Seven-Tenths Read online

  By now I had grown quite fond of him despite his stainless-steel faith in remedies and projects and even – quite possibly – in progress, too. But away from Jim I found myself caring only slightly that well-meaning, busy people like him should succeed in their tasks. I knew all about the fishermen but saw no reason for not holding contradictory views at one and the same time. It is not possible to balance an equation between aesthetics and somebody’s livelihood. They have nothing to say to each other. As far as I was concerned the dumping of a shipload of old lorry tyres into a man-made gap in a fringing reef was adding insult to injury. If the equation were to be solved equitably it would entail the agents of the damage paying its victims compensation for as long as it took the corals and fish to re-establish themselves. Jim said I was a drivelling idealist, flitting about the world like a disdainful butterfly irresistibly attracted to decay, content merely to feed off it rather than do something about it. I warmed to him still further, saying he was an excellent judge of character. Butterflies do not believe in the efficacy of doing, but they definitely are fond of flitting and feeding and drivelling. We bought each other a series of drinks until the Mayor who would be mayor again came in and began a lengthy discussion of arrastre or lighterage fees for unloading hundreds of tons of perished rubber.

  * George Johnston, A History of the British Zoophytes, 2nd edn (London, 1847).

  † V. Donati, Phil. Trans. (1757) abridg., xi, p. 83.

  * John Ellis, Essay on the Corallines of Great Britain (1755), Introduction.

  † Linnaeus, Correspondence (1821).

  * Johnston, A History of the British Zoophytes (1847).

  † See Anita McConnell, ‘The Flowers of Coral – Some Unpublished Conflicts from Montpellier and Paris during the Early 18th Century’, Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 12 (1990), pp. 51–66.

  ‡ McConnell, ‘The Flowers of Coral’.

  * McConnell, ‘The Flowers of Coral’.

  † Lancet, 871 p. 225.

  * Boyle Somerville, The Chart-Makers (1928).

  † Susan Schlee, A History of Oceanography (1975).

  * See Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life (1990).

  II

  Sensing the oblique

  Just as law courts in certain hot countries provide a habitat for diverse species of people, so does a reef supply the architecture and ambience for all manner of marine predators and prey, hangers-on, refugees and indigent waiters on scraps. It has its diurnal and nocturnal rhythms but the activity never entirely stops. After a strange 20-minute hiatus, night creatures follow day creatures through the self-same corridors and chambers and are themselves distinct; but unseen and in no particular place long, long processes continue imperceptibly. Even in the depths of night scattered lights wink in the windows of these unsleeping cities.

  As a ramshackle social nexus a tropical law court is awash with voices. The sounds seem almost generative, as if every voice secreted a molecule of stone and buildings grew out of pure speech. Instead of some general administrative order, it is the uproar itself which supports and enlarges the monumental fabric. Around its walls and beneath the shade of banyan trees sit men at tables with ancient typewriters, patiently transcribing voices from the throng: aggrieved, supplicatory, self-righteous, wheedling. For every sentence typed a thousand ascend like smoke past the birds in the banyans. Hot knots of waiting petitioners discover each other and put their cases over and over again, ever more articulate, ever more impassioned, scattering in the sunlight gems of rhetoric whose brilliance goes unrecorded. Squeezing through the press of people the tea boys come and go with battered tin trays and dirty glasses with half an inch of undissolved sugar in them. Wholly unconcerned with legal wranglings they form a noisy sub-community of their own, their cries and whistles joining the birds. Everywhere is a prodigality of speech and gesture and smell, and from it all a distillation leaks out in a steady trickle of files containing depositions typed shakily on yellowed paper.

  An old man wearing spectacles mended with fuse wire gathers them up every so often and takes them inside the great building, through a back entrance and gloomy passageways, climbing flights of worn steps until, having knocked on a door, he enters a remarkable room. It is not particularly big but the open windows are spacious and it is the light coming through them which gives the room its quality. This must be the back of the building, facing away from the hubbub downstairs which had seemed to besiege it on all sides. The air is quiet. The windows open into a cage of leaves, as if the room were built in the heart of a tree. Through them filters a serene undersea glow pricked with spicules of dazzling sunlight, one stray beam laying the spectrum in a bar of colours across the window sill. At a bare table before the window sits a scholarly man – a judge, possibly – staring out into the greenery and watching the hop and flitter of small birds among the branches. The old messenger lays the files in silence on the judge’s desk and in silence withdraws, closing the door gently behind him. Maybe something of the din below is audible after all for there is a faint but constant background noise, a soft roaring like a distant sea. The judge sighs, opens the top file and begins to read. It is hard to connect the orderly, formulaic sentences with the whizzing and tumultuous lives which, in some garbled form, they partly express.

