Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

A gigantic black shape swam into view near the oscillating hoop, and a horror swept over me. It disappeared, but Nohea was still missing. The time beat in my veins like a pendulum. Every throb seemed a second, and they began to count themselves in my brain. How long was it since Nohea had left me? A minute and a half? Two minutes? That is an age without breathing. Something must have injured him. Slowly the moments struck against my heart. I could not look through the titea mata any longer. Another sixty seconds and despair had chilled me so I shook in the hot sunshine as with ague. I was cold and weak. Suddenly I felt a pull at the rope, the canoe moved slightly, and hope grew warm in me. I perceived an agitation of the water gradually ascending, and in a few instants the diver sprang out of the lagoon to his waist. He threw his arm over the outrigger, and bent down in agony. His suffering was written in the contortion of his face, the blood in his eyes, and a writhing of his whole body. He gasped madly at his first emergence, and then his bosom rose and fell in lessening spasms. The cramp which had convulsed his form relaxed, and, as minute after minute elapsed, his face lost its rigidity, his pulse slackened to normal, and he said feebly, “E tau Atua e!” With my assistance he hauled himself into the canoe and lay half prone.

“You saw no shark?” I asked.

“I saw his shadow, but it was not he that detained me. I saw a bank which might hold shells and I explored it. We will see what I have.”

We pulled up the hoop-net, and in it were thirteen pairs of shells. These were larger than the others, older, and, as he said, from a more advantageous place for feeding, so that their residents, being better nourished had made larger and finer houses for themselves. Some of the thirteen were eighteen inches across. He said that he had roamed seventy feet on the bottom, and he had been down two and a half minutes. He had made observation of the ledges all about and intended going a little deeper. I had but to look at the rope of the net to gage the distance for it was marked with knots and bits of colored cotton to give the lengths like the marks on a lead-line on shipboard. I wanted to demur to his more dangerous venture, but I did not. This was his avocation and adventure, his war with the elements, and he must follow it and conquer or fail.

Again he dived, and this time at 148 feet. This was almost the limit of men in suits with air pumps or oxygen-tanks, and they were always let down and brought up gradually, to accustom their blood to the altering pressure. Half an hour or an hour was often consumed in hauling a diver up from the depth from which Nohea sprang in a few seconds. His transcendent courage and consummate skill were matched by his body’s trained resistance to the effect of such extreme pressure of water and the remaining without breathing for so long a time. I could appreciate his achievements more than most people, for I had seen the divers of many races at work in many waters. Ninety feet was the boundary of all except the Paumotuans and those who used machines. But here was Nohea exceeding that by sixty feet in my view, and I knew that greater depths must be attained. Impelled by an instantaneous urge to contrast my own capabilities with Nohea’s, I measured off thirty feet on the line, and, putting it in his hands to hold, I breathed to my fullest and leaped overboard. At three lengths of my figure, less than eighteen feet, I experienced alarm and pain. I unloosed the hoop and it swayed down to the end of the five fathoms of rope, while I kicked and pulled, and after an interminable period I had barely touched it again before I became convinced that if I did not breathe in another second I would open my mouth. Nohea knew my plight, for he yanked at the rope, and with his effort and my own frantic exertion I made the air, and humbly hugged the outrigger until I was myself. Thirty feet! And Nohea had brought up the shells from 148.

He paid dearly. Several times of the score that he probed the deeper retreats of the oysters, he was prostrated for minutes upon his egress and in throes of severe pain during the readjustment of pressure; but he continued to pursue his fascinating and near-fatal employment until by afternoon a heap of heavy, darkish bivalves lay in the canoe. My curiosity had been heated since I had lifted the first shell, and it was with increasing impatience that I waited for the milder but not less interesting phase of his labor, the scrutiny of the interior of the shells for pearls.

There are two moments in a divers life;

One, when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge;

Then, when, a prince, he rises with his pearl.

The poet visioned Nohea’s emotions, perhaps, but he had schooled himself to postpone his satisfaction until the days harvest was gathered. When we had paddled the canoe into shallow waters, and the sun was slanting fast down the western side of earth, Nohea surrendered himself to the realization or dissipation of his dream. He knew that a thousand shells contain no pearls, that the princely state came to few in decades. But the diver had the yearning and credulous mind of the gold prospector, and lived in expectation as did he. The glint of a pebble, the sheen of yellow sand, set his pulse to beating more rapidly; and so with the diver. He knew that pearls of great value had been found many times, and that one such trove might make him rich for life, independent of daily toil, and free of the traps and pangs of the plunge.