Page 342 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
asphalt-like oil clots, too, but they did not appear to be more
concentrated than what we had commonly seen, and they were
tiny, not the large tar-balls we had fished up all across the Atlantic.
In the red soup were large quantities of short slimy bands of
greenish-grey fish eggs, a few bird feathers, and many small dead
coclcnteratcs, just as we had seen in thickly oil-polluted areas
traversed with Ra.
Somehow this red band did not seem the work of nature alone.
The sea off northern Peru turns red at intervals of years, a frighten­
ing phenomenon called ‘the Painter’, caused by the sudden death of
immense quantities of fish and birds which discolours the water.
The marine disaster of the Painter occurs when the equatorial water
of the Nino Current from Panama runs abnormally far south and
enters an area with a biotype adapted to the cold Antarctic water of
the Humboldt Current. But there was no difference in temperature
on the two sides of the red belt we crossed in the Indian Ocean.
We turned away from the painted path in the evening and saw it
no more. The last thing we observed in that area was a huge
1 chasing towards Tigris at a ferocious speed, then rushed like a rocket
hammerhead shark, twice the size of any of us on board, that came
to the buoy we towed behind, zigzagged with undiminished speed
around us once more, and then shot off, fin above water, along the
coloured belt.
Thunderclouds and lightning continued to circle around the
horizon for a couple of days, particularly in the direction of India,
but as we entered the second half of February all storm clouds
disappeared, just as predicted by the harbour authorities in Pakis­
tan. Yet the monsoon did not show up. Its continued absence might
have disastrous effects on the rainy seasons in Asia and Africa. We
sailed into a blue world, all sky and water, a planet where all land
was hidden deep below the sea. No ships, no planes. For days and
weeks we were the only human beings, but not the only life.
We did not see a single fishing-boat in this ocean. There was
supposed to be nothing to catch in the local waters, which were
sometimes described by oceanographers as a marine desert. Perhaps
this supposition was correct. But if this was a desert, then our
reed-ship was indeed a floating oasis. Whatever roamed about in the
surrounding emptiness must have seen our shadow as we drifted
silently like a cloud over the sunlit blue sky. Day by day the
swimming company around us increased. One marine species after
another turned up, multiplied, and the lifeless sea became reanimated
until in the end we felt as if floating in a packed fish hatchery.
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