Leviathan or The Whale

Lost and found. Another orphan.
    I could not believe that something so big could be so silent. Surveyed by the electrical charge of her sixth sense, I felt insignificant, and yet not quite. Recreated in her own dimension, in the dimension of the sea, I was taken into her otherness, my image in her head. As the whale turned past me, I saw her eye, grey, veiled, sentient; set in her side, the centre of her consciousness. Behind it lay only muscle, moving without effort. The moment lasted for ever, and for seconds. Both of us in our naked entirety, nothing between us but illimitable ocean.
    Then she was gone, plunging soundlessly into the black, silhouetted against the blue, her shape so graphic it might have been created by computer, a CGI image set against a cinematic matt. Only as the distance between us increased–as the silence of her descent became hypnotic–was her ancient enormity revealed; something I had seen, and yet which I could not quite comprehend.
    Back at the boat, Marco hauled me out of the water, and João smiled, shaking my hand and saying solemnly: ‘You are a lucky man.’
    Over the next few days, I spent all my time at sea, beyond the land. I didn’t need my credit card or my keys. While people were shopping, eating, talking, waking, sleeping, I swam with whales.
    Often I could not see the whales as I entered the water, and had to trust entirely in João’s shouted directions. Sometimes the animals would move so fast that they vanished before I could swim within sight. I watched their diminishing shapes, a trio of whales with their tails moving almost imperceptibly, powering them into the blue. But sometimes I found myself closing in, moving towards huge heads rising rhythmically with each blow as I blew air out of my own snorkel. I saw them on their level, rather than from above, as the great flukes rose on tails drawn vertically out of the waves–the hand of God so feared by the whalers–before plummeting with immense grandeur into the deep. I was within their world, rather than outside it; looking into it, rather than merely looking on.
    Then the bad weather rolled in, and for days the seas lashed Pico, smashing white against the black rocky shores. The boats lay tied up in the harbour. At night, the Cory’s shearwaters, which by day followed the whales like courtiers, came in to roost, their ghostly shapes circling over the darkened harbour, singing almost comically, ‘sqwhack, sqwhack, sqwhaaackkk’.
    I lay in bed, unable to close my eyes. Every time I did, I would see the whale. All my life I had dreamed about whales. Now the void had been filled; or rather, I had been taken into it. What was I trying to prove? All my fears of loss and abandonment and being left behind seemed to be summed up in this confrontation, so extreme that it induced a state of suspended hallucination. As I lay sleepless in a hired bed, I thought I might lose my senses entirely, in the early hours of the morning, the same time when I had lain on the floor in the hospital ward, listening to the breath that had brought me into the world slowing to a halt.
    Then, in the seeping light of morning, with the volcano looming out of the dawn beyond my window, the sea abruptly calmed, like a hand stretched over its surface.
    Lowering the hydrophone over the side, João listened intently to the clicks echoing over the ocean. Beneath us, under the thin floor of the boat, the whales announced their position, the clicks increasing in intensity, in patterns I could not discern–
    click–click–click ∼ click-click-click ∼
click-click-click
.

    –accelerating ever closer, entirely in charge of a world over which we floated. It was as if they were resounding miles below, even as they radioed their presence to other whales miles apart. Tuned in to some unseen circuit of food and communal intent, they knew instinctively where they were, while we wonder constantly what on earth we are doing.
    A smooth rounded shape ploughed through the water towards us, its melon and pointed beak the unmistakable form of a beaked whale. ‘For me, it was a Sowerby’s,’ said João. It was a species I knew only as a model in the museum or a picture in my handbook: ‘
Mesoplodon bidens
. Status: unknown; Population: unknown; Threats: unknown’.
    The seas were alive off this island of rarities. Suddenly, animals were everywhere, conjured up out of the otherwise empty sea, as though one of my manuals had come to life. The sheer variety