Seven-Tenths (23 page)

The pleasure Beebe took in the luminous fish he saw was mixed with wonder at this evidence of a rich and entirely alien way of life where
ambient darkness was as little a problem as either cold or pressure. More than sixty years earlier when aboard
Porcupine
, shortly before the
Challenger
expedition, Wyville Thomson had noted the light given off by coelenterate fauna such as gorgonians and sea pens brought to the surface in the trawl, marvelling that it should be bright enough for him to be able to read his watch by it. On one occasion what he saw gave him a glimpse into that illuminated underworld.

Much research has gone into the bioluminescence of different marine organisms, a subject made more complicated because the light has no unitary function. It seems that flashes of luminescence may be used variously as a defence, to entice prey, and as a sexual display. It may be seasonal or constant. It is even thought that some creatures may adroitly vary the wavelengths they emit, thereby using light itself as a method of camouflage. This is the same principle as the red colorations used by deeper reef creatures to make themselves look grey and stonelike, though beyond a limited depth there is little point in talking in terms of colour. The theory goes that an animal could camouflage itself by emitting low levels of light if it exactly replaced that lost by absorption on its upper surface. The light would have to be of precisely the right strength, at the right wavelengths and of the right angular distribution (since below about 400 metres the remaining light falls vertically and is no longer refracted at other angles). There is increasing evidence to support this theory, and certainly the eyes of many creatures of the deep twilight and lower zones are highly sensitive to light and to the
subtlest variations in its intensity and wavelength. Animals such as squid and hatchet fish use amounts of daylight which would appear indistinguishably black to human eyes in order to regulate their vertical migrations.

The discovery that vast numbers of animals rise to the upper waters at night and return to the depths during the day was surrounded by secrecy in World War II. Three scientists experimenting with sonar aboard the USS
Jasper
in 1942 had found a layer in the water at between 1,000 and 1,500 feet from which echoes bounced as if it were solid. This was not made public until 1946 because it was thought an enemy submarine might take advantage of the layer by hiding beneath it. In 1945 the Scripps Institution of Oceanography found that this layer moved up at night and down during the day and concluded it must be alive. Now known as the Deep Scattering Layer, its movement varies seasonally and from place to place. It consists of huge numbers of small animals migrating punctually up and down the water column, some by as much as 1,500 or 2,000 feet. The DSL is probably the chief cause of bogus sonar contacts, and many a ship has reported ‘lost’ land lurking just beneath the waves where later investigators have found only thousands of feet of water.

The deeps triumphantly disclosed the consequences of Darwin’s ideas of natural selection in that the often bizarre colours and shapes of abyssal fauna emerged as exquisite adaptations to extreme circumstances. The ‘azoic’ theory had betrayed as nothing else the limits of understanding of the nature of life, and how erroneous all judgements were when based solely on human considerations of what might constitute a liveable environment.

Where ‘monsters’ are concerned, they may yet be found, although it is unlikely, owing to scarcity of food, that they will be from the very deepest parts of the ocean. However, if the Kraken is mythical, the giant squid is not. Huge specimens – and fragments of even huger – have occasionally surfaced. It is clear from measuring the sucker marks on dead whales that immense battles must take place in the middle deeps involving squid of a size never yet seen. The great mass of the oceans remains unexplored, even as the contours of their beds are electronically surveyed. Their waters must hide
many species strange to taxonomy, but this is hardly surprising. Letting down nets here and there may catch few creatures with acute sensory equipment and evasive powers. The world a mile or more down keeps its secrets well, with neither victors nor victims necessarily leaving the least trace of their lives. As regards the deepest trench faunas, there has been relatively little recent research because most of the effort and money has been directed towards studying the vent communities around ‘black smokers’, which have the required glamour to attract funding.

As to geology, the seabed turns out to be of great use in climate modelling. It is possible to weigh the atoms of oxygen trapped in fossil shells brought up in sediment cores and determine what the temperature was when the creatures were alive. Such cores have also yielded information about monsoons and glaciation. It seems the present pattern of monsoons only started some 10 million years ago, and a theory has been put forward that they have been directly influenced by the vertical uplift of land masses (as a result, one should point out, of horizontal movement elsewhere). In the last million years alone the Himalayas have risen over 2 kilometres and it now seems likely that winds and precipitation have been directly influenced by this uplift, much as the construction of a groyne or breakwater can lead to the silting up or scouring of an adjoining bay.

