Leviathan or The Whale

scientific interpretations: pre-eminently, that the spermaceti functions as a focus for the whale’s sonar clicks. A piece of bone cut in half shows honeycomb cells which in life would be filled with oil; filled with air, they would expand with changing water pressure as the animal dived.
    So many occupational hazards for the whale.
    There is something atavistic about these objects. The smallest comes from the whale’s inner ear, the same shell-like bone found in the bilges of the
Morgan
. These are the parts of the whale that survive the longest: otoliths, the fossilized ears of fifteen-million-year-old whales, have been found in South Carolina, their strange curling chambers evocative of ancient oceans and prehistoric sounds, as if by holding them to your own ear you might hear extinct animals singing in long-vanished seas.
    Outside his museum, on a rocky ledge overlooking the ocean, Malcolm has built a life-size model whale out of tubular grey scaffolding. It resembles a cross between Ishmael’s Arsacidean temple and a children’s climbing frame. As buzzards hover overhead, we talk about Malcolm’s years at sea. At my urging, he even speaks of monsters: of the giant squid that one fisherman saw alongside his boat, its tentacles longer than the hundred-foot vessel, making the entire animal twice its length; and of the pilot of a whale-spotting plane flying over the Indian Ocean off Durban who saw a wrecked plane’s fuselage sticking out of the water, only to watch the shape animate itself into a long neck and slip silently into the ocean.
    Such stories seem to suit this infernal island, a half-formed place of fire and water; I could imagine Melville and Hawthorne meeting here. Even the cliffs on which we stand are undermined by hidden caves. Due south from here lies Antarctica. And somewhere down in the fathomless, gathering darkness, sperm whales swim, eternally aware, their lives one waking dream, moving through valleys that run thirty thousand miles along the ocean floor, through lakes that lie stilly in the abyss, separated by temperature like pools of mercury, past jellyfish pulsating as ghostly Victorian brides in ectoplasmic crinolines.

XV
The Chase

    And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

    Job

    ‘Now, Philip.’
    João’s command is urgent, unexpected. There is no time to get into my wet suit. I scramble to spit into my mask and jam the snorkel into my mouth. Marco stands on my fins so that I can push my feet into them. Climbing over the side of the rigid inflatable boat, I am launched into the Atlantic.
    I am swimming in waters more than two miles deep. I can’t see ahead of me. Below the blue gives way to complete black, the kind of impenetrable black I only ever saw in a cave in Cheddar Gorge as a child, when the guide turned the lights out and told us that we would never experience such a profound darkness.
    João shouts directions from the boat. It is getting smaller with every minute that I swim away from it, away from safety, into the unknown. I might as well be swimming into outer space.
    I hardly knew it, as we hurried to leave the harbour, but the conditions were perfect. The sea’s surface was glassy, barely rippling in the summer sun. João, with his cropped hair and an orca tattooed on the calf of his leg, scanned the horizon through his sunglasses; Marco, his first mate, peering in the other direction as he hung from the superstructure of the rib, a modern-day whaleboat with a 250-horsepower engine.
    As we picked up speed out of the harbour, a pod of common dolphins had zoomed out of nowhere and into our path, playing at the bow. Competing to be first, they rode so close I could easily have reached out and touched them. Steel blue and dove grey, their hour-glass, go-faster stripes were raked with each other’s teeth marks; as cute as they looked, these animals were bigger than me. They swam in water so clear that they appeared to float in a vacuum, streams of silver bubbles trailing from their blowholes. As they twisted and turned their bodies to peer up at us, it seemed as though they were escorting us to some appointed meeting, here at the end of the world.
    Then something larger loomed ahead. Even from a mile away, I knew it was a whale–albeit one unlike any other I had ever seen before. Its blow was utterly distinctive, spouting at forty-five degrees to the surface. Instantly I saw the reason for the Latin name. It really was a big-headed blower;
Physeter even
sounded