by Sarban
‘The next thing I heard was that he had got a visa. How he persuaded them, I don’t know, but I gathered from some of our people up in Jedda later that he’d got the French Minister in Jedda and the French Ambassador in Cairo to back him, and I expect they turned the propaganda on full blast: advancement of learning, scientific research, benefit to humanity and la mission civilisatrice de la France—all of which, of course, would run off the Arabs like water off a duck’s back, but I suppose they didn’t care to upset the French over a trifle just then and so they gave the doctor a visa to permit him to reside at Qunfida but not to leave the coast—which he wouldn’t have dreamt of doing.
‘He came over, I remember, in a native sailing craft, squatting on top of a mixed cargo of cockroaches, dead fish and paraffin, and he intrigued the town from the very first. Well, poor things, they’d only had two foreigners to look at for a long time: just me and Jirji Haddad, and Jirji was a Lebanese whose language and habits were not far removed from their own, and me, I suppose, they’d got used to. But the whole town turned out to watch Colombani come ashore and as he marched up from the boat harbour in a flaming red shirt and a pair of exiguous white shorts and a new Panama hat with strings of infernal machines festooned round him, they obviously thought they were getting their money’s worth. On the whole, whatever the scientific motives may have been, it was just as well that he chose Qunfida to operate from. The Jeddawis are more sophisticated, but more sanctimonious and fanatical. Qunfida was at that time such a little place and so isolated that the people had retained a sort of primitive simplicity of outlook. They were enormously interested in Colombani, but they were not importunate or offensive; they decided at once, from his weird-looking gear, that he was a muhandis—an engineer, you know—and ‘engineer’ was beginning to be a title of respect among them. Later, when they understood it was fish he was after, that didn’t rob him of his title: he became known as the fish-engineer. In a very short time he impressed all the boatmen and fishermen in another way: by his tremendously powerful swimming and by the way he learned to handle those cockly little dug-out canoes—the things they call huris, over there—that upset if you clear your throat in them.
‘Colombani himself was entirely indifferent to the Arabs. I don’t think he really noticed that they were any different from the inhabitants of the South of France or Italy: they were land animals and he just wasn’t interested in them. Or the only ones he did notice were the two who worked the boat he hired. He used to speak to them in French and Italian, or just make noises with a kind of marine twang, and they seemed to understand well enough. He was a good hand at sailing himself and seemed to be familiar with the lateen rig, and it’s wonderful how two of a trade can get on together even when there isn’t a word of a common language between them.
‘Of course, I was delighted to have him staying with me. My French was passable, but in any case he had a pretty good command of English, and it was better than strong drink to have another European to talk to. He was about forty years of age, short and square, with the chest and muscles of a Channel-swimmer; he was intensely alert and vigorous and, as I said, effervescing with enthusiasm for his hobby. He impressed you as throwing his whole heart and soul into everything he did—and more than that, he had a way that Frenchmen have when they take up a sport, of trying to put a sort of professional polish, a gloss of rather ostentatious showmanship on their prowess. Swimming, you might say, was an essential means to his scientific end, but he went about it also like a sportif. He was absolutely tireless in the water, and the only thing I’d seen that could beat him for speed and smoothness was a seal. He was in his element at Qunfida.
‘He talked to me a great deal about his fish-studies. One of his ambitions was to develop a technique of under water photography. Obviously, the Red Sea, where you can count on such intense light any day in the year almost, and where you have shallows with bright coral rocks and gleaming white sandy bottoms, was an attractive place to work in. He had invented a submarine camera already, but I gathered it didn’t yet give satisfactory results. In the meantime he had a method of making sketches under water in colour on specially prepared stones or slates, and later he reproduced his sketches in more finished paintings which the French Zoological Society, I believe, were going to publish.
