Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  ‘I don’t rightly know myself,’ said the boatman to the prince, ‘I saw men clinging to the mast, I heard their cries, and all at once I thought: I must go!’

  There are other examples, as of the old man in Karelia who dug his grave in the summer as a service to his village in the winter, when the earth was frozen hard. Or the mutual aid practised by the crews of the Hansa trading ships on the Baltic and the North Sea who, if they were caught in a storm and believed they would drown, proclaimed each man to be the equal of the other, and all to be at the mercy of God and the waves.

  The statue of Christ of the Abyss stands 17 metres underwater in La Spezia harbour. Even at that depth, the world we know recedes. The sun appears to contract and harden like the pupil of an eye when a torch is shone on it. The water is blue. Red is already filtered out from the spectrum; if there is a cut the blood looks black.

  Those who strap on aqualungs and dive deeper find something darker. They drift in their wetsuits, calling ground control, flippers barely moving. Already the sea is becoming the ocean. They look down and see a pit. Davy Jones’s locker.

  Do not think to swim below. The ocean is already pushing into ears, sinuses, temples, the softness of eyes and the harpsichord strings behind the kneecaps.

  They brought him rice and marlin. He drank copious amounts of rainwater. He was burned by the sun. He told himself he would remain upstanding, but he was doubled over. He was an Englishman without shade. He was held by enemies whose lives he could not grasp, the kind of characters who appear in cartoons with no back story; heavily armed and claiming a significance of history he could not decipher.

  He managed to arrange a cloth over his face. He closed his eyes and saw the feet of a swan in an icy pond, from below, pushing away the slush; white swans in the boreal, black swans in the austral. He saw himself diving down into his swimming pool in Nairobi, then coming up for air. In his delirium, he sailed himself into the harbour of a flat island in the north, the shape of which appeared cut out with a scallop shell. It was a windswept island with only a few trees; pale, with tussock grass, heather, and a single dark hill rising up in the distance from another island in the group. The stone quay in the harbour was strewn with the creels and the orange plastic fish boxes commonly found in the fishing harbours of north England and Scotland, and there was at the end of the quay a narrow department store built from local sandstone – a flatiron building – whose opulent and glowing window displays contrasted with the inclement and solitary nature of this New Atlantis.

  Torpidity reigned. The dhow cut slowly through the water. They were coming to Ras Kamboni: Kenya was a short sail away. How quickly he could make it on a speedboat from there to Lamu. He might shower that evening as a free man at the Peponi Hotel and take supper on the veranda overlooking the sea. Crab and mango salad and chilled wine. But that was a fantasy.

  They came around a peninsula and grounded the dhow on a crescent beach that was in every respect the opposite of the harbour in New Atlantis.

  The Italians called the village Chiamboni, the British called it Dick’s Head. Some of its buildings were low with tin roofs that flashed in the sunlight, others were tall like the houses of Lamu, with flat roofs shaded by canopies, candy-coloured in the Somali fashion. He was untied. They pushed a gun into his back and he jumped down and waded in his kikoi through unreadable water to the land.

  He was marched and dragged through Chiamboni. He tripped and fell. He laughed. He listened to himself, like a bird to its failing song, curious at where the noise came from. His laugh was more of a cackle. Could it really be him? He felt humiliated.

  The alleys of Chiamboni were cramped and piled up with the rubble of collapsed houses. An open sewer dribbled milky water, fetid with lumps of dung. There were elaborate doorways in the Swahili style, and others with just a piece of cloth, and families teemed in single rooms, quieting as they went by, just as the boys playing table football in the street in Kismayo had hushed, and all of this repeating, labyrinthine, until they came out onto the sand to a remarkable Italian colonial building at the edge of the village. It was set directly before the dunes, like a house in a children’s story.

  The Pourquoi Pas? pitched in heavy seas on her first night out from Iceland. Danny lay in her bunk listening to Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony on high-fidelity headphones. There was a light over her head at the end of the bunk. The sheets were white and crisp: she always brought her own.