‘
There rolls the deep where grew the tree
. …’ The last Ice Age locked up enormous volumes of water during the Pleistocene when what today is known as Dogger Bank in the North Sea emerged as land. It was boggy and forested and became full of men hunting animals with flint weapons, chasing deer and bear and wild ox among the willows and birches. None of this was known until the nineteenth century when widespread trawling started and to their surprise fishermen discovered a lumpy plateau almost the size of Holland lying only 60 feet below the sea’s surface. They inferred that this had once been land when they began netting bones and axeheads and moorlog (a kind of peat). The waning of the Ice Age, that era’s equivalent of the greenhouse effect, brought an endless close season to the Pleistocene hunt. There must have been a long, mournful period of many centuries as the ice melted and the sea level began to rise again
to turn this land between East Anglia and the Netherlands into an archipelago, dozens of scattered islands with heterogeneous collections of hyenas, woolly rhinoceros and mammoth struggling for survival on ever-decreasing patches of territory. Then, at length, nothing but the deep. A mere 50,000 years ago and the forests of Dogger would have been visible from what is now the coast of Lincolnshire. Tennyson, fast in the grip of transience and loss and Charles Lyell’s bleak discoveries, had no need of them to complete his vision.

On the coast of a Philippine province there is a small town. On the landward side of the road, set well back among coconut palms and jasmine, is a whitewashed church with a green tin roof, only one of several civic buildings including an elementary school and an abandoned health centre. A legend surrounds this church, one known to every fisherman in town and to every boy who ever jumped off the little coral pier clutching a speargun. The legend
underlies
the church rather than surrounds it, for the story goes that there is a passage leading from the sea to a cave deep beneath it which is the lair of a giant octopus. There certainly is a fissure in the thick cap of fossil coral which covers much of the volcanic basalt of the island’s coasts. Its mouth lies about 25 feet below the surface at high tide and at night a powerful underwater flashlight shone nervously in reveals no end to its interior.

In the absence of scuba gear there is nothing to be done, since only a madman attempts to explore a submarine cave with a chestful of air. There would be nothing to be done in any case. Whether or not one has been worked on by the legend, this particular depth-less black slit does exude a peculiar aura of menace. The water around the mouth is always several degrees colder than elsewhere and very few fish appear ever to venture in. If there really were some great monster lying tucked away inside, a good deal of food would need to swim unwarily in for it to survive. On the other hand, it may be that one way or another much of the town’s drains seep into this crack and the creature survives on ordure. It might even have grown so fat it could no longer leave if it wanted to and is bottled up in its coral crypt. The thought of swimming up a sewer to confront a trapped monster is another good reason for not making the attempt.

These are all excuses, of course. The fact is, I am afraid of the place and so is everybody else. From the sunlit surface above its opening one can look across the road through the palms and see the church’s corrugated roof. If the fissure really does extend that far, it must be at least 100 metres long. Up in the brilliant daylight the whole legend looks different. The idea of a demon Kraken lying in its lair beneath a church is too naively Filipino, too redolent of Christian mythmaking to be more than the embroidery with which the credulous have ornamented a freak of local geology. Nevertheless, I am not going inside.

Only a mile or two down the coast and not far out to sea the reefs drop suddenly into ultramarine depths. By swimming out over the shallow corals it is possible to pretend one is low flying, hedgehopping above rough coral terrain, an illusion strengthened by soaring out over this great abyss. So abrupt and powerful is the effect one may even feel one’s stomach drop. It was here, over the years, that I would practise seeing how far down I could swim, to set my own private record. Soon I knew every ledge on this cliff face, each downward step of the agonising but exhilarating journey. I knew each level by its peculiar feature – a coral outcrop or eccentric sponge – and also by its ambient light. I knew as well as Beebe where red became grey, where my blood looked dark green in the water. This series of terraces now seems a lunatic perpendicular
via crucis
, every step gained representing pain, but it also stands as a chill measure of ageing. I can no longer reach the very deepest of the shelves I once touched, raising a confirmatory plume of silt still visible from the surface like a triumphant smoke signal impressively far below. I might again, I tell myself, but only if I lost weight since fat is buoyant and means one has to burn up more oxygen to drag it all downwards. Since I can no longer measure my own record I have to estimate it as between 85 and 95 feet, rather less than the average local teenager can manage when harvesting big white sea cucumbers.

