The Stone Raft

stone, a formula that curiously has never been output by a computer, although it might well be, for between the one and the other there are similarities of all kinds, in the first instance there is the heavy weight of the water in the pitcher, in the second instance there is water once more but this time drop by drop, dripping freely, and there is time, that other common ingredient.

These are popular philosophies that we could go on discussing forever, but they are of no great interest to men of science, to geologists or oceanologists. For the sake of simple souls, the matter could even be put in the form of an elementary question, one that in its ingenuousness brings to mind that of the Galician confronted by the River Irati, sinking into the earth, Where does this water go, he wanted to know, as you may recall, now we shall phrase it differently, What is happening beneath this water. Out here, where we stand with our feet firmly on the ground, looking at the horizon, or from the air where observation continues indefatigably, the peninsula is a mass of earth that seems, note the verb, seems to float on the waters. But obviously it cannot float. In order to do so it would need to have detached itself from the bottom, which means it would inevitably end up at that same bottom, this time reduced to rubble, for even supposing that under the circumstances a sufficient force could be applied without producing any greater deviation or damage, the disintegrating effect of the water and the maritime currents would progressively reduce the thickness of the navigating platform until the entire layer was dissolved. Therefore, by a process of elimination, we must conclude that the peninsula is sliding over itself at an unknown depth, divided now along a horizontal fault into two slabs, the lower one still part of the earth's crust, the upper one, as already explained, gliding slowly through the darkness of the waters, amid clouds of mud and startled fish, this is how the Flying Dutchman, of unhappy memory, must be navigating through the depths, somewhere in the ocean. The notion is intriguing and mysterious, with a little more imagination it could provide the most fascinating chapter of all for Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. We live in another age, however, science is much more exacting, and since it has not proved possible to discover what is causing the peninsula to displace itself above the seabed, someone should go down there to witness the phenomenon with his own eyes, to film the dragging of this great mass of stone, to record, perhaps, the whale's cry, that squeaking, that interminable laceration. For this is the moment for the deep-sea divers.

As everybody knows, divers holding their breath cannot go down very deep or for very long. Fishers of pearls, sponges, or coral can dive to fifty feet, the best of them perhaps even to seventy, and they can stay under for three or four minutes, it's all a question of training and motivation. Here the depths are greater and the waters much colder, even when the body is protected by one of those rubber wet suits that transform anyone, man or woman, into a black Triton, with yellow stripes and dots. So one must have recourse to diving gear, to cylinders of compressed air, and with these more recent techniques and apparatus, taking a thousand and one precautions, one can reach depths on the order of two or three hundred meters. Better not tempt Providence by attempting to go any farther down, but send down unmanned machines instead, equipped with film and television cameras, sensors, tactile and ultrasonic probes, all the appropriate instruments for the job at hand.

At a given hour, to enable subsequent comparison of results, simultaneous operations began on the coasts to the north, south, and west, discreetly passed off as naval maneuvers within the scope of North Atlantic Treaty Organization training programes, lest the announcement of these investigations provoke fresh outbursts of panic, for, inexplicably, it had not occurred to anyone so far that the peninsula might be sliding over what for millions of years had been its plinth. The moment has come to reveal that the experts intend to keep quiet about another nagging anxiety stemming, almost inevitably, from this same hypothesis of a deep horizontal cut, it can be summed up in this other question of terrifying simplicity, What will happen if an abyss lies in the path of the peninsula, an end to that continuous surface over which it is sliding. Judging from experience, which is always desirable for a better understanding of the facts, in this case our experience as swimmers, we will understand perfectly what this must mean if we recall the novice swimmer's panic and distress when he unexpectedly loses his footing. Should the peninsula lose its footing or its balance, it will inevitably sink, go to the bottom, suffocate, drown, who would have thought that after so many centuries of miserable existence we would be doomed to the fate of Atlantis.