‘I went out with him, and, well as I thought I knew that coast, he revealed a new world to me. With a pair of water-tight goggles on, cruising about the sides of the reefs in four or five feet of water, I discovered a wealth I’d never suspected before. Under water the light is still brilliant, but somehow changed, coloured and enriched; it’s not harsh there, but lovely; not blinding but revealing. In that undazzling clarity you can see things exquisitely defined, and the colours and shapes of things are astounding. The living reef below water is a fantastic garden, where the very stones are like brilliant and delicate flowers; where flowers and animals share each other’s forms and colours, and where all life seems to move with strange, soft rhythms unknown in the air. And strangest of all to me was a feeling that human beings were accepted there by other species as they are not on land. A little thing makes me say that: I noticed that the tiny fishes, the ones that Colombani was particularly interested in sketching, were not at all afraid of me. As I crept along the side of the reef, holding myself down by the knobs and branches of coral, bold little chaps, pied and striped and painted, with pennants and streamers of fins floating from them like flags of a Spanish galleon, would glide out from bowers of coral, straight at my face and hover there at my nose-end inspecting me, and even, very often, make darts at my eyes and fetch up short with little bumps on the glass of my goggles.
‘When I had been out about the reefs a few times with Colombani, I could well understand his passion for that element. Enjoying the extraordinary ease of motion in three dimensions in that warm sea, revelling in that transfigured, subaqueous sunlight and constantly delighted by some new and brilliant or fantastic form of life, you were loath to go out again to the stark searing barrenness of the land, to the poverty of life in the air. The sea was living and land was dead. You found yourself wishing, as you might have done as a little child, that you had the power to breathe in the water like a fish and so live always down there in the wavering, changing green and golden brilliance, among the coloured groves and glades. It would want but one thing to make delight complete, and that’s what the fairy-tales have supplied: an under-sea lover to play with there in that world where the body is so light and free.
‘I had lived on that shore close on three years, but I had never found out how to enjoy the treasure at my door until Colombani showed me. I am a fair swimmer, but, I don’t know how it is—though I expect you understand the feeling—swimming alone there, even in the shallows, I’d never felt sufficiently at ease to enjoy it. The risks of a shark within the reef, in four or five feet of water are remote enough to be discounted altogether, but I suppose there is in many men a lurking, ancestral fear of the creature of the deep that no amount of knowledge and reasoning will eradicate. I’ve felt it myself swimming in an English river at night, and even in a concrete irrigation tank, where I knew for certain there could be nothing bigger than a goldfish: it was simply the dark, and the depth, and being alone. I used to feel it in the Red Sea, even in the blazing sunlight with white sand gleaming a few feet below me, because there the deep gulfs were not far away and the passages through the reefs were numerous. I used to think of the great brutes I’d seen occasionally basking on the sluggish swell outside the reef, and I used to remember how every so often one would hear of a native fisherman’s little canoe being found drifting upside down and the man never returning from his night’s fishing. Now, one of the first things that impressed me about Colombani was his courage as a swimmer; or, if that seems a little exaggerated, let me say his complete lack of nerves and imagination. Perhaps, after all, it was not lack of imagination but amplitude of knowledge: he knew what there was in the sea and what he didn’t know about just wasn’t there
. I suppose he never felt the slightest stirring of such irrational fear of the deep as I at times have experienced. Certainly, he never hesitated to plunge into any stretch of water. He would swim long distances across those dark blue chasms between the reefs when he was alone, or dive over the side of his boat in the open sea far outside the outer reefs. His boatmen told me that; they said they tried to tell him it wasn’t safe, but they thought he didn’t understand. He understood perfectly well. I mentioned sharks to him and he informed me that the natives’ fears, and my own, were quite groundless; neither species of shark found in the Red Sea, he said, had ever been proved to attack human beings.
‘I have no doubt he knew what he was talking about. Nevertheless, I told him, I should never give a shark the opportunity of demonstrating its neutrality. Instead, I gave him opportunities to laugh at me and what he considered my superstitious apprehensions. You know how here and there in the broader reefs, which may be just awash, you come across very deep, wide holes—submerged lagoons, as it were? We found one when we were out one day and Colombani promptly proposed to explore it. I refused to go in. I would cheerfully have confessed any degree of cowardice, but nothing would have induced me to plunge into that dusky blue profundity, full of moving shadows and with long black arms of leathery weed groping and twining on mysterious currents. Colombani dived in, swam down to the bottom, plunged into every corner of the pit and parted the tangles of swart, glistening weeds. He climbed out again grinning.
