Submergence (27 page)

Then there was the biological revolution. It was possible to see creatures that had never been noticed before, the living matter of the minestrone, of which only one recently discovered species of pico-phytoplankton in the upper layers of the ocean was reckoned to have a biomass equivalent to the insect life in the Congo River basin. The diversity was overwhelming. She was interested in numbers, in percolation, but almost by accident she had discovered new species. She had overseen the mapping of their DNA, given them a genetic barcode and put them in the book of life (others said the hard drive of life). One of the papers she co-authored with Thumbs had incidentally reinforced the view of some biologists that there were microbes in the sea that were deliberately rare. These microbes were waiting for conditions to change so they could become abundant. She found this a very powerful thought. It changed her idea of what a lifespan meant. A microbe waiting a million years, holding to a different rhythm through those many sunrises and sunsets. What was that rhythm?

The
Pourquoi Pas?
rolled and the portholes were washed with seawater. It rolled back and she saw how the glass shone the length of the ship. The fog closed in. She sang to herself:

In South Australia, my native land

Full of rocks and thieves and sand

I wish I was on Australia’s strand

With a bottle of whisky in my hand.

It was a shanty her father liked to sing. If the world forgot its sea shanties, forgot the sea, it would be even harder to speak of the strangeness of what was under the waves.

They passed through the fog bank and Jan Mayen appeared then with the clarity of a photograph taken with the highest quality camera; thin beaches, blues and greys of augite and pyroxene. The volcano looked like Mount Fuji, only more spectral. The cone coughed up cinders. The fire inside of it glimmered on the underside of the clouds. The iron ore on the slopes, the snowfields and shreds of mist about the rim were the sulphurous way in. Looking at it, considering how it plunged into the sea to a point where it swarmed with seismic tremors and was suppurated with magma, she felt she understood what Saint Brendan said when he had seen the volcano on his incredible sixth-century voyage: that this way into hell, the opening to the infernal regions every damned soul must take.

She pulled a notepad from her bag and a felt-tip pen. She began to write James a letter. It felt good to write to him. These big thoughts were like blackened icebergs. Even in her, with her commitment, they were too big to hold onto. Yet the more she worked on them the less desperate she felt. They effected in her an almost religious sentiment. It was not sub mission – she would work – it was a Buddhist sense of resignation and a feeling of responsibility to her own living form. To Danny Flinders. The very precariousness of her condition and more generally the condition of mankind made her body and choices more precious to herself. It was incumbent upon her to live fully; to give and to receive. The thought of him someplace in Africa brought out a tenderness in her. What she wrote to him then was very intimate, deliberately containing small things which are quickly forgotten: she had a cold, she had managed to avoid having a cabin-mate, Thumbs was in a sweat because he was missing a rock festival and the livestreaming was not working, there were bird droppings on her sleeping bag. It felt good to write with pen on paper in such a place, in such a mood. It felt permanent.

The colours turned pale. It was gelid. Her breath was like steam. Heroic friendships were being formed below decks, the
Nautile
was
being equipped in the aft hangar for its dive the next day, but she was content to remain up above a little longer, wrapped up, staring out at the productive waters, the shearwaters, storm petrels and eider ducks.

If you talk about the acceleration that is in the world, you have to talk about the advances in computational power. There was a recent momentous day when a computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico achieved petaflop speed. One thousand trillion calculations a second. How to conceive of such a rate? If everyone in the world were given a pocket calculator and ordered to tap out sums for six hours a day, it would take them until the twenty-fourth century to match the calculations a petaflop computer can perform in a day.

The exaflop is the next step in the history of computing: one quintillion calculations a second. Then the zettaflop, yottaflop and the xeraflop. The goal is nothing less than to slow down time and colonise it. Of course, a petaflop computer uses more electricity than the power grid of an African city. Then there is the problem of asking useful questions of it.

The sand around the camp was filled with thorns. There were long acacia thorns and round thorns spiked like depth charges. Even with flip-flops, his feet were punctured at every step.

One of the Boni laid a British Enfield rifle and a Soviet PPS submachine gun on the ground together with a few bullets and strips of dried meat. The Boni beckoned one of his children forward. She could
not eat. Her belly was swollen and her skin festered with sores around the ankles and the calves. When the man appealed for help, Saif had him beaten with sticks. A leg cracked under a blow and the beating stopped. It was strange: Saif wanted to see a jinn, but he refused to look the Boni in the eye.

