Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I am slightly tense with excitement as I run a file over the tip of my spear. I like fishing before moonrise, which effectively puts an end to it. Tonight the moon is very late and will come up at about 2.30 a.m. When the cycle changes and the moon rises almost at sunset, going down at midnight, it is a different experience. Then one drags oneself from sleep and lowers oneself over the side of a boat into black sea beneath black sky. It is too uncertain whether a dream is ending or has just begun. But now day has conveniently elided with moonless night. I have slept this afternoon, I am rested and alert. At the last moment I bring with me a spare spear and catch-line. Leaving the oil lamp burning low in the hut’s doorway I follow the others down to the shingle.

  For me this anticipatory moment before a dive is almost the best part. I am fully aware of what may be waiting for us out there in the deeps but on dry land, suited up in black cotton, knife on calf and spear gun in hand, I feel competent. Food will be won from an alien element. Tonight the breeze is onshore, carrying over from the mainland a smell of incense which I recognise as sahing, the soft aromatic mess of gums used as a firelighter in charcoal stoves. It intensifies the sense of ritual, of being prepared for a mixture of ordeal and awe. For all that they are born to it I really think my companions are themselves not unaffected. Their movements as we pile equipment into the boats and push off with a hollow grating sigh of keels are practised but not casual. It is – why pretend? – a dangerous business to be conducted far below the upper air with its summer lightnings. Apart from natural hazards there is always the possibility of equipment failure. If the frayed old fan-belt driving the compressor snaps or if the engine breaks down there is a rusty standby tank which will supply two divers with about forty seconds’ worth of air. This is not enough to get them up from forty-five metres if they have been there an hour. (Indeed they ought not to have spent more than five minutes at that depth without decompressing later.) At the end of that gasping ascent will be minor haemorrhaging if they are lucky, the bends and aneurisms if not.

  But we none of us dwell on such specific disasters. They simply blend into a general latency of threat enough to keep us silent as the boats head out across the sea to the far side of the island, outriggers snubbing the occasional wavelet so that it bursts into grains of phosphorescence and sows our wake with bright pollen. Except when lightning defines the horizon for an instant it is impossible to tell where water and air meet. We forge ahead into the blackness aware of Tiwarik’s proximity only because the racket of our engines comes back to us as a hollowness on the right side. The breeze is cool on our faces. We stare out with our private lack of thoughts letting the black air flow through our minds.

  Danding and Bokbok cut the engines and in silence we abruptly lose way. We have arrived at the place where the seabed is strewn with huge boulders which over the millennia have been shed from the invisible cliff above. It is a good place to start for the boulders are usually a dormitory for lapu-lapu. Then the current can carry us back towards the strait over some of the richer corals. If we are still in the water when it changes we can even work our way partially across the strait to the deepest point of the channel. In this manner we will not have to waste energy swimming against the current, for although it is not as strong far underwater as it is at the surface it still counts, particularly when towing a full catch-line.

  The polythene hoses are checked by torchlight and roughly straightened into two coils fore and aft. I will take one and Arman the other. On the other boat Silo and Jhoby are also preparing to dive. A boy in each boat will follow his swimmers by paddling while Bokbok and Danding do their best to keep the engines running and the compressors working. It will be a long cold night for them especially if it rains from the overcast which fits above our heads like a manhole cover. Not a star can be seen, only pinkish-mauve discharges of electricity as from faulty circuitry in the planet’s wiring. Now Bokbok has his engine running and Silo and Jhoby are in the water. I watch their torchlights turn from bright white to small green clouds as they head downwards. The torchlights of companions as they dwindle beneath the surface look most like lightning reflected on the top layer of clouds seen from a high-flying aircraft in the clear stratosphere above them: a limitless floor of greyish ground glass on whose underside appear momentary puddles of green light to tell of lone activities below. I yearn to join them.