It was here, perhaps to spite myself, I tried ‘riding the rock’ instead, or using a weight to pull me down. This is how no-limits free-diving records are set. Nobody labours to swim down; they ride the rock and when they let go they hope their still uncollapsed lungs
contain enough air for them to claw their way back to the surface.
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Taken to extremes it is a lethal sport, but I had no intention of going very deep. In the event, the whole business felt faintly embarrassing. There is something foolish about loading rocks into a dinghy, rowing out and jumping overboard clutching them to one’s chest. The first was too heavy and took me down so fast I could not ‘clear’ in time and the pain in my ears made me let go at about 30 feet. The next took me down rather languidly, and it was a pleasure to see ledges I had fought to reach drifting upwards past me like floors in a descending lift. With a subsequent rock I passed my own record and was pulled onwards into unknown territory. I do not believe I ever went further than about 160 feet. There was something disagreeably inexorable about the downward tug. It was not as if one doubted for a moment that one’s arms would release the weight before it was too late, but it had something to do with increasing pressure and deepening gloom which I had never experienced without breathing apparatus. Perhaps because the motion was entirely vertical and swift one imagined dissolving like a meteor, leaving a trial of silver bubbles, soon to be worn away to nothing by the rasping caress of the sea.

Beebe had written, ‘The only other place comparable to these marvelous nether regions must surely be naked space itself … where sunlight has no grip upon the dust and rubbish of planetary air.’ The exploration of space and of the deep sea have obvious things in common. Both require venturers to be supplied with complex life-support systems and defended against extreme ambient pressure, whether positive or negative. At a mythic level, however, there are important differences, many of which – in the case of deeps – have to do with the dark.

The famous and fatuous opposition of light and darkness is pre-Socratic in origin, only one pair of many made up of a ‘noble’ element (right, above, hot, male, dry, etc.) and an ‘ignoble’ (left,
below, cold, female, wet). By the sixth and fifth centuries
BC
the faculty of vision and the attributes of knowledge had run together in the Greek word
theorein
, meaning both ‘to see’ and ‘to know’. Knowledge was henceforth a register of vision. Ignorance therefore becomes a lack of knowledge predicated on objects not being visible, so darkness equals ignorance. In turn, the dark becomes a source of fear as if a knowledge of visible objects were the only defence against terror and anxiety. By the eighteenth century the light of reason stood for the banishing of primordial fear: literally, enlightenment. Superstition as a concept is a product of eighteenth-century topology.
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Where the ocean’s deeps are concerned several other dualities operate as well, such as up/down, lightness/pressure, outwards/inwards and future/past. To go into space is in some sense to go forwards; to go down into the depths is at a psychic level to regress.

Why should this be? Space travel is ‘going forwards’ in the obvious sense that it involves technological ‘progress’, but so does deep sea exploration. It is as though
Homo
viewed himself in spatial rather than temporal terms, as if his history had been one not of eras and dynasties so much as of steady territorial expansion. Maybe the whole of human history might be rewritten, leaving out dates and measuring instead the boundaries pushed outwards by tribes on their way to becoming nations, by earthlings as they stake out their claims to colonise the solar system. Yet even with nations claiming EEZs and seabed rights it never feels an appropriate choice of cliché when journalists call the ocean depths ‘the last frontier’. As always, the sea is really less connected with space than with
time
, as if there were a correlation between going deep and going back. Thus the deeper one went the more primitive would be the life forms encountered, the more prehistoric and inchoate.

This must be a comparatively recent idea, post-Darwinian, at any rate, and taking into account a popular version of Victorian scientists’ excitement on learning that the deeps were not azoic. The
finding of the first coelacanth would have strengthened this, as does every fresh ‘sighting’ of the Loch Ness Monster. Legends of monsters and sea serpents are at least as ancient as the written word, but presumably it is only after the mid-nineteenth century that they begin to be depicted as prehistoric and corresponding loosely to fossil forms. The Loch Ness Monster is almost invariably spoken of nowadays not as some unknown species of sea snake or eel but as a saurian of prehistoric type. Since this is what people wish to be there, it is faithfully confirmed by all the ‘sightings’. It is thus a true remnant of a misapprehension by nineteenth-century science.

Myths of space travel do include visits to worlds at an earlier stage of evolution than our own. Yet even these are often in ‘obscure’ backwaters of space, as if in the scriptwriters’ imaginations space corresponded to a vast ocean in which the most developed regions tended to be those appearing from Earth most brightly lit. (‘Rigel Concourse’ in Jack Vance’s stories is a good example, Rigel being a pure white, first-magnitude star. This is exactly where one would expect to find our outwardly bound pioneering descendants rather than huddled around some dismal cepheid variable out in the galactic sticks.) All this apart, the creatures most commonly associated with space operas as well as with UFOlogy are of an intelligence superior to ours, and with the waning of American paranoia about Communism they tend to be less and less bent on kidnapping and brainwashing. Nowadays space aliens may well incline towards the godlike, beings from whom we might acquire knowledge, enlightenment, light itself, before it is too late.