‘ “At bottom, my friend,” he said, “your aversion is just the same as the superstition of my boatmen who refuse to take me to the islands because they are haunted.”
‘That was the first I had heard of his wanting to visit the islands, but I knew the ones he meant. There is a little group of islands ten miles or more north of Qunfida and far out from shore called Juzur ul Ghaur. They are not marked on the maps though I think the Admiralty charts indicate them as unnamed reefs. I have seen them from a distance and they are genuine islands, dry, I should say, at all states of the sea, though none of them appears to rise more than a few feet above sea-level; they are small in area and you might call them coral rocks covered with a layer of sand. I knew only two things about those islands. One was that according to the fishermen and Sambuk sailors, the sea round them was immeasurably deep—bottomless, they said. Hence the name of “ul Ghaur”, Islands of the Abyss. The other thing was that they were an abode of Jinn. Well, many places in Arabia are pointed out to you as being inhabited by Jinn; an Arab will tell you that there are Jinn in such and such a ruin or mountain in as matter-of-fact a way as we would say there are pike in that pond or badgers in that wood. But the Jinn won’t stop him going there, in daylight, and with companions, if there is some material inducement. The difference with Juzur ul Ghaur was that the Arabs not only said there were Jinn in them, but they acted as if that were so. Never, to my knowledge would any Arab waterman voluntarily approach those islands. I was not surprised, then, when Colombani said his boatmen had refused to take him there.
‘I had discovered the reason quite early in my residence at Qunfida from my own launchman. He’d been employed by our branch ever since we opened there, and he was a chap of wider experience than most: he’d been a Sambuk hand—captain, he claimed—and had sailed to places like Zanzibar and Mukalla and Muscat and Bahrain and Kuwait in the Gulf. Looking round during my first month or so for some sort of diversion, and not being allowed to go inland, I thought of those islands, which I’d seen in the far distance from the Mahrusa when I was first going over there, and I planned to go up to them on a sort of fishing picnic and maybe spend the night there and come back in the cool of the morning. Old Ridha, my launchman, didn’t refuse to go outright, but it was just unfortunate that the day I’d fixed on was the very day when he’d arranged to have the launch hauled up and its bottom scraped. Well, I fixed another day; but when that came round something had gone wrong with the engine. I decided on another day, and then, of course, Ridha had retired to his house with acute diarrhoea or something. In the end, inch by inch, I got some sort of an explanation out of him: there was a danger in the bottomless sea near those islands, he said. What sort of a danger? Well, God is more knowing, but it was known since before his father’s father’s time that there was something in those deeps that would not permit a boat to swim there; it was known that whenever a fisherman in dark or mist or sandstorm had approached within a certain distance of Juzur ul Ghaur his huri or his boat had sunk like a stone and of it and him no trace was ever discovered. I had by this time heard something of the islands being haunted by Jinn from other people, so, pulling his leg, I asked him if it was the Jinn who sank the boats. He took me perfectly seriously, of course—Jinn being vouched for by the Koran—but he did not use the word himself. At the roots of those islands, far, far down, there were certain dark holes, the entrances to labyrinthine caves which ran so far and deep that they connected with the springs of ocean, those primordial waters under the earth that feed the shallower seas God had provided for us to sail upon and fish in. It was known that in those dim caverns far under the sea there lived certain creatures—hagg ul bahr, he said, ‘things of the sea’—which might have been set there by the All-knowing to guard the entrance to one of His mysteries. It is certain that these sea-beings suffered no son of Adam to approach their abode, and since all things in the three created worlds act only by the permission of their Lord . . . the old fellow let me draw the inference that sudden death was clearly predestined for any trespasser near Juzur ul Ghaur. As regards the precise form of the instruments of predestination he was guarded, though absolute. As you know, an Arab will rarely admit ignorance: to my questions about how he knew that these things, that their caves, even existed, he replied with the last-ditch argument: It is known.
