Page:Ghost Stories v02n02 (1927-02).djvu/14

Dancers in the Sea

One diver went down to the bottom of the
sea, to come up dead of heart failure—
another diver came up a maniac—and when
Bill Hacker went down, he found a horror

worse than death

I had come back from the war—and lost my girl. She had married another man.

Naturally I was feeling low as I walked slowly along Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, trying to think out some solution of my troubles.

Funny I should meet Blake right then—an old pal of mine. He almost bumped into me.

"Just signed up with the Overseas Salvage Corporation as Senior Officer in charge of an expedition bound for the Mediterranean," he informed me. "Why not come along?"

I rubbed my eyes and stared. Yes, it was Lieutenant Blake all right.

"Nothing too Big—Nothing too Far—Nothing too Deep," he droned in a sing-song tone, then burst into a loud laugh. "Come on, Bill—let's go!"

Guess that was their trade slogan for I noticed it at the top of the contract I signed the next morning.

With one stroke of the pen I was metamorphosed from a chief gunner's mate into a deep-sea diver. Anybody who knows anything about this, knows that was some jump, and it would be putting it mildly to say that I was elated with this sudden turn in fortune.

And the pay—about five times as much as I had received from Uncle Sam, though I had rated a C. P. O.'s chevrons overseas. I might mention too that this matter of pay didn't deter my enthusiasm any.

We sailed the following week-a party of eight. Lieutenant Blake acquainted us with the intimate details of our job as we were crossing the Atlantic in the big Cunarder. It seemed unreal—the luxurious staterooms, the music, beautiful women and dancing in the salon—after two years of cramped iron bunks and four-hour watches.

"This is de-life, boys," Slim Galvin was fond of repeating.

Slim, a tall, sharp-featured fellow, was our ace diver. Diving—like every other game, including flying and baseball—has its aces. Slim was our Guynemeier, our Walter Johnson. A twin-hitch, ex-service diver, Slim could have pointed to a fancy string of upside-down altitude records as long as your arm. But he never did. Slim was one of the most modest chaps I ever knew.

The Salvage Company had contracted, Lieutenant Blake explained, to recover 1,000,000 pounds sterling in gold bullion, a mere bagatelle of $5,000,000, from a water-proof safe in the submerged cabin of the S. S. Frisia, a 4,000-ton Russian merchantman lying somewhere on the bottom of the Black Sea. The Frisia had been rammed and sunk the previous winter of 1918 by a Bolshevik patrol boat in the harbor of Odessa.

Two months later—in June. 1919, to be exact—we had rigged-up and moored a lighter about 200-yards off the shore. Less than 250 feet back from where we lay, doubly anchored, the Black Sea drops off from the harbor ledge to sheer depths of a mile or more.

For a week the dull boom of the surf on the jutting pier heads had been like the roar of distant artillery. But one Monday—a day of ill-omen in the Navy—the skies cleared and the sea became several shades lighter.

The Black Sea derives its name from its murky color, and its color from the dreary reflection of dull, overcast skies. While the Mediterranean is always blue because of the deep sapphire of the sky, the Black Sea is a dark mirror reflecting leaden skies. There are no coloring pigments in the water.

The shadowy, hostile waters constantly reached with skeleton white-tipped fingers over the sides of the lighter. They quieted down by noonday. The sun broke through the dismal sky and diving conditions became as propitious as could be reasonably expected. We prepared for several hours of diving.

The apparatus, consisting of an air pump, depth lines, two regulation diving suits with harness equipment, which had been previously rigged on the shore side, was carefully inspected.

Slim was our lead-off man. He was assisted into his suit, and slowly descended the ladder over the side. He paused on a bottom rung, the lower half of his body in the water, while I clamped the heavy glass visor into place. Holding to the ladder with one bare hand, he thrust the other into the sea. He recoiled as from the bite of an adder.

"Ugh!" he shuddered. "Cold as ice!"

After a final rehearsal of the pre-arranged call signals Slim dropped beneath the surface.

Deep sea diving is an art—of a sort. A highly intricate, dangerous sort. The air pump, equipped with a high-pressure gauge, is manned by two men. A third operative manipulates a measuring line. Two others attend to the lowering rope. The whole operation is in charge of a supervisor, usually the Senior Officer, who, with a constant eye on his watch, coordinates the depth as indicated by the measuring tape with the air pressure registered by the dial gauge. A slip on the part of any one of these workers might prove extremely dangerous to the man below.