like evicted tenants on our boxes of air cylinders while we watched the train pull out.
Then followed much recrimination and an indignant interview with the stationmaster. Fortunately, there were several southbound trains that afternoon, and it was not difficult to book seats on the next one out. What was difficult to discover was the time the train was expected to leave; every porter gave a different estimate, so we decided to take no chances but to check in our baggage immediately and thereafter to keep a continuous watch on the station. The next train wasn’t going to get away without us.
So in the late afternoon we finally left the Tropic of Capricorn, and in little more than seven hours’ traveling arrived at our destination, a whole two hundred miles away. It was now midnight, and when the train halted under the stars at the junction outside Maryborough the baggage van was very out in the no man’s land beyond the station. While I tried to arrange transport into town, Mike walked down the line to see that all our luggage had been safely unloaded.
Despite the late hour, there was a good deal of local activity, and when our train had pulled out, shunting engines started moving around us on mysterious errands. Presently one of them began to approach along the main line, and at that moment I heard, unmistakably if somewhat unintelligibly, Mike yelling at the top of his voice out there in the darkness beyond the station. His exact words were not audible, but his intonation conveyed his general feelings quite clearly. It was easy to detect the frequent appearance of the Great Australian Adjective, as well as the remaining triad comprising what Sidney Baker, in his scholarly work The Australian Language, has called “the four Indispensable B’s.”
The violence of his verbal reaction assured me that, whatever might have happened, Mike was none the worse. He was still slightly incandescent when I arrived, and it was some time before I could extract a coherent account from him.
The porters, it seemed, had unloaded the contents of the baggage van not by, but on the railway track. Mike had managed to move almost all our property out of the way when the next train arrived, but was unable to cope with the large wooden crate containing six Porpoise air cylinders. The train had smashed the box and tossed it off the track, but its contents—which were made of high-quality steel and so could stand up to rather rough treatment—were none the worse. As I surveyed the wreckage, I wondered what would have happened if the train wheels had hit, fair and square, one of those cylinders with a full charge of air in it—and thus carrying a total pressure of almost a thousand tons.
The rest of our gear had been missed by inches. The complete photographic record of the expedition, containing some hundreds of color slides, would have been lost if Mike had not arrived on the scene in time. Even now, I do not like to recall how narrowly all our months of work escaped being destroyed. It was a strange coincidence that, in several thousand miles of travel, we should twice have skirted disaster in the small Queensland town.
We quickly checked our property for damage, and then started to breathe again. Other goods consigned to Mary-borough had not been so fortunate as ours; I fancied that the local cinema would be feeling the pinch, as a large container of 35-millimeter film was lying in a somewhat battered condition beside the line. Mike had been much too busy safeguarding our belongings to rescue anyone else’s.
When the porters returned to the scene of the crime, they did not appear to be at all upset, but put the blame on the engine driver. We learned, with some incredulity, that this kind of thing happened quite often. If we needed proof of this, it lay close enough at hand. There in the bushes beside the track were two large and shattered trunks—casualties of the previous night, which had not yet been removed from the battlefield.
We did not feel really safe until, early the next morning, we were once more driving south in the now-repaired Chevy, the scene of our misfortunes receding behind us. It was true that, when one considered all the things that might have happened to our expedition, we had little to grumble about, but I have never had much sympathy for the “Well-it-might-have-been-a-lot-worse” school of optimism.
As I glance back over this account of our adventures, I wish that I could have been a little kinder to the Queensland roads and railways. There are some excellent trains, but we had to take the ones forced upon us by circumstances outside our control. And as far as the roads are concerned, here the State faces a problem which is virtually insoluble. A small population scattered over vast distances cannot possibly finance the sort of road network which the Englishman or American takes for granted, and the annual heavy rains, with their accompanying floods and washouts, aggravate the problem.
