In the early spring of '89, as I contemplated a final coelacanth capture foray to the Comoros before the arrival of the Toba aquarium mega-expedition, Shakur Aboud, a journalist I had met there, and Salim Ben Ali, the director of the Comoran Center Nationale des Researches Scientifique, traveled to Japan. Their job was to nail down a contract between Toba Aquarium and the C.N.D.R.S.- the museum in Moroni, which had now seen the light to get into the coelacanth business. In fact the C.N.D.R.S. was vying to take over coelacanth affairs from the Ministry of Production. This made sense as the C.N.D.R.S. was supposedly the scientific organ in the Comoros. But Shakur and his boss had also seen the possibility of using coelacanth favors to gain advantageous contractual exchanges for the C.N.D.R.S. Goodies like video equipment, exhibit cases, scholarships and trips abroad were there for the asking, in exchange for exclusive access to the fish. Shakur explained these new realities to me during a swing through New York on his return from their red carpet reception in Tokyo.

          This, of course, was bad news for me and the E.C., with barely enough resources to conduct operations in the Comoros, let alone provide perks. Our coelacanth project had taken a bizarre new turn, with the C.C.C. bashing us on one side of the issue, crippling our fund raising, and the Japanese preparing to outdo us on the other. I made one unsuccessful appeal for funding in the spring of '89, then decided I would have to go it alone.

           I wanted to be able to tag a coelacanth for tracking if we caught one and decided- or were compelled- to release it. This required some rather specialized equipment. On the one hand, a small portable sonic transmitter was needed which the fish would "wear" attached to a fin. On the other, an underwater microphone, called a hydrophone, was required to listen from the boat for the pulses from the transmitter. The hydrophone also consisted of an amplifier and a set of headphones. The problem was where to get this rather exotic gear and for what price. I put in a call to Jack Musick at V.I.M.S. with no response. I noted here a general effect of human nature which I prefer to designate "The Coelacanth Callback Principle:" Fish scientists were likely to return my calls in inverse proportion to the number of coelacanth specimens they had. Jack had two. Amen. Then browsing through the science section at the former Doubleday on Fifth Avenue, I found a book about tracking the pearly nautilus in Indonesia. Here was ample information on radio tagging and technical sources. I was soon in touch with a specialist in California who promised to prepare me two transmitter tags, between meetings with lawyers handling the breakup of his marriage. Within two weeks, he got his divorce and I got my tags and a rented a hydrophone both at reasonable cost.

          In May, a letter from Shakur arrived confirming that his director agreed I would be welcome to come over and conduct my research. As June '89 approached, another coelacanth matter was in the air. The work done by Jack Musick, Willy Bemis and their associates on our '86 specimens had coalesced into a body of research papers, some of which were to be presented at a special symposium on the coelacanth to be held as part of the annual meeting of the Ichthyological and Herpetological Association. This year's meeting was to be in San Francisco during the second half of June. Jack Musick issued me a late invitation to meet with him in S.F. either before or after the conference. But this now coincided with my proposed departure date for the Comoros. I would have to pass on it.

          Meanwhile, Mike Bruton, the Director of the J.L.B. Smith Institute, was passing through Toronto to spend time with Eugene Balon at Guelph, before they both headed west to the conference. Balon contacted Peter Stevens to see if I would fly to Toronto to meet them? I had to think that one through. I had never met Mike Bruton. It would have been useful to meet them and diffuse our controversy. I was curious as well. But I suspected their agenda was to talk me out of our project, and as I was already familiar with their arguments, I didn't see the need to spend time and money hearing them again on the eve of my departure. I would grant that pleasure to my proxy, Toronto resident, Peter Stevens. Poor Peter got quite a dose. In the end he was reduced to pleading that he himself was not going back to the Comoros so why pick on him? Peter invited them to his cottage in the Ontario lake country. There, Dr. Balon, who opposed any kind of sport fishing, even for food, enjoyed a hearty steak barbecue with Mike Bruton. Peter had been my buffer: Peter, the sports fisherman, my one true loyalist in the whole affair--the only one who harbored no devious will to power where the coelacanth was concerned--but this was his last gasp. The coelacanth would become a mixed memory of triumph, danger, disappointment, and confusion.

           In New York, my countdown for departure was on. Leaving my new family behind, I invited eighteen year old Steven Clark as an assistant. Steven, an earlier "surrogate son", was a lad I'd partially raised when I was dating his mother in the '70's. The irony of the two of us setting off with a couple of bags for the Comoros, just as the Japanese Coelacanth Assault Armada weighed anchor in Tokyo, was not lost on me. I could also imagine the dismissive smirks of my "colleagues" in the C.C.C. at the thought of my returning yet again to catch a coelacanth. But in our favor, facts were facts. We still had a complete life support system in place in the Comoros, with all the equipment necessary to stabilize a coelacanth and even to transport one stateside. And we had all the fishing gear we needed to conduct an active fishing effort. This was the last chance. I had to take it.

          When our plane touched down at Hahaya Airport north of Moroni on Grand Comoro Island, I felt a rush of fresh enthusiasm. We would face the same challenges, but I had two new plans for meeting them. The first was to fill the transporter with water right where it was stored in the Embassy warehouse, and so bypass the use of the cage altogether--why hadn't I thought of that before? The second was to fish for coelacanths down off the lava flow at Singani, the location of Dr. Fricke's submersible sightings in '86. I wanted to get organized quickly, and as I was about to find out I would have to.

          Monsieur De La Croix, the Belgian manager of the Ylang Ylang hotel, who doubled as the local caterer for Air France, appeared on board the plane before anyone had exited. "Mr. Hamlin, it is lucky for you. They just caught a coelacanth and it is alive," he greeted me almost nonchalantly in his thick Flemish accent, "Jean Louis put it in a cage at the village here." I focused immediately, grasping for details, but the manager had no more information, except that the coelacanth caught previous to this one had been kept in his hotel freezer and later displayed to guests on a buffet table. "So that was the consequence," I mused, "of my suspending our resubmersion program to gratify critics!"

