Undersea Quest Read Online Free Page B

month we were actually going beneath the surface of the sea.
    True enough, we were not going very far. But squad by squad, we drew diving gear—aqualungs, face-masks, pneumatic guns and frog-flippers—and set out on our first undersea expeditions.
    I was in Crew Five, with twenty others, under Cadet Lieutenant Hachette. When we had drawn our gear we boarded a whaleboat and stood out to sea. We were not quite out of sight of land—Bermuda was a low line on the horizon—and when Lt.
    Hachette gave the order to stop the engines. We drifted, bobbing gently on the Caribbean swell until, at the lieutenant’s command, we went over the side, one by one.
    The water was shallow there—not more than twenty feet—and crystal clear. We wore regulation weighted shoes, carefully balanced to each man’s weight and body volume. With them on, we exacdy balanced the weight of water we displaced. It was like hanging suspended like Mohammed’s Tomb. At the flick of a webbed foot we climbed; at the merest stroke of the arms, we sank.
    We gathered in ranks on the rippled, sandy bottom and waited for orders.
    Talking, of course, was out of the question. Standing there, teetering gently back and forth like a pillar of smoke on a still day, I was conscious of the absolute silence. The only whisper of sound that came to me was the ripple of bubbles from my breathing gear. I found out later that this was unusual—the bottom of the sea can be a very noisy place! Fish are not the mute beasts they seem; and, as I can testify, being within range of a battle royal between a hammerhead shark and a squid is about like being on the fringe of two fighting wildcats.
    But that morning off Bermuda, I felt as remote as the spaces between the stars.
    Lt. Hachette looked us over to make sure everything was in order; signaled us to check our gear for leaks or malfunctions; then ordered us on. In columns of twos, we marched off along the sea bottom. Curious march—in slow motion! We were at route step, and the uneven footing made it a struggle to keep in some sort of proper dress. Stumbling over sand mounds and broken branches of coral, dodging the wicked little sea anemones, that look like chrysanthemums and sting like hornets, we must have been a ludicrous sight to the curious little fishes that swam in schools overhead! It was more a ballet step than a march; half the time my right foot was off the ground before my left foot had touched before me, in a slow, stately grand jete that Nijinsky would have envied.
    I doubted that we were making more than a mile an hour. We had air, that first dive, for only thirty minutes; we marched about a thousand yards in all, a hundred yards in one direction, then a sharp right turn and a hundred yards more. At the end of the thirty minutes we were back where we started; Lt. Hatchette gave us the signal, and we, two by two, slipped upward toward the waiting whaleboat.
    It sounds rather dull, perhaps.
    It was not! Every second of that first half hour was pure adventure, and unbelievable excitement. It was not dangerous excitement—we were, after all, only twenty feet down! Even though Bermuda’s waters teem with sharks, they rarely go near humans, and certainly not when the humans come in groups of twenty. But it was an enchanted land we were traveling, inhabited by long- legged starfish and slow sea-cucumbers and pulsing sponges and brilliant-colored, inch-long fish by the uncounted thousands.
    We dived twice more that day, and then the whaleboat started back. It would be two weeks before our turn would come again; but already I was making plans for the next time. For I had been on the sea-bottom… it was like going home again, after a long, long time away.
    Cadet Captain Sperry, from the lead whaleboat, bellowed: “Attention all boats! Stand by for diving!”
    The whole class was out in whaleboats; it was our first night maneuver underwater, and it was a mass affair. Fourteen whaleboats strung out behind Sperry’s