MYSTICISM UNDER THE WATER

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27670, 28 May 1955, Page 3

MYSTICISM UNDER THE WATER

The Seas of Sicily. By Philippe Diole. Sidgwick and Jackson. 176

The underwater is becoming popular territory. To all its visitors it appears, to judge from their books, to be a most fascinating world. To some the charm is more mundane—the excitement of deep fishing or of the exploration of wrecks. Philippe Diole belongs to another category. To him the hidden world that he finds under the surface brings something that is almost akin to mysticism. It is a new realm to be explored and understood and to him it can bring spiritual experience as profound as to some who climb mountains. “Underwater exploration,” he writes, “is a form of mental excitement, an excitement moreover that is neither disruptive nor confusing . . . the tenuous of its aims puts it outside number and distance and allows it only the exquisite, the perfect, and the consummate.” Though the reader may not be able to follow Mr Diole the whole way, he is given an opportunity to appreciate his point of view. As he has already shown in the "Undersea Adventure,” Mr Diole has considerable gifts as a writer and is able to explain himself with both clarity and force. The present book was written after an exploration of the seas around Sicily. It is an elegaic book in which the author helps the reader to share to the full the beauty and strangeness of an unfamiliar world. At the same time Mr Diole writes extremely well of Sicily itself; his descriptions of some of the famous and some of the lesser known places of that island are very fine. The sea may be his inspiration, but it has not distracted him from delights to be found elsewhere. Tut is for the sea that Mr Diole reserves his reverence.