by Morris West
We rode easily through the channel and cruised along the reef, dropping the markers one at each end of the search area. Then we cut the engine and heaved over the anchor-cable with its bag of ballast.
Now it was time to go. My stomach cramped with sudden fear. A little sweat broke out on my upper lip. I wiped it away with the back of my hand. Johnny Akimoto shot me a quick glance, but said nothing. He and Pat helped me into the lung-pack and I was acutely aware of the touch of her hands, silken against my skin. I reached for the billy-can and gulped big mouthfuls of cold tea. The cramps in my stomach relaxed.
“Two tugs on the line, Johnny, and I’m ready to go. Three, if I want you to stop. Four and you come overside, fast, I’m in trouble. Clear?”
“All clear, Renboss,” said Johnny, and gave me the thumbs-up sign for luck.
“Good hunting, Renn,” said Pat Mitchell, and leant forward and kissed me full on the lips.
I slipped the mask down over my eyes and nostrils, tested it and set it comfortably. I clamped my teeth round the lugs of the mouthpiece and went overside.
The weight of the belt and equipment took me down a few feet, until I could see the fiat bottom of the work-boat and the fins of the small propeller, and below them, stretching down into the twilight, the furry thread of the anchor-cable.
I jack-knifed and went down in a steep dive following the angle of the cable. I felt the familiar pain in my sinus cavities and the relief when I swallowed and the Eustachian tubes cleared themselves. A school of harlequin fish flirted away from my descent, their tube-like bodies flashing blue and gold, their ugly faces smiling like a circus clown’s. The reef was on my left, thirty feet away. Its colours were muted by the watery distance, and the waving grasses and the branching corals and the shadowy caverns gave it the look of a forest on a hillside. A small ray slipped out under my breast. His long barbed tail was stiff as an arrow and he moved with little flickering motions of his wing-pinions.
In the shadows of the reef I saw the constant coming and going of other fish, small and large, and in the blue distance on my right I saw a mackerel school coast lazily by, flecked by the shafts of sunlight refracting through the clear water. Then I hit bottom.
There was sand under my feet—sand and small nodules and broken pillars of coral—but I could not see them. I was walking through waving grasses, green and red, and yellow and dark brown. Some of them brushed me with the touch of wet silk. Others rasped my skin like rough and scaly hands.
The ballast-net at the end of the anchor-cable hung clear of the bottom by perhaps four feet. I looked up and saw the shape of the boat, a pointed shadow against the surface.
I had grasped the anchor-cable and was just about to signal Johnny to start the engine, when I saw the shark.
He was no more than twenty feet away, a big blue fellow, twice as long as a man. I could see the sucker-fish clamped on the underside of his belly and on the upper edges of his dorsal fins. In front of his nose three striped pilot-fish hung motionless as their master.
He was watching me. His big tail-fin flickered but he did not move. I blew out a stream of bubbles but he refused to be frightened by such childish tricks. I clung to the cable and leapt and waved my arms, clowning for him.
Still he hung there. I leapt out towards him. He moved away, then came back towards me in a long, lazy sweep that brought him a pace or two nearer.
I took firmer hold on the anchor-cable and tried to reason out my situation, all the time keeping a wary eye on the big fellow, who, if he attacked, would come with the speed of an express train. I had two alternatives.
I could tug my belt-line and Johnny Akimoto would come shooting down with his knife and the long fish-spear. Then the shark might attack him, too. If he wounded it there would be blood in the water and other sharks might come, scavenging like cannibals on the flesh of the wounded brother. Then, even if we escaped, work would be over for the day. This obviously was a last resort. I tried the second alternative.
I gave two tugs on the line and seconds later I heard a sudden clatter, magnified by the water, as the outboard started and the propeller spun with the meshing of the gears.
That was the end of Johnny Shark. He flicked himself round with his big caudal fin and shot off into the shadows so quickly that even the pilot-fish were surprised.
