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11/11/08
12:12 PM
Page 140
ROBERT MASELLO
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. Before he suddenly spotted one more, a dozen yards off, even closer to the glacial wall. Perhaps he had found a treasure trove! Thoughts of fortune certainly crossed his mind—how couldn’t they?—but more than that, it was the scoop! Wait till Gillespie back in Tacoma got a load of this! A photojournalist, on assignment from Eco-Travel Magazine, discovering a sunken chest hundreds of feet below the Antarctic ice cap. From there on in, Michael would be able to write his own ticket. He stuck the bottle in a mesh bag attached to his harness, and sailed closer to the ice cliff. The seal seemed to hold off, drifting along on his back and looking at him down the length of his own sleek belly. The closer he got to the glacier, the colder the water suddenly got; it reminded Michael of the impossibly cold katabatic winds that rushed down the sides of glaciers on land and gusted across the polar plains. He shivered in his suit, and glanced at the diving watch clamped to the outside of his wrist. He would have to turn around soon, very soon, and come back later. The second bottle was wedged beneath a rock, and he decided to leave it where it was. His regulator hissed, and he realized that he had not been breathing normally—the excitement had been getting