  One needs to drift in the green undersea light day after day, month after month, maybe for years, until almost bored. Or maybe not bored but blocked. Looking and listening, the conviction grows that something is missing, some dark matter hidden but deduced. It is an absence which in an animal privileging the visual leads to the idea that it must be located, if only it could be found. Somewhere behind the next outcrop (vaguely right-angled, like the wing of a sombre old palace) must be a forgotten courtyard containing a great assemblage, a tumult, the core and centre of this submarine complex. Until it is found one will go on missing the point, ears stuffed with water and eyes straining behind glass, too immured in a scholarly attention to detail and too intent on deciphering easily apprehended messages which purport to tell the whole story. What is needed is a sideways shift, a skidding off into a different position entirely.

  Some black art may be needed for dealing with reefs, one I have never discovered. All my experiments with them, while having suggested themselves as serious, ended up as parodic or whimsical. When diving off coral reefs it would be useful to learn how to judge the direction and speed of a nearby boat rather than run the risk of surfacing for air directly in its path. Even after so many years I still cannot do this reliably. Sound under water becomes omnidirectional, reflected off rocks, off the shelving sea floor, even back down from the surface. Depth, too, makes a difference. The more distant a boat is the further down one has to go to hear it. Sometimes a fishing boat will pass directly above. The silver-edged lozenge scoots overhead – black, very sharp and swift – and the whirring disc of its propeller mutes itself for an instant, like an electric fan which is quieter heard edgeways on than from in front or behind. What, then, would be the effect of hearing a sound from a source vertically below instead of overhead?

  Having borrowed a cassette player with a loudspeaker I swathed it in many plastic bags and walked into the sea, its owner watching and torn between consternation and ridicule. I swam down about 20 feet and set the machine on a ledge among corals. The pressure flattened the layers of polythene in a secondary diaphragm across the speaker grille and it was possible to believe equally that this might conduct the sound better or else muffle it. I wanted to see what effect music had on fish and other reef creatures, but also how well it would sound under water. It turned out to be disappointing, ethereal only in so far as it was inherently weird to hang in water 20 feet down and hear Mozart’s G minor Quintet coming from behind an outcrop of Acropora. It was not so much attenuated as muted, the higher frequencies suffering most. With the cassette player on its back the sound, as heard from the surface directly above, was definitely feebler than at the same distance away horizontally. This was probably due to the focusing effects of rock
s and the sea floor. As for the creatures, they paid the music no obvious heed, with the exception of a damsel fish which braved the ecstatically depressed sounds to dart at the polythene. They are highly territorial, and the player was probably in its back yard. Since fish have excellent hearing it is likely that this dim source of noise was at all the wrong frequencies to be interesting. It certainly was muffled. This maybe had something to do with water pressure deadening the air column inside the speaker and even slightly inhibiting the vibrations of the paper cone itself. Altogether, it was a pathetic substitute for a GLORIA transponder.

  On other days I experimented with making high-frequency noises by partially inflating condoms and trying to make them squeak under water. It was necessary to wash off the silicone lubricant otherwise my fingers would skid greasily without making a sound. I finally coated my hands with a resin used locally as the basis of incense and tried inflating the bladders to different dimensions to obtain different frequencies. This, too, was a failure. At best I achieved a brief grunting sound, though it was uncertain whether this was generated manually. Anyone who has ever tried swimming underwater holding an inflated condom will appreciate the difficulties involved.

