Halfway across, the water overwhelmed him. It tore him off his
precarious perch, hurled him back into the basin below and swirled him
end over end. He surfaced in the middle of the pool, and once again had
to Swim with all his strength to break free of the grip of the current
and to reach the slack water below the wall again. He clung to his
handhold in the stone niche, and panted like a bellows.
"Nothing?" she called.
He shook his head, unable to answer until he had finally regained his
breath. Finally he managed: "Nothing.
It's a solid rock wall behind the falls." He gasped another breath, and
then invited sarcastically, "Next bright idea, madam?"
She was silent and he was glad of the respite. Then she called again,
"Nicky, how far do those niches go down?"
"You can see," he told her, "right to the one I am holding on to."
"What about below the surface?"
"Don't be silly, woman." He was getting cold and irritable. "How the
hell could there be cuttings below the surface?"
"Try!" she yelled almost as iff itably. He shook his head pityingly, and
drew a deep breath. Still clinging to his handhold, he extended his
limbs and body to their full stretch. Then his head went under the dark
surface as he groped down as far as he could reach with his toes.
Suddenly he shot back, snorting for air with a startled look on his
face. "By Jove!" he shouted. "You are right!
There is another niche down there!'
"I hate to say I told you so." Even at that range he could see the smug
expression on her face.
"What are you? Some kind of witch?" Then he broke off and rolled his
eyes heavenward in despair. "I know what you are going to ask me to do
next."
"How far do the niches go down?" she called in honeyed tones. "Will you
dive down for me, dear Nicky?"
"That's it," he said. "I knew it. I am going to speak to my shop
steward. This is slave labour. From now onwards I am on strike."
"Please, Nicky!'
He hung in the water'pumping air in and out of his lungs,
hyperventilating, flushing his . bloodstream with oxygen to increase his
underwater endurance to its limits.
In the end he expelled the contents of his lungs completely, squeezing
out the last breath until his chest ached with the effort, and then he
sucked in again, filling his lungs to their capacity with fresh air.
Finally, with his chest fully expanded, he duck-dived, standing on his
head with his legs high out of the water and letting their weight drive
him under.
Sliding head-first down the submerged wall, he reached down, groping for
the next niche below the surface. He found it, and used it to accelerate
his dive, pulling himself on downwards.
He found the second niche below that, and pulled himself on downwards.
The niches were about six feet apart - a nautical fathom. Using them as
a measure, he was able to calculate his progress accurately.
Swimming on downwards, he found another niche, then another. Four rows
of niches, twenty-four feet below the surface. His ears were popping and
squeaking as the pressure squeezed the air out of his Eustachian tubes.
He kept on downwards and found the fifth row of niches. Now the air in
his lungs was compressing to almost half its surface volume, and as his
buoyancy decreased so his descent became easier and more rapid.
His eyes were wide open, but the waters below him were dark and turbid.
He could make out only the surface of the wall directly in front of his
face. He saw the sixth niche appear ahead of him and he grasped it, then
hesitated.
"Thirty-six feet of depth already, and no sign yet of bottom he
thought. There had been a time, when he was spearfishing competitively
with the army team, that he could free-dive to sixty feet and stay at
that depth for a full minute. But he had been younger then and in peak
physical condition.
"Just one more niche," he promised himself, "and then back up to the
surface." His chest was beginning to throb and burn with the need to
breathe, but he pulled hard on his handhold and shot down. He saw the
vague shape of the seventh niche appear out of the murk below him'
"They go right to the bottom," he realized with amazeMent. "How on'earth
did Taita do it? They had no diving equipment." He grasped the niche and
hovered there for a moment, undecided if he should risk going further.
He knew he was almost at his physical limit. Already he was hunting for
air, his chest beginning to convulse involuntarily.
"What about one more for the hell of it!" He was beginning to feel
light-headed, and a strange glow of euphoria came over him. He
recognized the danger signs, and looked down at his own body. Through
the murk he saw that his skin was wrinkled and folded by the pressure of
water. There were over two atmospheres'weight bearing down upon him,
crushing in his chest. His brain was becoming starved of oxygen, and he
felt reckless and invulnerable.
"Once more into the breach, dear friends," he thought drunkenly, and
went on down.
"Number eight, and the doctor's at the gate." He felt the eighth niche
under his fingers. He was thinking in gibberish now: "Number eight, and
I'll have her on a plate." He turned to go up again, and his feet
touched bottom. -Fifty feet deep," he realized even through his fuddled
state.
"I have left it too late. Got to get back. Got to breathe." He was
bracing himself to push off from the bottom when something grabbed his
legs and dragged him hard against the rock wall.
ctopus!" he thought, remembering the line from Taita's stele, "Her
vagina is an octopus that has swallowed up a king."
He tried to kick out, but his legs were bound as if by the arms of a sea
monster; some cold, insidious embrace held him captive. "Taita's
octopus. My oath! He meant it literally. It's got me."
He was pinned against the wall, crushed, helpless.
Terror seized him, and the rush of it through his blood flushed away the
hallucinations of his oxygen-impoverished brain. He realized what had
happened to him.
"No octopus. This is water pressure." He had experienced the same
phenomenon once before. On an army training exercise, while diving near
the inlet to the turbines of the generators in Loch Arran, his buddy
diver who was roped to him had drifted into their terrible suction. His
companion had been sucked against the grille of the intake and his body
had been crushed so that the splinters of his ribs had been driven
through the flesh of his chest and had come out through the black
neoprene rubber of his suit like daggers.
Nicholas had narrowly escaped the same fate. The fact that he was a few
feet to one side of his buddy had meant that he escaped the full brunt
of the rush of water into the turbine intake. Nevertheless, one of his
legs was broken, and it had taken the strength of two other army divers
to prise him out of the grip of the current.
This time he was at the limit of his air, and there was no other diver
to assist him. He was being sucked into a narrow opening in the rock,
the mouth of an underwater tunnel, a subaqueous shaft that bored into
the rock wall.