The Endless Mystery.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4811, 17 July 1939, Page 3

The Endless Mystery.

(Copyright.)

The forest of sea trees mention-

ed in this story is well known. It encircles a deep hole in the ocean floor near Darnley Island, Torres Strait. Two divers met their deaths among these trees, as described.

QN the lake-like sea both luggers

had drawn almost dangerously close together. Perhaps impelled by that unknown power which will attract driftwood to driftwood; probably the tide was the influence. "Fate!" mused Heywood. "Like human life drifting goodness knows where."

He was sitting on the hatchway smoking. His eyes scanned the white posts on a grassy hillside. "The Divers' Graveyard. Alive today, dead tonight. I wonder if the dead really do die—finish!" The tender, whistling cheerily amidships, was overhauling the diving gear preparatory to the afternoon drift. The crew squatted on the deck opening shells. With the deft twist of their knives they laughed hilariously at carefree island jokes. The bluff slopes of Darnley Island near by stood up out of the sea, the white posts of the Divers' Graveyard plain on the hillside. Both luggers were drifting in dangerous waters debarred by law for that reason on the hill. The bottom around Darnley is notorious for its deep holes, which means pressure and paralysis to the luckless or unwary. But the shell in patches is rich, and these divers were prepared to defy the law of man and sea and take a risk.

At a hail from the companion lugger Heywood waved in response. The vessel was manned by Japanese, whose diver invited him to dive in company.

Clothed in thick woollens against cold, they helped Heywood into the clumsy diving-dress, adjusting corslet and weight's and big domed helmet with seriousness and care. Cumbersomely he climbed overside and clung to the ladder waiting while a similar monster took to the water from the companion vessel. Heywood nodded to the tender, who started the air-supply pumps. Heywood's face, deep in the helmet and framed by that little round hole, looked like a schoolboy's. By ear and nostril he gauged the working of the pumps, pumps that were to supply him with air. Satisfied, he nodded "0.K." The tender screwed on the face-glass. Heywood felt as isolated as a caterpillar in a cocoon. From his prison he gazed with more than usual longing on the old familiar world. He regulated his airvalve to the forced stream of air, his fingers tuned to a delicate nicety, allowing in just sufficient air for his bodily requirements and to fill his suit so that he would sink with a speed as nearly as possible controlled by himself. Satisfied he was master of his air and movements he nodded "0.K.," then slipped into the water with a backward motion, slowly sinking to a stream of bubbles. "Like entering into another world," he thought. "These dreaming fancies are persistent to-day." The water was crystal clear; the sunlight reflected upon it from that intense blue sky characteristic of Torres Strait. Under such conditions, visibility is extended under-below to a distance and depth perhaps unknown in other seas.

He slipped down fairly fast through yellow-green water that darkened into blue-green at ten fathoms; then he descended more slowly. Through the side-glass he watched his companion descending "like a bloated spider," he mused. "I hope he doesn't get his web entangled with mine; we're drawingjolly close together." The lifelines and air-pipes loomed like hazy threads sagging down from above. Gradually the "spider" faded away as increasing depth blurred vision. At twenty fathoms, Heywood was gazing anxiously for bottom, descending very slowly, increasing by manipulating the air-valve the airpressure within his suit to press back the increasing external water pressure, and inhaling the ever-greater quantities of air clamoured for by his system. At twenty-five fathoms there formed below him a dull, brownish-yellow blanket. Like a blurred shadow it appeared to grow wavering upwards. He landed gently and gladly on this sandy bottom, then moved forward, lightly pressed by the tide, his fingers making the demanded air adjustments so that his body could live, and move, and think. He walked

By lON L. IDRIESS.

AUSTRALIA'S MOST POPULAR WRITER

slowly now in shadowland where dwell silence and blurry things.

The pearl-oyster does not thrive on sand, so Heywood moved continually forward, searching the shadow bottom, peer through his faceand side-glasses at the shadows dow bottom, peering through his facewas accentuated by the far-off beat of the pumps, thumping hazily down through the air-pipe like the heartbeats of some far-away giant. Occasionally the heart-beats had unregisterable sounds, funny unguessable whispers that sobbed in mysteriously. For, when under great pressures, sound and brain, sight and thought, movement and blood and nerves alter their vitality and meaning in a manner unrealised by us above.