  Now Danding has our own compressor going and Arman and I gird ourselves with the narrow plastic hose: two turns around the waist and a loose hitch allowing enough free tubing for us to take the end in our mouths and leave movement unhindered. The coldly gushing air stinks of oil and the dank yeasts which have taken up residence in the walls of the tube. I bite the end to close off the supply to a mere trickle. Long before the end of the dive our jaws will ache intolerably and we will have to take a bight of the tube between our fingers and pinch it shut. Such are the lowtech recourses for those who make do without refinements like airflow regulators. Bahala na … Intoy gives me a grave salute with the paddle and a broad grin. He is huddled in the Jhon-Jhon’s stern in a plastic raincoat several sizes too big. I wave to him, adjust my mask, signal to Arman and slip over the side. Together we angle downwards towards the boulders and begin our night’s work.

  Without the constraint of having to keep coming up for air one’s search is more thorough, the experience altogether less impressionistic. The submarine landscape settles down into one continuous entity instead of being broken up into small disconnected patches. In just such a way the dispersed streets of an unfamiliar capital combine to form a city. With air-supply I also miss fewer fish. Working without the compressor there is always that moment when, right on the point of surfacing for air, one spots a mullet sheltering beneath a rock and has to decide whether to take a quick shot and maybe miss, maybe get entangled in the corals and have to leave the spear and claw upwards for air; or whether to mark the place mentally, go up and breathe and go back down in the hopes of finding it again. If there is a current the chances of retrieving either mullet or spear are practically nil, as they are if the sea is at all cloudy. Merely turning around on the surface is enough to disorientate me. I find it quite possible to return to the same rock with a fresh lungful but from a different angle and not recognise it. The mullet is lost. But with the compressor inflating my lungs with the reek of oil and mildew I can take my time.

  The boulders are truly immense. They lie against one another on a stony, weedless bed. There are no corals here and few plants. Not many fish are to be found here during the day except in the sparkling upper waters. But at night the caves between adjacent boulders provide shelter for quite large fish where they can hang motionlessly in the dark for nine or ten hours. With a plastic air-hose between my teeth I can go into these cave systems, into narrow tunnels whose roofs curve and hang like the skin of a tent, needlessly anxious lest a thousand-ton rock might choose that moment to settle a little more firmly in its sleep, more sensibly wary of a savage stubby eel which might be waiting in a cross-passage. Tonight I find a reasonable haul of surgeon-fish, dark brown and flattish, each weighing a good half-pound. I also find a couple of samaral, speckled and rather rectangular fish whose flavour I prize above that of nearly all others in these waters. They are adept at flattening themselves against walls and even roofs to avoid torchlight, whereas if they are surprised on an open seabed they will do the opposite, adroitly angling themselves so as to present only their narrow backs to the beam of light. (The practised spear fisherman holds his torch sideways at arm’s length and brings his spear tip to within six inches of the fish from the opposite direction.) Fish like these samaral which flatten themselves against rock walls are easy to spear but just as easy to lose unless they are thick enough in the body to engage the barb. Otherwise the spear tip alone goes through them, striking the rock on the far side and allowing the fish to wriggle free before it can be grasped. Grasping a samaral is like holding a snake: it must be done with address and decisiveness because its dorsal and ventral
spines are agonisingly poisoned. I grip the heads of these ones and pass them back to join the surgeon-fish, hoping they will not drift into the path of one of my kicking feet. (I once shot a bantol dead through the top of its head and was proud of getting it safely onto the catch-line since it is a member of the family which includes stonefish and lionfish and is similarly armed with poisoned barbs around its head and back. Half an hour later the current brought the catch-line tangling into my legs. Forgetting the bantol I kicked out. The pain was so awful I had to go ashore: it monopolised attention even to the extent that it became possible to forget not to breathe water.)

