The Tang Dynasty Underwater Pyramid Read Free Page B

nervous Injun that flopped backward off the side of the boat into the Pearl River Delta and descended with the others into the murky water in search of Jesse’s lost cargo.
    In any event, I needn’t have been so worried. From the forty-meter mark, I spent the entire dive in a state of complete hilarity.
    I chortled. I laughed. I giggled. I found the fish in my vicinity a source of mirth and tried to point out the more amusing aspects of their anatomy to my fellow divers. Eventually I became so helpless with laughter that Laszlo, wearing an expression of even greater disgust than was normal for him, grabbed me by one of the shoulder straps of my buoyancy compensator, or B.C., and simply hauled me around like a package.
    I had become prey to nitrogen narcosis, more colorfully known as “rapture of the deep.”
    When we got within sight of the muddy bottom, it was clear that the Goldfish Fairy was not to be seen. The captain appeared to be a little off on his calculations. So, still a good fifteen or so meters off the bottom, Laszlo checked his compass and we began searching the bottom, so many kicks in one direction followed by a ninety-degree turn and so many kicks in the next, the whole creating a kind of squarish, outwardly expanding spiral.
    We found the Goldfish Fairy within moments, the bow section looming suddenly out of the murk like that of the Titanic in, well, the film Titanic. Bibbling with laughter, I tried to point out this similarity to Laszlo, who simply jerked me in the direction of the sunken ship and yanked me over the bows to begin his inspection of the vessel.
    The bow section was a little crumpled, having struck first, but the rest of the little ship was more or less intact. The hatches were still secure. These would present very little trouble, but the fly in the ointment was the ship’s mast, which had fallen over both hatches and which presented a nasty snarl of wire designed as if on purpose to entangle divers.
    Laszlo grimly dragged me around the ship as he made his survey, and I spat my air supply from my mouth and tried to explain to a school of nearby fish the finer points of playing the charango, which is the little ten-string guitar with its body made from the shell of an armadillo. Eventually Laszlo had to look at me very severely and wrote a message on the underwater slate he kept clipped to his B.C.
    I think you should breathe now, I read, and I flashed him the okay sign and returned the regulator to my mouth.
    Our survey complete, Laszlo tied a buoy to the stern rail of the ship so that we could find it again, inflated the buoy from his air supply, and then led us in stages to the surface, breathing during our decompression stops from the cylinders we’d attached to the anchor line. As soon as we passed the forty-meter mark, I became cold sober. The transition was instantaneous, and I wanted to dive down a bit and see if I could trigger the narcosis once more— just as an experiment— but Laszlo wasn’t about to permit this, so we continued to rise until we saw from below the remaining members of the water ballet practicing their moves. The women were wearing their mermaid tails, the better to convince any prying eyes that their reasons for being here had nothing to do with any hypothetical wrecks lying on the bottom sixty meters below, while the men swam in formation and flexed their muscles in synchrony.
    “Just sit in the boat and don’t do anything, ” Laszlo hissed to me after we were back in the launch and had got our gear off. “And don’t say anything either,” he added as he saw me about to speak, even though I had only opened my mouth to apologize.
    A pair of Apollos went down next, breathing the gas mixtures that would enable them to stay longer at depth. They were to enter the hold through one of the crew passages that led down through the deck, and in order to find their way back, carried a reel with a long line on it, one end of which they attached to the launch and