  The cabin smelled of diesel. She became drowsy. She took Bruckner in and contemplated the Greenland Sea as an orchestra pit and the entire Los Angeles Philharmonic dropping into it. The sound changed and carried underwater like whale song.

  The house was built on the model of a plan by Enrico Prampolini, the Futurist whose mural decorated the post office in La Spezia. It was an indulgence of a colonial officer from Turin, who wanted to leave a mark at the southernmost point of the Italian Empire. When the house was built it must have been possible to take a cocktail and sit on a deckchair and look out over the Indian Ocean. There was an inscription in the entrance hall and surviving parts of a clock. Everything else was gone, except the quality of the building itself; its unwrinkled concrete, the steps up on all sides, the immense fireplace used one day a year, the stencils of organisms on the plasterwork and the flagstones arranged in harlequin patterns characteristic of Prampolini’s polychromatism. It was airy, with sand over the patterned floors. There were goats and sheep in the courtyard. The overflow of the latrine was easily mistakable at first sight for yellow mud. The men slept together in one room. The roof was for the women and children.

  He was led into a room in which Yusuf the Afghan was on his knees in prayer. When the prayers were done Yusuf looked up and clapped his hands and went to each of his fighters and kissed their heads and hands. James stood between Saif and Qasab; Yusuf did not acknowledge him. He was marched into an adjoining room, the original dining room, which was filled with new recruits. It was the usual scene; weapons, ammunition boxes used as seats as in the mosque in Kismayo, food in the centre; king fish, spaghetti. There was a television and a video recorder hooked up to a car battery. Yusuf was opposed to public entertainment. Television was banned, so was popular music. The al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan had shown Hollywood action films – John Rambo fighting with the holy warriors in Afghanistan against the strutting Soviets – but those days were over. Instead there were discs of their own manufacture showing beheadings and suicide-bombings in Somalia and Iraq. Yusuf made an exception for classic Disney; he loved Snow White, Dumbo and the rest. His personal favourite was Bambi.

  It was crowded; it felt like a school to him. The new recruits were very young and the others behaved like older pupils, telling them to be quiet, cuffing them. He wondered which of them would volunteer to be a suicide bomber. What would they say to make sense of self-destruction? (He had wanted to ask these questions of Saif, but the moment had not presented itself.)

  The mood was excited. Even Qasab smiled and leaned in when Yusuf had Bambi turned on. They stopped the film at one of the songs. James’s hands were untied and his wrists were daubed with ointment where the rope had cut into them. He was given a pen and paper and asked to write down the words. They replayed it several times. He wrote them down and passed the paper along:

  I bring you a song

  And I sing as I go

  For I want you to know

  That I’m looking for romance

  I bring you a song

  In the hope that you’ll see

  When you’re looking at me

  That I’m looking for love!

  The film was paused again near the end, at a scene where the forest was burning and Bambi fell in the flames and was bucked to his feet by his father, the great prince stag. He transcribed:

  ‘It is man. He is here again. There are many this time. We must go deep into the forest. Hurry, follow me!’

  Yusuf stood up in front of a stilled image of rising flames and urged them to identify with Bamb
i. The Crusaders were man. The forest was the mangrove in which the believers were safe. It did not trouble Yusuf that they were watching an American narrative. To him, it was pure. It had religious worth.

  James glanced around the room. The fighters were spellbound. There was something more to it. When he understood, it was obvious. The faces were bathed in Disney colours: the same pinks, blues and greens which dominated in portraits of jihadists; with songbirds fluttering around turbans, an armful of flowers, gun on lap, and always in the background a forest with a cornflower-blue sky and a yellow sun that itself had been lifted from Bambi in the form of Chinese computer wallpaper. It was the art as much as the story that held them. The Crusaders were burning the Islamic state and Bambi was the innocent combatant, as they were represented in the martyrdom videos.

