Leviathan or The Whale

last breath, the body straightening briefly before the back arched, the great ridge of knuckles flexing beneath the taut skin like a resurgent mountain range. Finally, the animal pulled up its tail and levered itself into the ocean.
    This announced sequence, invariable and majestic–the muscular tail, so much more upright than any other whale I had ever seen, like some vast grey tree trunk; the powerful backbones exposed, just as the colour of your bones is revealed when you clench your hand to make a fist; the trailing edge which announced the individual’s identity–all this was constantly strange and exciting. It induced a state of perpetual nerves: to be witness to this repeated beauty was almost too much. Yet there was also something immemorial about the articulate right-angledness of its leaving, the flexibility of something so huge–the presentation of the distinctive shape of its flukes which marked it out, their geographic lines echoing the island on the distant horizon–before vanishing with barely a ripple, so sublime was the animal’s re-entry. It was at this moment that the whales seemed at their most dinosaurian, most prehistoric; it was easy to believe, at such times, that these creatures were older than any other. Then the waiting began all over again.
    Ah the world, oh the whale.
    All day I sat in my wet suit, as rubbery as the side of the rib, nervous, ready. Two or three times there were false alarms as João could not get his boat ahead of the whales; to approach from any other angle would be futile, as his predecessors knew.
    The sun beat down, turning my body brown, tattooing my neck and wrists with tidelines to remind me of my encounter. The waves lapped languorously at my feet as I dangled them over the side. I wanted to get back in.
    ‘Let’s go.’
    This time I was ready, protected against the deceptive chill of the sea; insulated, like the whale. I dropped over the side, fingertips leaving go, letting my body bob in the water and find its own buoyancy. João’s shouted directions drifted away with the boat. I was left alone, moving steadily towards the whale.
    It was a juvenile, about ten years old–João said later–and its pronounced melon meant it was a male; I had learned that the older the animals, the paler they became. But he was still bigger than our boat as he lay there, his greyness shining in the sun.
    This time, as the whale came into view underwater, the fear in me subsided as I took in his unbelievable beauty. Forcing my body down, I felt oddly calm. I relaxed; my heart rate began to slow, and I tried to open my eyes wider, to optimize what I could see. Looking into the water, through the sun’s rays that played on it from above, I concentrated, committing to memory, even as I saw them, the elements of the whale.
    The colour and texture of his skin, shading from smoothness into wrinkled flanks. The rippling muscles, the slatted flukes like an aeroplane’s tailfins. His tightly clamped jaw merely made him more placid, playful, even. He did not seem in any hurry to leave. He hung there. And then he turned towards me.
    I knew now that the whales had the measure of me; that they knew what I was, even if I could not comprehend them; that I was an object in a four-dimensional map, appraised in six senses. Every nuance of their movement took account of mine. Where I struggled to maintain my balance, to remain part of the encounter, they entirely controlled its choreography.
    The young whale moved alongside. Noiselessly, for minutes that seemed like hours, we swam together, eye to eye, fin to fin, fluke to fluke. His movements mirrored my own as we moved in parallel. Black neoprene and grey blubber. Scrawny human and muscled whale. I wasn’t afraid any more.
    Back in the boat, I watched as the whale turned in a circle. Raising his head one last time, he dipped down, then lifted his flukes, and was gone.

Bibliography

    All publications London, unless otherwise stated. For a comprehensive list of sources to the text and further notes, please go to www.harpercollins.co.uk/leviathan

Diane Ackerman,
The Moon by Whale Light
, Orion Publishing, 1993
Peter Adamson,
The Great Whale to Snare: The Whaling Trade of Hull
, Kingston-upon-Hull Museums, Yorkshire (not dated)
Newton Arvin,
Herman Melville
, William Sloane Associates, NYC, 1950
Newton Arvin, editor,
The Heart of Hawthorne’s Journals
, Houghton Mifflin, Boston & NYC, 1929
W. H. Auden,
Collected Poems
, Faber,