Australia is a country which is bypassing the age of surface transport. Its internal air system is probably the best in the world; DC-4’s put down at small country towns, and turboprop Viscounts are slicing schedules in all directions. Against this sort of competition, the railways have not got a chance, and perhaps they know it. When we go to Heron Island again, as one day we hope to do, we shall fly to the new airfield that has been opened at Gladstone. And later still, no doubt, there will be a helicopter service over to the island, leaving the Capre to concentrate on fishing trips around the neighboring reefs.
As we drove south to Brisbane, through now familiar scenes warmed by the gentle sun of early spring, we tried to marshal our thoughts and to put into some sort of order the impressions and experiences we had gained. It was hard to find any patterns; we had gone to the Reef with no preconceived ideas and had brought back from it no far-reaching conclusions. We were conscious of all that we might have done, had we the time and the equipment. One omission I would have given much to rectify. I had never been to the Outer Barrier itself, and seen the surf beating against the great submerged ramparts through which Cook and Bligh sailed into history two centuries ago. Out there, facing the Pacific, is virgin territory which few divers indeed can ever have plumbed. It can be a dangerous place to visit, except during certain seasons, and even then one may have to wait for weeks for the right conditions. But I think that the wait would be worth it.
In an age which is seeking new frontiers, the Great Barrier Reef provides one of the few unexploited—indeed, largely unexplored—regions still remaining on this planet. In at least three major fields of human activity—commerce, science, and recreation—it offers opportunities which it would be hard to match elsewhere.
The unromantic but vital battle to feed an explosively increasing population can never cease, and must be intensified in the years that lie ahead. Though it may not be as rich as the cold waters round the poles, the great lagoon within the thousand-mile-long coral wall of the Reef must hold prodigious quantities of fish, and could be an inexhaustible source of shark and whale byproducts. Inexhaustible, that is, if its exploitation is properly controlled. At present the waters of the Reef yield fish and shell to the value of over a million pounds a year, and this output could certainly be much increased without risk of overfishing.
To the scientist—whether his interest lies in geology, biology, oceanography, or even anthropology—the Great Barrier Reef presents a challenge which, largely because of the difficulty of transport over such distances, has not yet been properly met. There has been only one major expedition to the Reef—and that was almost forty years ago. In 1928 a group of eighteen scientists spent a year on Low Isles, about forty-five miles north of Cairns, and the reports of this expedition were later issued in many volumes by the British Museum. It is surely time that, with the new resources and equipment now available, the Reef was made the subject of another comprehensive survey. Of course, such a project would cost at least ten times as much as in 1928, but as some corrective to that the general interest in the sea and matters pertaining to it has enormously increased in the last de
cade.
When it is complete, the Great Barrier Reef Committee’s laboratory on Heron Island will undoubtedly be the spearhead of such research. It has already been used by many students, both from Australia and other parts of the world. When the aquarium now planned is operating, it will also be a major attraction to the tourists.
Every year, several thousand visitors take their holidays at the Reef’s resort islands, and many more travel out by launch on brief excursions from the mainland. But this is barely a beginning; in the foreseeable future, the Reef could become one of the great playgrounds of the world. This is not a prospect that I view with unmixed pleasure, though I hope and believe that the Reef is too big to be spoiled by man. It could absorb a million tourists, and they would be lost in its immensity.
Mike and I often indulge in a pleasant daydream where we try to picture what we would do with one of the more romantic outer islands and a syndicate of complacent millionaires. With its own helicopter service, the Reef Hotel would be within an hour of the mainland, yet it would be so far from the coast that it would be washed by the unsullied waters of the open Pacific. Part of the hotel would be sunk into the reef; there would be wide-windowed corridors below the water line, through which all the life and beauty of the coral world outside could be observed. By day or night, this would provide an entertainment which only those who have seen it can ever really imagine.
By night? Yes, for when there was neither sun nor moon, many of the creatures of the reef would glow with their own phosphorescence, providing a luminous background against which the great sharks might be seen gliding as sinister silhouettes. From time to time submerged searchlights could be switched on, attracting fish like moths around a lamp, and showing the coral polyps fully extended from their tiny limestone cells.
The Coast of Coral Page 22
