by Jim Shepard
“Hollister is German?” I had asked politely.
“Holitscher,” she said.
“Ah,” I said.
We had had a dalliance and this had complicated things. Waiting for me to respond further, her ears had colored with impatience and humiliation.
“Can you help?” she had asked again. She was much younger than I. She had a very American directness. This had been a partial cause of our dalliance.
The new government was by all accounts even less understanding than the old one. Her father was at that point in a prison in Darmstadt awaiting trial. His lawyer had been told that the charge might be sedition but his lawyer assumed that to be a scare tactic.
There seemed to be an unstated understanding that we would talk about this further. She wore shorts made from cut-off men’s pants, and a floppy white hat against the sun. Sleeveless white shirts that billowed in breezes.
The Evolution of Human Diving
At the age of twenty-five I married Mary, my first wife, at sunrise at her family’s plantation in Virginia. Her family had roots from the colonial days. Her grandfather was a Supreme Court judge. We went to Mexico for our honeymoon to obtain specimens for the Zoological Park. We published an account of our trip entitled Two Bird Lovers in Mexico. Mary wrote the final chapter and provided tips for female travelers in the tropics. Over the next seven years we traveled fifty-two thousand miles and visited twenty-two countries. A year after our return she fled to Nevada to begin the six-month residency requirement for divorce. Because of my celebrity as an author, it was very public. The front page of The New York Times carried her account of events under the headline Naturalist Was Cruel.
Fourteen years later, aboard a friend’s yacht, I married Elswyth, my second wife. She was twenty-five years my junior. She was the surprisingly famous author of the play Young Mister Disraeli. She wanted only to stay in our farmhouse in Vermont and write; she detested the tropics and travel. I hated cold weather. She wrote a play about me called Stranger in the Hills.
A Diver Can Attract Fish with a Crowbar
When I first put on a diving helmet and climbed down the submerged ladder, I understood almost immediately that I had escaped from dry land etymology and entered an entirely new world. It was on a reef off Bermuda that I had named Almost Island: it was so shallow, and surrounded on all sides by abyssal depths dropping away into blue. Herring schooled above me like a tiny storm of silver comets. Parrotfish barged slowly along. Yellowtail floated about moving their jaws in an absentminded, adenoidal manner. A crinoid waved its orange ferns. The reef stretched up and up, alive with plumes and sea fans, brain coral and sharp-spined urchins. I stood amazed, vainly trying to catch the fish.
I found that what seemed to be a desert of animal life could be converted into a hectic oasis by a few strokes of a crowbar on the reef, fish rushing in from all directions to the source of the exposed food. I invented submarine slingshots and speared what I wished with barbed arrows of brass wire. I found branched arborescent growths into which I could climb.
One starlit night, when my eyes passed just below the level of the water, the illumination of the wavelets was like cold fire. From the bottom, the boat’s keel was molten silver. Jellyfish and sea worms showed blue.
And I considered, hauling myself up the rope, sergeant majors and wrasse following me to the surface, the way the concrete intellectual returns from aviation have finally been superficial: the atmosphere itself being transparent, and our already having obtained knowledge of its upper reaches from our experience with heights such as lofty mountains. The same was true of our penetration of the tropical jungles: the new understandings and difficulties had arrived as a matter of degree, but not of kind.
“You’re forty-nine years old,” Elswyth remarked in a letter. “Isn’t that a little too far along for Undersea Adventure?” “No,” I wrote back.
All These Instruments Plus Two Men
By the spring of 1930 the sphere was nearing completion. In April I moved my field laboratory to Nonsuch Island, which had been donated by the Bermudans for oceanographic work. The pronoun “I,” it should be noted, throughout should be considered as divided into four, four of us comprising the staff of the Department of Tropical Research: besides myself, John Tee-Van, General Associate, Gloria Hollister, Research Associate, and Jocelyn Crane, Technical Associate. For this trip Miss Hollister had brought a friend with her. Miss Crane would be helping with the charts for recording time, depths, and temperature. They’d been schoolmates. Miss Crane looked at me sharply at times when she fancied I wasn’t paying attention.
We had a barge, a seagoing tug, and a seven-ton Arcturus winch. The barge was outfitted with twin boilers to drive the winches. A simple meter wheel measured the amount of cable paid out.
The distance between the generator and the bathysphere would cause a drop in voltage, necessitating the use of specially made ninety-volt lamps. The electric light circuit could also be used as an auxiliary signaling apparatus, in the case of a failure of the telephone lines.
In the trays we had calcium chloride (anhydrous porous, #8 mesh) for moisture, and soda lime (#4 mesh) for carbon dioxide.
The crew necessary for a descent turned out to consist of, besides our staff, a steersman for the barge, two men to tie the telephone line to the main cable, deckhands for paying out and hauling in, a generator hand, and a man at the meter wheel who also tied tape onto the cable at every hundred feet.
We made a trial submergence to one thousand feet with the bathysphere empty. It came up with the windows intact and only a quart of water at the bottom.
“Do you know anything at all about National Socialism?” Miss Hollister asked while we watched Mr. Tee Van work the pumps to empty it. She had her arms folded.
