Leviathan or The Whale

like its bursts of exhaled breath.

    As the boat drew closer, I could make out a grey shape, lying like a pale shiny log in the water. It was difficult to tell one end from the other: which was the head and which the dorsal fin? Then, as it rose to take its breath, I saw its single nostril, wantonly lopsided. It was shockingly strange. The animal was an arrangement of sun-burnished bumps, ‘compared to little else than a dark rock, or the bole of some giant tree’, as Frederick Bennett wrote in the 1830s.
    As the head lifted out of the water, I saw that it was not alone. Quietly, it became part of an assembly. Further off lay two or three animals, then yet more until, almost disguised by the waves, a group of ten or twelve sperm whales hung there, breathing in rhythm with the sea, a rhythm that caught my breath too as the boat rose and fell with the swell.
    All that was five minutes ago, but it might have been a lifetime. Now I was fighting for air in the water, trying to remember to breathe through my nose and not my mouth, like them.
    ‘To your left, Philip!’ João called through cupped hands. I had no idea which was left and which was right. I kicked my legs furiously, but I didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The waves seemed to push me back and under. With my heart pounding in my ribs, I took a deep breath and peered beneath me, down into the unknown.

    It was as if I were looking into the universe. The blue was intangible yet distinct; untouchable and all-enveloping, like the sky. I felt like an astronaut set adrift, the world falling away beneath me. Floating in and out of focus before my eyes were a myriad of miniature planets or asteroids, some elliptical, some perfect spheres. Set sharply against the blue, the glaucous, gelatinous micro-animals and what seemed to be fish roe moved in a firmament of their own, both within and beyond my perception.
    I was moving through another dimension, suspended in salt water, held over an earth that had disappeared far below. I could see nothing ahead. The rich soup on which those same tiny organisms fed combined to defeat my sight, reducing lateral visibility as they drifted like dust motes caught in the sunlight.
    Then, suddenly, there it was.
    Ahead, taking shape out of the darkness, was an outline familiar from words and pictures and books and films but which had never seemed real; an image I might have invented out of my childhood nightmares, a recollection of something impossible. Something so huge I could not see it, yet which now resolved itself into reality.
    A sperm whale, hanging at the surface. I was less than thirty feet away before I saw it, before its blunt head, connected by muscular flanks to its infinite, slowly swaying flukes, filled my field of vision.
    In a moment that seemed to go on for ever–catching my breath in my perspex mask, my limbs frozen with panic and excitement, my body held in suspense, not wanting to go forward but never wanting to go back–the distance between us closed.
    Its great grey head turned towards me, looking like an upright block of granite, overwhelmingly monumental. Its entirety was my own. That was all I could see: far taller and wider than me, the front end of an animal which, it suddenly occurred to me, had one major disadvantage over the puny human swimming towards it. It could not see me. Its eyes could not take me in. I was approaching the whale from its blind spot. And it was coming closer.
    What if it just kept on coming? The head bent down, bringing its ponderous dome to bear in my direction. Then I began to hear it.
    Click-click-click,
click-click-click
, click-click-click.
    A rapid series of sounds, creaking. I felt them, rather than heard them, in my breastbone; my ribcage had become a sound box. The whale was creating its own picture of me in its head; an MRI scan of the intruder, an outline of an alien in its world.
    I felt my body let go, and peed into the water. A ridiculous thought passed through my mind: I had arrived unannounced, only to lose control of my bodily functions and piss on my host’s doormat. Then, at the crucial moment, the head turned, bowing slightly, as if in identification. Not edible. Not interesting.
    From sheer fear the moment turned into something else. I realized that this was a female. A great mother hanging before me, intensely alive. For all her disinterest, it seemed there was an invisible umbilical between us. Mammal to mammal; her huge greyness, my unmothered paleness.