Hold the Enlightenment (25 page)

Richard was handsome in a boyishly tousled way, and he showed me the implement he’d use to collect the blood. It was a simple, oversized syringe that looked like a big horse needle, with a barb halfway down its length. A piece of monofilament fishing line was connected to the plunger of the syringe, the length of it wrapped around a blue plastic plate-sized reel. The trick, Dr. Londereraville said, was to insert the needle just behind the shark’s gills, where the skin is softest and the blood is fresh from the nearby heart. As
the shark pulls away, you play out the line, gently pulling back on the plunger so that the syringe fills with blood. It wasn’t like DNA work: you needed a lot more blood to test for the presence of a hormone.

Once the syringe was full of blood, Richard would yank the line, which would free the barb from the shark. In ten days of work, he’d collected three good samples.

“So,” I said, “the syringe is fastened to some kind of long pole—”

“No. That doesn’t work.”

“How do you get the needle into the shark, then?”

“You have to do it by hand,” the seriously insane Ph.D. said.

Low, a former commercial fisherman, piloted the GWSRI Dive Cat. After slaloming through sixteen-foot-high swells for forty-five minutes or so, we arrived at Shark Alley, and anchored about fifty yards from the fur seal colony on Geyser Rock. It was seven-thirty in the morning and no other operators had arrived yet.

The place smelled like a feed lot, which in fact was what it was if you were a great white shark. Seventy thousand blubbery mammals—males weigh in excess of six hundred pounds—produce an enormous amount of solid and liquid waste, so that the various gusts of wind that buffeted the Dive Cat seemed to have actual weight to them, and they hit like a slap to the face.

On the far side of the narrow island that is Geyser Rock, over on the other side of the great hillock of densely congregated furry blubber, the full force of the Atlantic Ocean exploded against a rock in a constant, booming meter. The sixteen-foot swells produced great geysers of spray perhaps forty feet high. This spray rose above the fur seal colony, and caught the sun in such a way that it fell back to sea and earth like the shards of tattered rainbows.

It was a noisy place, Geyser Rock, and the air itself was shattered by the continual barking and roaring of the seal colony. Females sounded like aggravated terrestrial cows, mooing in a kind of constant bawl, while juveniles baaed like goats or sheep, and the large males occasionally roared in the manner of some unfortunate soul suffering the agonies of projectile vomiting. The sound was constant and unrelenting: moo-baa-ralph, moo-baa-ralph.

The fur seals, scruffy, golden-looking creatures, were draped over the sandy-colored rocks in blubbery profusion, side by side, like an allegory about population dynamics, or Hong Kong, and whenever one seal needed to move any distance at all, it disturbed all the others that it touched or jostled, so that every annoyed seal had to moo or baa or vomit at the traveler.

Seals reaching the beach lay there for a while, heads in the air, bawling at the sea. These seals were joined by others, all of them vocalizing, as if daring each other and hurling curses to the sky. Finally, one, perhaps braver than the rest, would plunge into the sea, and it was as if the floodgates had opened and a hundred more would hit the surf, while their fellows above lay across the rocks, in attitudes of adipose unconcern, all of them melting in the sun like Salvador Dalí clocks.

The seals swam in “rafts,” dozens of them, clustered together for the safety that can be found in numbers. The rafts hugged the shoreline, a single flipper raised to the sky, catching the cooling effect of wind against wet flesh and fur. They were dithering about in the surf, only ten yards from the safety of land, only fifty yards from the boat, and it was tempting to wave back to them. Hi, seals.

Washed up on Geyser Rock were several ship’s timbers, boards forty feet long, the remnants of some historic shipwreck. Waters around the cape are treacherous, combining, as they do, currents from the Atlantic and Indian oceans running at odds to one another and to the prevailing winds. Huge waves, called Cape Town rollers, have been known to literally break bulk cargo ships in half. Waters here are unpredictable and deadly. The area, known to the rest of the world as the Cape of Good Hope, is locally known as the Cape of Storms, and, sometimes, the Cape of Souls.

Directly off the shipwreck, dozens of seals, basking in the ebbing water of a broken wave, lifted their flippers, as if to say, “We, who are about to die, salute you.”