  There are fish which are blind and others which have no olfactory organs, but they all have some variety of acoustico-lateralis system. That is, they have ‘ears’ or sound receptors as well as lateral line organs. A fish’s lateral line runs from its head along both sides, its course often marked with a pigmented stripe. It is made up of tiny hairlike sensors which respond to changes in the water caused by local movement and currents. (It was probably a similar mechanism which triggered the tube worm.) In addition to having ‘ears’ some species of fish have the capacity to make sounds, generally in one of two ways. They either drum on the wall of their swim bladder or, like a cricket, stridulate two bony surfaces together. It is presumed that such abilities are used for courting and mating rituals. Species which have some sort of connection between their swim bladder and their inner ear must have exceptionally acute hearing since the air sac would act like a diaphragm and efficiently collect sound. As for the noises made by marine creatures, some are very loud indeed. Apart from the celebrated carrying qualities of cetacean sound, the sharp snapping of a pistol shrimp is enough to make a swimmer jump, while the grunts of toadfish have been known to set off acoustic mines.

  Such things are the background to another experiment, one performed so often as to become a habit. This is to swim out to the edge of the reef on a moonless night, head down into the depths and, holding on to a rock near the bottom, simply concentrate on all that can be heard and seen until the air in the lungs runs out. This is the best way I have yet discovered of apprehending a reef and it has become the central ritual of my explorations. To save blundering painfully into corals, stinging hydroids and sea urchins one needs to take a sealed torch, but it must be used sparingly otherwise the light destroys the eyes’ rhodopsin and leaves one blinder and – strangely – deafer as well. Obviously it is better to choose a reef whose layout and fauna are familiar. Knowing what to expect it is less of a shock when a stingray explodes off the bottom in a cloud of silt, pelting wings flashing quick beats of white underside as it vanishes into the blackness. It is necessary to be alone and it is essential to be apprehensive. When the night is overcast and the wide drench of tropical starlight falls uselessly into an upper bed of soft cloud and nothing below it can be seen, not even the shore then is the time to take a deep breath and swim down, grains of luminescence streaming back from fingertips, down and down.

  It was whale song which mariners heard filtering through their vessels’ resonant wooden hulls and which they took for the Sirens’ voices, beckoning them to disaster. To have lain in one’s bunk at night and heard on the other side of a few inches of oak and copper sheathing those directionless, distanceless cries must have been to feel the chill of utter melancholy and dissolution – also, to have felt one’s nakedness. This is the effect of listening to reef sounds at night, too. It is more than just the nakedness of wearing next to nothing, and it is more than vulnerability. It is the sensation of animal messages passing through one as if, being seven-tenths water, one’s body were transparent.

  At first it is too unnerving to permit concentration. After a time when nothing life-threatening has happened the rhythm of swimming down, waiting, and coming back up for air becomes soothing. The sea is warm. With the clamp of water over one’s ears and the blackness pressing up against one’s mask conditions approximate very slightly to those of controlled sensory deprivation, a disorienting and eventually unhingeing technique fashionable in torture and interrogation circles some years ago. But there is no real comparison. There is too much sensation, too much physical effort in holding the breath, in staying down rather than floating up, in seeing and hearing. It is never more than mildly hypnotic for a few minutes (but with a vanishing of time which makes those moments impossible to calculate). Steady in the background is the loud white noise of uncounted crustaceans stridulating with pincers, horny plates, mandibles, who knows what. Very occasionally it stops dead, and in the ensuing silence a chill passes over the body because a million crabs and prawns have all heard something attention-grabbing which one has missed completely. What is it out there? Out here? The frogs in the paddies do it, too. Nightly they crank up their ranarian machine until it is turning over at a constant speed. It goes for an hour, then abruptly stops. A beat or two, then a few brave ones try to turn it over, are joined by others until it catches and settles back into its rackety tick-over. Crickets will do the same.

