Discovering none, and presumably concluding that it was upside down, the starfish curled the extreme tip of one arm under itself. Finding a foothold, it then curled its arm further in an effortless, boneless sort of way. At the same time, it curled under the two arms on either side of the first one, and slowly and gently, the animal started to lift itself with this triangle of arms. The arms on the opposite side of its body curled and spread upwards like the fingers of a hand to support it, and soon the body was vertical like a wheel, supported by the ever- stiffening arms. The arms on the farthest side now spread wide and the body sank towards them slowly and gracefully like a yogi completing a complicated and beautiful asana. The body was now turned upright; it remained only for the starfish to pull out its remaining arms from underneath it and the animal was the right side up. The whole action had been performed with a slow-motion delicacy of movement that would have brought tears to the eyes of any ballet dancer.
Now, however, the starfish did something that no ballerina, be she ever too talented, could have emulated. It lay on the sand and simply disappeared. Before my eyes, it vanished and left behind it, like the Cheshire Cat left its smile, merely a vague outline, the suggestion of a starfish, as it were, embossed upon the sand. What had happened, of course, was that while the starfish remained apparently unmoving, its hundreds of little feet, out of sight beneath it, were burrowing into the sand, so the animal simply sank from view and the white grains drifted to cover it. The whole thing, from the moment I had unearthed the creature until it disappeared, had taken no longer than two minutes.
I had approached the lagoon with every intention of plunging in and swimming out to deep water, but I had already spent five minutes watching the ghost crabs, five minutes admiring the necklace of flotsam washed up by the tide, and another two minutes standing ankle-deep in the water watching what was obviously a guru starfish attaining a sort of sandy nirvana. During this time, the fishermen, perched like some gay parrots in their boats, had been regarding me with the same avid interest as I had bestowed upon the natural history of the shoreline. Their curiosity had been well concealed, however, and there had been no attempt to solicit my custom for their wares in the tiresome way that is indulged in by pedlars in other countries. Mauritians were too polite for that. I waved at them and they all waved back, grinning broadly.
Determined not to be sidetracked again, I waded out waist- deep into the water, put on my mask and plunged my head under the water to get my head and back wet and protect it a little from the sun, which was hot even at that early hour. As my mask dipped below the surface, the sea seemed to disappear and I was gazing down at my feet in the submarine territory that immediately surrounded them.
Instantly I forgot my firm resolve to swim out into deeper water, for I was surrounded by a world as bizarre as any science fiction writer had thought up for a Martian biology. Around my feet, a trifle close for comfort, lay six or seven large, flattish sea urchins, like a litter of hibernating hedgehogs with bits of seaweed and coral fragments enmeshed in their spines so that, until one looked closely, they appeared to be weed-covered lumps of dark lava. Entwined between them were several curious structures, lying on the sand in a languid manner, like sunbathing snakes. They were tubes some four feet long and about four inches in circumference. They looked like the submarine parts of a strange vacuum cleaner, apparently jointed every three inches and manufactured out of semi-opaque, damp brown paper that had started to grow a sort of furry fungus at intervals along its length.
At first, I could not believe that these weird objects were alive. I thought they must be strange, dead strands of some deep-sea seaweed now washed into the shallows by the tide, to roll and undulate helplessly on the sand to the small movements of the sea. Closer inspection showed me that they were indeed alive, unlikely though it seemed. Sinucta muculata, as this strange creature is called, is really a sort of elongated tube, which sucks in water at one end and with it microscopic organisms, and expels the water at the other.
As well as Sinucta, I saw some old friends lying about, placid on the sea-bed — the sea slug that I had known from my childhood in Greece, thick, fat, warty creatures, a foot long, looking like a particularly revolting form of liver sausage. I picked one up; it was faintly slimy, but firm to the touch, like decaying leather. I lifted it out of the water and it behaved exactly as its Mediterranean cousins did. It ejected a stream of water with considerable force, at the same time becoming limp and flaccid in my hand. Then, having exhausted this form of defence, it tried another one. It suddenly voided a stream of a white substance that looked like liquid latex and was sticky beyond belief, the slightest portion adhering to your skin more tenaciously than Sellotape.
I could not help feeling that this was a rather futile form of defence for should an enemy be attacking, this curtain of adhesive, rubber-like solution would only serve to bind it more closely to the sea slug. However, it seemed unlikely that any weapon as complex as this would have been evolved in a creature so primitive unless it had fulfilled a necessary purpose. I released the slug and he floated to the bottom, to roll gently on to the sand, fulfilling the gay, vibrant, experience-full life that sea slugs lead, which consists of sucking the water in at one end of their being and expelling it at the other, while being rolled endlessly by the tide.
Reluctantly, I dragged my attention away from the creatures that lived in the immediate vicinity of my feet, and launched myself on my voyage of exploration. That first moment, when you relax and float face downwards, and, under the glass of your mask, the water seems to disappear, is always startling and uncanny. You suddenly become a hawk, floating and soaring over the forests, mountains and sandy deserts of this marine universe. You feel like Icarus, as the sun warms your back, and below you, the multi-coloured world unfolds like a map. Though you may float only a few feet above the tapestry, the sounds come up to you muted as if floating up from a thousand feet in still air, as you might be suspended and hear sounds of life in the toy farms and villages below a mountain. The crunch of the gaudy parrot fish, rasping at the coral with its beak; the grunt or squeak or creakings of any one of a hundred fish, indignantly defending their territory against invaders; the gentle rustle of the sand moved by tides or currents; a whisper like the feminine rustle of a thousand crinolines. These and many more noises drift up to you from the sea bed.
At first, the sandy bottom was flat, littered with the debris of past storms and hurricanes; lumps of coral now covered with weed, and the abode of a million creatures; pieces of pumice stone. On the sand, lay battalions of huge, black sea urchins, with long, slender spines that move constantly like compass needles. Touch one of them, and the spines moving gently to and fro suddenly become violently agitated, waving about with ever-increasing speed like mad knitting needles. They were very fragile as well as being sharp, so that if they penetrated your skin, they broke off. They also stained the immediate area of the puncture, as though you had been given a minute injection of Indian ink. Although they looked black, when the sunlight caught them, you found that they were a most beautiful royal blue with a green base to each spine. This species was fortunately flamboyant enough to be very obvious and, although some lay in crevices and under coral ledges, the majority lay on the sand, singly or in prickly groups, and were very apparent.