Dolphin Island

The first time that Johnny went out onto the reef, Mick was his guide. Because he had no idea what to expect, everything was very strange—and a little frightening. He did well to be cautious until he knew his way around. There were things on the reef—small, innocent-looking things— that could easily kill him if he was careless.

The two boys walked straight out from the beach on the western side of the island, where the exposed reef was only half a mile wide. At first they crossed an uninteresting no man’s land of dead, broken coral—shattered fragments cast up by the storms of centuries. The whole island was built of such fragments, which the ages had covered with a thin layer of earth, then with grass and weeds, and at last with trees.

They were soon beyond the zone of dead coral, and it seemed to Johnny that he was moving through a garden of strange, petrified plants. There were delicate twigs and branches of colored stone, and more massive shapes like giant mushrooms or fungi, so solid that it was safe to walk on them. Yet despite their appearance, these were not plants, but the creations of animal life. When Johnny bent down to examine them, he could see that their surfaces were pierced by thousands of tiny holes. Each was the cell of a single coral polyp—a little creature like a small sea anemone—and each cell had been built of lime secreted by the animal during its lifetime. When it died, the empty cell would remain, and the next generation would build upon it And so the reef would grow, year by year, century by century. Everything that Johnny saw—the miles upon miles of flat tableland, glistening beneath the sun—was the work of creatures smaller than his fingernail.

And this was only one patch of coral in the whole immensity of the Great Barrier Reef, which stretched for more than a thousand miles along the Australian coast. Now Johnny understood a remark that he had heard Professor Kazan make—that the Reef was the mightiest single work of living creatures on the face of the Earth.

It did not take Johnny long to discover that he was walking on other creatures besides corals. Suddenly, without the slightest warning, a jet of water shot into the air, only a few feet in front of him. “Whatever did that?” he gasped. Mick laughed at his amazement. “Clam,” he answered briefly. “It heard you coming.” Johnny caught the next one in time to watch it in action. The clam was about a foot across, embedded vertically in the coral so that only its open lips were showing. The body of the creature (partly out of its shell), looked like a beautifully colored piece of velvet, dyed the richest of emeralds and blues. When Mick stamped on the rock beside it, the clam instantly snapped shut in alarm—and the water it shot upward just missed Johnny’s face.

“This is only a little feller,” said Mick contemptuously. “You have to go deep to find the big ones—they grow up to four, five feet across. My grandfather says that when he was working on a pearling lugger out of Cooktown, he met a clam twelve feet across. But he’s famous for his tall stories, so I don’t believe it.”

Johnny didn’t believe in the five-foot clams either; but, as he found later, this time Mick was speaking the exact truth. It wasn’t safe to dismiss any story about the reef and its creatures as pure imagination.

They had walked another hundred yards, accompanied by occasional squirts from annoyed clams, when they came to a small rock-pool. Because there was no wind to ruffle the surface, Johnny could see the fish darting through the depths as clearly as if they had been suspended in air.

They were all the colors of the rainbow, patterned in stripes and circles and spots as if some mad painter had run amok with his palette. Not even the most garish butterflies were more colorful and striking than the fish flitting in and out of the corals.

And the pool held many other inhabitants. When Mick pointed them out to him, Johnny saw two long feelers protruding from the entrance of a little cave; they were waving anxiously to and fro as if making a survey of the outside world.

“Painted Crayfish,” said Mick. “Maybe we’ll catch him on the way back. They’re very good eating—barbecued with lots of butter.”

In the next five minutes, he had shown Johnny a score of different creatures. There were several kinds of beautifully patterned shells; five-armed starfish crawling slowly along the bottom in search of prey; hermit crabs hiding in the shells that they had made their homes; and a thing like a giant slug, which squirted out a cloud of purple ink when Mick prodded it.