              Steve and I scrambled through the airport formalities. Shakur appeared to meet us. He did not seem to know about the new coelacanth catch. I thought I'd better hold off telling him for the moment, in case there was a problem between Jean Louis and the museum, some reason the museum had not been notified. However, on the way south as we passed the village of Hahaya, a man yelled some Kiswalhi in the window, and with a great excitement Shakur told me about the latest capture. What luck! Back in the Comoros after a year and a half and a coelacanth has already been caught for us, the first catch in several months, and it was alive in Jean Louis' cage! Forget jet lag, we had to get to that fish. Jean Louis and a group of other French SCUBA companions were planning a dive to check the fish in exactly half an hour. We rendezvoused with them at the Coelacanth Hotel where, in my excitement, I gave Jean Louis a hug while standing on his foot. He still didn't remember my name and had to read it off the tag on my camera bag. Then we all jumped in the bashe for a dash back up the coast road.

               The scene at Hahaya was a sociological phenomenon. Men, women and children were swarming out of their shacks, mobbing the road and the shoreline. An agitated din of excited jabbering voices and shrieks arose from them. They surrounded the bashe. What was the coelacanth to these people, I wondered? They didn't know the scientific history of the creature. Was there some ancestral mystic attachment to this fish? But how could there be? Before '52, it's importance was completely unknown here. Yet these people were all growing up with the legend of Gombessa. They knew the prestige (if not the bounty) its catching brought to the lucky fisherman. They saw the attention and the excitement from the white men. Yes, the fish must be very important. Besides, a coelacanth had not been caught off this village for a couple of years. This was just a rare afternoon's entertainment. Still, in hundreds of shouting voices, something primitive and ritualistic was happening here. There was a surge of sound and swirling dust that lifted one's senses on a spear and thrust them forward towards the water and the captured fish beneath.

               Shakur took my Sony 8 water resistant camcorder to interview the fisherman in his traditional white Kanzu gown and Kofia cap. They shouted in Comoran Kiswahali above the racket. I handed Jean Louis one of our walkie-talkies. Steve was eagerly absorbing the turmoil. Shakur and the two of us made our way down to the water's edge, where we negotiated with the owner of an outboard-equipped canoe to take us out to the cage site. A thousand eyes watched with envy as we got in the boats and left the shore.

              The cage site was less than a kilometer out, in a beautiful light turquoise sea. But, I suddenly remembered, that the light color meant the water was shallow. A few other boats and French divers were already there. I wanted to take depth and temperature readings to make sure the fish was in the proper conditions. As I began lowering our high-low thermometer, Shakur shouted in French to one of the other boats. A high pitched conversation ensued. My thermometer hit bottom at fifty feet. The temperature reading was 78 degrees. "No good, No good", I was muttering. Shakur turned to me, "The fish is dead." he announced as if he were making a comment about the weather. "What are they doing? They are just playing around!" he went on. It did look as if the divers had been having a field day with this animal. Why was it in shallow water? One of the boat drivers claimed they had brought the cage up from deeper water. Shakur was disgruntled, "What's going on here? They are just playing around with it."

                We radioed Jean Louis who was still ashore adjusting his diving gear. He swam out to retrieve the fish. We came close to the boat hauling in the cage. I popped the water resistant lens of my camcorder underwater. The cage came into view, Jean Louis' rusty chicken wire contraption. Inside, swaying with the jerks on the cage line, was an enormous coelacanth, a female as it turned out. Her mouth was covered with rust from butting against the ends of the cage. Her eyes were opaque. She was quite dead.

          Jean Louis, in his faded aquamarine wet suit, guided her weightless body out of the cage and swam her to shore, clutching the famous pectoral fins from above, as if he were preparing to mount her underwater in some bizarre necrophilial ritual between the species. He swam her to shore where the crowds were, and now the din was even louder and more stridently cacophonous than before. We got back to shore. J.L. raised her gaping rusty maw in front of my camera lens. She was a monster Al right. Steve later measured her at 69 inches. Her yawning jaws revealed clutches of irregular teeth protruding from the upper palate. White flecks accented her cobalt blue flanks in distinctive patterns. I was too awestruck to be disappointed that she was not still among the living. She was at once the ugliest and most beautiful creature I had ever seen.

             I scrambled up a lava outcrop in the inter-tidal zone, dodging splotches of human excrement, to get a good video of the proceedings. Jean Louis swam the fish over to the crowds along the other shore of the bay to give them a close look. The screams intensified. Then two divers joined him to carry the creature up to the bashe. The crowd, now completely frenzied, harried them as they climbed the sloping gravel of the beach. It reminded me of the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi or the Ayatollah Khomeini, except that in a few minutes Steve and I were sitting alone next to the dead fish in the back of the truck, her enormous bulk threatening to slime my cameras and radio equipment. Children ran after the bashe, following us out on the main road, until one by one they disappeared, spidery specks devoured by the dusk.

          We drove with the fish first to the Ylang Ylang, where the manager declined it freezer space. He'd seen enough of frozen coelacanths. By flashlight, Steve took measurements according to the scientific protocol for divvying up a fish. I declined further interest in the fish in accordance with our policy of not taking more dead specimens. We took her to SOCOVIA, the meat processing plant, where she was laid to rest in the freezer room- but not before Jean Louis deftly removed several scales as souvenirs.

          "You will make a lot of money from this. I'm a naturalist, and I don't mind telling you, you have a bad reputation here." It was our third day in the Comoros. I had just been introduced to the man so self-righteously assaulting me. He was in his early forties, of average build with curly black hair and a Middle Eastern aspect. He was David Black, director of the first U.S. Peace Corps contingent, recently posted to the Comoros. We were at an Embassy send off reception for Bill Carlson who was leaving the islands for good in a week. "You're a naturalist? What is your speciality?" I asked, trying to evince grace under pressure. "I S.C.U.B.A. dive. I helped when that fish was brought up last October, and if you don't have a scientist permanently stationed here you shouldn't be doing this. I know what you're doing, your plan to come here after a fish is caught, and if you think that thing in the Embassy warehouse (referring to the transporter) can do the job you're crazy. I want to see your proposals. The Japanese, now they know how to do it right!"

               I explained to Mr. Black that we were not causing the fish to be caught, we were intercepting Comoran catches bound for the freezer to try to learn how to keep them alive. Jean Louis Gerod, with his experience and facilities was as good for resubmerging them as anyone we could base here permanently. Further, I was quite sensitive to the fact that the fish had died, and as for our proposals, they were publicly available at the C.N.D.R.S. library. Finally, I told him that we had discontinued our resubmergence program, failing to add that the very next coelacanth caught wound up on a buffet table at the Ylang Ylang hotel--before being "donated" to French President Mitterand as a token gift for his swing through the Comoros earlier in the year. All this mollified Mr. Black somewhat, as I don't think he'd thought things through in these terms. But he still scoffed when I said no one was making any money. In fact, by now we were many thousands of dollars in debt to the project with no scheme for compensation. "Well, I'd like to see some generic information on the coelacanth, he concluded." "O.K. fine", I agreed. I had loads of the stuff in my expedition file binder. "Just leave it at the Embassy office," he finished.