  Out here we are on the edge of something: of drowning, fear, understanding. The huge unseen city itself seems always on the cusp of vanishing, it is so delicate and its true nature so elusive. It is a place whose strangeness is far greater than we can know even as we painstakingly try to identify each snapping shrimp, each grunting fish, the soft concussion – like a cloth being flapped – of a sizeable fish taking evasive action somewhere nearby. Whup. But then we, too, are stranger than we imagine. We hang here in the depths with granules of cold fire prickling around us as creatures and currents stir dinoflagellates into luminescence. We hang here, inquisitive carbon-based life forms, knowing that every atom of carbon now in our bodies was once in the interior of a star. For an instant, we dissolve, are without form, become nothing but the point at which the three axes plotting this three-dimensional borderland intersect. The three dimensions of a fringing coral reef are as follows. Horizontally, it marks a border between sea and land. The flats at low tide baking for hours in sunlight support a variety of marine animals which can survive out of water and resist a wide temperature range. Vertically, the seaward cliff of a reef face reaches to within inches of the surface and may plunge 1,000 feet in a precipitous slope, its initial descent marked by a steady change in colours and life forms. Obliquely, a reef exists at other wavelengths than those we can perceive. The hidden courtyard with its tumult, the babble and rhetoric, the colours and unimagined smells, all are tucked away in great bright pockets of the electromagnetic spectrum which are closed off to us, in sounds we cannot hear, in pheromones our nostrils cannot detect. This knowledge makes us ache, sea creatures that we once were, as for a country we have lost on the far side of a frontier we can barely even discern. We are left with our narrow, thickened senses. We are also left resorting to fossil gestures. I find myself opening my mouth under water, the better to hear. It works on land, but not noticeably beneath the sea, where a proportion of sound reaches one via direct conduction through the bones of the skull. It is the gesture of a creature with a phylogenetic memory, as if some ancestor with a different otopharyngeal arrangement had opened its mouth to let messages in and out, grinding chattily away with a set of bones at the back of its throat. I also track down a dimly surviving fragment of my lost lateral line, maybe. In daylight one day I notice tiny plumes of silt pulsing from a hole at the foot of a coral outcrop about 30 feet down. I do not know what particular worm or
shrimp is busily excavating inside but have the sudden urge to feel this minute puffing as well as to watch it. I put my fingertips half an inch away but can detect nothing. Without thinking I manoeuvre awkwardly so that my head is close to the hole. The puffing stops for a few seconds but then starts again. Gently I move so that I am almost kissing the hole and can just feel the tiny waves of energy from the unseen creature’s fins or pedipalps break against my upper lip. It is the underwater version of that unconscious gesture which makes people press their washing beneath their noses to feel how dry it is: ex-weanlings whose haptic sense for moisture and movement was designed for the breast.

  The reef’s vertical axis is most vividly revealed in terms of light, ranging from the brilliance of sunlight to the inkiest depths. The sea is both lit and heated by the sun’s energy which is absorbed and scattered from the moment it penetrates the surface. The uppermost metre of the sea effectively absorbs all ultraviolet and infrared, respectively those wavelengths shorter and longer than the visible. Thereafter, seawater absorbs the longer wavelengths first and at about 30 feet down most of the surviving energy is in the blue-green part of the spectrum. From here downwards, increasing numbers of reef creatures are coloured in various shades of red. With almost no visible red light remaining they look dark or black and in still dimmer waters further down become almost invisible. In these top 10 metres the simplest experiments show how much light the water absorbs. Slightly dull objects take on fabulous colours as one swims towards the surface with them. Likewise, a blood-coloured anemone becomes pale and anaemic as one swims away from it.

  At a depth of 50 metres only 5 per cent of the sun’s energy still penetrates. If the water is exceedingly clear there is enough light for photosynthesis in plants and algae down to 150 metres. Below that, ordinary plant life cannot exist, which is why there are no great prairies of seaweed covering the deep ocean beds.* Generally speaking, the 100-metre mark defines the bottom of the euphotic (‘well lit’) zone, the most productive part of the sea. It was also long believed to mark a theoretical limit for unaided human divers. The ‘constant weight’ diving record (i.e. with held breath but without fins) is currently 80 metres (105 metres with fins), although the ‘no-limits’ apnea record was broken in 2005 at 209 metres. Such extreme feats are made possible by the mammalian diving reflex, itself highly suggestive of an aquatic past for Homo.* In splendid violation of a supposed boundary auks (razorbills and guillemots) have sometimes been seen from submersibles at 100 metres while the bird diving record is easily held by the emperor penguin with a recorded 18-minute dive to 265 metres. In any case this 100-metre zone effectively denotes the end of the reef as an ecosystem. Below this its dead corals become a habitat for scattered sponges and, of course, the sundry twilight animal species.