11 Diving Adventure

by Willard Price

  There, with a small spire, was the church of which the rascally Rev. Merlin Kaggs was pastor’ Roger could hardly resist the temptation to nip off the spire. He high-jumped over it.

  The jeep skimmed over what appeared to be a power plant turning out electricity to supply the town with light and heat.

  There was a building that Hal guessed might be a desalting plant to turn salt water into fresh and distribute it round the town.

  There were streets of residences, green with tropical growth. The houses were set in pleasant gardens with the most fantastic and beautiful plants - and animals that looked like plants - sea fans, coral trees, sea anemones, gorgeous gorgonias, waxy little animal flowers like tulips.

  The principal shopping street appeared to be Main where shops had windows but no doors. Stilts anchored them to the ground and the entrances were underneath. People floated up into them and came out with plastic bags of groceries and household articles.

  There was a dairy that advertised whale’s milk, a book store announcing ‘Books on the Underworld’, a restaurant, barber’s shop, a shop that offered ‘Deep-down Souvenirs’, a hospital, a pharmacy, a bank, and a shop where one could buy ‘Jewels from the Sea-bed’.

  A man came out of a hardware store with a piece of iron machinery as big as himself.

  ‘Golly,’ exclaimed Roger. ‘That thing must weigh half a ton.’

  ‘Up above, it would,’ Hal said. ‘Down here, he can carry it easily because the dense water helps hold it up.’

  There was even a pet shop - but the pets were not dogs, cats, and canaries. They were dolphins, porpoises, and ornamental fish.

  And there were several shops specializing in diving gear, scuba tanks patterned after Cousteau’s aqualung, fins, masks, snorkels, and everything else the well-dressed underwater man would wear.

  Now the scene changed. Here was a lovely underwater park with paths winding between the ‘trees’, brain coral, corals like minarets, starfish, wonderful shells, giant clams and other strange and beautiful sights of the seabed.

  On the edge of town was the industrial district where experiments in mining were going on. The sea floor was being explored by men with magnetometers that would detect any metals below the surface. Ore containing gold, silver, uranium, magnesium, and other buried treasure was being lifted to the ship above by electromagnets.

  Roger throttled down the motor and drifted slowly over a great iron see-saw rocking back and forth like a teeter board. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A pump bringing up oil,’ Hal said. ‘You’ve seen them in the Gulf of Mexico.’

  ‘But there they were up on platforms over the sea.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s a very poor way to bring up oil from the sea floor. It’s terribly expensive to reach down so far to get at the well. Besides, it’s extremely dangerous - the platform may be torn down by a typhoon or rammed by a ship. Great waves may destroy it, It’s far better to get right down where the well is and escape all the things that can happen up on the surface. Watch out - there’s something dead ahead.’

  Roger turned the glass jeep just in time to escape crashing into a towering cliff.

  ‘It’s the reef,’ exclaimed Hal, ‘the Great Barrier Reef itself.’

  The precipice rose as straight as the wall of a skyscraper. This was the greatest structure ever built by living creatures. It was greater than the pyramids of Egypt, greater than the Aswan Dam. It was one thousand two hundred and fifty miles long, stretching from one end to the other of the Coral Sea, walling in the north-east coast of Australia. And this colossal structure had been built by one of the smallest of builders, the coral animal - so small that it was hard to see it without a microscope.

  This part of the great Pacific had been quite properly named the Coral Sea because it afforded the finest display of coral to be found in all the world.

  The coral cliff was the home of millions of fish. Some with hard-as-rock snouts battered off chunks and ate them. Countless small fish of every colour shot into caves and crevices in its surface to escape big fish-eating fish determined to devour them. Sharks were so numerous that the boys were glad to be protected, although they felt terribly exposed with nothing between them and these predators but a plate of glass. Moray eels and octopuses made their homes in holes. A writhing sea snake coiled around one of the jets. Sea anemones, clinging to the wall, stretched out their tentacles to sting any hand that might touch them or paralyse any small fish that might come within reach. Barracuda with open jaws rushed in to get a closer look at the boys and appeared much surprised when they banged into something they could not see.

