' "All the time, in the beam of our lights we can see motes endlessly descending and descending to make the great bed of ooze.
'"It is an eerie place, an awful place, death's own place; for the floor, the rock shelves, everything but the perpendicular faces of the cliffs, is drifted deep with the mortal remains of untold billion millions of minute creatures. 'Nothing,' you would say, 'absolutely nothing could live here. This is beyond the reach of life: the nethermost pit.'
'"But " and then some stuff about the improbable places you do find life, leading up to: " is this, the most secret womb in the world, not barren, after all?" Er, well, words to that effect, anyway. And then, giving the Bocker line a complete miss: 'Is a new form of life and not only of life, but of intelligent life about to emerge from these depths, from this slime, and struggle up through the miles of water to the sunlight, perhaps to challenge the supremacy of man himself? Millions of years ago our own ancestors crawled from the sea on to the land " Then sprinkle in some bits which support the possibility. Then you can follow on with a piece about the inevitable animosity, and I can take the line that should the two forms of intelligence be complementary they may be able to solve all the riddles of the universe between them. What about something along those lines?'
I considered. 'Well, to be frank, darling, I don't quite see the over-all form, and conclusion.'
'I'm seeing it rather as one of those "Whither ?" things, only not highbrow. You know, ending on a question.'
'As well it may. If I may say so, Voice doesn't seem to have quite made up his mind whether he is a florid moralist, or a metaphorical guide. But I think I see the mood you're after the picture of a new kind of life emerging from the mysteries of a sort of super Celtic-twilight that kind of thing?'
'Well, allowing for the fact that I shouldn't express it at all like that roughly, yes, I suppose.'
'Well, Phyl, you'd have an awful handful there, because, honestly, I don't think this thing can be made to lend itself to a romantic treatment. Why not wait until we get a few more facts to add to it, and then try again along more documentary lines? They're always your real hits, you know.'
She thought it over. 'You're probably right, Mike. But I'd like to get in first with that angle, so I hope we don't have to wait too long for the extra facts.'
'I, on the other hand, would prefer that we should never have them at all. I should be a lot happier if I were to hear that the things down there had simply drowned themselves, but I'm prepared to be disappointed.'
And I thought I was. Nobody, however, was really prepared for the next day's news.
Phase Two
We made an early start that morning. The car, ready loaded, had stood out all night, and we were away a few minutes after five, with the intention of putting as much of southern England behind us as we could before the roads got busy. It was two hundred and sixty-eight point eight (when it wasn't point seven or point nine) miles to the door of the cottage that Phyllis had bought with a small legacy from her Aunt Helen.
I had rather favoured the idea of a cottage a mere fifty miles or so away from London, but it was Phyllis's aunt who was to be commemorated with what was now Phyllis's money, so we became the proprietors of Rose Cottage, Penllyn, Nr Constantine, Cornwall, Telephone Number: Navasgan 333. It was a grey-stone, five-roomed cottage set on a south-easterly sloping, heathery hillside, with its almost eavesless roof clamped down tight on it in the true Cornish manner. Straight before us we looked across the Helford River, and on towards the Lizard where, by night, we could see the flashing of the lighthouse. To the left was a view of the coast stretching raggedly away on the other side of Falmouth Bay, and if we walked a hundred yards ahead, and so out of the lee of the hillside which protected us from the south-westerly gales, we could look across Mount's Bay, towards the Scilly Isles, and the open Atlantic beyond. Falmouth, 7 miles; Helston, 9; elevation 332 feet above sea-level; several, though not all, mod. con. When you did reach it you decided that it was worth travelling two hundred and sixty-eight point eight (or nine) miles, after all.
We used it in a migratory fashion. When we had enough commissions and ideas on hand to keep us going for a time we would withdraw there to drive our pens and bash our typewriters in pleasant, undistracting seclusion for a few weeks. Then we would return to London for a while, market our wares, cement relations, and angle for commissions until we felt the call to go down there again with another accumulated batch of work or we might, perhaps, simply declare a holiday.
That morning, I made pretty good time. It was still only half past eight when I removed Phyllis's head from my shoulder and woke her up to announce: 'Yeovil, and breakfast, darling.' I left her trying to pull herself together to order breakfast intelligibly while I went to get some newspapers. By the time I returned she was functioning better, and had already started on the cereal. I handed over her paper, and looked at mine. The main headline in both was given to a shipping disaster. That this should be so when the ship concerned was Japanese suggested that there was little news from elsewhere.
I glanced at the 'story' below the picture of the ship. From a welter of human interest I unearthed the fact that the Japanese liner, Yatsushiro, bound from Nagasaki to Amboina, in the Moluccas, had sunk. Out of some seven hundred people on board, only five survivors had been found.
Now, in common with most of my fellow-countrymen, though independently of foundation, I have the feeling that in the Occident we construct, but in the Orient they contrapt. Thus the news of an oriental bridge collapsing, train leaving the rails, or, as in the present case, ship sinking, never impinges with quite the novelty its western counterpart would arouse, and the sense of concern is consequently less acute. I do not defend this phenomenon; I regard it as reprehensible. Nevertheless, it is so, and in consequence I turned the page with my sense of tragedy somewhat qualified by non-surprise. Before I could settle down to the leader, however, Phyllis interrupted with an exclamation. I looked across. Her paper carried no picture of the vessel; instead, it printed a small sketch-map of the area, and she was intently studying the spot marked 'X'.
'What is it?' I asked.
She put her finger on the map. 'Speaking from memory, and always supposing that the cross was made by somebody with a conscience,' she said, 'doesn't that put the scene of this sinking pretty near our old friend the Mindanao Trench?'
I looked at the map, trying to recall the configuration of the ocean floor around there.
'It can't be far off,' I agreed.
I turned back to my own paper, and read the account there more carefully. 'Women,' apparently, 'screamed when ,' 'Women in night-attire ran from their cabins,' 'Women, wide-eyed with terror, clutched their children ,' 'Women' this and 'Women' that when 'death struck silently at the sleeping liner.' When one had swept all this woman jargon and the London Office's repertoire of phrases suitable for trouble at sea aside, the skeleton of a very bare Agency message was revealed so bare that for a moment I wondered why two large newspapers had decided to splash it instead of giving it just a couple of inches. Then I perceived the real mystery angle which lay submerged among all the phoney dramatics. It was that the Yatsushiro had, without warning, and for no known reason, suddenly gone down like a stone.
I got hold of a copy of this Agency message later, and I found its starkness a great deal more alarming and dramatic than this business of dashing about in 'night-attire'. Nor had there been much time for that kind of thing, for, after giving particulars of the time, place, etc., the message concluded laconically: 'Fair weather, no (no) collision, no (no) explosion, cause unknown. Foundered less one (one) minute alarm. Owners state quote impossible unquote.'