Jack Higgins by Night Judgement at Sinos Page B

lot of rocks around which reduced visibility considerably and they reared up out of a great carpet of marine grass that stirred uneasily.
    I went over a spur of rock and found my first sponges, but these were worse than useless. Bloated and horrible, they were mainly black in colour and a tinge of green gave them a suggestion of putrescence. Of some living thing gone bad. No wonder the Turks called them dead men’s fingers.
    I had been down perhaps ten minutes and had worked my way round the western tip of the island. I went over a great ledge of rock and got the shock of my life. Beneath me, the chasm drifted into infinity. Across the gulf on a large sandy plateau, a diver was working amongst as good a crop of sponges as I had ever seen. He was wearing a regulation diving suit, his air and lifelinessnaking up to the surface like an umbilical cord. He saw me at once and paused in his work.
    I had an idea who it might be, swam across the chasm quickly and moved in close enough to peer through the front window of his helmet. He was called Ciasim Divalni and he was a Turk from Hilas in the Gulf of Kerma.
    Now that the Cyprus troubles were really fading into the past, Turkish sponge boats were beginning to be seen in the Aegean again. I’d found Ciasim and his two sons on the waterfront at Kyros a week or two earlier wrestling with a faulty compressor. A serious business for poor men, for without it they could not dive. It was a simple enough fault if you knew what you were doing and Morgan had a positive genius for that kind of thing.
    We were accepted from then on which was quite something where Turks were concerned and when Morgan spent a day overhauling the old diesel engine on their boat, the Seytan , our stock rose even higher which was good for his ego.
    Ciasim reached out in slow motion, touched the empty net hanging from my belt, then gestured to the sponges scattered around the plateau, inviting me to join in. I didn’t need asking again. They were definitely the best I’d seen and I filled my net very quickly.
    He was ready to go himself, pointed upwards then gave the regulation four pulls on his line which was divers” language for Haul me up .
    I ascended a lot faster than he did. There was no need for me to decompress for I hadn’t been down long enough at that depth. It would probably be different for Ciasim. Not that I believed for a moment that he would decompress properly even if it were necessary. Mostsponge divers treated the whole paraphernalia of modern diving tables and decompression rates with the same good-humoured contempt they reserved for all those who used self-contained diving rigs. Their own remedy for the bends and any minor physical aches and pains experienced after diving, was to bury the sufferer up to his neck in soft sand or get him to smoke a couple of cigarettes. The nicotine was supposed to have a beneficial effect, being absorbed straight into the bloodstream, which explains why every Turkish diver I’ve ever met is a heavy smoker.
    I surfaced beside the Seytan which was a trenchadiri , one of those strange double-ended boats made from time immemorial in exactly the same way. It carried a large, patched, ochre-coloured sail and the diesel engine Morgan had overhauled gave it a top speed of four knots.
    Ciasim’s eldest son, Yassi, a tall, handsome youth of nineteen kept a careful eye on the vessel’s speed. It was necessary to stay on the move, not only to combat the effects of tide and current, but to keep pace with the diver down there on the bottom. It was also essential to keep the vessel in such a position that the engine exhaust was always to leeward of the compressor. More than one diver had died from carbon monoxide poisoning when someone had made a mistake over that one.
    The compressor was banging away and Ciasim’s second son, Abu, a bright, cheerful fourteen-year-old rogue, was acting as diver’s tender, the most important task on