Ohtami took them off again, and squatted to chow with the others, for it was sundown.
Each
man helped himself from a bowl full of rice, broke the rice-paper seal
around a pair of chopsticks, rinsed his mouth with tepid water and
spewed a libation to the jealous demons of the deep. Around them on
platters stood the delicacies of their diet, boiled purple seaweed,
cubes of pickled cabbage, chopped onions, pearl-oyster mince. Sea and
air were still. A thin blue haze hung over the water. The fifteen-ton
lugger, under bare poles, drifted quietly round its stern anchor chain.
The men were silent, for the death of their shipmate had depressed
them. Who could say what Ohtami felt? Toyo had come from the same
storm-swept village and they had been friends.
In
those latitudes there is no sunset, and the sun plunges into the sea.
At the precise moment of its departing Ohtami thought he saw something.
He thought he saw a great arm sticking up out of the sea, pointing with
one finger at a couple of islands not more than a mile away. Ohtami was
greatly excited, but no one else would believe he had seen anything,
and they laughed all the more because they were so relieved to have
something to laugh about that night. Ohtami relapsed into sullen
silence.
The
next day he went down to the sea-bed after the shell. But it was an
unlucky trial trip, for he found nothing. When the number one diver
went down he had no better fortune, and so it went on the whole day. It
was a prospecting trip after new grounds, and the pearling master was
glum. He made up his mind to hoist anchor
