There was nothing to do but return to the Comoros immediately, expense be damned. But immediately, in this case, meant catching the next sequence of linking flights to Paris and Moroni. That was two days away. I cabled the Comoros with exact instructions on where to find the sonar sets and their operating manuals and then mobilized for a quick return.

          I talked to Lou at the Aquarium. Father George had died in Philadelphia, while we were in the Comoros. I had missed the services. He would never know the outcome of all our efforts, yet he had played his part in the ongoing saga of the coelacanth. Perhaps we were all just footnotes to that saga, but we were there, nonetheless. Lou was now the acting director of New York Aquarium--"Trying for an Oscar" was how he put it.

          Lou arranged for Richard Crist to go back with me. Peter was also on standby. We expected to get a response to my sonar telex before the departure date, so a final decision on who went could be taken then.
With the fish, the fish, and nothing but the fish, on my mind, I had the peculiar task of running errands for my new friends in the Comoros. I had to track down a certain brand of Japanese graphite golf clubs to take back to Bill Carlson at the U.S. Embassy. Bill was using them to pay off a lawyer in Madagascar, who had helped with the adoption of one of his kids, a Malagasy infant named Mina. I also had to buy an 8mm Camcorder for Charly Hortoland and his wife Elka. It was crazy, this coelacanth business.

         While I was busy running errands, I thought about the fish. What could have happened? Had the tide come in, causing the barrel marker to lift the cage and float the whole works out to sea? Was it stolen by a coelacanth black marketeer? Lou had doubted that. He felt that a theft of that magnitude in such a small community would be hard to pull off without the culprits being known. Had the marker alone been taken? Or the marker and the nylon polypropylene line? That line would be valuable to a fisherman. I thought of our vanished B.C. vests. Had the barrel buoy broken away in bad weather or had the barrel simply sunk? Why hadn't Mombassa guarded the barrel with his life? Why hadn't I stayed in the Comoros? But these ruminations were useless. I found the golf clubs, and the camcorder.

         The next cable from the Comoros was not encouraging. Bill and Charly had searched with the sonar and found nothing. I talked with my contact at Lowrance Electronics, the supplier of the sonar units. I described the construction of the cage, the square, welded, hollow steel tubing. Yes, he thought the cage should bounce a signal. The machines were very sensitive. Some scientists had scoffed at our using sonar to find coelacanths because, they argued, without an air-filled swim bladder a fish would not bounce a sonar signal. But Lowrance knew their units worked well with sharks, which also lack gas-filled bladders. Yes, the sonar should be able to locate the cage even in 150 meters.

         Perhaps the sonar hadn't been used correctly. Yet, that second telex did sound discouraging. David Wilkinson of the E.C. group cautioned that we should not over-react. To bring the aquarium back to the Comoros on a wild goose chase might dampen their enthusiasm for the project. Lou Garibaldi and I agreed that I would go alone to look for the cage. Lou estimated the fish could live for a month in the cage, even without eating. Richard Crist would remain on standby in case I found it. Lou arranged for me to take over a new, larger, portable refrigeration unit for cooling water. Peter also held back for later in January.

         On December 30th, I flew to Paris for another groggy day. I walked down the Champs-Elysees where, having no energy to spare for France--I needed to save every ounce of attention for that cage search--I lunched at the huge new Burger King. The Arc de Triomphe was covered with gigantic blue and white bunting, undergoing restoration for the upcoming French Bicentennial. Frazzled Christmas decorations glittered feebly along the commercial side of the avenue, in a poor man's imitation of New York. The air was cold and damp, the atmosphere glum. A few hours later, I passed gaily-costumed boarding gate attendants at Charles De Gaulle. Glued on glitter sparkled around their eyes. It was New Year's Eve. A brief announcement over the cabin P.A. wished everyone "Bonne Annee ." I was headed once again south over Africa.

          No, my life was not boring, but what kind of a life was it? There was no other life now but my obsession for this fish. I was losing track of old friends. Unlike Peter, I didn't even have a wife to complain about. I had no kids. I didn't even have a proper job. Please, just let me find the fish, then I'd get myself straightened out! Let me just get this business out of the way before I really do go crazy.

