Page 351 - The Tigris Expedition

From Asia to Africa; from Mcluhha to Punt
speed, straight for Carlo, who calmly continued to wash his leg.
Then, fortunately, the brute began to behave strangely, wagging its
tail and whipping the surface as if in challenge before attack. Carlo
looked up and saw the big predator approaching fast and directly
towards his leg. With the remarkable strength of a life-long moun-
tain climber Carlo hoisted himself up with one arm and grabbed the
side bundle with the other as he swung himself up from the rudder
blade. The men aft estimated that another shark-length, equalling
another second, saved Carlo from losing his foot.
We had almost reached Africa when Gherman without my
knowledge took an unforgivable risk. While all but the helmsmen
were dozing in the shade of the cabins after a good dolphin lunch, he
donned his rubber suit and let himself out from the stern on a long
rope to film the mixed company that swam in our wake. Hanging
there with his goggles on, white-fin sharks and other fish
approached him and paraded on cither side of his camera. Some
species were by now so tame that Torn used to swim out with a bag
of chopped sea food and feed them with his hand. Hanging alone,
far behind, Gherman noted one of the really big man-eaters deep
down below. It had already seen him and came in slow circles up
from the depths. Gherman had filmed sharks in his own Caribbean
Sea and most other shark-infested waters on our planet, so he knew
when one of them was approaching with evil intentions. As calmly
as possible he started to pull himself in.
While the rest of us were out of sight and most of us dozing, HP
and Rashad were joking and laughing between themselves on the
steering bridge, and had no notion of what was going on in the
ocean behind them. Circle by circle the shark came higher as
Gherman, grip by grip, pulled himself closer to Tigris. Nobody was
there to pull him aboard. An uncontrolled grip or a provocative
sound or'movement, and the shark would have rushed to attack. It
was there, right below him, as he grabbed the starboard rudder-oar
and pulled himself up on the bundles. He was pale, speechless,
confused, angry at himself and at war with everybody for a couple
of days after his unjustifiable adventure.
Among the inhabitants of the open aquarium under Tigris were
rainbow-runners and trigger-fish, two species not known to us
from previous raft voyages in other seas. The rainbow-runner,
Elagatis bipinnulatis, was a beauty in lines and colour, slim and
speedy as a projectile. It derives its name from the two blue and two
yellow stripes that run lengthwise on either side, separating the
silvery belly from the dark blue back, and it has a tail of pure gold.
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