WITH HELMET AND HOSE 81 



made visible little, individual whirlwinds and 

 casual, separate breezes which twist the shell- 

 dust about or send up clouds of sand about my 

 body. 



In days to come I was to find the surge some- 

 times a very real danger, as when at Cocos I went 

 down in a smashing thrashing sea and was scraped 

 and torn back and forth across lacerating knife- 

 points of coral and poisonous spines of urchins 

 until flesh and blood could no longer stand it. 

 Like getting one's sea-legs it soon became second 

 nature to anticipate the swell, to lean against it, 

 to shift the balance, so that everything moved ex- 

 cept myself and the eternal rocks. 



Now, day by day, occurred the accidents by 

 which I learned how to do things, little by little 

 relinquishing the ideas which, on dry land, had 

 seemed feasible and important. For a day or two 

 I could not understand why, during certain dives, 

 the fish were so much tamer than at other times. 

 The clue came to me when a rather heavy swell was 

 running and I found that if I gave to the move- 

 ment of the water, all the inhabitants, from gobies 

 to groupers, from shrimps to sharks, accepted me 

 as something new but harmless which the waves 

 had washed in, but if I resisted the aquatic wind 

 and maintained place and posture, I became an 

 object of suspicion. This was the first of many 

 radical differences which I was to find between the 

 world of dry land and that of the under-water ; on 

 land, to move is to arouse fear among the wild 

 creatures, here I did it by remaining still. 





