Abel was not taciturn, indeed he could be very loquacious if he thought the occasion warranted it, but if he thought your observations or instructions were of an imbecile nature, he would not reply.
‘Abel,’ you would say, sternly, ‘we only want to go a short way today.’
Abel would be riveted by something in the blue distance, or maybe fall into a trance.
‘Only a short way. We must be back by eight-thirty,’ you would say.
Abel would look at you, unseeingly.
‘Did you hear?’ you would shout above the stutter of the engine.
His eyes, expressionless, would flick on to you briefly and then go back to their contemplation of the horizon. You would get back to the hotel by half past nine, owing Abel twice what you intended, but it was always worth every penny. He knew what you wanted and you did not.
Once we had been several times to taste the pleasures of the Stag’s horn area, Abel, without any reference to us, took us to an area which we eventually named the ‘crockery shop’. We dropped over the side expecting the prickly ‘Swiss forest’ of the Stag’s horn, and were amazed at what we found. Here, the coral was in great plates or bowl shapes and was brown and with perforations like a brandy snap. In places, it was in tottering piles like a giant’s washing-up, and in other places, it had formed monstrous candelabra or the sort of rococo fountains that you find in the beautiful gardens of remote French chateaux or Italian villas. This was totally unlike the Stag’s horn forest, where you could swim with the fish, for here, if you got too close, they simply disappeared amongst the crockery, where you could not follow them. You had to adopt a new technique. You simply drifted slowly along and let the fish come to you.
It was here that I saw my first Moorish idol, one of the strangest-looking of fish. If you could imagine a delta-winged aircraft with wings curved into a point, a small, blunt tail and a very protuberant engine, the whole thing flying on its side and striped in yellow and white, and black, you would have some conception of this strange fish.
It was in the crockery shop too, that I was engulfed suddenly by a large school of coral-pink and orange fish, some eight to ten inches long and with enormous dark eyes. I had been floating there, watching a sea slug standing up on end and wondering what it was doing, when I caught a flash of red out of the corner of the side windows of my mask, and the next minute this flock of colourful fish surrounded me, swimming very languidly and coming close enough for me to touch, gazing at me with their soulful black eyes. I recognised them with delight as being a fish I had always wanted to meet, which rejoices in the name of the Wistful Squirrel fish. They certainly look wistful. They gazed at me with a sort of lugubrious expression that gave the impression that they had all just returned from an exceptionally trying interview with their bank managers. Their eyes seemed to be full of tears and they looked so depressed that I longed to comfort them in some way. Hoping to relieve their gloom, I dived down and overturned a slab of dead coral lying on the bottom, thus unearthing a host of titbits in the shapes of shrimps, crabs, minute worms and diabolical-looking black starfish with their writhing, snake-like limbs covered in what looked like fur. Normally, fish delighted in this largesse, but the Wistful Squirrel fish merely gazed at me in a grief-stricken way, and quietly edged away. Obviously I was not sufficiently sympathetic.
One of the exhausting things about swimming on the reef was the bewildering number of life forms that surrounded you everywhere you looked. In the four-and-a-half months that we were in Mauritius, we went out on the reef nearly every day and on each occasion, we would all see at least four new species of fish that we had not identified before. However, I really began to despair when, towards the end of our stay, Abel took us to the area we came to call the ‘flower garden’; for it was here, in an hour’s swim, that I hit the mind-boggling, all-time record of seeing sixteen species of fish I had not seen before during four months of snorkelling!
The flower garden was a very shallow reef, mostly three to three-and-a-half feet with parts of it only just over a foot in depth, so that you had to search for a channel through the coral lest you scrape your chest or knees. In this shallow water, the colours seemed even brighter and there were species of coral which one did not find elsewhere — the Mushroom coral, for example, which is free-living; that is to say, it does not form a reef as the other corals do, but lies about on the bottom, moving from place to place. It looks like the underside of a large, pinky- red and brown mushroom and only when the small, pale yellow tentacles come out from between the gills and wave about, do you realise that it is alive. Then there were the corals that looked like mounds of tiny green chrysanthemums, the size of a little finger nail. These were in constant movement and so they looked like great mounds of flowers being blown by some underwater breeze. And there were the startlingly vivid blue corals, a really bright cobalt blue; and the red corals which varied from the colour of blood to the palest sunset-pink. One could see heads of coral that looked as though they had been neatly clipped into round shapes by an expert in topiary. Each of these heads was so neat that you could not believe they had grown like that. Closer inspection revealed that each of these heads (about the size of a large bouquet of flowers) consisted of pieces of coral shaped like small, snow-covered Christmas trees.
It was these coral heads that were particularly favoured by the Leaf fish, which would float in schools near them and take refuge from danger by diving in amongst the Christmas trees. It was near one of these corals that I found a school of about fifty baby Leaf fish. At that age, I discovered, they do not possess the green iridescence but are sky blue, a much lighter shade than the adults, but just as exquisite. I amused myself for a long time by simply stretching out my hand towards this glittering group of minute fish, whereupon they would dive into the coral and disappear. The moment my hand was withdrawn, they would reappear out of the coral head like blue confetti bursting from a snow-covered pine forest.
It was in the flower garden that you saw the greatest number of species in the smallest area, and it was particularly attractive because, owing to the shallow water, you could get closer to them. The File fish were always a joy to watch. These were leaf-shaped fish with a curved, unicorn’s horn on their foreheads, a brilliant green with longitudinal lines and bright orange spots, an orange striped snout and orange and black striped eyes. They get their name from the rough file-like quality of their skins. A relative of the File fish is the Trigger fish which goes locally by the jaw-breaking name of Humu-humu-nuku-nuku-a-puaa. They are a deep-bodied fish, roughly leaf-shaped but instead of having a protracted mouth like the File fish, the Trigger fish has a pouting, belligerent face like a Brigadier-General watching slovenly recruits. This is helped by its striped uniform of black and white and grey, and a bright blue band across the top of its nose, which makes it look as though it has got bushy eyebrows. The Trigger fish gets its name from a rather extraordinary defence mechanism. Like the File fish, it has a sort of curved horn, but this lies behind the eyes and can lie flat. When the fish is pursued by an enemy, however, this spine erects and another, smaller spine locks it into position to keep the trigger erect and immovable. This not only makes the fish a difficult and dangerous mouthful, but when it dives into the coral and erects its trigger, it is impossible to dislodge it without dismantling the whole coral head.