The Lover of the Coral Glades

He was two hundred years old and lately he had begun to feel his age. There'd been twinges, if you know what I mean.

Shushu, they called him in the Solomon Islands, probably from the sound he made when diving, for they knew him well by sight. There was no mistaking that stump which was once a very fine tail fin.

Ah, well, if the God who made the Great Waters was about to take him, there was nothing unworthy of a sperm whale in yielding to the One Being mightier than himself. Besides, what had he to fear? In his heart, he'd always been God-fearing despite his manifest immoralities.

And it was always at this point that he took a big mouthful of plankton and spat it out again. Cow-whales, indeed! He knew their tricks, for he'd had enough of the little beauties down there in the pale blue glades where the lovers went, even left 'em one or two calves just to remember him by.

But it had never been the real thing, never. There wasn't one of them for whom he'd have charged a school of Grampii or risked the red weeds in the Sargasso.

There lay the single shadow in looking back down the long, long years, and it didn't make it any better to feel that somewhere out there — maybe among the coral grottoes, maybe up in the frozen waters — at this very moment she, too, might be swimming and blowing and dreaming about her ideal bull. But if twinges meant anything, it was already too late to do much more about it, so he'd just go up and bask a bit in the sun.

Though the sea was like glass, it was just as well he had that honorable growth of sea-weed and barnacles round his tiny bright eyes, otherwise he might have been seriously inconvenienced by the irresponsibility of the flying-fish who would persist in landing on his head. He could remember the days when flying-fish showed better judgment in their leaps, more respect for others even if there was an albacore or two snapping at their tails.

Yes, he'd certainly seen enough — in fact, everything that was to be seen in the big seas, even in the far, far away where the lands came floating tall and white and silent across the midnight waters under a sun hanging sullen red in a midnight sky.

It had been a mistake, that journey, for it was up there he'd lost half his tail to a pack of killer-whales and been seriously annoyed by a narwhal, but, after all, youth must learn and experience is always expensive in the sea.

Well, he'd seen it all, so what if God was preparing to call him? He was a don't-care whale and to show it he'd take just a little jump and incidentally shake off some of those pertinacious crab-lice.

So Shushu jumped his little jump, straight up from the warm Pacific waters and straight down again, and the boom of it made the albatrosses take to the air for five miles in a circle around that maelstrom of bursting spray.

And it was while he was sinking, a monstrous shadow in the clear blue, that he saw — Her.

She was coming up to blow, no doubt about that, and never did a cow-whale come up more prettily from the depth of the sea. And her color! A pearl gray. He was round now to have a closer look. What a back, smooth as rock! Her tail — he hardly dared to glance, it was too good to last. But look he must and did. Never in two hundred years had he seen such a tail! Not even a blue shark could exceed the grace, the curving grace, of that wonderful waving thing shaped like a sea-fan.

She had slowed, the hussy, and as he caught her eye and they looked upon each other, it was then that Shushu knew that the search was ended, that at long last the philanderer of the ocean was become the lover of the coral glades. He had found his dream.

He took her down with him, not very deep, to his favorite place where the silver sands lay in a sifting violet light and the stag-horn corals formed grottoes and glades all shimmering with the bridal jewels of the sea. And there they mated, there linked their hearts, strong unto death, with the love that is forged a hundred fathoms deep.

Shushu's twinges had fled to the limbo of forgotten things. Once again, the spirit of his youth which he had imagined gone forever coursed so gaily through his fins that, at the slightest provocation, he leapt like a herring in the glad light of the sun or, rising from the deep like a stealthy mountain, he would blow his steam jet between a couple of peacefully sleeping dugongs just for the devilry of it.

Then there were the days, the wonderful blue days, spent drifting in search of squids for miles and miles over the endless plains of the middle deep in which the only movements were the passing of their own shadows across the azure sand and occasionally a thin smoke-like swirl from the ocean bed where a polyp fled in vain before the rush of their twenty-foot jaws.

But Shushu liked it best of all in the coral glades where he could lie at his ease, scratching his belly deliciously on the stag-horns while his young bride worked off her surplus energy by standing on her head so that the parrot fish could obligingly nibble off all unwanted boarders or gliding in and out of the columns and pinnacles where the sea-ferns, waving like rose-pink feathers, seemed to sway in harmony to the beat of their own graceful tail.

Months passed.

Side by side they ploughed the open seas after the schools of skipjack and Spanish mackerel heading northward in one of those migrations that are the mystic heart-pulses of Nature; then, off the Kapangamarangi islands, the schools broke with the monsoon and, in a matter of hours, the ocean was as empty as the desert.

The coral areas — those teeming larders of fish — had been left far to the South, a strong swim of many days. Below, a thousand fathoms below, lay the larva peaks bristling up from the blackness of unplumbed depths. The place of the Terror, the place of the Demon, where none of all living creatures save only the sperm whale — if he be strong and great of heart — could hope to enter and return.

Food they must have before they began the Long Swim, but how was it to be obtained? She was heavy with calf, which was the reason they'd followed the massed schools where feeding was easy, but now in the desolate wastes where the fish were few and fast it was a matter of agility or death by starvation. Down there, in the caverns of the submerged peaks, food was to be found — but, as he knew instinctively, in her condition she could sustain neither the depth nor the fearsome struggle that must await them.

In following the migration, Shushu had made his second mistake in two hundred years, and that was one too many in the Gentleman's Agreement that exists between God and sperm whales.

So he eyed her with his bright little eye and nuzzled her a little so that she understood, and then, clearing his lungs with a last blow, he went down into the deep to get her the food which would start them on their journey back to the coral groves.

Down and down. Vertically down.

The light had gone from the water — the green from the blue — the blue from the purple — the purple from the deep gray.