  The windows were open. The mosquitoes were just out there in the wind. Music carried from the village. It drove Qasab into a rage. He sent two boys to put a stop to it. One wore a grenade in his belt. There was screaming, wailing. After a few minutes, the two came back with a smashed radio.

  There was the braying of a wounded donkey, the shuffling around him, the oiling of guns, then not even that; only the surf booming on the reef.

  The men of Chiamboni were trap fishing for yellow tuna under the full moon. They waded and swam out with nets and spears. The women were on the beach collecting cowries, which were sold to Kenyan traders, who in turn employed beach boys to sell the shells to tourists up and down the Kenyan coast.

  Somali beaches were the finest in Africa, and this one was very wild, very beautiful, bone white, and backed by the east-facing dunes. The stars were all in their ocean station, the turtles laying eggs, there were large-toothed fish in the shallows and mangroves holding the dry land together. There was surf and in other places the water was unmoving, warm as blood, and full of life. He imagined the dotted scuttle of jade crabs to their burrows. How many crabs was that? How many separate journeys? He saw a heap of shell fragments and bones, a midden that amounted to 10,000 years of human leavings.

  *

  The south wind blew. It lifted scarves from the floor. It scattered paper and turned pages in an open prayer book. Dust kicked up from the alleys in the village. Sewage dribbled from buildings to beach, not milky any more but green with weed and reactions. It wetted a mahogany boat that was lain on its side.

  He remembered something from his childhood, of how the ancient Britons worshipped the south wind and divided the elements into flowers, fire, sky, soil, mist and freshwater, but were confounded by saltwater.

  He thought of many other things besides, more personal things. Of course he did.

  He was consumed with the desire to escape. He was to be taken the next day to a camp hidden in the mangrove. That was to enter a place of martyrs. He was only Mr Water to them, a curiosity, yet he knew too much. They would watch for him. Bribe? Firefight? He had to try. But there were fighters sleeping on either side of the door, there were guards downstairs, the night was lunar-lit, and he was so weak, standing was difficult for him, he needed medical attention, and, besides, he was tied hand to foot and only by chance had he the Futurist window view.

  Two skiffs had appeared on the bay in the morning. He was thrown into one of them. Maize meal and spaghetti were loaded along with dried mangoes and papayas, tinned fish, turtle meat, medicines, mosquito netting, candles, kerosene, fuel, knives, guns, ammunition and explosives: even the smallest jihad needed its provisions. The scene was Somali – the fighters jostling, the scarves, the teeth, fringed by seas and swamps and backed by furnace scrub – yet in the breaking light the skiffs stood in contrast to the darker sky, and it rained, silver, everywhere. It was high tide, and when they sped off the bay and Chiamboni looked like the gunmetal Thames, and London at Michaelmas. Captivity was a humiliation, it was also a loneliness that made you want to see something else in front of you. They steered into a lagoon and the tropical heat buffeted him. They opened the throttle on the Yamaha outboards (bought or stolen from Captain Andy’s Marine Supplies in Mombasa) and chattered over the water like skis on ice; thence into tidal channels, a creek, another, towards the camp hidden in the swamp. It became steadily more tenebrous and overhanging. The outboards were lifted up and the men poled the boats forward. At some points the fighters jumped off and pushed the skiffs over a sandbar into a cut of water. The mangrove roots were underwater at high tide and exposed at low tide. They were tubular, lifelike. They looked like hands of puppets held in horror. Just like in the wadi, there was concern about the Americans. They sought to keep themselves out of sight under the branches. Uncle Sam knew nothing, Uncle Sam saw everything.

  Down narrower creeks like capillaries, to a shallow island which had a crossing point for elephants from the mainland. The camp was where the moat stood a little deeper. It had survived the Ethiopian and American strafing and bombing, but had been abandoned and occupied by Boni hunter-gatherers, at the northern edge of their range.

  Several Boni men stood before them. James’s first impression was not of a paradisal people, but of children gone feral.

  They laughed when Saif interrogated them about the fishing.

