The Sea Inside

its beak a stiletto blade. One of the men pulls its dorsal fin out like a fan; it must be a metre high, electric blue and spiny. Their shiny prize took six hours to land, bucking and twisting once it was in the boat. It is a valuable catch; they won’t have to work for a week. Later, we’ll watch as another crew free a green turtle from their nets. Other marine wildlife are not so lucky: by-catch and overfishing are endemic problems throughout the Indian Ocean, a consequence of its crowded shores.
    Further out at sea, another boat hoves into view – a mere dot on the horizon one moment, up close and larger than life the next. Sticking out from its sides like the antennae of praying mantis are huge rods made from stripped branches, sturdy enough to land a tuna. Bhangra blares from a sound system. In return for this operatic performance, the crew ask for cigarettes, employing a characteristic swivel of the head that might mean anything from acquiescence to approval – a subtle ambivalence in a country that runs on good manners. Rasika speaks volubly and rapidly in Singhalese, although it’s not entirely clear whether the crew are denying that whales even exist, or whether they’ve seen vast schools of cetaceans, just over there, yes, there, over there; or, no, none at all.
    As the land diminishes with every nautical mile, it loses all importance, reduced to a blur in the distance. To the south lies one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes; on it, the same slow-moving juggernauts I see from Southampton’s shore, prosaic compared to the fishermen’s painted craft. At least half a dozen dark shapes dot the horizon, moving relentlessly against the sky.
    Rasika points ahead, almost whispering the word we’ve been waiting to hear. I can’t see anything. Then, there, yes, something white against the blue.
    And again. It must be as tall as a house.
    And again – a vertical plume in a horizontal world. A geyser erupting out of the ocean.
    Kushan Putha
’s engine picks up speed. We’re really moving now. I lean forward, white knuckles to the grabrail in front of me, head down, bent double, to an endurance test determined by the whims of a whale. Suddenly, right off our bow, the whale surfaces, sending its calling card into the air. The steamy blow is two storeys high.
Balaenoptera musculus
: the blue whale. Something so beautiful as to be unbelievable.
    It is a gradual revelation. First, a dark lump, the splash-guard to the whale’s blowholes. Then, rolling behind its wedge-shaped head, its body – no more a mere body than a skyscraper is a building; a living construction that leaves words in its wake.
    I’ve only seen this creature as a shape against a white page, laid out with the rest of its relatives in the austere context of a field guide, or modelled in a museum. The reality is so far removed, so enormous, that the only thing I can fix on is the colour. It really is blue, at least in certain lights: a deep, petrolly blue, or the blue of a swallow’s back; the concentrated essence of water, with an added iridescence. Like sperm whales, these chameleons seem to change colour with every angle, every glimpse. One moment they’re mottled grey and turquoise, organically patterned like lichen on a beech tree or the sheen on a plate of zinc; the next, the blue becomes so black it is as deep as the lacquer on a Japanese chair. This illusive quality makes the whale even harder to comprehend – as if that weren’t difficult enough already.
    Only afterwards, looking at my photographs, do I recall what I must have seen but not registered in the moment: that with its forward motion the animal drags the sea down with it, as if the water were parting to make way for the whale. Its imperial progress demands nothing less. It is animate, yet not set apart from the ocean; it is the ocean itself. I think of the visible rays in medieval paintings that connect God’s gaze to his saints, as Drew tells me about a scientist who has devised a laser that, by bouncing off either end of a whale, instantly gauges its size. All I have are my eyes.
    Then, as the sequence plays out, something almost ridiculous: the animal’s dorsal fin, risibly small, an afterthought of sorts. The stubby bump only serves to make what went before appear even bigger. It is followed, inexorably, by the thick tailstock – the caudal peduncle – restoring to proper proportion an animal the size of an airliner. Densely muscled, it is charged, ready to