  Now from between some boulders I catch a glimpse of Arman’s far-off light and change direction slightly to bring us closer. We have traversed the field of boulders and are at the extreme range of their tumbled trajectories. The seabed is changing as the water deepens. So far we have not been much below thirty feet but now there is a perceptible slope dotted with coral outcrops. This, I know, will remain fairly uniform since we are working our way along its face as we round the island. To our left the boulders, to our right the black gulfs. The slanting horizon ahead raises its metropolitan skyline of turrets and spires, avenues and arcades. At least, it does so in daylight. Now my torch reveals not cathedrals and office-blocks but anatomical details attached to amorphous bulks: tripes, spines and brains; antlers and tusks; wens, polyps, lipomas and sea-cancers. The rocks are encrusted with living corals of all kinds, most of the rocks themselves being dead growths. Plants incline gently to the current. The delicate silver-beige fans of hydroids wave their plumes. They sting worse than nettles and can leave a brown stain on the skin like the aftertrace of a burn. This vegetable mass conceals all sorts of nooks and caverns, fissures and pits which are home or shelter to a vast variety of living creatures only a tiny percentage of which are my own potential prey.

  Arman appears from behind an outcrop. His torch-beam catches the brilliant craters of air spilling from his mouth and wobbling upwards. Briefly we light up each other’s catch-lines to make sure that tonight’s luck is evenly distributed. I used to be quite competitive until it became obvious there was no way I could compete with him over an extended period. Luck might win me a bigger catch than his even on two consecutive nights, but finally he was far the better fisherman and could go out on nights when I hardly found a fish and bag enough to keep his family in food for a couple of days. At this moment, however, we have roughly the same amount. Arman stays where he is while I head off to the right towards deeper water, my own preference, and work parallel with him roughly thirty metres away.

  I am examining a coral as tall as I am and shaped like a series of crinkly interleaved ice-cream wafers. The technique with these is to swim above them and shine the torch directly down into the deep fissures; several species like to rest in the crisp folds but tonight there is nothing worth bagging. As I move off my line snags something behind me, tugging the tip of my spear momentarily downwards. Simultaneously, in the water beside the coral and then directly through my legs a torpedo slides. It stops and turns and hangs there not two metres away, sideways on, a five-foot shark. Its mouth is not fully closed and from it trail white strands.

  A five-foot shark is no threat to me so although my first reaction is the usual one of freezing shock this passes at once. I have met sharks before during day and night, ones twice the size and on one startling occasion a fifteen-footer. But anything seen underwater appears larger than it is and viewed as a fish this small shark is extremely big. I do not wish to take my torch-beam off him to examine my catch-line but assume that, attracted by the blood of my catch, he has just helped himself to the lot. As I watch, his mouth cranks open another inch. There is the whiteness of many teeth but no green nylon. Tentatively I bring my spear-tip round as if to perform a wholly imaginary act and in that instant the shark is gone. I do not even see his tail flick. My light stares through an empty chamber of water where not even a few threads of meat hang to betray his recent occupancy. Half expecting him to be circling nearby, or maybe a larger relative, I nervously shine my beam around before inspecting the catch-line. It appears intact but then I find the first three fish I shot are only half-fish. All of them have been snipped neatly away leaving three heads strung on the end of the line. From one of these hangs a white worm of gut.