‘You are not good Muslims,’ Saif told them. ‘You worship trees. You eat pigs. You are not welcome on our island. You must go.’

The Boni were expressionless. There was no fear, anger, or bitterness apparent in their faces, just the resignation of the enslaved. They left quickly with the injured hunter and their few possessions: bows and arrows, spears, pots and palm matting. One woman gathered a bundle of clothing and strapped it to her back, while the younger women carried the children. The jihadists gave them kerosene and sugar.

James spoke out in favour of the Boni and was punched in the face. Perhaps it was because he was a witness to the unkindness, or perhaps it was the way he stared so rudely at the wine-coloured callus on the forehead of one of the Pakistanis, where the young man struck his forehead to the ground in prayer. Perhaps it was just because morale was low.

It was not true that the jihadists were self-sufficient and needed nothing more than a prayer mat. They had had high hopes of this camp where there had been so many martyrs before them. They had expected more. The boys from Mogadishu were especially desolate. They had seen a documentary in a video shack about the British Army and had persuaded themselves that the jihad had these facilities. Instead of a shower block and a canteen there were only ruined huts, the roofs collapsed, with the water a walk through the overgrown bush.

There was a baobab tree in the centre of the camp that afforded shade and shelter from the rain. He was ordered to make his own shelter under the tree. He took mangrove stems and drove them into the sand and hung up the mosquito net. He made a palm roof and scooped out a hollow in the sand. He was bound again inside the netting, but with such a length of rope that he could crawl freely and see the comings and goings of the camp.

The first days were spent repairing the huts, hacking out routes in the bush, collecting firewood, and digging latrines. It was hard. They sandbagged the main hut with food aid sacks filled with wet sand. On each of the sacks was a Stars and Stripes and the words
Gift of the People of the United States
.

A fighter fell into a Boni trap and was sent back to Chiamboni with a broken thighbone. There was an infestation of flies, also scorpions. They slept outside on plastic sheeting, under mosquito nets. Food was in short supply. They had handfuls of maize meal, fish and crab. Spaghetti was rationed.

They pinned up a picture of Osama bin Laden. His body was drowned, yet remained living to them. They played games on a laptop, including one where you got to fight Christians in the sixth-century Holy Land. They trained with rocket-propelled grenades and explosives. They trained with knives. There was no mobile-phone signal; the only connection with the world was by speedboat.

Days passed. Weeks. Baboons encircled the camp. The females had red arses to compare with the blue testes of the male colobus monkeys. He watched the baboons coming and going, quarrelling over fruit and scraps. He studied their personalities. He named them after his captors. They were dog-human; they pissed like dogs, but their faces were human.

It was the French polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot, who, on his many voyages to the Greenland Sea,
²
discovered that the
temperature of the Hadal deep is a uniform four degrees Celsius around the world. Its sole virtue is constancy. Its processes are uniform. Cold water percolates into the rock, is superheated, and spurts from the chimneys of hydrothermal vents. It dissolves minerals and metals in the rock and, in this way, provides the ingredients for chemical life in what would otherwise be a deathly night, visited only by matter from above.

Until the discovery of hydrothermal vents off the Galapagos Islands in 1977, scientists assumed that life on earth was photosynthetic and belonged to the surface. It was the other way around: photosynthetic life came later, when cells strayed to the top where they were cooked for millions of years before evolving a way to absorb the light, and all the while the chemosynthetic life in the abyss was evolving a stability we cannot hope for.

The hydrothermal vents are only a small part of it. In the fissures, crevices, clefts and cracks; in the volcanic pus, in all the amazing lattices of the deep, are heat-loving or hyperthermophile protists, archaea, fungi and especially bacteria, which together constitute the earliest life on our planet. They are chemosynthetic, with no need of the sun. They live off hydrogen, carbon dioxide or iron. They excrete methane, or eat it. Some breathe in rust to produce magnetic iron. They feed on the anaerobic and on what is no longer living. When you place them in a Petri dish, they multiply into a colony visible to the naked eye. If you dwell on them they change the way we see ourselves. They are the factory workers, unquestioning, dynamic: the base. Less than one per cent of them have been identified, they are a part of you. You carry a weight of them in your belly and on your skin.

The microbial life of the deep exists in the queerest plane, where worms live in scalding pools and keep fleeces of microbes on their backs that are even more extraordinary than those that live on the timbers of our eyelashes.