Submergence (17 page)

She walked by herself on the beach the next morning. She had left him asleep in her bed – their bed, perhaps – and felt the need to be
scoured by the wind, to see the Atlantic, to feel its rhythm, the way the water met and was contained by the land. It was colder than when she had swum and the wind was at her back and seemed to lift her along the shore.

The lighthouse was white with a band of black and a band of orange around the light itself. It was built beyond the breakers on the higher side of a reef. The reef’s dingy cracks were infested with insects and molluscs and its plunging walls, rank with glistening seaweed, resembled the palm of a hand outstretched from France, resisting the storms. The door of the lighthouse was high above the reef, approached by slimy steps, and the light was often obscured in the mists. How was it built? First, they raised an iron drum on wooden stilts. Men worked on the lighthouse in fair weather and sheltered in the drum during storms and at night, singing songs and playing the accordion in the dreadful echoing wet. After several years, the windows in the lighthouse were put in and sealed and the workmen rowed back to the shore, leaving a beacon to swing across the bay and out to sea.

She could see the jagged rocks further out to sea on which many ships had foundered. The sailors, fearing being drowned so close to shore, must have called out for an acre of barren ground; broom, furze, anything, in their fear.

The waves were messy, porridgy, falling off before the lighthouse. There were no surfers. She knew how deep it was out there at the horizon. She had these other languages of numbers and sonar. She saw the deepness that was at the edge of France and it made the beach under her feel like a ledge on a cliff.

When she turned around and began walking back towards the Hotel Atlantic the wind almost knocked her over. It was like the skiing in Scotland in her undergraduate days, where the wind came so hard that even dropped into a schuss on the steep slopes she barely moved.

The longest golf drive recorded was hit on the moon. Man has yet to return to the Challenger Deep. The lesson from this is that it is easier for human beings to push outwards than it is for them to explore inwards. The wind that carries you away like a kite will blow you on your back if you turn to face it. Consider how the surface area of a balloon grows when air is blown into it. When we push out, we create new frontiers we might populate. When we take the air out of a balloon, it deflates, and becomes shrivelled.

Millions and millions of years ago we lived in the ocean. When we emerged we had to move in two dimensions, instead of three. That was painful at first. No up, nor any down. We learned to drag ourselves along without legs then with them, going faster and faster, and faster again, by any means. The lack of a third dimension is one explanation for our need to head out over the horizon. Another explanation is that we were raised up from chemosynthetic life in the deep ocean to become photosynthetic life at the top. Having ascended from the eternal night we cannot stop ourselves from heading towards the light. We are moths in the thrall of the sun and the stars, shedding off darkness. That is our instinct, but our conscious nature is also to be drawn to the unknown. We want to know what is behind the wood, what the next valley looks like, and the valley beyond that. We want to know what is in the sky and what is behind the sky. These have been our obsessions since our beginnings, yet the curiosity does not extend to the ocean. We forget there is so much darkness in our world, and to be out on a beach is to be lucky. We know the tides, because they cover the edges of our countries and swell our river mouths and fill our fishing nets, but the connection with the ocean has been lost. If it is described at all, it is as a tomb or a hiding place. Even Tennyson needed the Kraken to batter huge sea worms in its sleep until the last fires heated the deep.
Moby-Dick
is the greatest novel in the English language about the sea.
It is not concerned with the ocean. Only at the end of the book is there a sense of sinking and what is beneath, when the
Pequod
twists into a whirlpool and a death shroud of water closes over it and calms, rolling as it did 5000 years ago. You may have read
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
. The distance in the title refers to the journey taken across, not down. If you read it as a child, it would have been an adventure story. As a grown-up, you might be more interested in Captain Nemo’s background as an Indian national embittered by the Sepoy mutiny. At any rate, there is nothing of oceanography to be learned from the book. Nemo steers the
Nautilus
down deep, but Jules Verne makes the deep hospitable! There is no weighing of atmospheres, no crushing pressure, no eternal night. When Nemo takes Professor Aronnax on an underwater hike to sunken Atlantis, Verne asks the reader to imagine a forested slope in the Harz mountains in Germany, only underwater.

A nuclear submarine is a killing machine, a destroyer of worlds, yet it is fragile. It implodes when it sinks out of its depth. In 1963, the United States submarine
Thresher
was wrecked with such violence that parts of it were scattered across an area several kilometres wide. There is no comparison between the technology of a submarine going across and the unadorned submersible diving deep. This is because our world is firstly about power and only secondly about knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, most advances in submersible technology have come from secret military projects. The United States Navy developed its own submersibles to clear up its own submarines and to locate and recover fragments of sunken Soviet submarines. A Soviet missile, if recovered, would have been worth years of spying on land. One of these submersibles was called
Deep View
. It had a glass nose and dived into the Sea of Okhotsk. Later there was the
NR-1
. It was powered by a small nuclear reactor and could stay submerged for weeks. The director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme handpicked its crew of two scientists and ten sailors. It was
NR-1
that recovered a
gold sextant from the debris of a Soviet sub, from which the navigator was able to calculate the sub’s position, according to the stars.