A shadow apparently on the bottom grew eerily defined into coiling strands of shadow serpents that was really sea-grass, with a vague patch behind it that merged into darkness. Heywood smiled relief; for a diver dislikes a drift wherein he sees nothing but wasted time and sand. To his left presently loomed a shadow pyramid that was a hillock under the sea. Heywood drifted in amongst the grass patches and found himself walking down a sloping incline with snake-like grasses coiling to his thighs. , Cumbersomely he moved his great boots ahead. Inside the suit, though, he could move quite easily; he felt very light, too, for he was moving in air. But to carry that big suit about, under the great waterpressure, necessitated slow, methodical movement.

Then loomed a threatening shadow that grew into a gigantic diver, becoming smaller but still magnified as the men approached each other. Like mammoth crabs they sidled closer. They stood, their domed heads thrust back as they peered up at the hazy droop of the lines reassuringly free from danger or entangling. The Jap sidled close and edged his helmet against Heywood's.

But Heywood heard only an indecipherable volleyings of noises like word sounds rumbling in a canister. Heywood shook his head. The small, brown face behind the face-glass smiled, nodding and edged back into largeness again. Pressed by the tide, both grotesque shapes moved on into the shadow depths keenly peering at the rockeries gay with sea-cabbages large as wheelbarrows; at the coral ledges draped with reddish manes of seamaids' hair; at the terraces of halfleaf, half animal-like growth in their hideous, their beautiful shapes, their weird mottling, their often ravishing colours; at the crawly things frighteningly suggestive of vindictive life. The pearl is often the hidden flower in such under-sea gardens, the pearl that round one tiny grain of sand in an oyster's belly, grows and grows and finally kills the life within the mother shell.

Fearfully those groping shadows halted, bracing back against the tide, the Jap with upthrust arm, Heywood's heart dangerously beating as they pressed back from a ledge overhanging a "hole." The deep-sea diver dreads falling into a hole in the bottom of the sea!

As nearly blind beings would, they peered down into that thick greygreen while edging back from its darker mystery. Probably, below them stretched a valley with its black cliffs and abysmal chasms terrifying in their invisible dangers, so unlike mountain valleys in the world above the sea.

Each had reached for his life-line to signal hauling in of the slack and each had stepped hard back against the tide—too late! That grass ledge that could stand the weight of unknown tons of water but not of two small men from a world regulated by other laws, collapsed, and out, over, and down they swept into depths of greatly increased pressure, their oxygen-inflamed minds overwhelmed with a horror that drowned the precious seconds in which reason might perhaps have saved them. The helmets bumped and those inside realised rather than heard a medley of sound never tuned to any sound on earth above.

Instinctive fingers closed their airescape valves, seeking an inrush of air to force back the water-pressure now rapidly enclosing them in a "squeeze" of death. It was all over, even as the tenders above snatched the slipping life-lines and felt them fast. Dov/n below Heywood sagged open-mouthed to the compressed air, his body convulsively straightening as the suit slowly filled out; he wondered (how he battled to overcome the wonder that races an oxygenfilled mind to a deathly exhilaration)

whether he had "got the air" in time to prevent the "squeeze" giving him paralysis. He would not know until he got on top—on top! A tugging at the life-line prompted him to tug "Haul up!" and he was drawn strongly up, only to be held back as if by a definite hand from the sea. He grated against the Jap's faceglass, the man's face was just coming down (he had been squeezed up into the* helmet), his eyes protruded like fishes' eyes, blood dripped from his nostrils. Heywood's ears buzzed to indecipherable sounds from the grating helmets as his lifeline reluctantly slackened. He gazed at what he was gripping as though he was facing a ghost—he was gripping the limb of a tree! He read dawning horror in the Jap's magnified eyes slowly regaining reason. Both divers were entangled in the branches of a sea tree. Around them like pictures seen in a storm-cloud were the ebony limbs of weird trees —they had fallen among a forest of them. Heywood closed his eyes; deliberately dismissed thought; and with iron will concentrated on manipulating his air-valve until he felt his body and suit adjusted to the increased pressures of air and water. Then he forced his mind to realise that the excess of oxygen he was consuming would drive him thoughtmad unless he could calm his reason. Only when master of his exhilarated mentality did he allow his eyes to open and thoughts to form.

(Continued on page 7.)