Dolphin Island

Even so, he was taken by surprise when the coral suddenly fell away beneath his feet and he found himself standing at the very brink of a dark, mysterious pool. The beam of the torch seemed to penetrate only a few inches; though the water was crystal clear, the light was quickly lost in its depths.

“Sure to find some crays here,” said Mick. He lowered himself into the pool with scarcely a splash, leaving Johnny standing above, half a mile from land, in the booming darkness of the reef.

There was no need for him to follow; if he wished, he could remain here until Mick had finished. The pool looked very sinister and uninviting, and it was easy to imagine all sorts of monsters lurking in its depths.

But this was ridiculous, Johnny told himself. He had probably dived in this very pool and had already met all its inhabitants. They would be much more scared of him than he would be of them.

He inspected his flashlight carefully and lowered it into the water to check that it continued shining when submerged. Then he adjusted his face mask, took half a dozen fast, deep breaths, and followed Mick.

The light from the torch was surprisingly powerful, now that both he and it were on the same side of the water barrier. But it revealed only the small patch of coral or sand upon which it fell; outside its narrow cone, everything was blackness—mystery—menace. In these initial seconds of Johnny’s first night dive, panic was not far away. He had an almost irresistible impulse to look over his shoulder to see if anything was following him…

After a few minutes, however, he got control of his nerves. The sight of Mick’s exploring beam of light, flashing and flickering through the submarine darkness a few yards away, reminded him that he was not alone. He began to enjoy peeping into caves and under ledges and coming face to face with startled fish. Once he met a beautifully patterned moray eel that snapped at him angrily from its hole in the rocks and waved its snakelike body in the water. Johnny did not care for those pointed teeth, but he knew that morays never attacked unless they were molested—and he had no intention of making enemies on this dive.

The pool was full of strange noises, as well as strange creatures. Every time Mick banged his spear against a rock, Johnny could hear the sound more loudly than if he had been in air. He could also hear—and sometimes feel through the water—the thudding of the waves against the edge of the reef only a few yards away.

Suddenly he became aware of the new sound, like the patter of tiny hailstones. It was faint, but very clear, and seemed to come from close at hand. At the same moment, he noticed that the beam of his flashlight was beginning to fill with swirling fog.

Millions of little creatures, most of them no larger than grains of sand, had been attracted by the light and were hurling themselves against the lens, like moths into a candle. Soon they were coming in such countless number that the beam was completely blocked; those that missed the flashlight made Johnny’s exposed skin tingle as they battered against him. They were moving at such a speed that he could not be certain of their shapes, though he thought that some of them looked rather like tiny shrimps about the size of rice grains.

These creatures, Johnny knew, must be the larger and more active of the plankton animals, the basic food of almost all the fish in the sea. He was forced to switch off his light until they had dispersed and he could no longer hear—or feel—the patter of their myriad bodies. As he waited for the living fog to drift away, he wondered if any larger creatures might be attracted by his light—sharks, for example. He was quite prepared to face them in the daytime, but it was a very different matter after sunset…

When Mick started to climb out of the pool, he was glad to follow. Yet he would not have missed this experience for anything; it had shown him another of the sea’s many faces. Night could transform the world below the waves, as it transformed the world above. No one knew the sea who explored it only by daylight.

Indeed, only a small part of the sea ever knew daylight Most of it was a realm of eternal darkness, for the rays of the sun could reach only a few hundred feet into its depths before being utterly absorbed. No light ever shone in the abyss—except the cold luminescence of the nightmare creatures who lived there, in a world without sun or seasons.

“What have you caught?” Johnny asked Mick when they had both clambered out of the pool.

“Six crayfish, two tiger cowries, three spider shells, and a volute I’ve never seen before. Not a bad haul—though there was a big cray I couldn’t reach. I could see his feelers, but he backed into a cave.”