             I could not take the charge of having a bad reputation in the Comoros too seriously. I had been delicate in all my dealings and people at every level of society seemed genuinely cooperative and interested in our success. Nor were we buying that cooperation at any great price, for our expenditures of necessity remained modest. Those that we worked with were ready to work again on each new visit. And even if Jean Louis Gerod could never remember my name, he had expressed an interest in joining the Explorers Club. But I was actually quite disturbed by the encounter with Black. This was a new twist: to be pro capture but only the Japanese way! And this from the local American Peace Corps director. Everyone put their own spin on the coelacanth. What next!

              The eight young men and women Peace Corps volunteers we met- the most Americans I'd ever seen at one time in the Comoros- were bubbling with enthusiasm for their mission- mainly teaching English. Their only complaint was that they had (by regulation) to live in large houses with servants. While, they had expected to be romantically roughing it in African village huts, these perky kids right out of middle America were suddenly living like nobility as they set off to help save the Developing World. It was, to say the least, confusing their perspectives.

         David Black had indirectly raised an issue that had dogged me for a long time. Why didn't we just stay in the Comoros until a coelacanth was caught- however many months that might take? I had no simple answer. Partly, it was the cost of being there, but that could have been scaled down by going native, so to speak. Partly, it was the history of the project which had been conceived as a series of monsoon period visits over a three year period--a strategy that eventually left me holding the bag as the others lost interest. Partly, it was because I didn't see how I could significantly improve on Jean Louis' performance or communications by being there. Partly, it was the idea of being there for six or seven months with no captures. Or even worse, being there for months, then having a coelacanth finally caught but not hearing about it in time, so that we had the same old surface elapse of several hours in spite of being there. And, partly, it was because I always thought I should be doing something else with my life. As far as someone else being there? David Wilkinson's original concept was to have a scientist permanently posted. I had prepared a proposal for this and submitted it to the NYZS board with meager response following the Fricke attacks and whatever confidence they may have lost in me. Still, whatever excuses I may offer, had we taken the alternative approach and stayed on for several months, the whole affair might have turned out quite differently. But here we were now, with three weeks of fishing to organize before the Japanese arrived. No more time for further ruminations.

          On the very night of our arrival, after the wild fish chase, Mombassa, of his own accord, appeared at the door of our hotel room, gave a crisp Kenyan Army salute and entered. I was dead tired, but I could sniff the adventure was to begin anew. I took Momba's news. His mother, the spindly wisp of a woman who had blessed our fishhooks- our secret ally almost two years before, had passed away. Life and times in the Comoros were tough. It was hard making ends meet working for the Embassy and bouncing at the local disco club. Since he last worked with me, the manager of the Ylang Ylang had never given him his job back as weekend security officer. I told Mombassa we could certainly use his services if I could get approval from U.S. Charge' d'affairs Karl Danga for a part time loan of Momba to our efforts. The two of us agreed again on $40 per day. Mombassa would also arrange a bashe for our transportation needs.
That settled and the necessary permissions for both Mombassa and the Zodiak arranged, Steve and I got to work.

              First, as each of our tagging transmitters had a built in strain gauge to vary the frequency of beeps according to depth, we had to calibrate them in the water, cross referencing their depth and number of beeps with the depth readings on one of our sonar units. That way we could tell by the number of signals received, say every ten seconds, how deep the tagged fish was. Calibrating the transmitters actually took a couple days of trial and error in and out of the Zodiac. One unit wasn't working at all. I had to dissect it and perform tests in a bathroom sink to get things working properly. Now we had our sea legs. I was back in the swing of dealing with half a dozen technical problems in rapid succession. Steve studied a knot tying guide carefully and soon was a master at the bowline, the sheep shank and the fisherman's knot. My feeling was that if we caught a large coelacanth off Singani we would tag and release it. If we caught a small manageable one, the temptation would be great to move it to the transporter for a controlled resuscitation attempt. If successful, we could later release the fish or play the political situation by ear, in terms of bringing it home.

           Second, we had to fill the transporter in the warehouse with sea water and test the cooling unit. The sea was at least a mile from the warehouse by road and the transporter, once filled, would be too heavy to move by bashe. We had to bring about three hundred gallons of seawater to the transporter. But hauling it up from the beach at Itsandra would be too time consuming and labor intensive. The short-cut proved to be the Embassy Residence swimming pool just down the road. The pool was filled from the sea by a powerful pump and pipeline. With Karl Danga's blessings and between his daily dips, we siphoned the magic liquid from his pool into fifty gallon drums, hauled these by bashe up the road to the warehouse, then pumped them into the transporter, filling it to a depth of about two and one half feet, enough swimming depth for a large coelacanth. We ran the cooler unit successfully, lowering the temperature of the water in the transporter from 75 degrees F to 59 F degrees in three hours. By then current knowledge, 59 degrees F was optimal for the coelacanth. I shut off the cooler. Outside air temperature was fluctuating between 77 and 82 degrees. Forty four hours later, the time it would take to fly the whole rig back to New York, the transporter temp had risen 8.5 degrees to 68 F, giving a temperature "decay rate" of .19 degrees per hour. If 68 degrees = 20 C, is the upper limit for Gombessa according to Dr. Fricke's observations, then temperature-wise the transporter looked O.K.. Besides, the outside temperature would be much cooler in the airplane's cargo bay.

           Third, we needed an "interim transporter" to move the living fish from the seaside to the warehouse. That was easy. Coffins are kept in storage by U.S. Embassies "just in case". We "borrowed" one of the coffin packing crates from the warehouse and lined it with one of Lou Garibaldi's plastic float bags creating a coelacanth-size portable tank which could be carried in the back of a bashe. Now we were ready to try to resuscitate any coelacanths caught during our stay.

