By the third time down I had gained confidence and was beginning to feel at home on the bottom. Now I remembered the trick of which the Paumotan diver had told me, and when I had been half a minute under water I began to let the air out of my lungs. The native had spoken truly; each little string of bubbles brought its moment of relief and enabled me to go about my work more calmly.
I was beginning to see the oysters now: my eyes were growing accustomed to the dim light. This time I managed to tear off a couple of oysters and put them in the basket before I rose for air. Three dives filled the basket, and when Marama pulled it from the water with its coral-encrusted load, I gave an imitation of the exultant native shout—a cry which brought a grin to my companion's face.
"We are learning," he said mockingly, "but it will be time to shout when we can fill the basket at one dive!"
That afternoon, when we joined the little fleet of canoes to paddle home, Maruia stood up, craning her neck for a look at our catch. "You have done well," she remarked, a smile wrinkling her brown face, "not badly for the first day's diving! I have seen grown men do worse. No pearls? Never mind—you will find them surely. Beginners always have the luck!"
From that day onward the fishing occupied less than a third of our time, and the balance was put in on the lagoon. We learned fast, as boys do, and gradually worked our way into deeper water till we were diving with the rest. Within a few weeks we were bringing in as much shell as the Paumotans, and my uncle was enthusiastic over our success! He could dive with any native, and once or twice, when he had leisure, he sent Marama out alone to fish and accompanied me to the diving-grounds. On those days my uncle's share of the shell went to the native boy's account—growing into a round little sum.
As for me, the diving fascinated me more each day: the beauty and strangeness of the underwater world; the spice of danger—small, but a reality, nevertheless; the thought of the money I was earning; the daily, even hourly, hope of finding a rich pearl, perhaps worth a small fortune. From time to time we found a few small pearls, but when at last good fortune came to us, it came hand in hand with tragedy.
As the nearer shell-patches became worked out, the canoes moved gradually northward, taking the cream of the shell without diving enough to exhaust the beds at any one place. One morning, in the latter part of July, Marama and I anchored close beside Maruia's canoe, on new and very promising grounds. It was my turn to open shell. The Paumotan woman, not ten yards away from me, was loafing that day—letting her nephew dive, for once. Teura was a boy of twenty or twenty-one, a favorite among the natives because of his skill as a musician and his jokes. I had grown fond of him since we had been thrown with the divers, and often went ashore in the evening to chat with old Maruia and listen to her nephew's songs, accompanied by wild native airs on his accordion.
I remember that morning as if it were yesterday. The bottom was at about eleven fathoms, rougher than any part of the lagoon that we had seen. Here and there pinnacles of coral rose to within a few yards of the surface; in the shadowy depths below, the bottom was seamed with crannies and pitted with the mouths of caves. The look of the place, in fact, was by no means reassuring, but the men sent out to survey the bottom reported that the lagoon there was fairly paved with shell.
It had become my habit to take a water glass in the canoe, for by now I was expert at opening the shell, and I found it interesting, in leisure moments, to watch my companion at his work. The depth was too great to see clearly, but I watched Marama plunge feet-first into the shadows, and a moment later, a second string of bubbles told me that Maruia's nephew had followed him down. Vaguely in the depths I could see Marama moving about, a dim moving shadow when his body passed above a patch of sand. Then, before half a minute had passed, the canoe lurched suddenly and sharply—the native boy was pulling himself up the line in desperate haste.
His head broke water. With a heave and a spring that nearly capsized us, he threw himself into the canoe.