The mythology of our own planet’s oceans is the polar reverse of all this, so much so that the nether world sometimes seems hardly part of the Earth at all. It is worth examining this from the popular standpoint for a moment because it shows how the concept of ‘the deeps’ relies on a jumble of associative ideas. Far from being likely to find enlightenment the further down we go, then, we expect to meet ever-dumber creatures. Moreover – exactly opposite to actuality – we envisage them near the bottom as still bigger, more terrifying in their mindless strength, and
uglier
… in fact, monsters. To this extent they are remarkably similar to the nightmare creatures of the
unconscious: tentacular horrors which enwrap and bear their victims down and down to lairs where, in due time, begins the business of the hideous rending beak and saucerlike eyes. The very gradations of sleep itself seem to suggest a vertical descent into annihilating depths, the deepest levels of sleep being those of oblivion. The levels of dreaming, like the layers of the ocean which can support the biggest life forms, lie nearer the surface. In any case, by descending into the sea we would expect to meet the monstrous rather than the divine. Gods are the last things we would imagine finding in the deeps. It is no accident that even the men we encounter tend to be people like Captain Nemo, ominous whichever way we read his name. Astronauts have claimed close encounters with a Supreme Being, but never deep sea divers. Nor should we be surprised. Superior beings are by definition on top, while only the inferior can lurk below. The deeps also remind us of where we suppose we originally came from, what we have left behind. Going back thus to our genetic roots rather than to the sunlit idyll of Eden is a disquieting affair. Did we not abandon our ancestral dark by crawling towards the light?

No; we did not. The sea, to its dwellers, is not a dark place. With exceedingly acute eyes perceiving low levels of light and complex codes of bioluminescence; with sensitivity to sounds, smells and minute pressure differentials far beyond the spectrum of our own senses, it is as pointless to speak in crude human terms of ‘light’ and ‘dark’ as it would be when speculating about what a bat sees. A bat ‘sees’ with its ears with great precision and at speed. In short, there is no such thing as darkness. It exists only in the perception of the beholder. Vision, like understanding, does not depend on light.

To these ‘oppositions’ and their associations (up/down, above/below, superior/inferior, heaven/hell) should be added striving/sinking, where the first generally implies upward aspiration and self-betterment and the second is redolent of slummocking on a downward path, of Jack finding his own level while still undrowned. ‘Sinking’ is also used to describe wretched people glistening with sickness on their deathbeds, as if their problem were only one of weakness and they could no longer resist the force of gravity tugging them down towards their graves. That there might be something
subtler at work than these pairs of opposites is suggested by the Latin word
altus
which can mean both high and deep (as it does still in Italian and where
l’alto
means ‘the Deep’ in an oceanic sense which also lingers in the English phrase ‘the high seas’). In the Freudian unconscious, at least, such an idea would not embody a contradiction because there are no contradictions in the unconscious. Entirely antithetical and mutually cancelling propositions can exist simultaneously with not the slightest difficulty.

Perhaps, then, the least strange thing about the Deep is the degree to which it has retained its psychic force, its sonorous and chilling stateliness, its amalgamation of height and depth, of gulfs of space and of time. Almost no matter what is done to the oceans, however much they are explored and exploited, even ravaged and polluted, the Deep surprises us by its resistance to contamination. In this respect its resembles the Moon, which still feels much the same even though we know its dust bears the frivolous prints of cleated boots playing golf. The fact is, it was a different moon on which the astronauts landed, just as it is a different deep which GLORIA deafens with its sonar signals and whose silt is scarred by remotely controlled sleds gathering the sort of things a sled would gather. Neither Beebe nor Piccard nor Ballard ever visited the Deep. They reached various depths, even the ocean bed, but they carried the Deep within them. It is not a space to which there is physical access. Yet an air of mystery, no matter how slight, still surrounds objects retrieved from the depths, even beer bottles and polystyrene cups lowered by the curious. People like to touch things brought up, such as hoppers full of nodules. They like to feel the chill of aeons before it fades, just as they like to handle meteorites and moon rocks. If the ocean vanished tomorrow its mystery would not be found in the sum of its creatures flopping and dying and rotting on its bed. It exists elsewhere altogether, as Tennyson well knew when he capitalised on its high melancholy to express his grief over Arthur Hallam’s death, hidden and heightened in a transition: ‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes.’
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