  Altogether, it was a bit terrifying. But suddenly a more friendly creature appeared. It was a dolphin, and the boys knew that the dolphin is the friend and protector of man.

  The dolphin had a pointed, bottle-shaped nose. In that way it differed from the porpoise which has a blunt, rounded nose. Both are like man in one respect. They must come to the surface to breathe. But unlike man, who cannot hold his breath for more than three minutes, they could stay down some thirty minutes at a time.

  They were like man in another way. They were intelligent. Along with their air-breathing cousins such as whales, they were the most intelligent creatures of the sea except man - who also must be reckoned now as a creature of the sea.

  The dolphin, peering into the glass jeep, seemed to be smiling. The smile might be just the natural turn-up of the corners of the mouth, but it gave the boys confidence that here was someone who would never do them harm and just might become a good and faithful companion.

  If anyone could win him over, Roger could. He had a way with animals. So had Hal. But Hal was so big and powerful that animals were a little afraid of him. They seemed to feel that they had nothing to fear from his young brother.

  Roger turned off the motor and drifted. He tapped on the glass.

  ‘Hi there, Mr Bottle. Come over and say Howdy-do. You’re the finest gentleman in the sea. Come and get acquainted.’

  He kept on talking quietly and the dolphin seemed to be listening. ‘I don’t suppose he can really hear me,’ Roger said.

  ‘He can hear you.’

  ‘I don’t see any ears.’

  ‘Hc has ears, but they are very small. He does most of his hearing without ears.’

  ‘How can you hear without ears?’

  ‘You can’t,’ Hal said. ‘But the dolphin can. Sound makes vibrations in the air or water. Delicate nerves ill the skin of the dolphin feel these vibrations. Different sounds make different kinds of vibrations, and the dolphin can tell one from another. The sound doesn’t have to be strong. Scientific tests have shown that even the splash of a falling drop of water causes a dolphin to turn his head in that direction and look. He knows pretty well what is going on around him at all times.’

  The dolphin was talking back. His speech was a sort of whistle and sounded friendly. It came not from his mouth, but from the blowhole in the top of his head.

  ‘The dolphin has no vocal cords,’ Hal said. ‘But he has a big vocabulary just the same. They’ve made tape recordings of the dolphin’s whistles and they find he has thirty-two different kinds of whistle. Each one means something different. Friendliness, fear, anger, weariness, pleasure, distress, a cry for help, and so on.’

  ‘Well,’ Roger said, ‘that’s one way the dolphin is not like us. No human beings talk in whistles.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ his brother said. ‘The bushmen of Africa talk in whistles. So do certain tribes in the Amazon jungle. Some Mexican Indians use whistle language, but can’t express as many different ideas and feelings with it as the dolphin can. In the Pyrenees there is a whistling speech. Canary Island shepherds on mountain peaks three miles apart talk with each other in a whistling language.

  ‘And the dolphin has another language - a language of clicks. It’s not every human being that knows two languages. But the dolphin does. Dolphins that have been around human beings develop a third language -an imit
ation of the speech of the humans. In an oceanarium they get to understand what their trainer tells them to do, and they try to repeat what he says. They don’t do too well with it because of the lack of vocal cords. But they understand it well enough to follow instructions. They even learn to answer in a low enough voice so that they can be heard.’

  ‘What do you mean, low enough voice? Can’t you hear a high voice?’

  ‘Not if it’s too high for our ears. Sound is measured in kilocycles. A man can’t hear any sound above twenty kilocycles. A dog can hear up to forty kilocycles. A bottlenose dolphin can hear sounds above a hundred and twenty kilocycles. He can make sounds that high, but it doesn’t take him long to notice that his human friend doesn’t hear them. Most of his talk to his fellow dolphins is up in that range, but he learns that he must get his voice down if he wants to talk with us. He must think us pretty stupid.’

  ‘I wish we had some fish to feed him,’ Roger said. ‘Then perhaps he’d stick around.’