           Last but not least in our preparations, I had to draw up--at Shakur's request--a contract between the Explorers Club/New York Aquarium and the Centre Nationale des Reshearches Scientifique, the C.N.D.R.S., in Moroni. The contract with the C.N.D.R.S. was tricky. I was not prepared to negotiate a contract as Shakur had made no mention of this in his permission letter to me back in New York. While I was empowered to establish terms for the Explorers Club, I had at this late stage, no authorization to represent New York Aquarium. What to do? I telexed Lou Garibaldi with no response. The Aquarium at this point was wary, I suspect, of getting into a bidding war versus the Japanese. All I could do was incorporate Lou's verbal agreement that any monies the Aquarium gained from exhibiting a coelacanth would be put back into coelacanth conservation. How to get this printed up? I'd met Paula Berg, the temporary secretary at the Embassy, for dinner a few nights before. She was caring for a sex-starved mutt named Chocka, which tried to hump my Reeboks all through the meal. Paula agreed to type up the contract. But Shakur and the Director of the C.N.D.R.S., with Japanese sugar plums dancing in their heads, decided we weren't offering enough and rejected the contract. So here we were ready to go, with no Comoran authority to proceed. New York Aquarium and the C.N.D.R.S. had left me twisting in the wind--or, more credibly, in my eagerness I had put myself in that position. I remembered how Robert Kennedy had helped solve the Cuban Missile Crisis back in '62. Khrushchev had sent two telegrams to President Kennedy, the first with moderate demands in exchange for withdrawing his missiles from Cuba, the second with firmer, and from the U.S. position, unacceptable demands. Apparently the Polit Bureau had given Khrushchev a working over between the two cables. RFK suggested that the President simply respond favorably to the first and ignore the second. And so the crisis was diffused. I decided I would respond favorably to Shakur's invitation to research the coelacanth and ignore the contract problem until and if we actually had a fish in our possession. Such an eventuality would create a whole new ball game both here and stateside. Shakur for his part would have the option of stopping me which would violate his own invitation, or looking the other way until something happened. The latter is exactly what he chose to do.

              As I worked on the contract dilemma, a Japanese advance team from Toba Aquarium arrived in Moroni and met with President Abdallah. Shakur attended the meeting. The President expressed the odd sentiment, given the context of the meeting, that no coelacanth should ever again be sold or leave the islands. His Highness also clung to the old notion that coelacanths die on the surface because of a change in the salinity of the water compared to where they live. It had been known for sometime from tests, that aside from the submarine aquifers from which the coelacanths definitely do stray--if they inhabit them at all-- the salinity of the water around the Comoros is the same top to bottom. The Japanese later held a reception at C.N.D.R.S. to which I was not invited. Despite the President's comments they had a green light for their operations. Shakur said the Japanese would be sending a 10 man team, including a film crew, aboard a large ship. The ship was due to arrive September 7th. The Japanese, said Shakur, "keep much to themselves". He also mentioned that a million dollar satellite telecommunications dish for Moroni would be thrown in as a sweetener. It was interesting how Japanese coelacanth activities seemed to be tied to broader economic inroads.

              Soon it was our turn, to meet the President. This was not in any private audience as had again been suggested to me by Ambassador Moumin in New York. Not one where I would hand over the Sharper Image N.A.T.O. Commanders Compass and a few electronic gadgets I'd brought along. Instead, Steve and I were invited to a general reception at the President's Palace, honoring Comoran Independence day. All Europeans and other foreigners filed into the Palace on one side of the entrance, all Comorans on the another. The President, forming a one man receiving line, greeted guests from each line in turn, with a handshake at the door. He was flanked by Comoran security guards. There was a curious feature to shaking hands with the President in this way. As he shook your hand he looked directly at the next person in line, not you. So the greeting consisted of eye contact first and a handshake when his attention was on the next person. I figured he must be checking for concealed knives or guns. The Comoran whose line dovetailed with mine just ahead, kissed the President's hand and bowed respectfully. At that point the President was looking at me. His handshake was amazingly firm and warm considering how much flesh he'd already pressed. The President was short, brown skinned, turbaned, and otherwise traditionally dressed. Only his hands and face showed. The face was broad, softly wrinkled, with a wide mouth and alert brown eyes. Somehow he reminded me of a stone fish, that deadly spiny denizen of the Indian Ocean reefs with its wide jaw and tapering body. The lines filed through the Palace and out onto the grounds behind. There I found the old Governor, Michael's pal, looking like he'd gotten good use out of the pasta maker we'd brought him on the previous visit. There too was Ibrahim, the Christ-like fisherman, who caught "Ruggi". He'd wandered up the back trail from his village, into the President's backyard to join the occasion. I spoke briefly with Mrs Lynch, the U.S. Ambassador to Madagascar and the Comoros. Ambassador Lynch was a Reagan appointee. She lived at the U.S. Embassy in Madagascar. There were rumors that when she was replaced by the Bush administration, the Comoros would be granted a full ambassador of their own by the State Department. Then silence was called for while the Grand Mufti of Grand Comoro spoke endlessly in Comoran, warming up the crowd for the President.

          When Abdullah spoke, first in Comoran to his left, then in French to his right, I could tell he was a clever and very astute politician. In fact, the way he waved his arms, alternated his speech between humor and deadly seriousness, then thrust out his chin to take the crowd's approval, eerily reminded me of old Mussolini newsreels. He concluded his speech with a brief tribute to France, Abdallah's great provider, and a reference to the island of Mayotte, by choice still a French dependency. "The four islands of the Comoros are like the four rooms of a house", he said, "And one of them, Mayotte, can be a guest room for the French." Laughter and much applause followed. He was charismatic and scary at once; sweet and sour. Probably a bad guy to cross.
The one equally tough character I'd seen in the Comoros was Bob Denard the mercenary, chief of security for President Abdullah. Denard had married a Comoran and situated himself Noriega-style among several imposing houses about the island. Sitting at a lunch table across from mine one day at the Ylang Ylang hotel, he looked like a man who could order executions in the same tone of emotional indifference he now used ordering coffee.

             The day after the President's reception, Steve, Mombassa, and I drove south down the coast road to the village of Singani, just north of Insounsou where "Ahmed" had been caught back in '86. We wanted to stake out a campsite from which to stage fishing forays out over the Singani drop off. The village, built on both sides of the coast road, had been partly destroyed by a 1978 lava flow from Kartala. The flow, fortunately slow moving, had pushed through town before spreading out into the sea like a giant bowl of spilled porridge. It cooled in the water, leaving massive black craggy lava bluffs towering above the waves. Bulldozers had apparently tried to clear some of the town on the sea side of the road. A steep black dozer track wound down the slope out onto the flow. There little hovels had been erected. Were these tiny shacks weekend seaside villas for the more affluent Singani villagers? Or were they hovels for the homeless? The bashe was able to negotiate the track, but barely. I saw that it would never make it back up that hill with a full "interim transporter" great with coelacanth on board. Bringing a fish ashore at Singani would be hopeless. While this was a set back to our plans, we also found that Singani is back up the mountain a ways--not really a fishing village--and there were no boats for rent.

