The ocean waits where soundings fail.

– Old sailors’ proverb

18 July, 1803

Thomas Hale did not drown in the Levantine that night. He was rescued by a passing sloop. The sea was calm and the full moon shone bright, allowing the man on watch to see the struggling figure. A small boat was launched, and strong hands pulled him out and carried him back to the ship. 

The surgeon went over him. He had swallowed a lot of salt water and was delirious, nerves shot. His back was bruised and he seemed to breathe with effort, but the sprain would heal quickly. 

"You are a lucky man. God watches over you." 

The man flinched. He might have lost his mind, the surgeon thought.

The cutter had launched across the ocean from Malta precisely fifteen days before. Thomas, a midshipman with the Royal Navy, had a bright future ahead. He had sailed the seas since he was twelve years old and had risen through the ranks quickly, hinting at a commission in the near future. The cutter held urgent papers for the admiralty building in Alexandria. It ran into a sudden storm in the late evening, and by midnight the boat was rocking in huge swells. 

Thomas had been trying to pull down the sails before they ripped when a squall pulled him overboard. The boat disappeared amidst the rolling waves, flung east by the storm. Thomas felt the crashing weight of water close in on him. But the sea abruptly went quiet. He found himself alone, nothing leading to the far horizons except oily blackness.

As the sea quieted, Thomas suddenly became aware of a sharp pain across his spine. He had hit the railing before falling in, and it felt like something tore and gave way. His limbs moved with great effort, and they were growing heavier. The black salty water started to fill his nostrils. He desperately looked around for a way to keep afloat— a piece of wood nearby, maybe the railing had left him something to survive. But he found nothing. His head dipped below water. There was an inky blackness there; the moon did not penetrate much. He tried to push his head up, but the searing pain in his spine defeated him. He went under with finality, and despite all his attempts, a cold fire flooded his lungs as he took a gasping breath underwater. Blood roared in his ears. He commended his soul to God as his mind began to drift.

His eyes were wide open. The water was green, not black. He was floating just a few inches below the surface. The water seemed murky yet somehow clear. He could see what seemed like thousands of feet into the deep. His confusion slowly started to give way to something else. Deep down there was something. He tried to look away but he couldn't. His mind seemed to pull toward it. He could make out a black shape there, deep down, farther away than he should have been able to see. Larger than something that far could be.

As his eyes focused, the thing stirred lazily. It seemed shaped like a giant curve, its edges disappearing outside his field of view somewhere deep in the depths. He could almost feel a powerful muscle turning the orb. 

A dread filled him then. He wanted it not to move, willed it not to move. It began a slow, torturous rotation upon some unseen axis. Turning, turning for eternity. The orb started to turn a dirty yellow around the edge, and then it dawned on Thomas: the orb was an eye. Large beyond comprehension. Deep down where it should not have been. Nothing could be this large. Sea monsters of stories were large, but this seemed like creation itself. 

He watched as the eye turned on him. Watching, unblinking. He waited for the inevitable; maybe a tendril would pull him into some cavernous maw. Maybe the eye would move closer. Anything for this nightmare to end. But nothing happened. The eye watched him. Indifferent. Its pupil seemed to change size but it did not move.

Thomas was violently jerked out of the water. He crashed into a wooden plank and his back exploded with pain. He threw up saltwater, lying at the bottom of the small boat. He looked up at the sky. The moon shone bright, but he felt unhinged, afloat, grasping at the arms around him and the boat to be sure. He tried to tell them what he had just seen, but he couldn't spit out the words. As they lifted him into the sloop, he took one look at the once black water, and his body convulsed in fear.

#

The sloop left him at Alexandria. His cutter had arrived a day earlier. He met with the ship's officer and told him nothing, bent with pain but recovering. By now his mind had settled a bit. Telling them what he had seen might prove dangerous; he had heard of the asylums back home. But he could not go back on the water again, and there was no civilized way out of the Navy. He collected his pay from the quartermaster on a made-up pretext and slipped out of the barracks that night. He paid a Bedouin guide to take him to Cairo over land. He did not risk the Nile, the desert was merely a ledge.

Most children in the run-down Cairo suburb knew about the old Englishman. He lived alone in a dilapidated house slightly away from the other houses. He was filthy, unkempt and unwashed, speaking broken English and broken Arabic. He made his living guarding a warehouse. He spent nights sitting at the doorway of the small building. He spent days working on leather and ropes, his fingers weaving patterns from decades past at sea. He kept as far away from water as he could. He was perpetually parched. He drank it from the smallest tumbler possible. He always poured down into it, careful not to look at the bucket or the pitcher. To wash his face he poured water into his palm and tried to keep his eyes open. 

It seldom rained over Cairo. When it did, he kept his door tightly shut and his eyes wide open, unwilling to look into the grey clouds.