Page:Dumas - Tales of Strange adventure (Methuen, 1907).djvu/99

Rh But I am bound to say, if it had only been sharks, that would not have stopped my turning diver; what I did fear was the Buchold.

"Amongst our divers we had a negro and his son. They were two splendid specimens of humanity, Africans, who had been presented to my Cingalese master by the Imaum of Muscat himself; the boy was fifteen and the father thirtyfive. They were the boldest and best divers we had. During the ten or twelve days the fishing had lasted, the two had gathered by themselves almost as many oysters as the eight other fishermen all put together. I had taken a fancy to the little black lad, and amongst all his companions he it was that I specially watched in his dives; so each time he left the water he always came and laid his winnings between my legs, and I looked after his interests. He was called Abel.

"One day he dives as usual. Now he used always to remain under water fifteen or twenty seconds—which is an enormous long while, remember. This time, contrary to custom, scarcely has he disappeared before he shakes the line. But there, there, the man who was in charge of the rope was thinking of something else, having just seen the poor boy plunge into the sea. I shout to him: • Haul in, man; haul in, you fool! Can't you see there is something wrong down below? Haul in, I say! ' But the fellow was too late. I see a great red stain rise to the surface, and then in the middle of it the lad splashing about with one leg bitten off above the knee. Next instant the father comes up, sees his child's face convulsed with agony, and the water dyed red with blood, but he does not make a sound. Only his countenance, usually as black as ebony, has turned the colour of ashes. He climbs into the boat with the lad in his arms, lays him across my knees, whips out a great knife, cuts the line fastening the stone round his waist and the one tying him to the boat, and plunges in, just as the shark was coming to the surface. I shout: ' Look out, you fellows, I know my man; we are going to see something worth looking at.* The words were hardly out of my mouth when, lo! the shark, whose dark fin was just visible above the surface, begins lashing the sea with his tail and then dives too; there was a wild whirling, swirling and eddying, and the lad yelling, with blazing eyes, quite forgetting his pain, * Well done, father, well done! Kill him, kill him, kill him! ' and trying to jump out of the boat with his poor mangled leg. Believe me, you will never see anything to match what happened before our eyes; the fight lasted a quarter of an hour—a full quarter of an hour. During all that time he only rose five times to the surface to get breath, and cast a look at his son, as much as to say: ' Never fear, my boy, you shall be avenged.' Then down he went again, and instantly the sea is agitated once more as if by a submarine tempest. For twenty yards all round the sea was reddened with blood; the great fish would leap six feet out of the water, and we could see its belly slashed open and the entrails protruding. Presently the sea grew calmer; it was not the man now that came up to breathe—it was the fish. At last the death agony began. The shark turned over on its back, lashed the air furiously with its tail, dived, reappeared, dived again; then you could see what looked like flashes of silver glittering under the waves. It was the monster rising to the surface, belly uppermost, rolling "about as helpless as a log. The shark was dead.

"Then the negro came up too, climbed on board, took his child in his arms and sat down at the foot of the mast. The surgeon of a French vessel which was lying in the Bay of Colombo amputated poor Abel's leg, and the lessee of the fisheries allowed the father to keep the whole of the oysters he had secured.

"Looking at the shark floating on the surface and counting its sixty-three wounds, two of which pierced the heart, I had made the reflection that since a man can defend himself against a shark and kill it in fair fight, he ought to be able to defend himself against a woman and get the best of her, even though she be a mermaid. I felt ashamed of my cowardice, and learning that the two negroes' share of pearl oysters was valued at over twelve thousand livres for ten days' fishing, I was tormented with the thought of making my fortune too. So the first time my Cingalese friend came to pay us a visit, as he never failed to do every four or five days, I asked him as a favour to exchange my berth as skipper for that of a common diver.

"The proposal appeared to annoy him. 'Olifus,' he said to me in Dutch, 'I am