                   We tried the settlement of Bangoi, the next "town" up the coast. Bangoi is a fishing village which utterly captured my imagination. With permission and a guide we explored it. Remote from Moroni, modernity, if it can be called that in the Comoros, had not yet reached this village. Wherever one turned, Bangoi presented a perfectly preserved Comoran town of perhaps one, two or even three hundred years ago. A Williamsburg V.A., except that nothing was staged for tourists. The antiquity was real. Buildings of crumbling lava stones, were encased in cream colored cement mortar. Blocks of connected houses intersected by alley-ways clung to the high lava bluff overlooking the sea. Where fingers of water cut into the bluff, rough black lava beaches were stacked with skeletal outrigger canoes above the high water mark. The boat builders, huing their dugouts from trees felled on the slopes of Kartala were part of a real economy. The kids were excited to meet Steve and gathered round him in a great circle, hanging enthusiastically on every incomprehensible foreign word he uttered. But the road to Bangoi stopped much too far from the water to move the "interim-transporter" in close to the shore. We had better luck at Salamani further up the coast. Here there were boats available and close road access to the water. Salamani had, in colonial times been a center for distilling perfume essence from the Ylang Ylang flower. The distillery still stood, reminding me of an abandoned prison. A long straight drive, flanked by rows of soaring clove trees, leads from the coastal road past the few buildings that comprise the village and out to the shore where the boats are kept. We noticed several of the new fiberglass outboard outriggers built by the European Assistance Program. One of these would be perfect for our fishing efforts. Mombassa made arrangements. By July 5th, ten days after our arrival in the Comoros, we were ready to fish.

                Steve Clark, with all the enthusiasm of his youth and eagerness to dive in and get the job done, cut a new sort of figure in the Comoros. At 6'2" with long hair, an inverted baseball cap, torn T shirt, ambling gait, and cheery disposition, he had the manner of having just emerged from a fraternity socializer to start prepping for final exams. And prep he did, for now we got down to business. The first night out we loaded all fishing and life support first aid gear in the bashe at the Embassy warehouse. Otoman just smiled to see me again when we picked him up at Iconi. We drove forty minutes south to Salamani, where the rented fiberglass outrigger outboard awaited us. Along the way the headlights, of the bashe captured instant "flash" pictures of Comoran life: two women speaking to each other from different sides of the road; men playing at a board game near a bend, children with baskets on their heads marching along the margin; all momentarily frozen like strobbed dancers in a disco. The volcano Kartala, even blacker than the sky, loomed perpetually to the left as we drove through the night. Mombassa told me that back in January fire was visible at the top of the mountain and clouds glowed red above the crater. In my mind jagged red fingers split the flanks while a golden lava souffle frothed over the summit. I liked the idea of that volcano. Damn! I had forgotten the battery for the sonar. Mombassa and I left Steve, Otoman, and the gear at Salamani, then repeated the run.

               When we got back Steve, Ottoman, and everything else was aboard the outrigger, which thrashed about in the waves of a small cove. Mombassa stayed behind with one of the walkie-talkies. As the boat came in against the shore to pick me up I could see a young Comoran was driving. He kept laughing hysterically without any apparent provocation. I'm afraid I dubbed him "The Idiot Laugher." He was not a "wise giggler" like Ottoman, just a noisy irritant, one of the "Yahoo" class of motorboat cowboys, a subculture that followed the introduction of powered canoes. Though he spoke some French, communication with the laugher was impossible in any language. He overshot Singani during the twenty minute run south from Salamani by water. Meanwhile, the outrigger of the boat which had a way of splashing water on the gear and occupants, shorted out the sonar. But when we backtracked to the reaches off Singani, Ottoman, who had compressed himself into the forward hull compartment for the ride, came to life again, prepping his fishing line. Otoman was using monofilament. I didn't see anyone using cotton line anymore. With the old fiber line I'd seen fishermen use one fist-sized stone sinker or "mbize" as a weight tied with a slip knot to a piece of string attached just above the hook. But with mono, Ottoman weighted his line with two stones taking advantage of the stretch in the line. First, he baited his hook with a fillet of roudi, then he placed the line between the stones with the baited hook just protruding. Next, he pulled the line tight and wrapped it several times around the two stones so that the elasticity of the mono bound them together. Then he tucked a loop of the free length under the wrapping and tugged on this with his teeth to set the loop to a certain tension which he gauged with his mouth. Finally, he chucked the whole lot overboard rather casually. The mono paid out from a big ball, like a ball of string, as the stones carried the bait hundreds of feet beneath us. "Deepest hand-line fishing in the world", I recalled reading somewhere. He felt the stones hit bottom and gave several powerful yanks on the line to release them. Now the bait rose slowly from the bottom and drifted with us in the current. Otoman waited patiently, holding the line across his palm, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, working it up and down from time to time by catching a wrap around the back of his hand. The outboard was shut off, the laugher strangely quiet. Oh but it was sweet to be out there again doing it. Away from the political squabbles, the cities, towns and peoples, the appearances, out there with the source of the data, the creature-in-itself, lurking beneath. I felt as if my life were dangling on the end of that line, ensouled Buddha-like in a slice of roudi.

           We waited almost without expectation. July in the Comoros seemed different. The night air was cool and we'd seen small fires lit along the shore at Salamani to warm the fishermen on their return. It was winter in the tropics. More of the kerosene Coleman lanterns were aboard the fishing canoes than I'd seen before. The lights were used to attract small fishes which would then lure in tuna. Was this due to the season or creeping modernity? I was going to try to ask the laugher when Otoman had a bite. His fingers could feel it through the stretch of the hundreds of feet of line. With a flick of his wrist he wrapped the line around his hand and yanked up hard. Then he began pulling up the line, hand over hand, never letting it slack. The mono curled into a pile at his feet which rose in a minute halfway to his knees. I clicked on the video light and rolled tape. But roudi it was that roudi caught. "The little cannibals!" I muttered.
Otoman threw the fish near the line at his feet, grunted, then laughed. The laugher laughed. Steve watched, picking up the technique as Ottoman baited his hook anew and repeated the process with two more stones. This time the line paid out from the heap at his feet without a single snag. And so it went through the night. Roudi, roudi, and more roudi. Otoman caught roudi. Soon Steve caught roudi. I counted roudi. The laugher wanted the roudi. But where was the FISH?

