DISSEI, BROWN ISLAND 59 



heaven, they couldn't escape us! ... And here they were! 

 We stopped dead, amazed, silent, while before us passed the 

 spectre fish in rank . . . fish never seen, never even imagined 

 by us. They were not sharks. Long and silver, they were 

 three to four feet in length, cigar-shaped and looking some- 

 thing like huge mullet. Their heads glistened like white 

 lacquer, their tails were right out of proportion. Slightly 

 stunned, we realized that those famous 'fins' were not dorsal 

 fins at all, but the upper lobe of their tails. This then was 

 why they had been so impossible to hit. We had imagined 

 that we were aiming at their backbones, but in fact we were 

 so wide of the mark that we were just making a hole in the 

 water. 



In this moment of enlightenment came also a frenzy to 

 capture. We all had a go; we followed them, stopped quite 

 still, ducked behind corals and then dived down and with 

 our stomachs touching the sea floor, lay in wait. They 

 remained unapproachable. What could these fish eat ? They 

 travelled just under the surface, their muzzles held aloft, 

 almost snifiing. Following them, waiting for them, tricking 

 them, all our tactics were equally useless; all they did was 

 to take us for a ride either alone or in groups. After a while 

 I noticed a few passing me at the side with uncanny speed. 

 I shot, and missed. At the same moment I heard a muffled 

 yell from Gigi : 



'Got it!' 



But excitement turned to disillusion. The mysterious fish, 

 hit in the middle of its back, reacted with such incredible 

 violence that it snapped the steel harpoon soldered to the 

 steel arrow in two as if it had been a twig. Half an inch of 

 steel torn clean off without pressure on anything more solid 

 than water. And the fish had gone for good. 



The water was clearer than on the day before, the sea bed 