  ‘We don’t fish!’ said one, in Swahili. ‘We are Boni! We hunt!’

  They had dug pits in the sandy soil. Animals fell in and the Boni speared them.

  ‘There is space for you here,’ another said. ‘There are dik-dik. There are pigs.’

  ‘Pigs!’ Saif shouted. ‘What does he take us for?’

  If the ancient hunter-gatherer Boni are known at all it is for the version of Kropotkin’s mutual aid they practise with a bird they call mirsi. They whistle to mirsi and mirsi whistles back. It leads the Boni to the wild honey in the trees in the bush. The Boni shin up the trees and smoke out the hives, taking the honey and honeycombs, being sure to leave the bird a generous share in wax and bee larvae.

  The Boni are resistant to bee stings and exhibit little sense of vertigo in the high branches of trees. They are an ancient people, related to the Twa Pygmies of Congo. They go barefoot, their walk is peculiarly solid, from the pelvis, very different from the stride of the Somalis, which comes loosely from the shoulder.

  A Boni boy achieves manhood by spearing a buffalo, an elephant, or other big animal. On the night before their first hunt the girls pleasure the boys and smear their heads with coconut oil. If a boy fails the hunting test, he will be denied the right to marry. Brides are expensive and have to be paid for in bush meat, skins, sugar or cash. The kidnapping and the rape of girls by Boni men who cannot afford the marriage portion is common.

  She stood at the railings. The air was raw. The Pourquoi Pas? was approaching Jan Mayen Island. She wanted to see it. There was salt on her lips and spray on her Icelandic sweater and tangerine-coloured jeans. She wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and sat on a deckchair and opened the New Scientist. She furled the magazine tight against the wind and read the latest news on nanotechnology. When she was done, she watched a matinee: fog and sea. Gulls wheeled above cold rich swells. There were pieces of ice and icebergs. There were pilot whales riding the bow wave. It was beautiful to watch them. A killer whale cut loops under migrating geese. It went in and out of the water. It sparkled. She could see from its dorsal fin that it was a male, old and tired. It appeared troubled by the thrumming of the ship. It made her think of the changes that had occurred in the Greenland Sea in its lifetime. When it was birthed there were hardly any ships. There were no submarines. There were no engines, klaxons; no man-made noises. There were many seals and fish then, whereas now there was such a competition the killer whale was forced to trail geese in the hope that one might fall from the sky.

  The ocean was being fished out, poisoned and suffering acidification. Quite apart from the vessels there were sonar arrays and other electronics that ruptured the orientation of sea mammals. And if sea mammals could become so disorientated as to beach themselves, so could man exterminate himself. Man had hardly taken breath from the Stone Age and
yet was altering the flow of rivers, cutting up hills and discarding the materials that would be easily identifiable to future geologists. The anthropocene: a geological age marked by plastic.

  There was not enough funding for ocean research. If the financial crisis continued, there would be even less money available: the Greenland Sea expedition was her best chance to gather data for years to come. There was a faulty sense of perspective, she thought. The looking up, the looking out. Through difficulty to the stars, never to the deep. The worry for the skin, not the lungs. The ocean was too immediate, too familiar. You did not need a launch pad, you could just drop into it: it could wait.

  Yet there could be no serious work on climate change without understanding marine living systems. The change was real, she was certain of that. The water under the ship, carried through the Fram Strait on the East Greenland Current, had warmed by 1.9 degrees Celsius since 1910. That was 1.4 degrees Celsius more than the increase during the tenth- to thirteenth-century Medieval Warm Period.

  She was doing her part. She had been a proponent and a player in the Census for Marine Life and the Deep Water Chemosynthetic Ecosystems. She was an adviser in Southampton, at IFREMER and at the Deep Submergence Facility in Woods Hole. She believed manned submersibles were vital. They provided the necessary leap of imagination, the human connection to the deep. Machines could complement them. Hundreds of drones could fly far under the sea, quietly, at all hours, providing a constant flow of information to the surface.