              We fished out of Salamani for a few nights running, but the positioning and control of the boat was practically impossible because my attempts to communicate with the "Idiot Laugher" were futile. We both spoke some French, but our heads were in two different places. He would just laugh whatever the situation. Either he was high on Ottoman's leaf, or he just had a very positive life attitude. Neither, it seemed to me were handy in the search for coelacanths. I soon scuttled the arrangement, and made plans to bring the Zodiac down from Itsandra on nightly fishing sorties.

              A routine developed. If we'd been out fishing the night before we got up around noon back at the hotel. Brunch was a leisurely affair on the Ylang Ylang's open patio. We could see the ocean from our table. During July, the sea conditions were unpredictably variable. Each day began with the sea calm in the morning, but often there were white caps by noon. That was a problem. Not for reasons of safety, for Monsoon squalls were unlikely this time of year. We had to judge if we could make adequate speed down to the fishing grounds, about an hour and a half at full throttle on a smooth sea from Itsandra, and once there make profitable use of the fishing equipment. So we studied the water. The fishing "go-no go" decision was left to Ottoman. In the afternoon, Momba would come from Iconi with the word from Ottoman. But sometimes Ottoman couldn't be found at Iconi in the afternoon and we would have to first mobilize the gear then consult with him there by radio from the Zodiac on the drive south at night. Ottoman would glance at the sky and along the shore, then mumble something to Mombassa who reported to me on the walkie-talkie. He was quite good at predicting the sea state down near the bottom of the island. If we knew we wouldn't be fishing, we tended our equipment at the Embassy warehouse. If we knew in the afternoon that we were to fish, we squeezed in dinner on the same patio as a single brunch, surrounded by the hotel's guests of the day: the rare businessman from overseas, the airline crews, the older man with his young "escort" on a getaway, the CARE worker waiting to take up his post on Anjouan. The oddity of our situation was that after we had sampled the pastry chef's daily delicacy, while the others lingered over coffee or retired to their rooms, we folded our napkins and went off in search of coelacanths.

            As the Zodiac raced south, Mombassa would track us along the coast in the bashe maintaining radio contact. Using my storm experience from '88, I would back the Zodiac into the rough inlet at Iconi, dodging coral heads, to pick up Otoman wading out to us in the swell. We would by-pass Salamani and the Idiot Laugher completely on the way down to Singani. Arriving off Singani by zodiak, on a pitch black, moon less night was an experience worthy of the Navy Seals. We had to make radio contact with Mombassa who by then had reached the village of Singani a ways up the flank of Kartala. He would face the bashe towards the sea and flash the headlights so we could position ourselves. Sometimes this positioning went on for ten minutes or so. The practice of using the radio backfired. One morning Mombassa was hauled into the office of the Presidential Guard and accused of assisting a naval invasion force intent on overthrowing the President. He had to do some fast talking, which fortunately he was good at.

              Once off Singani, we fished for a few hours until we ran out of stones or Ottoman began nodding off because he'd run out of "leaf." The fishing was routinely disappointing, even though Steve contrived a vertical long line- a weighted line fastened to a barrel with multiple hooks, that we could set out and return to when we were done. At 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., we would pull up the gear, wake up Mombassa with the radio and prepare to head north. There were two modes of getting back. We could travel at a comfortable, civilized speed arriving at Itsandra by break of day. Or open the throttle up, go like hell, bang our guts out, and get back in the dark with the sense that we could still look forward to going to bed at "night." We invariably opted for the latter--the empty handed morning landings were just too depressing. A night return meant a scary ride, like those times when an aircraft is passing through turbulence and to maintain a schedule won't slow down. On these night returns there were no guiding lights along the shore. If stars were out, the hump of Kartala would be visible off to the right, remaining motionless against our travel. One by one, headlands dimly appeared off the starboard bow as way points along the west coast of Grand Comoro: fingers of lava, that seemed forever unapproachable until the last few minutes when each was suddenly passed to be replaced by the next, on and on into the wee hours before dawn. Off the villages I had to be especially careful, arcing further out to sea to avoid occasional unlit fishing canoes. If the moon was out and in the right place I could use its reflection on the water as a safety zone to aim for. If not I would peer intensely ahead watching the approaching water: I watch. The motor roars. The others are huddled down out of the cold wind, bouncing on the aluminum floor like beans on a drum. I see now in the distance the Iconi bluff. I watch the water again. The air seems to blend with the sea. No horizon. Suddenly, faster than I can think, I swerve. Something dimly flashes by, bobbing in the wake of our boat. I missed. Thank God! I turn around. The canoe fades behind without a whisper, no Comoran curses yelled into the night, the fisherman timelessly sculling his paddle, seemingly oblivious to his near impact with a rubber tube full of bodies and machinery and minds of strange designs. One night late in the trip, returning alone, I couldn't raise Mombassa on the radio coming into Itsandra about 3:00 a.m. To be as conspicuous as possible, I turned on the light strapped to my purple climbing helmet. Then I had visions of my head exploding like a pumpkin in a barrage of machine-gun fire from the shore pill box installation. I carefully placed the lighted helmet on the bow of the boat, then held my breath all the way into shore as I tried to keep my body out of alignment with the helmet and the pill box. No shots but a military patrol met me at the beach next to a rudely awakened Mombassa. Just as well I can't translate Comoran.

          Although it seemed a long shot--given the view that coelacanths don't bite on immobile bait--I thought that we might abet our chances off Singani by putting a trap down to "work for us" between visits. To this end we constructed a giant version of the minnow traps fishermen use in Ontario, a mesh cylinder with two inverted funnel ends. Bait in the trap lures the fish through the broad concave end of the funnel at which point the creature is faced with finding the narrow opening of the spout end to escape- which it usually doesn't and so is trapped. We found the wire mesh and rope ingredients for this device at different shops around and about Moroni. Steve and one of Mombassa'a sons assisted in the construction. Mombassa suggested that we use a banana tree as a camouflage float marker for the trap to discourage sea pirates. Given past experience, I thought that was a good idea. Mombassa got the tree and a voodoo doctor's smorgasbord of dried fish heads and animal parts to use as bait. I was a bit dubious. We deployed the contraption one night with great difficulty. When we returned two days later, after a storm, there was no sign of the banana tree. Another vanishing mystery. Out of general concern for the safety of Dr. Fricke and his submersible crew I would have to report the possible presence of the trap and its mooring line to the C.C.C. More grist for their mill, but I did put the word out before his arrival. I would not see that mooring line again for another eleven years.