I felt the anchor-cable jerk and the next minute I was trailing out behind it, lying flat on my belly, as comfortably as on a feather bed, while I scanned the twilight ahead and the coral cliffs to the left and the shafts of sunlight in the deep waters on the right.
The grassy floor below me rose and fell like a country landscape. There were rounded hills and small depressions. There were small escarpments made by ridges of growing coral but there was nothing large enough to indicate the presence of a wreck. Many things can happen to a sunken ship in coral waters. If it founders on a submerged reef the corals will devour it, growing over it as the jungle grows over the lost temples of the Incas. If it falls on a sandy bottom the sand will cover it, perhaps, but it will still show like the tumuli of ancient tombs. It may be that the tricks of tide and current will leave it exposed in whole or part while its metal-work is pitted and eaten by galvanic action and the sea-worms bore into its timbers and the sea-growths cover it with branches and plumes and the fish swim through the gaping holes of its wounds. But always, to the end of time, there will be a sign, a mark, a scar on the bottom of the sea.
I was looking for such a sign now.
The cable went slack for a moment, then wrenched me round in a wide arc. The boat had reached the first marker-buoy and was heading seaward for our second traverse of the search area. After about thirty yards we turned again and headed backwards in the direction from which we had come. I looked down at the sea-meadow beneath me and saw with a curious thrill that it fell away steeply about three yards to the left.
The land-shelf was narrower than we had thought, and if the Dona Lucia were here we must find her soon or not at all. Without warning, a dark shadow blotted out the sunlight streaming down from the surface. I looked up, startled. A huge manta ray was flapping his lazy way over my head. I watched fascinated while the whole ton-weight of him hung over me and then moved on with the same easy motion as a bird uses in flight. I watched him go, lying on my back against the course of the boat. For perhaps ten seconds I followed him, then I rolled over and scanned the blue twilight ahead.
Then, with the stunning shock of a monstrous revelation, I saw it—twenty yards ahead of me.
A great blunt mass heaved itself up from the sea-floor into the underwater twilight. Waving sea-growths covered it. Sand and coral outcrops surrounded it like altar-steps. Shoals of fish, large and small, darted in and out of the dark hollows of the seaweed. One side of it was a rounded shoulder, the other a steep incline softened by the fluid contours of the moving weed. At the foot of the incline a short stumpy pillar was visible, festooned with grassy growth. As the tow-line drew me closer I knew that I had made no mistake. The rounded shoulder was the high stem of a Spanish ship. The incline was her canting deck. The pillar was her shattered mast.
I had found the Dona Lucia.
Chapter 11
I CAUGHT at the fish-line with my free hand and tugged it—once, twice and again. I heard the motor cut and, looking upwards, saw the last flurries of the propeller. The way of the work-boat carried me onward and over the sloping deck of the Dona Lucia. I loosed my hold and, blowing out air, let myself float down.
I landed, gently as a leaf, among the slimy sea-grasses. But when I groped for hand-hold the coralline growths and the seashells scored my palms. I took the knife from my belt and, working with a sort of frantic energy, scraped away a small area of weed and coral and clustered molluscs to reveal the spongy timber of the deck.
The riot of startled fish passed by me, unheeded, as I worked my way upwards along the edge of the slope and stopped to scrape away two centuries of sea-growth from the broken timber of the hand-rail. Half-way up the
incline was a gaping square hole fringed with brown weed. I looked in, but withdrew in sudden fear from the blackness and tore the skin from my hands on the coral crust on the edge. I had not counted on finding our ship so quickly. I had forgotten to bring the torch. But now that we knew where she was there would be a time, and times, to see all that she had to show us.
At the top of the slope was a high canted platform and above that another, smaller and narrower. On the top of the shoulder was a small structure that would probably show itself as the final ornament of the high Spanish poop-deck.
It was a triumphant moment. But I needed someone to share the triumph with me. I jerked four times on the line and, before I had counted five seconds, Johnny Akimoto came cleaving down like an avenging angel, with the spear in his hand.
