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bucket around his neck, tied twenty pounds of India zinc to his ankles, and dropped feetfirst into the sea. He sank ten or even twenty feet while a
saib
, or helper, tended his rope at the gunwale, and he collected as many oysters as he could before tugging the rope to signal the
saib
to haul him back to the surface. Up and down he went for three hours, eyes stinging from the salt. Then came lunch—more dates and coffee, another round of prayer—followed by a second shift of diving broken only by a pause for afternoon prayer. Dinner was rice and fish, washed down with a dipperful of barreled well water.
    In the evenings everyone pried open their shells, piling them in the middle of the deck while the captain collected pearls in a wooden lockbox that he slept on. Afterward, the divers rubbed themselves with the ooze of a gum tree to keep their skin from cracking. Then they finally relaxed by smoking plugs of
shisha
tobacco in a water pipe built from a hollowed coconut. Everyone said the evening and late prayers back-to-back so they could go directly to sleep.
    It was grueling work, but with Ali’s help Sharaf fared reasonably well, at least until the fleet reached the waters of Al Qarat Island, where the oyster beds were a daunting thirty and even forty feet deep. Sharaf was terrified. With each extra foot of descent, the tropical light faded. Pressure built against his ears and chest, and the creatures of the sea turned spooky and wraithlike, peering from crevices and cracks in the rocks and coral, or casting long shadows from above. In a panic, he nearly drowned during his first dive, after underestimating how long it would take his
saib
to pull him up. Ali, surfacing next to him, saw right away that Sharaf was quivering like a speared fish. He reacted by breaking into a grin, lips cracked.
    “Scary, isn’t it?” the older boy said, smiling hugely, as if the experience had been wildly entertaining. “That’s why the oysters are bigger and the pearls are better. That’s why you must embrace it, make love to it, like a dangerous woman who won’t let you go even when her husband is coming through the front door. Befriend the danger, the same way that an eel learns to love the shadows in his cave. Watch me.”
    Ali drew a deep breath and slipped back beneath the waves. Sharaf saw his friend disappear in a trail of bubbles, and he began counting off the seconds. Four minutes passed. Then five. Then six. The captain shouted angrily from the deck at the idling Sharaf.
    “Get to work, you lazy slug, or I’ll cut your share!”
    But Sharaf had to see this through. Finally, after another agonizing minute, and more taunts from above, something seemed to burst loose in his chest, like a pigeon fluttering free from a cage. Ali’s rope was still taut in the water next to him. Then it shook twice. The
saib
began to haul it upward. A few seconds later Ali burst to the surface, laughing as he exulted in his saving gasp.
    “Forty feet!” he exclaimed breathlessly. “Look at the size of them!”
    His bucket overflowed with huge, encrusted shells. The lesson was like a tonic, and from then on Sharaf was never quite as fearful.
    And so, as he slid into sleep with his newest doubts and concerns, Sharaf allowed himself to be carried ever deeper, as if again towed by a load of India zinc, while searching the currents of his dreams for answers he might take back to the surface.
    Just as he was reaching the limit of his tether, the telephone rang.
    Sharaf slowly pulled himself upward, keeping pace with his bubbles until he opened his eyes to the glowing red digits of the bedside clock: 3:37 a.m.
    The phone rang again.
    His cell phone, he realized, clear across the room on the bureau. Amina, right on cue, grumbled about the terrible demands of his job and rolled onto her side.
    He stood, walked slowly to the bureau, and answered in businesslike fashion.
    “Sharaf.”
    It was the Minister. Not even Amina was privy to this new