         Charly met me at the airport. By now the bag boys knew me, and it had become a joke about who would or would not be allowed to carry the bags through the usual mob. Charly offered that I could stay in the guest room at his house, a spacious, concrete, two-storey wealthy Comoran's domicile leased by the US State Department for embassy staff. That was great. The hotels were $80 or more a day, and Charly's house overlooking the sea near Itsandra was in walking distance of the US Embassy and its warehouse where our gear was stashed. Besides, Charly, this burly ex-Foreign Legionnaire, was a great character, and I liked his wife, crisp and efficient, German born, Elka--the Embassy secretary. As we drove south from the airport the story of the capture began to unfold.

          The fisherman at Iconi was as surprised as anyone else that he had caught a coelacanth. He paddled it, tethered to his canoe, the short distance back to shore. Because Ottoman also lived in Iconi, the lucky fisherman knew enough about our interest in the fish, and soon dispatched two boys to track down Mombassa. They found him at the one and only Moroni Cinema (since closed, a victim of VCRs and pirated movie tapes). Mombassa jumped to, and went for Charly and Jean Louis. Jean Louis must have been reached first. When Charly was found he was at a holiday dance party, and he declined to leave, deferring the operation to Jean Louis. Thus, the coelacanth passed out of Charly's supervision over to Jean Louis and Mombassa's. Jean Louis was sick in bed with a terrible cold. Nevertheless, he got up, drove to the Coelacanthe Hotel, organized his SCUBA gear, then drove to Iconi. Mombassa fetched the cage and also drove it to Iconi. There, they met the fisherman, got the cage into a South African's motor boat and ran it to the entrance of the harbor, where the coelacanth had been caught. In full SCUBA, Jean Louis back-flipped into the black water, then maneuvered the fish into the cage. The coelacanth, still very much alive, bit his hand hard enough to draw blood. Jean Louis closed the cage and the men from the boat began to lower it to the bottom. Ottoman was with them. Jean Louis tracked it down a ways, then returned to the surface. The men lowered the cage on a long loop of one inch polypropylene, which we had supplied. Afterward, they tied rocks on the line and let them drop to the cage to help secure it on the bottom--so much for the speculation that the cage had drifted out with the tide. The tops of the lines were secured to a steel barrel float, which we had also provided. The men returned to shore and soon everyone began congratulating Mombassa that he had finally got his coelacanth. At daybreak, the barrel was bobbing confidently over the prize.

         But the following night, in order to get some sleep, Mombassa assigned a watchman to look out for the barrel from the shore. This was odd in that the barrel was a good quarter mile out to sea and would be hard to see at night. In any case, the man fell asleep, and the next morning the barrel was gone. Then, on December 28th, came the telex to New York. There had been no one on duty to send a message on the 27th. When the Embassy got my response they broke out the sonar and used it to hunt unsuccessfully for the cage. But in questioning Charly, I determined they had probably used the wide angle transmitter/receiver setting, instead of the deep penetrating, narrow angle, one. I still had a chance.

         While Charly Hortoland and Bill Carlson were searching with the sonar, a French built Alouette helicopter, a recent gift to the President of the Republic from France, and the only chopper in the country, flew out over the cage site to look from the air for any sign of the "polypro" line, which is buoyant unless weighted down. The helicopter crew couldn't find a trace.

          Then the second telex was sent to New York and now here I was, wired and ready to go into action immediately. Alas the Zodiac had some motor problems and would not be ready until the next morning. I settled into Charly and Elka's guest room sifting through the story again in my mind.

         Why hadn't Charly left that party to take charge of the operation the night of the catch? If he had, with his organization and paranoia of Comoran behavior, a theft would have been near impossible. He would have had an armed guard in a boat by that barrel twenty four hours a day! I couldn't figure it out, and he didn't say. It's true that coelacanth catches were not big news to him. They happened several times a year, and unless outside coelacanth seekers were present in the Comoros, no one paid that much attention. But he knew he was the chief local expediter on this project. Did he resent the fact that we weren't there and he was expected to do our work for us during a holiday? That didn't sound like Charly. He had seen us struggling night after night for the fish the month before. Sometimes, when we came into Itsandra exhausted and frustrated, Charly would be there preparing to go out on an early morning fishing run for wahoo. He knew we weren't slackers. No that wasn't the problem. Then it dawned on me. There were several distinct social sets among the Europeans living in and around Moroni. First there were the Embassy staffs who sometimes formed subsets among themselves and other aid personnel when off duty. Second there were the "Mercs" or mercenaries and their commanding officers, some of whom overlapped the Embassy circles. Then there were the expatriates, like Jean Louis, who were trying to make a go of living in the Comoros. Jean Louis socialized on the periphery of the other groups. Everyone knew him, though he was not part of any particular "in group." There were international men's organizations such as the Rotarians represented in the Comoros that bound members from various sets together--such as Jean Louis and U.S. Charge' D'affaires Karl Danga. But I suddenly realized that Charly Hortoland and Jean Louis Gerod, though both French, travelled in distinctly different social circles. Perhaps they didn't even like each other. Charly had planned to use his own diver. Once he heard that Jean Louis was on the case, he backed off. It seems that when I inspired Jean Louis with that fancy shark book I sealed the fate of our coelacanth. The things you have to think of when you go fishing!