Let us spare ourselves the details, these will one day be divulged for the enlightenment of all those interested in submarine life, for the time being shrouded in the utmost secrecy they are to be found in ships' logs, confidential reports, and various records, some in code. All we shall say is that detailed examination of the continental platform yielded no results, no new crack was found, no abnormal friction was picked up by the microphones. This initial hypothesis having failed, examination of the depths was the next step, and the cranes lowered instruments built to withstand high pressures, to scan and search the depths of the silent waters, but these found nothing. The research submarine Archimedes, a jewel of technology French-manned and French-owned, descended to the maximum peripheral depths, from the euphatic to the pelagic zone, and from there to the bathypelagic zone, deployed lamps, pincers, bathometers, sounding lines of various kinds, scanned the subaquatic horizon with its panoramic sonar, to no avail. The vast versants, the steep escarpments, the vertical precipices were exposed in their somber majesty, in their unspoilt beauty, the instruments registered continuously, with much clicking and switching on and off of lights, the ascending and descending currents, they photographed the fish, the shoals of sardines, the colonies of hake, the brigades of tuna and bonito, the flotillas of mackerel, the armadas of swordfish, and if the Archimedes had been carrying in its belly a laboratory equipped with the necessary reagents, solvents, and other chemical paraphernalia, it would have been able to identify the elements dissolved in the waters of the ocean, namely, in diminishing order in terms of quantity, and for the cultural benefit of the masses who have not the faintest idea how much exists in the sea where they swim, chlorine, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium, bromine, carbon, strontium, boron, silicon, fluorine, argon, nitrogen, phosphorus, iodine, barium, iron, zinc, aluminum, lead, tin, arsenic, copper, uranium, nickel, manganese, titanium, silver, tungsten, gold, such riches, dear God, and with all the things we lack on terra firma, the only thing we cannot trace is the crack that would explain the phenomenon, which does exist, after all, and is plain for all to see. In desperation, a North American expert, and one of the most distinguished, went so far as to proclaim before the winds and the horizon, standing on the deck of the hydrographic ship, I hereby declare that the peninsula cannot possibly be moving, whereupon an Italian expert, much less knowledgeable but armed with a historic and scientific precedent, muttered, but not so quietly that he could not be heard by that providential Being who hears all things, Eppur si muove. Their researchers empty-handed and chapped by all that salt, humiliated and frustrated, the governments simply announced that under the auspices of the United Nations they had carried out an investigation of possible changes in the habitat of the ichthyic species brought about by the peninsula's dislocation. It was not the mountain that had conceived a mouse, but rather the ocean that had given birth to a tiny sardine.

The travelers heard this news as they were leaving Lisbon but did not consider it important, just one more report among others pertaining to the separation of the peninsula, which itself seemed to be of no great importance. A person can get used to anything, as can nations with even greater ease and speed, when all is said and done it is as if we were now traveling in an immense ship, so big that it would even be possible to live aboard for the rest of one's life without ever seeing the prow or the stern, the peninsula was not a ship when it was still attached to Europe and there were still plenty of people who knew no country other than that of their birth, so tell me, if you please, what's the difference. Now that Joaquim Sassa and Pedro Orce appear to have escaped at last from the obsessive prying of the scientists and there is nothing more to fear from the authorities, they can return to their respective homes, and Jose Anaico too, for the starlings have unexpectedly lost interest in him, but the apparition, so to speak, of this woman has sent everything back to square one, this being fairly characteristic of women, although not always in so radical a manner. It was after a meeting in that same park where Joana Carda and Jose Anaico had been the day before that the four of them decided, after reexamining the facts, to make the journey together that will take them to the spot marked with a line on the ground, one of those lines we have all had to make in life, but one with singular features, to judge from the agent and witness, coincidently one and the same person. Joana Carda had still not revealed the name of the place or even that of the nearest city, but merely indicated the general direction, We'll take the highway north, then I'll show you how to get there. Pedro Orce had taken Jose Anaico discreetly aside to ask him if he thought it was a good idea to set out like this, blindly falling in with the whims of an eccentric woman with a stick in her hand, suppose this were a snare, a plot to kidnap them, a cunning ruse, On whose part, Jose Anaico wanted to know, That 1 can't tell you, perhaps they want to take us to the laboratory of some mad scientist, as you see in films, some Frankenstein or other, Pedro Orce replied smiling, No wonder people are always talking about the Andalusian imagination, it doesn't take much water to start boiling, Jose Anaico commented, It's not because there isn't much water, it's because there's so much fire, Pedro Orce replied, Forget it, Jose Anaico concluded, what must be, will be, and they rejoined the others, who had started a