Down.

Now everything was blackness and, beneath its thick coating of muscles and blubber, Shushu's blood ran cold with a more deadly chill than he had known even in the Arctic waters.

And still he glided down.

Blobs and plumes of light, vivid as little green flames, streaked through the darkness on every side, but he heeded them not, intent on greater prey that would require all his vigor, all his strength, to master if he was to reach the surface again.

A deeper blackness loomed before him, his flukes touched rock and he glided on into the gorges of the larva peaks. Here lived the Terror, the thing he sought.

Nothing moved. The giant pinnacles, the beetling lips of precipices falling away into the bottom of the world, rose around him in awful stillness. His blood seemed to cease pumping as though frozen into ice and the pressure of the midnight waters lay upon him with the silence of death.

And then from a cavern there shot forth a long white arm.

It gripped him round the body and, after it, came another and another, each as thick as a barrel, writhing round his flukes — groping over his back — tearing at his head with gigantic suckers that sank into his flesh with a tiger's claws. Through the darkness two luminous eyes, cold as moonlight, floated stealthily towards him as yard by yard, from out of the depth of the cavern, there slipped a monstrous body, long and bulky as his own, but gleaming with a filmy pallor against the blackness of the abyss.

Exerting every ounce of his strength, the sperm whale rolled in the grip of the great tentacles and, propelling himself backwards with his flukes, the two titans of the deep floated locked in a struggling mass above the precipice.

The body of the giant squid covered Shushu's head, the horny beak rending and gouging at his flesh until the surrounding water grew darker still under a cloud of blood while the claws of the huge discs that were clamped to his body raked greedily into his veins.

With a single snap, he bit through one of the tentacles and then, plunging forward, worked his jaws into the gelatinous mass enveloping him. Too late a black fog of sepia veiled the awful eyes as the squid strove to shoot backwards into its lair, but Shushu hung on twisting and turning as though caught in a whirlpool until little by little the foam of the final death throes melted into the abyss. His teeth had met through the Terror's brain.

There was not a moment to be lost. Brute instinct told him that the air in his lungs was so perilously near to exhaustion (concluded on page 81)Coral Glades(continued from page 34) that he must commence the ascent at once if he would see again the sunlight of the upper world. Tearing a lump, perhaps three-tons weight. from the body of the Giant Squid, he drove upwards trailing it in his mighty jaws.

Blackness changed to gray — then purple — purple into indigo blue — and now, at last, the scintillating emerald green of the final hundred feet. His body shook and trembled with the desperate beat of his fins, his lungs were near the bursting point, but never for a moment did his teeth relax from the burden that weighed him down — the food he had won for her.

And then, even through his own agony, he smelled it. Blood. There was blood in the waters above.

Amid a crash of opening seas he broke surface, lolling there inert while the last of the air shot in a hissing jet of steam from the blowhole.

Slowly he turned, slowly his little eye searched the sea and then, in an instant, the lover of the coral glades had become the most terrible of all God's creations, the berserk sperm whale.

Forgotten the tons of squid now sinking back into the deep: forgotten his exhaustion: unnoticed the shape creeping over the waters behind him. He saw only that she needed him and, even as he commenced his charge, knew that he came too late.

She was dying.

In a sea whipped to foam rolled that lovely pearl-gray body seared with gaping wounds and, high above the spray, there leaped a lean black form curving in the air to fall again with a crash of its scythe-like tail across her back. Down she went and from the depth below up flashed a streak of burnished light, burying its sword in her belly. She turned over, her fins beating helplessly as the thresher shark sprang again into the air to flail her with its fearsome tail, to drive her down once more to the swordfish lurking below.

Up he sailed — all grace and evil against that blue Pacific sky — and up from the sea leapt a pair of gaping jaws to meet him.

There was a clash like a steel gate and the two halves of the shark, spouting crimson fountains, smote the water twenty yards apart. Round whirled Shushu, plunging headlong where the swordfish, fastest of all swimmers, had already turned to flee. In a swirl of foam charged the bull sperm and swifter still the swordfish. But not quite swift enough. Though the whale missed that sleek body, his teeth sheered through its tail. Propelled by its own momentum, on sped the swordfish down into the depth and — one — two — three — like wolves after a bleeding stag flitted a trio of shapes upon its trail.

The tiger sharks would feed well where the purple meets the blue.

Then Shushu came back to Her where she lay at peace and nuzzled a little and lay beside her as she sank lower in the water so that the wavelets lapped her graceful back with their silver lace. And she looked upon him, with the same look that had made him the lover of the coral glades, and with that look died. Shushu lay very still, for sperm whales whose hearts are far, far older than two hundred years suffer much from twinges.

From behind, furtive as a shadow, crept the whaler.

• • •

"The cow's sunk," growled the mate, pointing over the bows, "and the bull must have been sore wounded in the fight so quiet does he lie. Get home with the harpoon before he sinks too."

The old harpooner wiped the sweat from his eyes.

" 'Tis wrong," he muttered. "After such a sight as we have seen, seems somehow bitter wrong to take his life."

"Wrong, ye fool! Look there and reckon the weight of him in sperm oil, fats and even those ivory teeth. Are dollars ever wrong? Get set to fire."

"Aye, aye," grunted the old man. stooping over his sights. "But, damn my eyes, I'll do it clean. This, for his noble heart."

And he pressed the trigger.

"A hit, a hit!" yelled the mate. "Out boats there! What's that? Impossible. The rope ... bust?! Hell's death on the hands that wove it!"

"Nay," said the harpooner, "for it was the hand of God that broke it. But I killed him clean. He sinks! Look, he sinks! Well, that sees the last of him. Fare ye well, old warrior. Lie at peace with thy lass down there in the sea."