          I was up bright and early January 2nd, 1988. The welder at the Embassy warehouse fashioned a three pronged grappling hook for me out of steel rods. This was attached to a long length of quarter inch polypro, just strong enough to raise the cage underwater. We had the sonar rig at the warehouse as well, and so, from there drove everything to Itsandra beach, soon outfitting the Zodiac. I felt as though I had never left the Comoros. Several Comorans wanted to come along to show me the cage location. I settled for Danny, an assistant diving instructor who spoke only a few words of English, specializing in the phrase "No problem." Danny was of the new breed of rock and roll hip Comorans, who had sold out to the influence of western pop culture. He got on my nerves. Danny had been there when the cage was put down. In the Zodiac, with its Evinrude 40 at full throttle, the run down the coast past Moroni Harbor to the town of Iconi took about twenty minutes. Ottoman paddled out from Iconi in his canoe. He also knew where the cage had been lowered, and Ottoman was a genius at estimating points at sea from shore landmarks. I actually began to feel confident that, with their help and the sonar, I could find the cage.

          I flipped on the sonar. The first thing I noted was that the depth was only ninety meters, not one hundred and fifty as stated in the first telex. That might not be good for temperature as far as the coelacanth was concerned, but at least it would be easier to find the cage in the relatively shallow water. I set the unit to the deep water transducer, then zoomed in the graph window, so that I could study the bottom plus ten meters. The screen filled with craggy irregularities. "Must be coral heads and branches," I thought. Occasionally there were swirls around these. Schools of fish? Then I saw a regular form, like a squared edge jutting out from the surrounding chaos. I lowered the grappling hook, dragging it, till it caught on something. Now what? Well, pull it up, of course! I cut the motor and pulled on the line. As I pulled, the Zodiac seemed to back toward the point where the line entered the water. Was the boat the only thing moving, or was I pulling something up? I kept pulling. If I had the cage, I should at least feel it rise a bit, however sluggishly, from the bottom. That would confirm that I was lifting something. No need to pull it all the way up. I just had to mark it with a new buoy. Plenty of muscle power was available ashore for lifting it to the surface. I pulled very hard, until the boat's transom began to sink in the water. Nothing gave down there. I had snagged a coral head.

          These snags happened again and again, until finally the line broke when I tried to free the hook by powering it through a chunk of coral with the engine. To confound matters, the square edges of possible targets began turning up all over the place. How many cages were down there, anyway? Or were they all the same one and I was drifting back and forth over it in the current?

          I had set myself a thankless task. But I would not give up. Too much was at stake, particularly the life of the fish. True, without us it would have been dead a few minutes after the fisherman caught it. But now it was in our custody--or had been.

          In the days that followed, I refined my technique. I read the Lowrance manual, provided with every set, on dragging for drowning victims--not a pretty business. I used empty plastic Evian bottles, anchored with long lines of monofilament tied to rocks, to demarcate my search area so I could hold to an absolute course in the current. In a minor reprise of the barrel, these bottles would disappear each night, either scavenged or carried away by the tide. I dragged along a compass bearing, or in an ever-widening circle around one central marker. Sometimes, I used the wide angle transducer to search shallow for the line possibly hovering beneath me in the water. I looked both deeper and more shallow than ninety meters, in case the tide had thrown off the reckoning of my "advisors."

         To avoid bottom snags, I designed a grapple with a rod extending a foot beneath the three curved hooks. The rod would skate along the bottom and over the corals, keeping the hooks clear, but still low enough to catch the cage.

