"He felt serene. It was the pervasive sense of freedom and ease that he always felt when he dived. He was alone in the blue silence speckled with shafts of sunlight that danced through the water. The only sounds were those he made breathing - a deep, hollow noise as he breathed in, a soft thudding of bubbles as he exhaled. He held his breath, and the silence was complete."
Much of the action of Benchley's second novel would take place several fathoms deep, with a plot that combined the author's twin interests of diving and underwater archaeology. He would return to the same environment for his most Hemingway-like of books, The Girl of the Sea of Cortez, and, to prove his credentials, his photo on the dust jacket showed him swimming with a giant Manta ray. In all of his years of diving - which included swimming with sharks - Benchley claimed that he was never harmed by anything more dangerous than a sea urchin or jellyfish.
Hooper, floating four feet below the Orca's hull, tethered to the boat by only two coils of rope, is not so lucky. The shark approaches him in another one of the book's great sentences: "Rising at him from the darkling blue - slowly, smoothly - was the shark." The choice of the Keatsian adjective, the twin sibilant adverbs, and the particular placing of the noun - all these combine to produce a poetically disturbing effect. Just as the Great White appears to take form out of the "edge of gloom" so it only comes into the reader's field of vision at the very end of the sentence. It's a pity that having achieved this effect Benchley then reaches for a melodramatic metaphor, describing the fish as "an angel of death gliding toward an appointment foreordained."
Hooper's instinct to flee is checked by his admiration for the creature and Benchley's description also encourages a sense of wonder. The upper part of the shark's immense body is "a hard, ferrous gray", the lower part "creamy, ghostly white", a combination that suggests both invincibility and vulnerability. Indeed, Quint will finally kill the beast by plunging a harpoon into its "soft white belly". The shark passes close enough to the cage for Hooper to admire its "slack and smiling" jaws, its "black, fathomless eye" and its rippling gills, like "bloodless wounds in the steely skin". Then - in a moment of what can only be described as piscine erotocism - Hooper reaches out to caress the shark's flank from the pectoral fins to the "firm genital claspers". Rebuffing this advance, the fish slaps his hand away with its tail.
The scene of the shark appearing out of the murky water and sliding slowly past the cage did make it into the movie, but Spielberg could not allow his camera to linger on the mechanical shark for too long for fear of breaking the illusion. The one detail that is preserved is the rippling gills, but that may have been by accident rather than design.