‘Well, I gave up. Juzur ul Ghaur were not to be visited, and that was that. I did not feel the deprivation very keenly, for it was a safe enough bet that in all things except the depth of water round them they were indistinguishable from any other of the thousands of accessible dry reefs and sand-bars in the neighbourhood. One could easily guess, I supposed, at some possible origin for the local superstition: Arab fishermen do disappear from time to time; the very much deeper water round Juzur ul Ghaur might well be the habitat of a rarer and more aggressive species of shark than the one commonly seen off the outer reefs, and it would only need one glimpse of the unfamiliar beast, long ago, to start a legend growing. That is, I imagine, the common way we have of rationalising myths.
‘To Colombani, however, the local belief was purely “subjective”; hence, he found his Arabs’ refusal to co-operate in his researches excessively irritating. Juzur ul Ghaur, he had decided, from studying the imperfect charts and from considering such verbal descriptions as he could gather, offered interestingly different conditions from the rest of the reefs within his range. It was annoying to be prevented from going there only by some sort of local fairy-tale. He listened to my theory of the origin of the legend with a good deal of scepticism: the sharks of the Red Sea were well known; nothing short of hooking out a specimen of my postulated new species would have persuaded him to admit the possibility of its existence. Yet perhaps he was not at heart so dogmatic on the subject as he chose to appear. It may have been a matter of vanity with him to be so certain of his own subject in open conversation, while in private he may have admitted to himself that the authorities on which he based himself were not exhaustive. That is a thought that has occurred to me at times since: that my suggestion of a new species of great fish may have made him keener to explore the waters of those islands. Oh well, perhaps it’s unnecessary to torment myself with that: he would have gone there in any case. There was bravado in it.
‘I knew he had gone only when the thing had happened.
‘Several times before this he had been out on all-night excursions. He was interested in the local method of night-fishing with torches. That particular day he had set off at noon and told me he would be back the nex
t morning. As it happened the Mahrusa was in the roadstead discharging a bit of mixed cargo and waiting for a consignment of sheep-casings. We had the Kreuzer Line agency, there, you know, and for once I had something to do. It was only at lunch time the next day that I began to be a bit uneasy. Captain Kobus of the Mahrusa was going to have lunch ashore with me, and we were waiting for Colombani; we got far down the bottle of Bols that Kobus had brought, and still Colombani didn’t show up. Between drinks we went up to my roof and scanned the shallows and the boat channels through my glasses.
‘It would be getting on for two o’clock, I suppose; we had just returned from one of these reconnaissances, when with a great puffing and stumbling up the stairs Jirji Haddad floundered into my living-room.
‘ “He’s not here?” he asked. He stuttered and looked all round my place as if he expected to see the doctor, but then, when he had got his breath, he explained: “They left him—out on the reef!”
‘I saw a couple of Arabs cowering on the staircase, looking sideways up at us in a hang-dog way. I knew one of them for the owner of the sailing boat Colombani had hired. Jirji shouted at them in Arabic to tell us what had happened, where they had left the doctor, and then, without waiting for them to reply, told us himself what they had already told him. They had taken the doctor out the afternoon before and had sailed about among the reefs, making in a general north-westerly direction, going where the doctor bade them. In the late afternoon they had anchored within the arm of a reef on the edge of the stretch of deep water beyond which lay Juzur ul Ghaur. Here the doctor had swum about in the shallows for a time. Then he had taken the canoe which they had towed behind them, put certain of his belongings in it and paddled away by himself. They did not know where he was going and they could not ask him. He often went by himself in the canoe. They proposed to pass the time while he was away in saying the afternoon prayer and in preparing something to eat. They did not think he could come to any harm because he had set off to the northward, keeping close to the reef, and the sea was calm. When he did not return at sunset they became anxious and made sail and went northwards, inside the reef, looking for him. They saw no trace of him and when it became dark they anchored again and lit a fire in their brazier to be a signal to him. They lay there all night, but he did not come and in the morning there was nothing they could do but sail back to the town again, searching the sea with their eyes; but the canoe was lost.