         One time, I arrived in Iconi and arranged for Ottoman to take me to the spot once again, just to be sure I was looking in the right place. He left before me in his canoe. I followed at some distance, lowering the grappling hook in readiness. When I looked ahead, I saw a startling sight. Ottoman must have capsized. Looking into the sun, I could only make out his head and two arms silhouetted, flailing wildly on the surface of the water. Where was the canoe? I thought I could see part of it slightly submerged. I poured on the power. I liked Ottoman and did not want to be responsible for his demis. He was still flailing and waving. Couldn't he see I was coming? He was a good swimmer. Was he hurt? Was a shark taking him? I pulled my hefty Buck survival knife from its sheath. If it was a shark attack, I could stab at the beast from the boat while trying to haul Ottoman on board. I might even jump in. Not because I'm a hero. People do that kind of thing for each other automatically. What was going on there? My eyes were good. But I just couldn't make it out.

          The sonar was on, but the mounting frame swiveled up to the rear from the rush of water, while the grappling hook rose in the boat's wake. The nearer I got, the more confused was the scene. I came screaming up in the Zodiac, cutting power at the last second. At first I couldn't believe my eyes, then I laughed out loud. Beside me two enormous leatherback sea turtles were mating on the surface. One of Ottoman's flailing arms was a flipper, the submerged canoe, their shells, the head, his head, the other arm, her flipper. I grabbed my camera and clicked away. The sonar mount settled back in the water. Suddenly they noticed me and sounded with a mighty splash. Their shells cut traces on the sonar graph as they disappeared into the depths. Eggs would follow. One hundred feet away sat Ottoman, patiently, in his canoe, no doubt wondering what the hell this crazy white man was doing now.

          January wore on with no real signs of the cage. Something kept me searching, though by now it seemed pointless. One night, I went out to the cage site with "No problem" Danny and another Comoran. There were fishing boats around us. Danny was doing a lot of talking as we dragged and ran the sonar, loud yak-yak with the other Comoran on board. He was getting on my nerves again, as I tried to concentrate on the Sonar. I was trying to shush him up, when he abruptly shushed me instead. A fisherman was shouting in very excited Comoran from a nearby canoe. Danny shouted back, also very excited. This went on for about a minute. I kept quiet trying, unsuccessfully, to read the situation from their gestures. Then Danny turned and filled me in. The fisherman had a fish on his line, but the fish had wrapped itself around another line, the line from our cage, he said. He couldn't pull it up. Then his own line broke and he lost his fish as well. My God! That news was good for at least another two weeks of cage searching.

         A cable arrived from New York. Dr. Bemis had got wind from Eric Findes that there were two frozen coelacanths in the Moroni freezer. He was very excited. He wanted me to check on their condition and advise him at once. He wanted to come over and buy them. Willy had probably sensed an opportunity to redress his dismay that I had given him only one of the specimens from the '86 trip. I had mixed feelings about his proposed trip. On the one hand, I would be delighted to have his company and expertise in the Comoros--and he would be coming at his own expense. On the other, the business of removing more coelacanth specimens was a bit touchy. There was already an inkling of criticism in the air about the first specimens, perhaps from jealous scientists. It was true the fish would just rot away if Willy didn't take them, and that they would be of far greater service to science if he did. But now I had to deal with perceptions as well as realities. To the uninitiated, it might look as if we were causing these rare fish to be caught and sacrificed. Then too, I did not want to use up our good will locally on matters of frozen fish, when we really needed it for a live one. I checked out the fish. They were somewhat mummified, but not as bad as the ones Jack Musick had. I also found out there were two frozen coelacanths in the freezer on the island of Anjouan. I conveyed this information, as well as my reservations, in a telex back to New York. The only reservations mentioned in the reply were Dr. Bemis' travel arrangements. He would be on the next flight over and asked that I arrange for the purchase of the fish and pre-thaw them for his arrival. Peter Stevens was also planning to come back via South Africa.

         Well, now I had something to think about other than the cage and its starving occupant. Bemis would be taking the fish to the American Museum of Natural History. I guess the AMNH was once again "on board." These fish were not directly an Explorers Club or New York Aquarium responsibility. But Willy would use our infrastructure to get them out. We would ultimately be liable for them at some level.