.

          Steve left the Comoros a couple of weeks before me. The night before his flight, Mombassa invited us both to dine at his house. This was something of an honor as I had only been there briefly on one other occasion when I met Momba's wife and what I took to be their pet dog. We walked down the narrow "street" in the village of Itsandra where Momba lived. His neighbors stared from their houses or greeted us from doorways. One of these crumbling one story edifices was Momba's apartment "complex", which consisted of a front living room foyer just off the street and a curtained back room adjacent to an outhouse. There were no proper doors. The living room was simply furnished with a couch and a few high backed metal chairs next to an eating table. On the walls were pictures of world leaders torn from magazines. Michail Gorbachev and George Bush were both prominently featured. While the dinner had been in preparation for some hours, it was evident that something had gone wrong behind that curtain and the food would be delayed. Steve and I, on our best visiting emissary behavior, exchanged simple pleasantries with Mombassa. Ahmed one of his ten children, and his beautiful wife occasionally appeared from behind the curtain. Mombassa referred to his wife only as "your friend". She spoke little French and no English. The conversation was beginning to stretch a bit thin, when his wife finally appeared again from behind the curtain with the traditional ingredients of a Comoran multi-course dinner: Samosa pastries, rice, fruits, custards, several sauces and a meat platter. A pleasant interesting change I thought from the albeit rather good French cuisine at the hotel. The meat platter caught my eye. "I hope you like duck?" I understood Mombassa to inquire. "Wow, duck in the Comoros," I salivated, "What a delicacy. Momba has really gone all out." I heaped several slices onto my plate, barely concealing my greediness, for by now I was famished. I drew from the other less tasty dishes out of politeness to garnish the meat. Then we all dug in. But something was very wrong for with the knife and fork provided as a courtesy to us Westerners, I could not cut the meat. The duck must have been cooked to the consistency of tough tire tread. The slices were both too big to eat and uncutable. Mombassa saw my predicament. He was also having trouble. He produced a razor sharp Swiss Army Knife and we managed to cut and shred the slices into bite size pieces. But once in the mouth they were, of course, unchewable. With great effort I managed to swallow a few, all the time praising the feast laid out before us. Finally, Momba announced to us, "The dog, he is very tough." I got the picture.

           Steve's departure left me alone, still crazy for the fish, and so began the third phase of the summer's operation. Jean Louis Gerod had said to me somewhat confidentially that the best thing to do was to catch the coelacanth ourselves without waiting for a Comoran catch- an idea that had certainly occurred to us and was in fact the reason for our being there. But he aroused my curiosity by promising he would tell me where to fish. So perhaps there was a secret coelacanth fishing ground after all! I was grabbing at anything at this point. I finally cornered him for his wisdom. "Fish after rain at the new lava flows: Singani and Hahaya." "This is hardly new information," I thought. We'd just been busting our balls down at Singani. Now Hahaya?" Well, o.k. why not give it a try?"

         I drove Ottoman north by Zodiac to the village of Hahaya near the airport. It had rained. The phosphorescence in the wake and under the boat was so bright that I thought we must somehow be reflecting light from the ship's masts in Moroni harbor. We glowed our way north. It didn't take long to realize the folly of fishing at Hahaya. Yes, a coelacanth had just been caught there the day before we arrived. But Hahaya was a fishing village with a fishing "footprint" like the others. There were many boats out. Ours was just another line in the water, with the same odds as any other. No Hahaya was a waste of precious time.

            Mombassa had been down schmoozing with the boys at Salamani, including "The Idiot Laugher." They said there was no way we could catch a coelacanth in the Zodiac, because the zodiac could not hold position in the current the way a fisherman in a canoe can by sculling his paddle. We were constantly going and stopping. That was not the way for Gombessa. They would tow a canoe down by outboard to meet me at Singani. Then these fisherman would fish Comoran style in the canoe and show me what they could do. Fair enough. I had just enough money left to finance one night of such an operation.
The sea condition was only fair when I reached Singani in the afternoon. I wanted to spend some time dragging for the lost trap to spare myself the humiliation of having to report it to the C.C.C. I was alone in the zodiak with two bottles of Coca Cola and some bummed cigarettes to keep me going. I set out a barrel marker moored to a stone to give myself absolute position in the current. Then I dragged the grappling hook I'd used for the cage search back and forth while getting additional coordinates from Mombassa over the radio. No luck. O.K, that was done.

            Ocean swells were pounding against the lava coast in giant spray-bursts. I wanted to wait a bit to watch the sea condition, before deciding to go ahead with the night program. I had some time before sunset so I amused myself by taking a book on Wittgenstein out of a plastic bag, smoking a cigarette, and reading linguistic philosophy while dangling off the edge of the Comoros Archipelago a million miles from nowhere. I drank the second Coke and watched for the green flash as the sun dropped below the horizon in a spectacular display of colors. Mombasa made contact with the radio. "Ah happy to tell you, the boat is presently on its way down with a fisher, over." he reported in his husky English. "Ok, I will wait here, over." While I'd been reading Wittgenstein, the barrel marker with a cyalume stick had begun moving out to sea. The tide was rising! I pursued it and began hauling in the barrel line when it tangled with the grappling line and I had a snarled up mess on my hands. I worked on this into the darkness, bobbing in the swell, until eventually I heard the sound of a motor approaching.

                 At first I couldn't make out any canoe being towed behind the outboard. Then I realized the canoe was on board carried across the gunnel. The boat pulled up. There were three on board. I strained to see who was driving. Oh no! It was the "Idiot Laugher." He saw my plight with the lines, laughed, then climbed on board and sat down. With both hands he lifted himself off the Zodiac's rim tube and farted in my direction. Well at least that was a new bit of behavior. Then he fell upon the whole mess of lines and seemed to stuff as much of them into his mouth as he could. Was he going to pull the thing out with a line of shinny needles dangling neatly in a row? No, but with astonishing articulations of his mouth and hands the laugher undid the whole ganglia of knots in less than two minutes. The "Idiot Laugher" it turned out, was a genius fisherman. I should have known better.

