The Sea Inside

once tropical jungle will spring new and glossy cities’, with super-highways and laser-felled trees, settlements at the poles, and underwater hotels and cars; an entirely inhabited world, the vast suburb that the writer dreaded.
    By then Clarke himself had retreated from the modern world to live in Ceylon, ostensibly to pursue his passion for scuba-diving, although he may have been drawn by its other attractions. Inspired by his love of the sea, he also conjured up a more disturbing vision: ‘In the world of the future, we will not be the only intelligent creatures. One of the coming techniques will be what we might call bioengineering – the development of intelligent and useful servants among the other animals on this planet, particularly the great apes and, in the oceans, the dolphins and whales.’ Clarke thought it a scandal that man had neglected to domesticate any animals since the Stone Age. ‘With our present knowledge of animal psychology and genetics, we could certainly solve the servant problem,’ he said, although he also foresaw animal trades unions, ‘and we’d be right back where we started’.

    It’s difficult to tell how old Anoma is. He may be half my age, or older than me; he has a youthfulness about him. Since he was a boy he has trained himself to be open to the natural world. He was born here in Galle, knows it intimately. Walking through the remains of its Dutch ramparts, he points out a giant ficus whose roots seem more solid than the massive stone walls of the seventeenth-century fort, fingering its way in clusters to the cracks, slowly pulling the place apart.
    We emerge out of the deep, gloomy gateway that regulates those seeking admission to Galle’s ancient precincts, and which might well have been built to allow the passage of an elephant. Above us the museum rises like a cliff face. It is punctuated with arched windows, and seems impossibly old, ark-like; indeed, within its dark belly lay the skeleton of a Bryde’s whale, articulated and displayed there till the sea came to reclaim it. Anoma shows me the level to which the water rose that day, a memory marked in feet, although every inch measured out disaster. The slow withdrawal of the water. The fish flapping in the pools. The silence. Then, roaring out of the ocean, an unbelievable rising, an incomprehensible volume produced by one tectonic plate sliding under another. Below, whales had already fled the submarine sound waves; above, millions of lives were about to change.
    That morning, 26 December 2004, Anoma was sitting in his office in the Lighthouse Hotel, watching the sea swell over a great rock called Whale Head. Now it was lost in the surging waves that engulfed the lower floors of the luxury hotel. Two of Anoma’s colleagues, on their way to work, were simply washed away. Bicycles, tuk-tuks, animals, cars, houses, boats, stupas, people; there was no discrimination in the natural destruction, nor any dominion, either. Nor would it have occurred to anyone to worry about the inhabitants of the sea as those terrible tremors coursed through its depths.
    In a recent study it was found that, after an earthquake off California measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale, a single fin whale covered thirteen kilometres in twenty-six minutes as it attempted to flee the source of the two-hundred-decibel sound. In Sri Lanka, animals on land were said to have left the coast for higher land long before humans had warning of the tsunami. At Taprobane, the flying foxes left their caves in broad daylight, of their own accord. Later, when new shocks threatened the same waters, naturalists at sea, unaware of earthquake alerts, were mystified to see every cetacean, from blue whales to spinner dolphins, disappear. Meanwhile, the water in hotel swimming pools lurched and lapped like little oceans.
    On the road back to Colombo, posters and plastic bunting proclaim rival allegiances; political symbols are spray-painted onto the tarmac. On the city’s outskirts at night, young men march behind wire fences. ‘People are afraid,’ my friend tells me. Suddenly it seems even darker outside. What do they do, those slim young men? What will they be expected to do?
    And out at sea, the whales leave black holes behind, taking everything in their wake.

The southern sea

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination

T.S. E LIOT
‘The Dry