         Dr. Bemis arrived alright, but some of his scientific equipment got re-routed to other parts of the globe. Mombassa arranged a quiet "dissection room" at the meat packing plant, complete with running water and "dissection counters," where Willy could work undisturbed. The fish had been pre-thawed. I was deputized as his lab assistant. Because the fish were so well pre-thawed, Willy decided he'd better go right to work. So, just off the plane from New York and Paris, he began a double dissection.

         I videotaped as well as assisted. Dr. Bemis had not planned on a proper dissection. Once he'd seen--and smelled--the specimens his concern was to get their weight down, soak them in formalin, then have them crated for the flight back. In New York, they would be tossed into the beetle room at the AMNH, where the hungry insects would clean the bones. In other words, he was interested in skeletal material, not frozen specimens. As I watched him scrape the flesh off those fish with his hands, I slowly grew nauseated. Perhaps it was best I'd forsaken a career in the "wet" sciences after all.

         Willy brought with him a surprising clipping from the New York Times. It took up about a third of a page, and was an account of Jack Musick's dissection of the two Cairo mummies at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. Musick was running them through CAT scanners at a local hospital, and that according to the article was a first for coelacanths. I remembered from Michael's research at the Moroni Library that Japan's Coelacanth Research Mission had done the same thing in Japan a few years before. Perhaps the work had not been published in the scientific literature. The article also said that Musick's research proposal had won a competition at the Explorers Club which was not quite the case. I was afraid I'd have to watch the Times. In any event, the CAT scans produced a highly detailed sectional mapping of the coelacanth's anatomy, a valuable research asset.

         The next morning Elka stuck a telegram under my bedroom door. It was a congratulatory message from the Board of Directors of the Explorer's Club, which went on to wish me good luck with the project. "How nice," I thought, but why now"? The cable was no doubt prompted by the Times article which was about the fish we returned over a year ago. Well, so what if the Board is a bit behind on things. I appreciated the gesture.

          After a long rest, Dr. Bemis set up a second dissection area outside the lodgings I'd arranged for him at a bed and breakfast accommodation just up the road from the Ylang Ylang hotel. He acquired small fish from the market to work on there. Flies were a problem. I was whisking them away when I looked up and there was Peter Stevens, standing a few feet away. I was not that surprised. By my third trip to the Comoros, I had become accustomed to bodies flicking back and forth across the world from day to day. After all, "coelamania" is contagious.

         Peter conducted a night or two of luckless fishing. On January 28th, 1988, a day that almost lived in infamy for our families and friends, we decided to carry out one last hunt for the cage.

         It was a bright sunny morning, with smooth seas. Out to the west, over the water, the most majestic cumulus cloud I'd ever seen was sweeping the horizon a full hundred and eighty degrees. Billows of white and gray piled up layer after layer, as if a thousand multi-shaded pillows had been stacked in serried ranks across the sea.

         I walked from Charly and Elka's house along a back trail to the Embassy Warehouse across the road. Mombassa and I loaded gear into the bashe' and drove it to Itsandra. I asked Momba to tell Peter that I would be picking him up at the Ylang Ylang hotel by Zodiac from the sea. I would take the boat down from Itsandra, fetch Peter, then continue down the coast, to the Iconi search area. Mombassa would later have to take Willy to the airport. His globe-trotting luggage had finally arrived.

         At Itsandra, I kicked a soccer ball around with some of the beach boys while a well muscled Comoran swam out to fetch the Zodiac from its mooring.  Soon I was on my way, arcing across Moroni harbor, where a French frigate from the naval base on Mayotte was spending a few days at anchor. I could see an officer, on the bridge, watching me through a pair of binoculars. Shortly, I arrived off the Ylang Ylang hotel. Next to a cement catwalk, built on crags of lava, the hotel had tried to create a small beach in a shallow cove, but the sand had since washed away leaving only gravel. I maneuvered around this cove, practicing landings with the Zodiac. There is a trick to landing Zodiacs on beach fronts. You can't just come in bow first tilting the motor up as you hit the beach. With that approach, the surf, even light surf of only several inches depth, would soon begin breaking over the low transom soaking everything on board. The trick is to swing around 180 degrees at the last moment on approaching the beach, while pulling the motor up at the same time, leaving just enough prop in the water to tug into shore with the help of the surf. You wind up with the transom dug into the shore and the bow facing the waves. The boat stays dry.

         Peter, who hadn't heard I was coming, eventually caught sight of my fiddling and climbed aboard. We headed ten minutes south to Iconi.

