The Seventh Scroll - Smith Wilbur - Страница 63

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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.

His upper body was free of the baleful influence of the rushing flood,

but his legs were being drawn inexorably into it. He was aware that the

surrounds of the opening were sharply demarcated, as straight and as

square as a lintel hewn by a mason. He was being dragged over and around

this lintel. Spreading out his arms, he resisted with all his strength,

but his hooked fingers slid over the polished, slimy surface of the

rock.

"This is the big one," he thought. "This is the one punch that you can't

duck." He hooked his fingers, and felt his nails tear and break as they

rasped against the rock.

Then suddenly they locked into the last niche in the wall above the

sink-hole which was sucking him under.

Now at least he had an anchor point. With both hands he clung to the

niche, and fought the pull of the water. He fought it with all his

remaining strength and all his heart, but he was near the end of his

store of both. He strained until he felt the muscles in both arms

popping, until the sinews in his neck stood out in steely cords and he

felt something in his head must burst. But he had halted the insidious

slide of his body into the sink-hole.

"One more," he thought. "Just one more try." And he knew that was all he

had left within him. His air was all used up, and so were his courage

and his resolve. His mind swirled, and dark shapes clouded his vision.

From somewhere deep inside himself he drew out the last reserves, and

pulled until the darkness in his head exploded in sheets of bright

colours, shooting stars and Catherine wheels that dazzled him. But he

kept on pulling.

He felt his legs coming out of it, the grip of the waters weakening, and

he pulled once more with strength that he had never realized he

possessed.

Then suddenly he was free and shooting towards the surface, but it was

too late. The darkness filled his head and in his ears was a sound like

the roaring of the waterfall in the abyss. He was drowning. He was all

used up. He had no knowledge of where he was, how much further he had to

go to the surface, but he knew only that he was not going to make it. He

was finished.

When he came out through the surface, he did not know that he had done

so, and he did not have enough strength left to lift his face out of the

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