There were few fish here, but occasionally a colored phantom would slow up, pause, and whisk off, fry would pass like a flight of silver needles, and great jellyfish quartered like melons and absolutely invisible till glimpsed by reflected light.
All these things he noticed in his first submersion; after that the labor of the business prevented him from noticing anything much except the work on hand, cruel and murderously hard work to the man unused to it. The dredge was almost useless at first; it had to be taken up and altered, then, as it was dragged along, he followed it, helping it, picking up loose oysters and putting them in the bag. He could only work for less than half a minute at a time, coming up for a two minutes' breathing spell, and as he worked he could feel now and then what seemed a warm wind trying to blow him aside as the wind blows thistledown. It was the swell of the incoming tide.
They had arranged to work in half-hour tricks, but they found this absolutely impossible; before the end of the first twenty minutes Floyd confessed himself beaten and Schumer took his place.
An hour before noon they knocked off. They had taken a large quantity of oysters, despite the limited means at their disposal, enough to sink the boat a strake or two and give them an hour's work in unloading and spreading their catch on the coral on the windward side of the reef.
Then they took three hours' rest under the shade of the trees. At sundown they had completed their day's work, and they felt as though they had been laboring for fifty years.
Though they had dived as little as possible during the second half of the day's work, using the dredge as much as they could, the work had nearly broken them, owing to the sudden and tremendous strain put on their lungs.
Schumer recognized the reason of their exhaustion.
"We should have broken ourselves to it by degrees," said he--"done a couple of hours' work instead of a whole day's. We are fools. We didn't want to strip the lagoon; we were only after a sample, and could have taken a week over it. Well, we can take things easy to-morrow."
They rowed back to the camp and found Isbel waiting for them, and supper.
They had come back in low spirits, but after supper and a cup of coffee the surprising thing happened--their spirits jumped up as though under the influence of alcohol. Prolonged strain in diving produces these results--the tissues that have been starved or partly starved of oxygen reabsorb it with renewed vigor.