         Once there Peter saw some possible target traces on the sonar, but none different from the other false leads. "What has happened to that cage?" I wondered one last time. Was it still there, lost in the false bottom readings of my sonar? My grappling hook might have just missed it on several occasions. Dragging a hook in current one hundred and eighty feet down, trying to catch a cage three by three by six feet does not produce favorable odds. But then, why weren't we at least catching the line like that fisherman apparently had? Perhaps thieves had inadvertently moved the cage and its precious inhabitant while they were stealing the line. The question of the cage remains a mystery.

         Peter and I decided to call it a day. He took over the controls of the outboard and headed North along the coast in the direction of Itsandra. Ahead we could see a rain squall. Every afternoon the skies opened up over some part of Grand Comoro. After a few minutes the clouds would pass and the sun would blast out again. I didn't feel like getting wet so I suggested we put in at Iconi until the rain stopped up ahead. But Peter was keen on getting back so we headed north. He didn't see any problem so long as we stayed close to shore. We were in for a surprise.

         Out to the west, the giant cloud that had faced the island all day had grayed, with titanic anvils crowning its fluffy peaks. Cumulonimbus, I mused. Soon the wind was blowing quite hard, and the water began to kick up into a fair chop. Peter slowed the boat a little to reduce the pounding we were taking. I took out the video camera and captured the waves lashing the craggy shore in bursts of spray. It was a dramatic view. I was glad we would be landing at the Itsandra beach. That lava coastline looked dangerous.

         When I saw a barrel buoy we carried start to roll from one side of the boat to the other, I put the camcorder back in its plastic bag and began to pay careful attention to the situation. In all our outings, I had never experienced this kind of motion. The chop had become a swell, which was taking us from three quarters astern. I became concerned that these waves might pour over the transom, swamping the boat.

         By now we were well past the Iconi crater bluff and pounding our way abreast of the point where the Ylang Ylang hotel was situated on shore. The storm had closed in behind us. There was no turning back. Yet before us the sky was even darker. Rain pelted our faces. Peter crouched under an umbrella, while I held a life jacket over my head. We thought about landing at the Ylang Ylang, but the surf belting the shore looked too rough to put in without capsizing.

         As we pondered our dilemma rain was affecting Peter's vision. His eyeglasses were blurred, so I took over the steering arm and swung the boat into the wind. The swells were building by the minute, even though we were little more than a quarter mile from shore. I edged the boat beyond the Ylang Ylang to a point where the shore looked like an angled wall rather than the jagged lava everywhere else. Though we did not realize it at the time, this stretch was a sea wall reinforcing the southern edge of the runway at the old Moroni Airport. I felt that one way or the other I'd rather hit that wall, than drown at sea. Yes, by now we had started to think in those terms.

         Our status had suddenly become rather grim. We were caught between the storm building at sea and the breakers thundering onto the shore. The swells were now so enormous the Zodiac rode up the front wall of each wave as if in a cartoonist's caricature of a small boat foundering in a storm at sea. Yet still the squall intensified. A part of me was laughing at the absurdity of our position, another was almost in a stupor, robotically calculating the means of survival, staring at the oncoming mountains--all of life's ambitions compressed into this single moment of dread. I did not want to run that boat farther out to sea, where now, the chop riding the swells could well drown us if we swamped. Nor did I want to get too close to the shore, where the giant swell would catch us and carry us as it crested and broke into thunderous cascades, millions of tons of water roiling onto craggy lava. Rain and salt spray lashed our faces adding a taste of the ocean to our calculations. Peter and I were thinking aloud in shouts, "I must keep her pointed into the storm or we'll swamp!" I called out. That required motion. The only thing was to throw the motor alternately into forward, then reverse. But that alarmed Peter. "Don't reverse it, we'll be caught from the side and flipped!" he yelled back. Our voices sounded shrill and stupid. But I had to reverse, or we would travel too far out to sea. So, by yanking the shifter back and forth, we held a line facing the storm but not moving seaward. We rumbled back and forth in limbo for what seemed like an hour. Each wave we rode successfully bought time. Occasionally we got too close to shore; then rising on the monster wave I starred down at the sea wall below as if it were a feature in a model railroad layout. Would the squall subside before we ran out of gas?

