28Hy own romance thwarted me. My newly-married husband shook hls
sober Scots head and gave me a gruesome account of an officer from a
copra ship who, while attempting to swim in, smashed into the coral at
the top of the passage, cracked his skull and died.
"1 wouldn't do that", I said, with all the coura~e of ignorance.
When my husband spoke of the obvious fact that 1 had no skill
whatsoever as a surface diver, and mentioned the eight-foot descent to
the entry of the cave and the fourteen feet of passage in, I hesitated
and in that hesitation fear was born.
The cave is miles down the harbor from my home, but that did not
keep it from haunting me. As the years went by, humiliation was added
to fear as hosts of people of every age and both sexes came to boast to
me that they had been "in" and then they gave vivid descriptions of the
place's eerie beauty.
The crowning humiliation came when our daughters, half grown by
then, witnessed my defeat at the very entrance to the cave. My husband
said one day, "Oh go in if you must and get it out of your system."
With so much agreement from him I set out that very afternoon with
visiting American yachtsmen and was undaunted by the gray blustery
weather that threatened to blow up a storm. As we left our home beach
my husband bade us farewell and added sternly, "You mustn' t let the
girls attempt it today."
The warning was unneccessary because long before we'd reached
Nu apapu , the island on which the cave is located, one of them was
violently seasick and the other was shiveri.ng with cold. It was, to
say the least, an unpropitious day for diving.