Spray whipped our faces as the tug dragged us about and then pulled us back to shore against the wind and the waves. We could attempt a descent as early as the next day if the weather permitted.
“Probably more than the next fellow,” I told her.
“Then you understand some of my reasons for concern,” she said.
I’d been hurt by her tone. Across the deck, Miss Crane was packing away the logbooks. One never had to justify concern for one’s parents, I told her. The night of our rendezvous I’d talked about my parents. My father had been a dealer of paper, often away on business. I’d been an only child. We’d moved a few times and eventually settled in East Orange. We’d often visited the Museum of Natural History together on the elevated train. My father had wept at my first publication, a letter to the editor in Harper’s Young People’s Magazine. Miss Hollister had been greatly moved. We had been in my quarters on a steamer. I had invited her in. She had switched off the electric light after I had finished my account. The ship had wallowed a bit. She had eased me into my berth like someone attending an invalid. She had whispered her given name, Gloria, into my mouth. She had had a long face. Wispy blonde hair. Skeptical eyes. A long nose, and lips that were moist even after a day on the water.
“The German people have been through a terrible time,” I told her.
She nodded and waited for me to continue. Mr. Tee Van stood about with his hands in his back pockets, waiting to ask a question. I excused myself and dealt with him.
She was still waiting after he went about his business. I said, “By which I mean we have to be wary of too easily judging the choices they made and why they made them.”
She lowered her eyes as though she’d burst into tears, and I was swamped with helpless rage.
What I hadn’t done was offer her father employment in our tiny Department. She believed it would make all the difference in terms of the possibility of an exit visa. Of course, we had no budget for it and he had no expertise for what we were doing. He barely spoke English. But this was in her mind a white lie that would save a man’s life.
She was prone to hyperbole.
“Let me work on another letter,” I told her. I myself was routinely accused of hyperbole. I
had sympathy for those who suffered from it.
She raised her chin. I had to turn from her expression. Had I agreed to mention a job? Was I simply putting her off? I could see from her eyes that she couldn’t tell.
She followed me, though I wasn’t clear on where I was going.
“I realize that the very last thing we need are distractions,” she said. Now she was weeping, though discreetly.
“Yes, yes,” I said.
“And I want you to know how terrible I feel having to bring this up now,” she said.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Please don’t worry about that.”
She stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Thank you,” she said. “Your father will be all right,” I told her.
“Thank you,” she said.
I didn’t make it my practice to offer phantom positions as immigration aids. And I had no right to bandy about with the New York Zoological Society’s reputation. As far as I could ascertain, her father’s credentials were enthusiasm, a bookish background on spoonbills, and a willingness to break the law, and little else. But who knew? Perhaps the situation was as dire as she feared.
No one spoke to me about our little scene. It had never been clear to me how much information of a personal nature our little company had shared.
Each Nut Twisted into Its Numbered Place
The barge was anchored in the lee of the island. The next morning before the sun was fully up we settled down to watch sea and sky. Wind and barometer. We were looking for the absence of even the possibility of sudden squalls. It was June 6, 1930. Around five, a young gale blew itself out. The slender tips of the cedars beyond our veranda were motionless.
The sun rose on a calm, slowly heaving sea. We ran up the prearranged flag signal for those on the barge. The tug ferried us out to it and pulled us out to sea through Castle Roads. When we were eight miles offshore we had a mile of water beneath us. I stopped the barge and had it turned upwind and upswell.
A gull sideslipped back and forth above our mast. Everyone but me seemed to be ready. I looked around at the sea and sky, the barge, the tug. Miss Hollister.
“Here we go,” Mr. Tee Van finally said.
Barton and I stood on a step-box and crawled painfully over the steel bolts, fell inside the sphere, and curled up on the cold hard bottom. The notion of cushions occurred to me, and I called for some through the opening. They took a few minutes to be fetched. Barton and I disentangled legs and got set. He grinned at me. The longer we were in the thing, the smaller it seemed to get.
I took up my position at my window. He put on the earphones. Through the quartz I could see Miss Hollister arranging the other set over her ears. The four-hundred-pound door was hoisted and clanged into place, sliding and banging over the ten great bolts. The huge nuts were screwed on, each in its numbered place. Barton made a joke about Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”
After the nuts were screwed down as tightly as humanly possible, the wrenches were hammered with sledgehammers to take up all possible slack. The sound threw us about. It made our eyes water.
We complained over the telephone. “Miss Hollister says it must be very hard,” Barton shouted to me, when he was able. I could see her making a rueful expression. It didn’t look like she could see us.
He tested the searchlight. He opened the valve on the first oxygen tank and verified the flow at two liters per minute. We began regulating our breathing. I peered out my window at an angle and could see Mr. Tee Van waiting for a signal from the captain. He got one. We felt ourselves tremble, lean over, and lift clear. We revolved, slowly, out on the beam until the barge came into view. Miss Hollister gave a small wave.
We began to swing with the roll of the ship. Barton said, “Miss Hollister wants to know why the Director is swearing so.” I wasn’t aware I had been.
She pointed out that my exercise in self-expression had already cost us several liters of oxygen.