I danced for him on the ancient deck. I pointed and waved my hands in clownish gestures, mumbling helplessly against the gag of the mouthpiece.
When he saw the reason for my madness Johnny clasped his hands above his head and drew back his lips in a grin. Then he swam close to me and clasped my shoulder and I saw his eyes wide with wonder behind the goggles. Then he kicked upwards, motioning me to follow him.
I staged upwards more slowly, remembering, just in time, the lessons I had learnt, knowing that even a treasureship is poor payment for the crippling agonies of the bends.
Pat and Johnny hauled me into the boat and the next minute we were shouting and slapping one another on the back and laughing like idiots and Pat was kissing me and I was kissing her, with the boat rocking dangerously beneath us.
It was Johnny Akimoto who recalled us to sanity.
“Before we drift, Renboss, we should take bearings, so we find this place easily again.”
“Right you are, Johnny. There’s too much work to do now, without trawling all over the ledge every time we want to go down.”
We did a simple triangulation, lining one of the peaks with a tall pandanus, and the other with a jutting rock that Pat named the Goat’s Head. We tested our method by sailing round in a wide sweep and then trying to set ourselves in the diving spot. Then, more for monument that for any sort of reliable marker, we hauled in one of the glass buoys and dropped it over the resting-place of the Dona Lucia.
I wanted to go down again before lunch, but Johnny Akimoto shook his head.
“No, Renboss. No more today.”
I protested vigorously.
“To hell with it, Johnny. We’ve got the whole afternoon yet.”
“Johnny’s right, you know, Renn,” said Pat Mitchell calmly. “You’ve done in half a day what you were quite prepared to spend days and weeks doing. Besides, what more can you do down there today?”
“I want to have a look at that hold.”
“You’ve got no light, Renboss,” said Johnny mildly. “Besides, I can tell you what’s in that hold now.”
“Treasure-chests, Johnny?” I grinned at him.
“No,” said Johnny slowly, “not treasure-chests.”
“What then?”
“Water, Renboss. Water and fish and sand . . . tons and tons and tons of sand.”
I was shocked into silence. My triumph was destroyed, like a pricked bubble.
“It’s true, you know, Renn.” Pat Mitchell laid a sympathetic hand on my knee. “That’s what happens to all wrecks, isn’t it? The sand piles up, round and inside them. You expected that, didn’t you?”
I shook my head glumly. “I should have, but I didn’t. I was so set on finding the damn ship that I didn’t give half a thought to what would happen when we did find it. Well . . . what do we do now?”
“We have lunch,” said Pat promptly.
From her wooden box she produced thick sandwiches of beef and damper, biscuits spread with tinned butter and cheese, and four bars of creamy chocolate. She poured tea from the billy-can into our tin mugs and, as we ate and drank, rocking the ground-swell, we talked.
“Renboss,” said Johnny deliberately, “today we have found our ship. That is the first thing and the biggest thing. What we saw down there, you and I, shows us that her nose is well down in the bank. Something less than half of her is showing. I ask you this. You know about these things. She was carrying gold. Where would she carry it?”
“My guess, Johnny, is the stem, in the captain’s quarters, under the poop-deck. When we get back to shore I’ll draw you a picture . . . show you what a ship of this kind looks like.”
“So, then,” said Johnny, “our first chance—our only chance,—is that the treasure is still in the stem of the ship under the first layers of sand.”
“That’s right.”
“If it is anywhere else, then we can never reach it, except perhaps, with a salvage ship, which might pump away the sand. Even then,” he shrugged and spread his hand, “these things do not always succeed. You know that.”
Pat Mitchell had been listening carefully. Her dark intelligent eyes were alert and questioning.
“You’ve got something in your mind, Johnny. What is it?”
“It is this, Miss Pat,” said Johnny. “Renboss here, and myself, we know little about these things. I am useless, because I am only a diver. I learnt to work naked on the trochus-beds but I cannot stay down long enough to be of any use. Renboss, here, has learnt to dive and explore. He knows little more than that.”
