30 DAHLAK 



and hard work on my part as well as some help from my 

 companions in the boat to get the better of him. Then, with 

 much less trouble, I caught a six-pound grouper and a 

 magnificent cuttlefish of almost four pounds. Cecco and 

 Gigi were shooting as well, and Priscilla, a speargun in her 

 hand for the first time in her life, was going in furious search 

 of her first victim. We caught enough fish that day to fill half 

 the first zinc case of the fifty or more we had on board. Gigi 

 was lucky again and met another shark. He was in nine feet 

 of water, filthily turbid as usual, when the six-foot beast 

 swept ahead of him and vanished into the deep without 

 giving trouble. It was most probably a black-fin. I, mean- 

 while, was playing around with three barracudas, but at my 

 first lunge with the gun they went off quickly, distinctly 

 nettled. After this Gigi and I tried to get up to a small shark 

 splattering in four span of water with its back, fins and tail 

 well out, but at twenty yards distance it smelt a rat and with 

 a splash melted into the corals. 



Big fish there were in plenty, sharks, barracudas and 

 stingrays as well as those strange thin-finned creatures that 

 seemed to be everywhere at all times, wheeling close inland 

 yet always unapproachable, invisible, ghostlike. If it had not 

 been for Mohammed's insistence, which threw us into 

 uncertainty, we should have refused to believe that they 

 were sharks. 



While Gigi and I were swimming over an eighteen-foot 

 sea-bed, the little coral barrier, Cecco gave us a shout from 

 the boat: 



*Oi, get on ahead quick . . . hurry up!' 



*What is it?' shouted back Gigi. 



'A huge black back, a thing that goes on forever. Run!' 



*But what the devil is it?' 



*How do I know? It hasn't got a dorsal fin.' 