We hardly noticed the impact on the surface until a froth of foam surged up over the glass and our chamber was dimmed to a pleasant green. The great hull of the barge came into view. Then the keel passed slowly upward, disappearing into the green water overhead.
A Quarter Mile Down
Word came down that we were at fifty feet. Then one hundred feet. The only change was a slight twilighting and chilling of the green. I knew we were sinking only by the upward passing of small motes of life in the water.
We passed what had been the greatest depth reached in a regulation suit by Navy divers. We passed the depth at which the Lusitania rested. We passed the point below which only dead men had sunk.
After so many deep-net hauls, and so much planning, to actually be where we were—! It was like an astronomer being allowed to visit Mars.
Barton gave an exclamation and I passed the flashlight over the floor and saw a slow trickle of water collecting. Maybe a pint. It was coming from the door. We watched it. I gave the signal to descend more quickly. As the pressure increased, the stream stopped. We turned the flashlight on the doorsill obsessively the rest of the way down, and saw no more water.
A tiny flaw formed on the rim of my outer window. It did not enlarge.
Barton, who had a lifelong fear of drowning, was unfazed by the flaw. He estimated the total pressure on the sphere would soon be six and a half million pounds. With any breach, there’d be no issue of drowning.
At one thousand feet Miss Hollister sent down word through Barton that a young herring gull was contenting itself flying about their stern. She knew I’d be interested to hear of one this far south. Barton shook his head to himself after passing the information on.
We reached a quarter mile down and were still alive.
We dangled in a hollow pea on a swaying cobweb a quarter of a mile below the deck of our ship.
We were the first human beings to look out on this strange illumination. It was an undefinable blue that worked on our optic nerves like a brilliance, and yet when I picked up my notebook, I could not tell the difference between blank page and print. The color seemed to pass materially through our eyes. The yellow of the searchlight when switched on banished it entirely; yet it returned instantly when the light switched off. It was an entirely new kind of mental reception of color impression.
I switched on a flashlight to mark the moment in my little observation-log. I felt a tremendous wave of emotion, an unnerved appreciation of what was superhuman about the situation. Here I was, privileged to sit and try to crystallize what I observed through wholly inadequate eyes. I wrote, “Am writing at the depth of a quarter of a mile. A luminous fish is outside my window.” I could think of nothing else.
We attempted to pass some of our impressions up to Miss Hollister. Barton reported that she finally responded, with some frustration, that she couldn’t understand us.
We told her that language was inadequate to the sensation. She answered back, “Evidently.”
A Seascape from a Motion Picture Film
Over the next two months we attempted seven more dives.
We fastened the Tropical Research house flag of the Zoological Society and that of the Explorer’s Club to the cable shackle, and tied a squid wrapped in cheesecloth beneath one of the observation windows. We also set out some hooks, attractively baited.
Three times before we were completely submerged, the horizon and barge appeared across the glass, instantly erased by a green and white smother. Air slipped upward like balloon pearls in its dry, mobile beauty. It formed vertical wakes of iridescence. The surface quilted above us with the undersides of wavelets. On one dive at four hundred feet, tens of thousands of sardines poured past our windows like elongated raindrops.
We conducted more systematic optical investigations. At fifty feet, a scarlet prawn I’d brought along as a color experiment was a deep, velvety black. On a marked spectrum, at one hundred and fifty feet, the orange vanished. At three hundred feet, the yellow. At three hundred and fifty, the green. At four hundred and fifty, the blue, with only
violet remaining. At eight hundred feet, the violet evanesced, and only grayish-white remained inside the sphere. Outside remained the deepest blue-black imaginable.
Once, in a Central American jungle, I had had a mighty tree felled. Indians and convicts had worked for many days before its downfall had been accomplished, and after the wrack of branches, leaves, and debris had settled, a small, white moth had fluttered up from the very heart of the wreckage. In that way, life began appearing before us.
Strange, flat little crustaceans flashed like opals in the light. A transparent eel, vertebrae and body organs plainly visible, its eyes and filled stomach its only opacities, nosed our baited hook. A big leptocephalus undulated past like a ribbon of transparent gelatin.
We left the searchlight off. We kept descending. It was only by shutting my eyes and opening them again that I could realize the terrible slowness of the change from dark blue to blacker blue. The warm side of the spectrum was unthinkable. Speech was unthinkable.
Flashes of light sparked all around us. They vanished when we switched on the searchlight. At that point other fish and invertebrates swam up and down the shaft of the illumination like insects around a streetlight. Three myctophids. Pteropods. A big Argyropelecus.
Strange, ghostly, dark forms hovered in the distance, forms which never came nearer, but reappeared at darker depths. A great cloud of a body moved past us: pale, lighter than the surrounding water. It was maddening, as if astonishing discoveries were just outside the power of our eyes.
I heard Miss Hollister’s voice through Barton’s headphones. The sunbaked deck on which she sat with her notebook seemed hundreds of miles away.
“Miss Hollister asks me to tell you ‘Darmstadt,’” Barton said, mystified, an hour into our fourth dive. He had asked her to repeat the message.