  ‘That would help,’ said Hal. ‘But it isn’t really necessary. You have to feed a cat or dog if you want to keep it. But a dolphin may stay with you just because he likes humans. You’ve seen them gambolling along beside a ship. They’re not looking for food, but just want to play and enjoy the admiration of those creatures up on deck that they seem to think are very much like them.

  ‘And so we are. They breathe air and so do we. They don’t wear scales as the fish do, but have skins as smooth as ours. They have very highly developed brains and we think we have too. We are built more or less alike. We are mammals and so are they. We lived on land for ages and so did they. They once walked. They took to the sea again, but if you take a dolphin apart you find that what are now fins were once legs and all the joints are still there including five complete fingers. We don’t know why they decided to go back to the sea, but today man also is going back to the sea - at least you and I are and thousands or millions will in the future.’

  ‘Look - a moray,’ Roger said, pointing at a greenish black tail projecting from a hole in the precipice.

  The dolphin saw it too and at once undertook to capture the vicious moray eel, a choice meal for a dolphin.

  Mr Bottle’s jaws closed on the tail, then he paddled strongly backwards, trying to dislodge the snakelike creature from its retreat.

  Roger thought Mr Bottle would win easily, for he appeared to weigh about four hundred pounds and the moray would not tip the scales at a hundred.

  But the more the dolphin pulled, the tighter the eel wound itself into the rock crevice. Its muscles expanded and gripped the walls of the crack so firmly that it could not be pulled loose.

  Mr Bottle had to give up and go to the surface for a breath of air. Then he came down and lay contemplating the moray, tilting his head to one side as if thinking things over.

  A scorpionfish swam lazily out of the next hole. The scorpionfish is one of the most venomous inhabitants of the sea. The dolphin eyed it thoughtfully.

  Then he chased it, swept down below it, and came up like a thunderbolt to plunge his hard bottlenose into the fish’s belly. One blow was enough to kill the fish.

  Then the dolphin seized the scorpionfish by the belly and jammed the poisoned spines into the moray’s tail.

  The moray relaxed like a punctured balloon and was easily pulled out of its hole. It was six feet long - six feet of good eating.

  The performance gave a good idea of the almost man-like brain of the dolphin. He knew the scorpionfish had poisonous spines. He also knew he needed a tool to dislodge the eel. He didn’t seize the fish by the back where the spines were but on the underside where there were no spines. He used this deadly tool to kill the moray eel.

  “I can’t believe my eyes,’ Roger said.

  ‘You can believe them,’ said Hal. ‘Exactly the same thing happened in the fish tank of Marineland of the Pacific near Los Angeles. Spectators looking in through the glass windows on the side of the tank saw the whole act.’

  The glass jeep now floated lazily, without movement, near the coral cliff. The dolphin returned from his meal to rub his nose against the glass just where Roger’s fingers were tapping it.

  ‘It looks as if he’d like to get closer,’ Roger said. ‘Would it be all right to open the hatch?’

  ‘Why not? Go ahead.’

  Roger dropped the hatch. Immediately the dolphin swam beneath, poked his nose up into the jeep, and whistled a friendly greeting. The jaws were open and the teeth looked sharp. Roger, a little timidly, reached down and stroked the creature’s neck much as he would have petted the neck of a dog or cat. The dolphin made a series of soft clicks almost like a purr.

  Chapter 5

  Mr Bottle and the tiger

  This happy scene was interrupted by a savage visitor. A huge tiger shark that had been swimming around idly at some distance, minding its own business, suddenly became interested in that open hatch. It came over at full speed, pushed Mr Bottle out of the way and .thrust its whole head up into the jeep. Its jaws also were open, but how different they were from those of the dolphin. They were armed not with one row but with five rows of deadly teeth, the largest and most terrible being in front, the others getting smaller, the last row far back in the jaw not more than a half inch long and sharp enough to tear a man to pieces.

  The shark is believed to be the only animal with five semicircles of teeth. They all tilt backwards so that once they grip their prey it cannot pull loose. The teeth are so keen-edged that they are used by primitive tribes as razors for shaving. They have been known to cut a man in two at a single bite.

