The Sea Inside

to rise high into the air and jack-knife down below.
    But first we must wait as the whale blows and rolls through the water. Everything is stilled by expectation, diminished by this deferred miracle. All around the world people are going about their business; we are watching a blue whale about to dive.
    Subtly, the whale changes momentum, goes up a gear. You can’t put your finger on the moment that it does, but it’s obvious when it starts to happen. You feel the animal flex and ripple, drawing up and pulling down.
    Suddenly its flukes are held sharp against the sky, as though a giant sail had been raised out of the waves. They are utterly enormous, broad and of a piece, yet at precise right angles to the animal, like a plane’s tail fins. They hang there for a second, wobbling with their magnitude and the power of the body to which they are connected. They announce the end of the encounter. With this final flourish, our audience is over, leaving us wanting more. There’s something sexual about whales, Drew and I agree. Sleek, sensual and untouchable, they are the ultimate tease. It is that which draws you on.

    They may be the biggest animals that ever existed, but the blue whales of Sri Lanka have no place in the island’s culture. Roman maps depict a promontory on its south-east coast named
Cetcum Promotorium
, the Cape of Whales; Pliny, in his
Natural History
, written in the first century ad, described Ceylon as ‘banished by nature outside the world’, and therefore free of the vices of other countries. But beyond the influence of the West, the whales lived on in unhunted innocence. This island was a kind of Eden – it was also said to be the place where the whale spat out Jonah – just as whales were monsters at the edge of the map, islands in themselves in medieval myth, gathering roots, shrubs and trees on their backs as they aged: ‘As if the greatest mass of sea-weed lay/Beside the shore, with sand-banks all around.’
    It took a thousand years or more for the blue whales to resurface in these waters, in human sight, at least. My brother-in-law, Sampath, first told me about the whales which seemed to have miraculously appeared with the ending of the civil war and the lifting of military restrictions on the coastal waters in 2009. Until then the whale was regarded, if at all, as a stealer of fish or a destroyer of boats. Now they have become a sight to see, rather than fear, although later, when I asked a school assembly in Galle if they’d ever seen a whale, only half a dozen hands went up, despite the fact that such stupendous creatures swim only a few miles off the beaches on which the children play.
    That day, our first at sea, one blow was joined by another, then another, and another. We rushed this way and that, as whale after whale appeared in every direction – two dozen, maybe more. Their plumes shot up all around us like watery fireworks. Not far beneath the surface, the whales were busy scooping up the millions of krill they need to eat each day. I could even smell it, a definable change in the air – the characteristic scent of dimethyl sulphide gas given off by the phytoplankton on which their prey feed – and with it, the possibility of whales.
    All around us were mothers and calves, the young coming close to see what we were. No one has yet identified where these whales go to mate and calve, but Asha de Vos, a young marine biologist who has been studying this population, believes it is close by. She speaks passionately for the animals, which, as a Sri Lankan, she sees as her responsibility. They have their own specific,
Balaenoptera musculus indica
, and may even be a subspecies of their own, a resident, rather than a migratory population, which has developed to exploit this fertile territory. With the continental shelf so close to the tip of the island at Dondra Head, the upwellings created by the meeting of deep cold and shallow warm water provide the perfect environment.
    ‘He is seldom seen,’ Ishmael wrote of the blue whale, ‘at least I have never seen him except in the remote southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom!’ he said, employing the nickname that referred to the parasites which often coat its belly like mustard-yellow paint. ‘I can say nothing more that is true of ye …’
    The display board in the Natural