Darryl was below, with a net in one hand and his other hand on a rock the size of a basketball. When Michael came closer, Darryl indicated, with a tilt of his head and a gesture, that he wanted Michael to tip the rock over. Michael let the camera dangle from his neck while he used both hands to push the rock first one way, then the other. When it finally rolled over, a swarm of tiny amphipods, the size of a fingernail, their antennae waving and their many legs pumping, scurried out, many of them landing in the net, which Darryl expertly turned inside out before transferring them to a transparent Ziploc bag. Darryl gave Michael a thumbs-up—as much as could be done, given the thickness of the gloves—then waved good-bye and Michael took the hint. Darryl really didn’t want any extra commotion around him while he was trying to collect his samples and make his observations.
Nor did Michael want to be so encumbered. He had his own job to do, his own discoveries to make. He loitered above a clump of what looked like worms, each a yard long, as they writhed atop some nearly consumed carrion, and took some more photos that he would later on ask Darryl to explicate. The light was beginning to fade as he swam farther below the surface and the seafloor gradually yielded to a field of icy pressure ridges, like a gigantic sheet of crumpled white paper. From one side, a dark shape suddenly flashed into view, and as Michael peered through his face mask he saw a pair of big nacreous eyes, surrounded by a brush of long black whiskers, looking back at him.
It was one of the Weddell seals, the deepest-diving mammal apart from the minke whale in these waters, and he knew it would do him no harm. As he lifted his camera, the nictitating membrane that protected the cornea contracted, and the whiskers extended out like an opened fan. Ready for your close-up, Michael thought as he clicked off a series of shots.
The seal, five or six feet long, flicked one of its flippers and shot past him, looking back the whole while. It loitered then, as if waiting for this strange new acquaintance to catch up, before sailing off again.
Okay, Michael thought, I’m game. These, he thought, could be some terrific, and even amusing, shots for his article. He used his fins to take off after it, and the seal—a young one if he was any judge, with a sleek, undamaged coat and white unbroken teeth—retreated farther into the depths. Michael’s oxygen tank hissed and burbled as he followed the seal around a rotten berg the size of a cabin cruiser, then over a rocky outcropping matted with brown and red algae.
The sea was truly opening up beneath him, and he sensed that if he wasn’t careful, he would go too far. He clung to his vision of the sloping floor, and in the gloomy light provided by a break in the ice above, he saw something that looked entirely out of place. It was rectangular, too neatly so, and even encrusted with ice, it looked like a trunk of some kind. The seal spun in a lazy circle around it, almost as if it had been leading him here all along.
Oh my God, Michael thought, sunken treasure? It can’t be. Not here. Not at the South Pole.
He worked his fins and rapidly drew near. Even with all the exertion, he was beginning to feel the cold seeping through the many layers of his clothing. He stopped just above it, waving his arms lazily in the freezing water. And under all the ice, under the clinging limpets and sea urchins and starfish that festooned its sides—one of the ivory-colored starfish had even spread itself out on top like a skeletal hand—he could see that it was definitely a trunk, and that its lid had fallen open. By instinct, he took out his camera and reeled off half a dozen shots.
The seal did a quick arabesque above him.
Michael went deeper, until he could actually look inside the trunk; a frozen cascade of ice spilled out, like crystal coins, but mixed in with them he could detect a hint of something darker. Plum-colored. Glistening.
He swept his gaze from left to right, scanning the seafloor. To one side, the sea descended to a bottomless black, to the other he saw—perhaps a few hundred yards off—a sheer wall of ice that clearly went from high above the cap to a depth he could never approach. Between his present location and the looming glacier, he saw something else, also plum-colored, covered with an icy sheen, but lying on the seabed. He took the flashlight off of his harness belt and aimed the beam in its direction.
It was a bottle…it had to be. A wine bottle.
Michael swam down, and with his three-fingered glove brushed the sediment away from its neck. An urchin, attached to its base, opened and closed its mouth—a mouth was really all it was—thinking that something edible might be in reach. Michael used the tip of the flashlight to scrape it off. Ice coated the bottle from top to bottom, but under it he could see a scrap of what once had been a label, altogether illegible. He tried to prize the bottle from the seafloor, but it was not about to be plucked so easily. He would have to use both hands. He carefully balanced the flashlight between two chunks of ice moored to the bottom, inadvertently disturbing a scale worm that looked like a broken rubber band several feet long—and that then undulated off in search of calmer quarters—before trying again. To loosen the grip of the mud and ice, he had to rock the bottle carefully—the last thing he wanted to do was break an artifact that might have survived for God knows how many years. Eventually, it broke free—he felt exactly as if he had just won a delicate tug-of-war with the ocean floor—and he turned it all around in his hands, admiring it.