            The "Laugher" climbed back in his boat. The other fishermen launched their wooden canoe and disappeared into the night. The "Laugher" began behaving like an idiot again, racing back and forth in his outboard buzzing this way and that for no apparent rhyme or reason like a headless chicken. Then, he disappeared altogether, and the sea was quiet save for the wind and the muffled rumbling of the my Zodiac's Evinrude. I began a program of sonar scanning. Some time went by. Perhaps two hours. Maybe less. I wasn't seeing much of interest on the screen. And I was beginning to worry about those two fishermen in the canoe. I hadn't seen a trace of them since they set out. The sea was none too kind tonight, with a swift southern current. Almost every week we'd heard about fishermen lost at sea and seen the anxious faces of their relatives on shore. Now I felt responsible for those two guys that I'd barely nodded a greeting to. Where the hell were they? Why didn't they stick around. That "Laugher" could not be counted on. Where was the idiot anyway? The wind was rising. Black clouds scudded across the face of the moon. I pulled up the sonar and began to search the bays and coves of the Singani flow with a powerful searchlight. No fishermen. Somewhere out in the blackness I could hear the "Laugher's" boat again. He was back, madly zooming up and down the coast. I tried not to pay attention, peering into the night for that little outrigger canoe, and those two by now panicky fishermen. Then the "Laugher" zoomed up to me, laughing. The fishermen were on board, with their canoe across the gunnel. In an instant of seriousness he motioned that the fishermen wanted to show me what they'd caught. I turned my flashlight on them expectantly. They held up three small roudi. Again the "Laugher" laughed. So much for Singani.

              Sensing my days in the Comoros were numbered, I invited Mombassa and Otoman to dine with me at the Ylang Ylang. This was nothing much for Momba who had often eaten there with Steve and myself while we mapped out our program. But for Ottoman, the poor "Third World Fisherman", it was clearly a strange new world. Ottoman, like a visiting head of state, arrived in his finest traditional Comoran dress for the Sunday seafood repast. While we waited to order, he regaled us with some fishing tales translated for my ears by Mombassa. On one occasion, Ottoman had hooked a giant tuna which dragged his canoe from one end of the island to the other. His relatives thought he had been lost at sea. After thirty-six hours he had fought the fish up to the boat when fortunately another canoe pulled along side and the two fisherman hauled the great creature across the gunnel of both canoes. Ottoman spoke also of sharks snapping canoes in half, but said that since the motorized canoes arrived, the sharks had all but disappeared. Ottoman--through Mombassa--explained to me about a certain mix of conditions which I have come to call the "Gombessa Night." Coelacanths, it seems, have always been caught under the same set of conditions. The moon is new, the sky dark. There is little wind, and the current, if any, is moving gently inshore. Then the coelacanth forages up the submarine slopes. We had certainly not been having many of these "Gombessa Nights." The waiter finally appeared and Ottoman took his cues from Mombassa on what to order. The food arrived and while Mombassa ate Comoran style with his hands, Ottoman made a valiant though unsuccessful effort to use a knife and fork. Mombassa realizing that Ottoman was being unnecessarily formal, even for the "exclusive" Ylang Ylang, encouraged him to relax and eat with his hands. Now Otto really dug in and shoveled down the lobster salad gustily with his fingers. After several mouthfuls he looked up and emitted a resounding belch which nearly blew me out of my seat. Now even the casual Momba indicated this was going too far for the setting. Ottoman would have to return to his conservative "European" ways.

         The Japanese advance team had been staying at the Itsandra Sun hotel where one day I accidentally forced myself on Karl Danga, Paula Berg, and the hotel's manager for lunch. The Japanese had been unable to restrain themselves, bragging to the manager about the high tech gear they were bringing in: pressurized life support tanks, remote submersible robot cameras, film crews, marine biologists, fishing technicians. To avoid sounding like a fool by comparison, I had to pretend I'd just sort of been out for a coelacanth "look see". Nothing serious you understand. Just having a little fun on the water.
I knew my time was up. I'd shot my wad. I was out of funds and would have to leave. My window of opportunity was rapidly closing. But there were two ways I could keep it open just a crack. Unfortunately, because of Mr. Black's attitude, the Peace Corps contingent was out. But by a coincidence of timing, there were two American scientific divers on Grand Comoro whom I had first met back in '87 when we'd also overlapped. Larry and Denise Tackett were collecting corals and sponges for a cancer research clinic affiliated with the University of Arizona. Some initial lab results on chemical derivatives from their first Comoran specimens had been promising enough to send them back for more. We shared storage space in the Embassy Warehouse. Larry was a fascinating diving enthusiast, still keen after having once been abandoned by his diving boat in Shark Bay, New Guinea. There, he floated in his B.C. vest for two days while a diving assistant went mad and drowned beside him. Larry was picked up the next day by a passing trawler. By our second meeting in the Comoros, he was enough tuned into our project to follow my briefing on the transporter resuscitation procedure and agreed to cover that base for the two weeks he would be in the Comoros after I left.

            Second, there was Jean Louis Gerod, who took a quick lesson on resuscitation and agreed to do the same thing as Larry at least until Dr. Fricke arrived in October. Then he would offer his assistance to the Germans. I was satisfied. Perhaps oddly, I did not think my final fishing efforts futile or frivolous. Not by a long shot. I had done my best for God, Country, Club, and Self (probably in reverse order) in the face of the impending Japanese and German presence. And I had demonstrated again, precisely by not catching one, that coelacanths are not easily accessible at least by hand-line or sonar, even in the Singani region- site of the proposed coelacanth conservation park. Now I could only go home and wait out the Japanese onslaught.

            Mombassa flew with me, at least as far as Paris. He told his family that he was needed as my assistant, but the truth was that he wished to leave the Comoros. I was his cover. He just wasn't making the living he wanted there. Somehow the Comoran ex-patriot community in France held out more promise for him. His large girth filled the seat in front of me. I slept on and off en route to Paris. When I awoke on the approach to Charles De Gaulle airport Mombassa was reading yesterday's still crisp edition of Le Figaro, briefing himself on French affairs for the life that lay ahead. We lost track of each other in the airport. Later he would write that times were tough for him in France, but he did not dare return to the Comoros as police had been to his house looking for him. He was still suspected, as a result of his activities with me, of having something to do with a plot to overthrow the President!

         But now it was someone else's turn to catch a coelacanth, and this time, "to do it right." When I left the Comoros in August '89, I feared it might be for good, but alas, in spite of myself or because of myself, like the Terminator, I'd be back.