The Shoals of Capricorn [antikvár]

Chapter One THE SHOALS In the western half of the Indian Ocean there are many square miles of shallow sea where the depth is less than forty fathoms. In these places the bottom comes up steeply from the abyss, from over 2,000 fathoms perhaps, to form table-lands beneath the surface, drowned islands which may possibly, many millions of years ago, have formed part of an archipelago, or even of a continent, joining Madagascar to India. They stand in an irregular crescent from north to south for over a thousand miles, from the tropical islands of the Seychelles, in about 5° south latitude, to the twin dead volcanic peaks of Réunion and Mauritius, which lie almost on the tropic of Capricorn. The Seychelles are granite knobs, lush and verdant with coconut palm and cinnamon, standing on a submarine plateau about 10,000 square miles in area. It is believed that the group of islands was once much larger than it is now and has since sunk down beneath the surface of the ocean, leaving this shallow surrounding shelf. Four hundred and fifty miles south again is another great expanse of shallow water, the Saya de Malha Bank, 12,000 square miles in area, in which the English county of Surrey could be contained sixteen times. And to the southward again, separated from the Saya de Malha by a deep channel a hundred miles wide, is another shallow table-land of almost equal size, the Nazareth Bank. Grouped around these like satellites are many other smaller banks, many of them bearing clusters of islands and mere sand spits tufted with coconut palms. Around the edges of the plateau on which the Seychelles stand and along the eastern border of the Saya de Malha, and in many other places as well, the sea bottom comes up within sight of the surface. You may sometimes see these places a long way off because of the rippling tide race over them, running in litde choppy waves, strangely in contrast to the glassy calm