  Disgruntled at having three decent fish ruined I return to the hunt with the feeling of going back to the beginning again, like on that night long ago when I was a neophyte but shooting quite well, passing a series of fish back down my catch-line and finding things surprisingly easy only to discover that the stop-knot on the end had come unravelled and I was towing an empty line. Now I re-orientate myself with respect to the slope and see somebody’s torch on the far side of a mountain range briefly outline its jagged crest with a sad lightning. I assume it is Arman but at that moment I see another flash from deep in the gulf to my right where somebody else is mining his private seam of fish. Strangely enough this evidence of companions down here fills me with reassurance less than it emphasises distance and isolation. I very often hunt alone at night without a compressor and the initial sense of being companionless in unbounded dark is transformed into absorption. One cannot see anything one’s torch does not illuminate so moves forever as in a room whose fragmentary and misty walls expand before and close in behind. Tonight those far-off lights in the deep, their dim green winkings like algae, arouse in me the melancholy of infinitudes. There is a beautiful story by Ray Bradbury in which he describes the aftermath of an explosion aboard a spaceship. It consists of radio conversations between the survivors who have been flung outwards in all directions, all of them receding from each other, some heading for deep space, one for the Earth to flare briefly in its atmosphere as a meteorite. Their conversations are necessarily short as one by one they go out of radio range on their individual paths to nowhere. Now in the sea off Tiwarik the abysm of salt atmosphere which covers nearly three-quarters of the planet’s face seems to close in on me as the twinkling asteroids of my friends recede. I think I can never catch up with them, not even if I close the distance and work side by side.

  We are at about a hundred and twenty feet, to judge from the pressure, the species of fish and occasional plants. Even at midday the light down here is muted to the dimmest blue. The extravagance of foliage swaying in the brightness of the upper water becomes, at this depth, the occasional bank of dark weed whose colour is lost because the lens of water above them filters out practically all red and orange light wavelengths. But the holes in the rocks are full of fish and the increasingly large stretches of sand are not deserts at all. They are alive with shellfish making their purposeful, wavering tracks, with swaying garden eels growing like beds of reeds ready to retract into their holes, with fish drowsing motionlessly just above the seabed while those species which are active at night cruise restlessly above them in the dark. Every so often I turn round completely, flashing the light behind me to surprise anything which has been attracted to the activity and has warily approached. By this method I have already speared (lucky shot) a small barracuda two feet long and viciously toothed and now I turn and am confronted with the large silver platter of a mabilog, a roundish fish of the pampano family which tries too late to shy away from the light. It has already turned when my spear takes it from behind through one open gill and going clean out through its mouth. It is too big to thread alive onto the catch-line, its struggles would be a great hindrance, so I kill it by putting a finger and thumb up under its gill-covers and pinching its heart shut. This is a good quick method but it is unfortunately only practicable for certain species. Some fish are too large to allow one’s fingertips to meet inside while others have razor edges to their gill-covers.

  At this point two immense spurs of rock extend like roots from the island, anchoring Tiwarik to the sound. Between these mountain ranges there is a deep ravine floored with sand. I now fly slowly along this valley as through the skies of Drune itself, studying its floor from a few f
eet up. I must be at a hundred and fifty feet now for the air from the compressor somewhere far overhead no longer gushes into my mouth but leaks sluggishly. If for any reason I had to quicken my respiration rate I should have to drag the air into my lungs. If I were alone on the machine this would not happen before a hundred and eighty feet but the compressor is old and cannot cope with the two of us much deeper than this. So I drift slowly through the night skies of Drune trailing my mouldy bubbles when suddenly I spot a pair of eyes in the sand. There are all sorts of eyes down here – crabs’ eyes, shrimps’ eyes, tiny glitters of sentient ruby – but only rays have them that large and closely set in a lump like a cockpit canopy. Now I can make out the faint edge of its buried body, the long tail with what looks for all the world like an old-fashioned black and white quill fishingfloat. This quill is the animal’s lure, sticking up from the sand, so unignorable that even knowing what it is one is half tempted to pull it up. I am surprised; I had not known pagi lay up for the night as deep as this. It will need a careful shot. I want to kill him outright because he is big, about a metre from wingtip to wingtip, and with that surface area he can displace a powerful amount of water if he struggles. Above all I do not wish to engage with his sting. This is a backward-angled thorn on the dorsal surface of the tail nearer its root than its tip, and for this reason appears poorly sited and unmenacing. This is until one has seen a ray’s rubberlike flexibility with which it can lash its entire body back on itself and sting a creature immediately in front of its head. It would therefore be a bad mistake to hold a stingray’s head thinking that the sting itself was safely down at the other end.