On the Dive Cat, Frederick began macerating sardines and fish oil in a fifty-five-gallon drum using a big wooden pestle. Every minute or so, Richard would ladle a great glop of broken fish into the
water, and the iridescent mess would float away from the boat, mostly on the surface.

Low muscled the shark cage into the water. The cage was tied to a cleat on the boat with a yellow rope perhaps an inch in diameter, and the cage floated in the water at the transom of the Dive Cat, so that a prospective shark diver could just step from the boat into the cage.

Set close to the transom of the boat, and tightly secured to various cleats, was a standard-sized scuba tank fitted with what is called a double hooka rig: a pair of breathing regulators affixed to the tank with two hoses perhaps twenty feet long. Divers in the cage would breathe through the long hose from the tank on the boat.

The other paying passenger on the boat was Louise Murray, an English photographer with white spiky hair and milk-white skin. She smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and had once been a negotiator for British Petroleum, working deals that ran to millions of dollars. She fell into the job sometime after she joined the company and took a test that showed that she was “a risk taker.” British Petroleum apparently felt it needed fearless negotiators.

Now Louise was traveling the world, publishing her photos in various scuba magazines, doing some writing now and again, and galloping through the last of her “oil money.”

The chicken-wire cage was suspended by floats—cylindrical blue and white plastic objects like giant, two-foot-long sausages. The floats were placed deep into the cage so that about three feet of wire projected above the surface of the sea.

Louise and I repaired to the wheelhouse to don our wet suits, as Richard chummed for sharks, and Low worked a pocket-knife through the half-frozen head of a dead fur seal. He said that shark operators used to buy seals that had been killed in fishermen’s nets, but new laws, designed to make killing seals economically unsatisfying, had stopped the practice. Now, Low and Frederick just picked up dead seals every once in awhile. I spotted a couple of them—defunct seals—rotting on the far shores of Geyser Rock. In fact, there was a seal-shaped thing with a big hunk missing in the
middle directly below our boat, which was anchored in about fifteen feet of clear water. It might have been an oddly shaped rock.

“Is that a seal?” I asked Frederick.

“Yes,” he said, then added, unnecessarily, I thought, “it’s dead.”

Richard ladled chum, while Low whirled the roped seal’s head about in a great underhanded circle and tossed the bait about fifteen yards from the boat. To the west, a small squall, like a bruise against the sky, stood on dark and slanting pillars of rain. A freshening breeze slapped the boat with the heavy, deep brown odor of fur seal.

“The smell,” Frederick said, “isn’t too bad today.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.” The temperature stood at 60 degrees. On really hot summer days, 100-degree scorchers, Frederick said, fur seal excrement literally baked on the stones of Geyser Rock, and tourists who’d come to risk their lives diving with white sharks spent most of an eight-hour day vomiting into the sea, chumming the waters with last night’s dinner and unconsciously imitating the sounds of the fur seal bulls only fifty yards away.

“There’s a shark out there,” Low said, in the way another man might say, “Oh, look, a robin.”

I stared out to sea, in the vicinity of the floating seal’s head, and saw what looked to be a shadow on the surface of the sea.

Louise and I were struggling with our weight belts. I needed seventeen pounds to be neutrally buoyant in order to stand comfortably upright on the bottom of the cage.

Frederick and Low said they had seen the shark come up below the frozen seal’s head and then glide slowly past it. “We call that a dummy run,” Frederick said.

“Shouldn’t I be getting in the cage?” said Louise, the certified risk taker. She was standing on the transom of the boat, about three feet off the surface of the sea, and out beyond her, I could now see the dorsal fin of the shark cutting through the water, leaving twin ripples drifting off to each side. Definitely a great white.

Frederick tugged on the rope that pulled the shark cage to the transom of the boat. Louise sat with her feet dangling over the
water, then lifted them into the cage. She held the regulator in her hand, adjusted her mask, cradled her camera in her right arm, like an infant, and turned to me.

“Bring my second camera,” she said. “Be careful with it.”