The Challenger Deep of the Marianas Trench is named after Her Majesty’s ship
Challenger
, a Royal Naval vessel whose 1872–75 voyage was the first and greatest oceanographic expedition.
Challenger
’s mission was to plumb the remote seas and trawl them for new life. It was backbreaking and tedious work, but tens of thousands of new species were discovered. Sometimes a hundred creatures never seen before were returned in a single dredge, then nothing for days on end except the commonest fish and whale bones adorned with nodules of metal. Yet we know now that the slime which covered the inside of the dredge each time it was brought up was not the unexceptional ooze the ship’s scientist believed it to be. Not whale snot, either. It was all that remained of the most exquisite forms of millions of sea squirts, salp, and jellies, whose diaphanous musculature – more remarkable than any alien species yet conceived – had lost its form in air.

To push inwards is hard, to descend even more so; it challenges our sense of who we are and where we came from. This is why, even though we are inundated with seawater, the advances of our oceanographic agencies do not match those of our space agencies.

He had tracked the family of a senior al-Qaeda commander in Africa to an island off Madagascar. The terrorist’s mother lived in a neighbourhood on the slopes of a volcano above the island’s capital. It was a steep walk up from the town. The air grew thin, there were showers of hail. The massif rose lividly above the shacks. Smoking lines of lava ran down it and were glowing welts at night.

The terrorist was near the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. There
was a $5 million bounty on his head. He was elusive: the
New York Times
reported him dead on the day of a State of the Union address. The missile was not even close. He moved between Somalia and Kenya on foot, on donkey, in lorries and on dhows. According to the FBI, he was a bomb maker, an expert in urban warfare, a computer hacker, a forger, and a master of disguise who spoke many languages. The bureau could not accept that it was easy to buy a new identity in Kenya and move up and down the Swahili coast and that several languages were spoken there. His information indicated the terrorist was running scared. He thought of the man as an untrained hunter who had wounded an animal and then did not know what to do. He knew he was hidden in Somalia, in rooms where the television played all day, shaping him in new and unexpected ways.

The mother’s neighbourhood was filled with music and interspersed with Jurassic-looking trees. Volcanic ash fell on its corrugated iron roofs, lava flowed around it. The people were a Creole particular to that island, descended from runaway slaves and pirates who had landed there. She ran a kiosk a few steps back from the street. It was the kind of shack where most of the world goes each day to buy its milk, tomatoes and sundries. She sat on a stool outside, watching the passers-by. She wore a blue dress and crescent moon earrings. She was not veiled. She looked like she was about to pluck a goose, hands on knees, legs set wide apart. He climbed the steps and asked for a drink. She knew immediately why he was there. He followed her into the shack. She pulled a Coke bottle from a bucket of iced water and opened it for him.

‘I’ll give you nothing,’ she said, refusing to look him in the eye. ‘We paid for his education and not a sou did we get. He didn’t even turn up for his father’s funeral.’

She minded very much being found. He could not remember whether her voice had been rough, or not, only that she had struck him like a character in a fairytale – a cottager in a forest – not someone in a shack on the side of a tropical volcano.

He had zigzagged down to the town, pushing away large moths that brushed his face and stumbled into a courtyard where old men were slapping down dominoes on a wooden table under a swaying streetlight. The capital was built with its back to the sea. There were no beaches. The escaped settlers had chosen to face the volcano which sooner or later would spell their doom. There were hardly any animals left on the island. The mongooses had killed the snakes, the people had killed the mongooses. The islanders were ruled by superstitions. There was a miracle mosque that had built itself at night and a crater lake which granted wishes into which a Belgian scuba-diving expedition had gone down and never come back up. There were witches in every village who were paid to cast spells: for a successful visa application to visit France for instance. It was an extreme case of islandism, with no reference to the surrounding ocean. It was as if the rest of the world did not properly exist.

The next day, he remembered, hot ash had fallen on the town and out to sea. Apparently this was quite normal. It was difficult to breathe and the tarmac on the roads bubbled. He met with the terrorist’s sister in a café across from a tennis club called Roland Garros, which had beautiful red clay courts. Her name was Monique. She was more forthcoming.