A minute passed--a minute and a quarter--a minute and a half. The canoe lurched to a sudden strain on the taut basket-line. I looked over the side. Far down in the green water I could see the shadowy figure of the diver, mounting the rope with leisurely movements of his arms. He came to the surface, exhaling the breath from his lungs with the strange shrill whistle I had heard before. Then, raising the goggles from his eyes, he gave the exultant whoop of the diver who has brought up a rich haul--a cry that was beginning to ring out on all sides, where the canoes lay at anchor. He lay resting alongside while his companion pulled up the basket, loaded with six or seven great gold-lipped oysters; and craned his neck to watch as the other opened the shells with a twist of his knife at the hinge, felt for pearls under the soft mantle, and tossed the body of each mollusk into the open kerosene-tin. My companions seemed excited. "_Aué_!" exclaimed the diver. "There is no other island like this! It is as Seroni told us--the bottom is covered with shell, and the water is not overdeep: twelve fathoms, by the knots on my line. Last year, at Hikueru, I worked at twenty till my head ached all through the night. And this shell--the size, the weight, the color of the lip--think of what it must be worth a ton! No man in all these islands has ever seen its like! I would still dive if there were fifty sharks instead of the one Seroni killed yesterday. But watch carefully, and if a shark comes, move the basket up and down a little so that I may be warned. Now pass me the weight, for I am ready to go down again." At the end of three hours the diver clambered stiffly into the canoe; even in this water, only a few degrees below the temperature of one's blood, a man grows chilled and must come out to rest and warm himself in the sun. He had averaged a minute and a half to two minutes under water, and five minutes' rest at the surface between dives, and I noticed that he sent up five or six oysters each time he went down. We had brought along a bottle of water and a package of cold food done up in leaves. When lunch was over and the diver lay basking in the sun, I asked him how he could stay under water so long, and how a man could stand the pressure of the depths. At home in California I had excelled my friends by bringing up sand from the bottom at thirty feet, and my ears had ached for an hour afterward. These natives thought nothing of working at seventy feet, and from what they said, I knew that one hundred and twenty feet was not considered an extraordinary depth.