So it appeared I was going to get into the water. I sat on the transom with my feet in the cage, bit down on the regulator, adjusted my mask, and, as I did so, the shark rose out of the water and hit the seal’s head with a kind of indolent indifference. It was not at all like a trout hitting a fly on the surface of a stream. Instead, everything happened very slowly, very deliberately, and there was no sense of urgency in the shark, only a kind of regal indifference. The sun caught my mask at an angle, so what I saw was a blurred and brilliant glare, with a great triangular head shimmering in the center as it rose languidly from the sea, mouth agape. Rows of glittering triangular teeth ridged the palate, and the great white’s eyes were a pure and ghostly white.

Great whites are possessed of a nictitating membrane, a leathery eyelid that comes up from below and protects the shark’s eyes from the thrashing death throes of its prey. The membrane is pure white, so the shark rose like a particularly vivid nightmare, with gleaming rows of teeth and spectral white demon’s eyes completely devoid of pupils.

Because of the membrane covering its eyes, the shark was effectively blind at the moment of the munch. Low tugged the rope and gently pulled the bait toward the boat as the great white moved blindly forward, mouth open in a behavior Frederick called “gaping.”

“I’ll bring him right up to the cage,” Low said. “Get in.”

“You get knocked out of the cage,” Frederick said, “swim down.”

“Down?”

“They hit things struggling on the surface.”

And so, cradling Louise’s second camera, and biting down hard on my regulator, I dropped into the cage, where everything turned gray-green and I was looking at the world through a mesh of chicken wire, while Louise stood at the slitted window in the cage, her camera at the ready. Say I lost the regulator: How long could I
stay below the surface of the sea, with a great white shark circling above? Two minutes? How long is a great white shark’s attention span?

And then I saw the shark, perhaps forty feet in the distance, a dim abstraction, like a notion of grace half formed in the mind, something brilliant but hazily apprehended. There was a curious feeling of dread without vulnerability, as in a dream.

Louise and I stayed underwater for perhaps half an hour, and the shark circled back a few times, always gliding off at meditative distances. Occasionally, chilled and shivering uncontrollably, the two of us rose to the surface, and sat, somewhat awkwardly, on the floats set about the interior of the cage, so that we were still surrounded by the wire that rose above the surface of the sea.

“How big was that guy?” I asked Frederick. I figured twenty feet.

“About eleven feet,” he said. “Weighed maybe fifteen hundred pounds.”

“I thought it was bigger.”

“Adrenaline magnification,” Frederick explained.

“Biggest one caught around in these waters,” Low added, “was just over twenty feet. Biggest one I’ve seen here in Shark Alley was about seventeen feet. Weighed probably four thousand pounds.”

We saw six sharks that day. There were two other shark operators, with boats full of paying customers, anchored no more than a stone’s throw from us. While that felt a little crowded, the next day was a circus.

Here we are, four out of six operators, all of us anchored side by side in Shark Alley, in the one area just off the shipwreck where the water is relatively flat. There is, however, enough surge and surf that the boats are swinging widely on their anchor lines and banging, one against the other, so we are pushing boats off the Dive Cats with long poles, which is not something one really wants to worry about a whole hell of a lot because there are three (count ’em, three) great white sharks in the water, circling the boats, and there are three cages, containing five divers, in the water, not to mention three scuba divers, who are swimming around just under
our boat. These divers are not in a cage. One of them, an American scientist named Mark Marks, habitually swims with great whites in this exposed fashion. Other operators think this is dangerous, and feel that when he’s eventually killed, business will suffer.

Marks is working with a French film crew, and at the moment, he is acting as a safety diver for the cameraman, who, when looking through the lens of his camera, cannot see sharks coming at him from odd angles. Marks hovers above the Frenchman, holding a weighted, three-foot-long board carved into the shape of a killer whale. The board is painted with the orca’s distinctive black-and-white markings. Killer whales are one of the few creatures in the sea that might prey on sharks. Even great whites.

Anchored next to the French party was a small, seventeen-foot boat, boasting twin 75-horsepower Yamahas. Counting the captain, there are ten people aboard. The swells had diminished to a mere twelve feet, but this is the Cape of Storms, the Cape of Souls, and the boat, rated for six passengers, was dangerously overloaded. Low told me he had quit work for a rival shark operator because he tolerated such conditions. “I think people will die here,” Frederick said. “Not from the sharks, maybe. But for sure, a boat will go down. An overloaded boat, like that one.”