The Sorcerer's Stone

by Beatrice Grimshaw

I feared the effect of such a depth as seventy feet of water on an inexperienced diver like myself; but I need not have been uneasy. The skipper of the Dawn was not minded to have an accident, and he let me down very slowly. I saw the green water, full of silver air-bubbles, rushing up and past the window of my helmet, for what seemed quite a long while—though it could not have been more than a minute or two before my lead-soled boots came down as lightly as a dancer’s sandal on the crumbling coral at the bottom.

This was the real thing, and not like my amateur experiment at Thursday: I began to feel interested and to forget the shrinking fear that all new divers experience in leaving the light and life of the world above and trusting themselves, cased in benumbing metal and rubber, to the choking depths of the sea. My ears were very painful, and my lungs worked badly; my arms and legs seemed to move with a deliberation of their own, and the curious change in the conditions of gravity made me feel like a large cork doll.

But I could make my way about, and it was almost as light as on the surface. I could see the tiny blue and emerald and violet buds on the coral, and the eyes of the painted parrot-fish, and every blade and frond of the tall green seaweeds that waved about as I moved by. The whole scene was so wonderfully beautiful that I almost forgot the grim errand that had brought me down into the midst of it.

Coral beds, when you see them from the surface on a calm day, are like a garden of flowers below the water. Seen from beneath the ocean itself, they take on the hues of actual jewels: the huge fans and mushrooms and ferns of the reef glow with lights of emerald, sapphire, and amethyst; the sun that falls through the water makes magical fires of gold and green. Fish come gently past the windows of your helmet, hurrying not at all, and look in with their cold eyes as they go by; their bodies shine with all the colors of a painted butterfly, and they make broken little rainbows in the water as they move.

You are walking on the coral: it crumbles away like over-baked biscuits under your boots and keeps you slipping and staggering, and you must keep a sharp lookout over those ugly indigo-colored gulfs that open in its surface here and there, for coral reefs shelter many a dangerous guest.

All this I saw, treading with the long, soft pace of the diver at the bottom of the sea, breathing short with the weight of the seventy feet above me, and trying not to think about the invisible nails that kept boring into my ears. I had taken my bearings when I dropped down from the lugger, and I could see her now far above me, like a shadowy whale basking on the surface. A good way ahead I could dimly discern another shadow—that of the Gertrude. So far, not a sign of her divers.

I trod on, balancing with my hands like an acrobat as I passed the edges of deep crevasses in the coral, and watching carefully for the serrated double edge that marks the presence of the formidable Tridacna gigas—the huge shell that most people have seen in museums, from three to six or seven feet long, and as heavy as the great stone basin of a fountain in a park. Small ones I saw everywhere; bigger ones, a foot or two in length, now and then. But none of the giants was to be seen.

I must have been down fully ten minutes and was beginning to feel the effects of my submersion, in a certain giddiness of the head and numbness of the limbs, when I saw something a good way in front of me that was not rock, nor coral, nor fish. What it was I could not tell, for it was in rapid motion and agitated the water so much that one could only see something waving and bending about. I took a good grip of my ax and went on faster. Be it what it might, I had got to have a look at it.

The water seemed to clear as I drew nearer, and then I began to run—as one runs at the bottom of the sea, sprawling and waving and half swimming, working arms and legs together. For now I saw. There were two divers a little way ahead, attached spiderwise to their ship by long threads of life-line and air-tube, and they were fighting. I floundered up close to them and they never saw me; hear me they could not, for we were all isolated in our metal shells one from the other.

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