         Mombassa took Willy to the airport, fetched the missing bags, then drove back to Itsandra. We had not returned there. The walkie-talkies were out of action, damaged by water two days before, so our sea-to-shore communications were out. He drove on to Iconi. The squall was by then in full strength there. When he couldn't find us there either, he drove to the Ylang Ylang hotel, now fearing for our lives. We weren't there. The Belgian hotel manager prepared to call in the French Frigate from Moroni Harbor to search for us, when Abdoud, Mombassa's helper, spotted our tiny craft out on the waves. Instead, they all came down to the cement jetty by the Ylang Ylang's failed beach, waving frantically.

         I lifted the gas tank. Perhaps an eighth of a tank was left. Peter and I had to make what so suddenly had become the most critical decision of our lives. Should we stay out, hoping the storm would subside, but thereby risk swamping or running out of fuel followed by a fatally thunderous smashing against the shore? Or, in spite of the waves, try a semi-controlled landing? The storm was still building. This was no afternoon shower. I'd never seen anything like it before in the Comoros. We had been caught in the opening round of the monsoon, the great squalls borne in on the north easterly wind called the Kaskazi.

         An apparition appeared seaward off our bow. The thing rode in and out of view amidst waves and driving rain, heading north. In the gray rain-haze it took the form of a Japawa with two crouched Comorans. Were they coming to help us? No, they were in just as bad shape as we were. Suddenly, they vanished altogether.

         I spotted Mombassa and the others on shore. The sight of that small group watching from the land reassured us. Though helpless to assist, they became instant psychological companions in our plight, granting us the power of resolve. Peter and I agreed at once. We would go in for a landing at Ylang Ylang, in the very cove where I had picked Peter up on a sunny morning three hours earlier.

         To get back to the Ylang Ylang, we had to turn sideways to the storm and ride the shoulders of the waves at steep angles. But it was doable. Now, thank God I had learned the lay of that cove earlier in the day. I knew where the coral heads had been and we could see some of them even now breaking water in the troughs. I noticed that the monster waves were not forming there in the same proportions it was to either side. What a relief. It must have been the shallowness of the bottom leading in.

         Once off the cove, we headed again into the storm, but I threw the engine into reverse. We backed in towards the shore, letting the bow of the boat take the oncoming waves. The group on shore was frantically waving us in. Not grasping my tactic, they thought we were heading in the wrong direction! Then, a wonderful thing happened. The sea, as it poured past the coral heads into that cove, quickly lost its force. Huge waves were not breaking there. The shape of the channel between the coral heads cut them down to a manageable seven or eight feet. Once in the channel, I was certain we would survive even if we capsized. Such a sudden feeling of relief was more than a loss of fear. It was like a depression suddenly lifting. By a fluke of timing, we slid towards the shore between the breaking of two waves. Now we were home free.

          Mombassa waded into the shallows, reaching out towards us. I was trying to raise the engine to save the prop but it was jammed on its mounting. Helping hands were all around us. For Peter and I the ordeal was over. I handed Mombassa the camera bag. "Forget about that, man, get out!" he shouted. Peter and I hugged each other on the shore. I even gave the portly Belgian manager a squeeze. Mombassa, Dr. Bemis, and the manager worked the engine off the boat. I looked at the machine with reverence. The Evinrude had performed flawlessly--if it had quit we would have been dashed to bits. That motor's reliable performance saved our lives and this is not a paid testimonial!

         Within a minute, everything had been removed from the boat and carried ashore. I dripped my way across the hotel grounds to Peter's room. Looking back once at the fury of the sea, I wondered about the men in the Japawa. Their figures had seemed calm and determined, yet fishermen often disappear off the Comoros in bad weather. We never learned their fate.

         Peter and I were each on a kind of private survival high. Our clothes were spun dry in the hotel laundry, so we could keep an appointment with the Governor at his house. There, I drank cup after cup of ginger tea and munched samosas, while in the next room, his grandchildren were watching a particularly violent scene from "Aliens" on a VCR. The Governor, when he heard our story, wagged a finger, warning, "Faites attention a la mare. Faites attention a la mare." We didn't have the fish, but we had our lives. I later heard a strong rumor that the fish had been stolen by Comorans working for the French mercenary who tried to sell coelacanths "on the side." It was never confirmed.

         Two days later, with storms raging along the Comoran archipelago, we lifted off the islands on the weekly 747 headed home, blissfully unaware that a new squall, a monsoon of quite a different sort, was breaking over the Channel Angler Coelacanth Research Project back in New York.