It was all too true. I had no answer to the relentless logic of the islander.
Pat Mitchell questioned him again.
“What do you suggest, Johnny?”
“Renboss, here, has a friend . . . the man who made these things for him.”
Pat looked at me. I nodded.
“That’s right . . . Nino Ferrari. He was a frog-man with the Italian navy during the war.”
“So you see,” Johnny went on, eagerly, with his exposition, “This man is a professional. He understands salvage. He knows the tools we need and how to use them. Renboss tells me he has promised to come if we need him. I say we need him now.”
Johnny again. Johnny the lost man, the alien man, with a first-class brain ticking over behind his shiny dark forehead.
I grinned at him and clapped him on the shoulder.
“All right, Johnny, that’s it. Let’s have ourselves a picnic. You sail us over to Bowen first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll telephone Nino Ferrari in Sydney and tell him to get up here as quick as he can, with all the equipment he can lay his hands on. While we’re there we’ll freight the empty air-bottles down to Brisbane to be refilled. What do you say, Captain?”
Johnny’s dark face beamed.
“I say yes, Renboss. We take Miss Pat?”
“We take Miss Pat.”
“Good. Then I show her my Wahine and how she sails, eh?”
From then on it was a light-hearted meal. And when it was finished we tossed our scraps overside to feed the fishes and washed our mugs in the water and stowed our gear and hauled up the ballast-cable.
Then we saw the plane.
It was an old Dragon Rapide, like the barnstormers use on the country fields, and the outback cattle-men charter when they can’t get through in the rainy season. It came from the west—from the direction of Bowen. It was flying low and we could hear it chattering like an ancient chaff-cutter. As he neared the island the pilot banked and made a wide circuit that took him round the cliff-side and then back towards us round the edge of the reef. He was flying on the deck and we saw his face and the face of his single passenger, blurred behind the cabin window. Then he was past us, banking again for another circuit of the island. This time he flew low over the beach, then made a figure eight round the back of the island and swung out again for another look at the reef and ourselves. After that he sheered off and headed back to the mainland.
The three of us looked at each other.
“That,” said Pat with a smile, “would be a wealthy tourist.”
“That,” I said grimly, “could be Manny Mannix.”
Johnny’s mouth was shut in a tight line. He didn’t say an
ything.
“Who’s Manny Mannix, Renn?”
“Tell you later,” I said briefly. “Come on, Johnny, let’s go home.”
Johnny spun the starter wheel, the engine stuttered into life. We turned and headed home, through the lazy water.
That night, for the first time in years, I held hands in the moonlight with a girl. We sat in a small grassy hollow sheltered from the breeze and leant our backs against a bank of springy turf. Around us the spidery roots of the pandanus made a trellis-work for privacy. High above us their broad-bladed leaves made a muted clatter when the wind moved them. Above us a white ginger-blossom spread its heavy perfume and a bank of wild orchids drooped from a rocky ledge. The sea was a murmuring voice and a thin ribbon of silver beyond the rim of our retreat.
We were uneasy at first. We talked banally to conceal our thoughts and made small jokes and laughed like strangers who had met at a cocktail party. Then, as the languid night relaxed us and the sea voices sang, we drew close to each other and talked more quietly of things that lie near to the heart. I told her of my brief, beautiful love for Jeannette . . . of how I came to the island . . . of why I had left it . . . of all the restless, barren years between my leaving and my coming back.
I told her the things I feared and the things I hoped. I told her of the eerie, teeming world under the water. I told her of my small odyssey in search of the Dona Lucia and of the morning’s adventure with the shark. Her hand tightened on mine and I felt her shiver a little, as if someone had walked over her grave.
Then, shifting her position, she squatted in front of me and looked at me squarely.
“Renn, I want you to tell me something.”
“What?”
“Are you really interested in money?”
It looked like thin ice. I tried to skate away from it.
“Isn’t everybody interested in money?”