‘Smart work indeed’ said Balthazar approvingly as he stepped into the water; and then ‘By God! It is quite fantastically warm.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Clea busy in the locker.
‘It only proves my point about a thunderstorm.’ And curiously enough, at this moment, there came a distinct rumble of thunder out of that cloudless sky. ‘There’ said Balthazar in triumph. ‘We will get a fine soaking and you will owe me some money, Clea.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘It was a shore battery’ I said.
‘Rubbish’ said Balthazar.
So we secured the cutter and carried our provisions ashore.
Balthazar lay on his back with his hat over his nose in the best of humours. He would not bathe, pleading the indifference of his swimming, so Clea and I dived once more into the familiar pool which we had neglected all winter long. Nothing had changed. The sentinels were still there, grouped in silent debate, though the winter tides had altered their dispositions somewhat, grouping them a little nearer to the wreck. Ironically yet respectfully we greeted them, recognizing in these ancient gestures and underwater smiles a familiar happiness growing up in the sheer act of swimming once more together. It was as if the blood had started to flow again in veins long withered from disuse. I caught her by the heel and rolled her in a long somersault towards the dead mariners, and turning expertly she repaid the debt by coming up behind me to drag me down by the shoulders and climb surfacewards before I could retaliate. It was here, spiralling up through the water with her hair coiled out behind her, that the image of Clea was restored once more. Time had rendered her up, whole and intact again — “natural as a city’s grey-eyed Muse “ — to quote the Greek poem. Swiftly, precisely the fingers which pressed upon my shoulder re-evoked her as we slid through the silent pool.
And then: to sit once more in the simple sunlight, sipping the red wine of St Menas as she broke up the warm brown loaf of French bread, and hunted for a particular cheese or a cluster of dates: while Balthazar talked discursively (half asleep) of the Vineyard of Ammon, the Kings of the Harpoon Kingdom and their battles, or of the Mareotic wine to which, not history, but the gossiping Horace once attributed Cleopatra’s distempers of mind … (‘History sanctions everything, pardons everything — even what we do not pardon ourselves.’) So the warm noon drew on as we lay there on the hot pebbles: and so at last — to Balthazar’s great delight and Clea’s discomfiture — the predicted thunderstorm made its appearance, heralded by a great livid cloud which rolled up from the east and squatted over the city, bruising the sky. So suddenly too — as when an ink-squid in alarm puns out its bag and suddenly fogs clear water in a cloud of black — rain flowed down in glittering sheets, thunder bellowed and insisted. At each peal Balthazar clapped his hands with delight — not only to be proved right, but also because here we were sitting in full sunlight, fully at our ease, eating oranges and drinking wine beside an untroubled blue sea.
‘Stop crowing’ said Clea severely.
It was one of those freak storms so prevalent in the early spring with its sharp changes of temperature born of sea and desert.
They turned the streets to torrents in the twinkling of an eye, yet never endured above half an hour. Suddenly the cloud would be whisked away by a scrap of wind, utterly to disappear. ‘And mark me now’ said Balthazar, inebriated by the success of his prediction. ‘By the time we get back to harbour everything will be dry again, dry as a bone.’ But now the afternoon brought us another phenomenon to delight us — something rarely seen in summer in the waters of Alexandria, belonging as it did to those days preceding winter storms when the glass was falling steeply. The waters of the pool darkened appreciably, curdled, and then became phosphorescent.
It was Clea who first noticed. ‘Look’ she cried with delight, crushing her heels down in the shallows to watch the twinkling prickling light spark from them. ‘Phosphorus!’ Balthazar started saying something learned about the organism which causes this spectacle but unheeding we plunged side by side and ranged down into the water, transformed into figures of flame, the sparks flashing from the tips of our fingers and toes with the glitter of static electricity. A swimmer seen underwater looks like an early picture of the fall of Lucifer, literally on fire. So bright was the electrical crackle that we could not help wondering how it was that we were not scorched by it. So we played, glittering like comets, among the quiet mariners who sat, watching us perhaps in their thoughts, faintly echoing the twitching of the tide in thencan vas sacks.
‘The cloud’s lifting already’ cried Balthazar as I surfaced at last for air. Soon even the fugitive phosphorescence would dwindle and vanish. For some reason or other he had climbed into the stern of the cutter, perhaps to gain height and more easily watch the thunderstorm over the city. I rested my forearms on the gunwale and took my breath. He had unwrapped the old harpoon gun of Narouz and was holding it negligently on his knee. Clea surfaced with a swish of delight and pausing just long enough to cry: ‘The fire is so beautiful’ doubled her lithe body back and ducked downward again.
‘What are you doing with that?’ I asked idly.
‘Seeing how it works.’ He had in fact pushed the harpoon to rest in the barrel. It had locked the spring. ‘It’s cocked’ I said. ‘Have a care.’
‘Yes, I’m going to release it.’ Then Balthazar leaned forward and uttered the only serious remark he had made all that day. ‘You know’ he said, ‘I think you had better take her with you. I have a feeling you won’t be coming back to Alexandria. Take Clea with you!’ And then, before I could reply, the accident happened. He was fumbling with the gun as he spoke. It slipped from between his fingers and fell with a crash, the barrel striking the gunwale six inches from my face. As I reared back in alarm I heard the sudden cobra-like hiss of the compressor and the leaden twang of the trigger-release. The harpoon whistled into the water beside me rustling its long green line behind it. ‘For Christ’s sake’ I said.
Balthazar had turned white with alarm and vexation. His halfmuttered apologies and expressions of horrid amazement were eloquent. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ I had heard the slight snick of steel settling into a target, somewhere down there in the pool. We stayed frozen for a second for something else had occurred simultaneously to our minds. As I saw his lips starting to shape the word ‘Clea’ I felt a sudden darkness descending on my spirit — a darkness which lifted and trembled at the edges; and a rushing like the sough of giant wings. I had already turned before he uttered the word. I crashed back into the water, now following the long green thread with all the suspense of Ariadne; and to it added the weight of slowness which only heartsick apprehension brings. I knew in my mind that I was swimming vigorously — yet it seemed like one of those slow-motion films where human actions, delayed by the camera, are drawn unctuously out to infinity, spooled out like toffee. How many light-years would it take to reach the end of that thread? What would I find at the end of it? Down I went, and down, in the dwindling phosphorescence, into the deep shadowed coolness of the pool.