  The shark is believed to have been the first creature to grow teeth. Later they were adopted by the bony fishes, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and humans. Even the great tusks of the elephant go back to the shark’s invention of teeth.

  The shark liked teeth so well that it was not satisfied to have them just in its mouth. It grew them all over its body. The scales of the shark are really teeth. Every scale is pointed and sharp like a tooth, made of the same material, covered by dentine, and has a central pulp canal containing a nerve.

  These denticles gave the tough hides of most sharks a roughness like that of sandpaper that can scratch or tear a swimmer’s flesh. In fact, before sandpaper was invented shark hide called shagreen was used by carpenters to smooth hard wood. The teeth are so large and close to each other that it is difficult to drive a harpoon into the hide. Even bullets bounce off.

  But the best, or worst, of the teeth are in the mouth. Why five rows? The shark is a tremendous eater - it may use its teeth a hundred times in a day. As the front teeth wear out the row just behind moves up to the front and another row begins to form far back in the mouth. The result is that the shark always has good teeth no matter how long it may live.

  ‘I never saw such teeth,’ Roger said. ‘The front ones must be four inches long.’

  ‘Shark’s teeth are the largest in the fish world,’ said Hal. ‘After all, they’ve taken a long time to evolve. Fossil shark teeth are found in rock a hundred and thirty million years old. And they are very much like those of today. So it must have been many millions of years before that when the earliest sharks began to be equipped with teeth.’

  ‘I don’t see any molars,’ Roger said. ‘All the teeth appear to be cutters.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Hal. ‘They don’t grind. They slice like a knife. The lion has terrible teeth but they can’t compare with a shark’s. The lion has to chew and worry at a carcass to get a mouthful - but a blue shark or tiger or mako can slide up to a victim in the sea and spoon off ten pounds without slowing down. Its teeth go through hide and flesh and muscle as if they were soft ice cream.’

  ‘Shark bite must hurt like the dickens.’

  ‘Strangely enough,’ Hal said, ‘it may not hurt a bit. It happens so quickly and is so clean that it may not be felt

  until later. The nerves don’t have time to talk back. A Malay pearl diver swam up to his boat and said to his fri
ends, “I don’t know whether a shark bit me or not.” They pulled him in and saw that he had been bitten in half just below the heart.’

  Roger, shrinking against the side of the jeep, felt himself all over.

  ‘Just want to make sure that I haven’t been bitten in half,’ he said. ‘Why, that monster must have enough teeth for a dozen men.’

  ‘Enough for twenty-two men,’ Hal said. ‘A tiger shark has about seven hundred and twenty teeth - man has only thirty-two. Of course I don’t need to tell you that not all sharks are the same. Some have blunt teeth and seldom use them in fighting. The thresher shark fights with its tail and its bill, not its teeth. The whale shark has no teeth - it can’t bite you, but it inhales you. The basking shark is one of the biggest of all, about forty feet, but is quite harmless. It feeds on tiny things no bigger than mosquitoes.’

  ‘I wish this thing would go away,’ Roger complained. ‘I’m getting tired of its company.’

  The tiger had no intention of going away. Instead, it gave a strong thrust of its tail and sent itself farther up into the glass shell. Now it might be able to reach either of the boys although they had plastered themselves up as tightly as possible against the glass.

  The shark twisted itself within reach of Roger. Its jaws were about to close on his shoulder when it gave a violent start and dropped out of the hole.

  ‘What happened?’ gasped Roger.

  ‘Your dolphin came to the rescue. He rammed his hard head into the shark’s tummy.’

  ‘Would a shark feel that?’

  ‘Not if it struck his armour plate. But his underside is soft, and the dolphin knows it. Dolphins have often killed a shark by one blow where it hurts most.’

  But this shark was by no means dead even though its small enemy had struck it harder than a mule can kick.

  It wheeled about and went straight for Mr Bottle. The terrific size of the creature made the boys fear for the dolphin’s life. Nearly all marine animals of the Great Barrier Reef are larger than their cousins elsewhere. The tiger was a good thirty feet long. It must have weighed at least seven tons, and the four-hundred-pound dolphin looked like a toy beside it.