Читать книгу Into the Abyss. Diving to Adventure in the Liquid World онлайн

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The pain grew worse and worse as I sank deeper, becoming a numbing intense pain that filled my forehead inside my skull. I didn’t want to hold up the dive and with the ‘save face at all costs’ arrogance of youth, didn’t signal to tell any of the others that I was having difficulty.

Eventually we landed on the bottom. The pain was excruciating for me but I still managed to take a compass bearing to head out to the end of the headland where the cannon was rumoured to be.

We set off, heads down, finning out to sea. As we moved out to sea, so the seabed dropped away and it got slowly deeper. As the depth increased, so did the water pressure – and the pain in my forehead. The pain became the focus of my thoughts – but as I worked down the shelving bottom as the dive progressed, I found that the pain slowly eased. Perhaps, I thought, the effort of finning vigorously had helped clear my ears – or perhaps the increased pressure of air had forced its way through whatever sinus blockage I had.

‘Nature always tries to equalise’ was a rule taught to me at secondary school. The higher pressures now working on me, had strained to equalise with the lower atmospheric pressure in my sinal cavity. Eventually, somehow, the higher-pressure air had forced its way past the blockage and the pain left me.