The Shell Collectors: A short story by Me

I used to hunt with a partner, me and Malcolm ( Higgy) Higson, would arrive at our chosen spot as the tide neared low water and would comb our selected patch meticulously, using our collapsible aluminium quadrats and handheld GPS’s. I had the marine biology background and tended to do the research and Higgy had the enthusiasm ( rabid enthusiasm some said) and the vigor required to dig in glutinous mud or pull over the larger rocks underneath which the best shells were always to be found. We worked well together and we did pretty good, particularly on our trips abroad, where the big money is to be made, even after all the bribes had been paid. India was always a favorite destination with the Bay of Bengal becoming so polluted that if we didn’t take the shells they’d die out anyway and Indian ‘officials’, the easiest to ‘persuade’ and requiring the least remuneration to look away while we dug in the muddy sand or presented  our crates for air freighting back home.

But Higgy was a problem. He was really only  in it for the cash while I was  in it more for the thrill and the fascination, and, yes, for the element of competition that exists between the main players. And  I was a main player, witness the 2002 Glory of Bengal, ‘the Shining Moon’ as it became known, that was one of mine , possibly the most perfectly marked example ever found, an easy 70k and what’s more it was a genuine shell, hand picked by myself one moonlit evening, refecting back the light from my LED like a giant squid eyeball half buried in the sand. Of course the competition muttered and mumbled, the forums were full of retweets about the medio-dorsal flare ( it was 100% natural) , how traces of whitening agents had been found in the cotton wool it was displayed on when I first showed it but the shell was ‘right’ and the buyer realized that as well.

Higgy, however, thought that he could use my good name in the game as a cover for what turned out to be some seriously misjudged dealings, something that I was naively unaware of until the case of the Pendleton Vase became public knowledge…

That vase comprised a hard paste porcelain base holding a silver-gilt framework in which were mounted the three largest and most perfect Angularia dorsals ever found, their cream-pink milky translucency was often likened to angels skin. It had resided in the Wollaton Hall museum in Nottingham for over a century until Higgy, under the pretence of wanting to examine the shells in detail for a book he was preparing on decorative bivalves declared them to be fakes, moreover, nasty plastic fakes at that. This however was not the thing that attracted the interest of the national press, that came several weeks later when a police sting operation found the originals in Malcs briefcase, boxed and ready to sell. Fortunately my name was hardly mentioned and although I did appear on Newsnight it was purely as ‘an acknowledged expert’ on the field. I vowed there and then that I would work on my own from there on in. I was gaining a good reputation, business was on the up and no way did I want a partner who could foul things up. In this game, a reputation lost was lost for ever.

I really think that until that point the general public had little idea of the murky, extreme and sometimes even dangerous world of the enthusiast conchologist. Of course the rise of the serious Chinese collectors in the early years of the noughties really raised the stakes. Until then, big , important shells could fetch ten to twenty grand if perfect and from a good source but with the Chinese in play the figures soared, two hundred grand had changed hands for a stunning alabaster variant Elongata and there was speculation on just when the first quarter million pound shell would be sold. This sort of money caused a ‘gold rush’ and a lot of heavy duty characters started to enter the scene. Why search methodically, using clues from the environment ? More than 200ppm of cobalt in a limestone stratum means much better chances of  a pure blue Aractoida for example, no, why mess about with a scientific approach, taking only the best and most perfect and leaving the rest to breed when you could pay a hundred kids to grab and kill everything in the hope that there was a collectable one in there somewhere?  This type of collecting didn’t only damage often fragile populations, as potentially big shells were often damaged as well, reducing their value by 99%.

So anyway Higgy got two years suspended and we went our separate ways. I had decided that it was going to stay that way. I had my name as a (largely) ethical operator and my painstaking scientific methodology was paying off pretty well. That was until I met Rayn.

I was working my way along a particularly difficult to access section of coastline about three hundred miles north of Brisbane in an area where a filament of current from the southern ocean bought a rich supply of nutrients close inshore. I’d been studying satellite data and marine charts for some time in an effort to find some decent sized and well marked Anguilina and had spent an uncomfortable night camping rough by the side of my Land Cruiser in an effort to get down to the furthest part of the intertidal zone as soon as there was daylight. I had spent a good hour negotiating the razor sharp rocks and slippery seaweed when I heard a cry. Sure enough about another two hundred meters out a small  figure was waving in my direction frantically. There was panic in that yell so I dropped my collecting bag and increased my pace. At first I thought the slight figure was a child but when I finally reached it I found to my surprise that it was a woman in her forties. Her face was pallid and her breathing rapid and shallow, I knew immediately what the problem was; Blue ringed octopus bite……..

There is no anti venom for the bite of this animal and it kills principally by paralyzing the respiratory system, the victim can remain conscious and with a clear head but completely paralysed. Victims may die within minutes of a bite if artificial respiration is not given and this may need to be continued for several hours while the body metabolises the venom constituents. By the time I was at her side she seemed slightly detached, her breathing becoming shallower by the minute and  her pale grey eyes stared into mine, pleading. So there I am, about five hundred meters out into the ITZ with an unknown woman apparently on the verge of dying.

I said something like ‘Can you make it to the shore with my help?’ and she attempted to stand and I though we were going to have a go but almost immediately she sank back down, and seemed to slip into unconsciousness. There was only one thing to do and that was to administer mouth to mouth. I held her and breathed into her mouth and felt her lungs expand, I let her exhale and repeated …. And repeated.

It occurred to me that if my efforts to save her were to be successful then I would have to continue with this for several hours and yet within an hour we would be in several meters of water, water containing a number of unpleasant and/or very dangerous organisms.

The woman was hardly conscious, in some kind of torpid delirium, not able to move and yet her eyes bore into me when I glanced at them, I had no choice but to continue and to try and float us both towards the shore when the water became deep enough.

Four hours of mouth to mouth and she began to breath on her own, after five I was able to get her to the car. She slept while I wrapped her in my sleeping bag and eased her into the back seat. The colour was returning to her face. I had no idea who she was, I had been unable to salvage her bag or mine so I decided to get her to the nearest medical facility, at Golengong. Having deposited her at the hospital and given a statement to the local police I decided that there was nothing to do but return to the beach and try and retrieve my kit at the very least, assuring the authorities that I would return in a couple of days.

I found nothing of course except her tent and an old Honda 650 that was the only visible means of her getting to this isolated spot.

Up to that point I had never considered the woman as a person but rather as a problem for me to deal with. ‘Jeez’ I thought, she’s either one tough cookie or completely mad, quite possibly both..

At the next low water I went back down to the low water mark  to prospect for shells but somehow those panic filled grey eyes staring so imploringly into mine kept messing with my concentration and after a largely fruitless search I decided to return to the hospital to see how she was. I had a Russian client flying into Sydney in four days time expecting some big shells but I had to find out about the woman……

At the little outback hospital, she’s sitting up in bed listening to an ipod with her eyes closed as I approach with the doctor.

‘Rayn, this is Mr Withers, the person who bought you in’.

We both spoke at once, me to say ‘Call me Ade’ and her to say, ‘I know’.

There followed an awkward silence, broken by the doctor.

‘Mr Withers, erm, Ade, I’m not sure if you realize but you saved this lady’s life.’

More silence.

‘I know who you are’ she said, ‘you were also after some decent Anguilina I’ll bet, I had two beauties in my bag, small but flawless, they were destined for an investment banks foyer in Munich’.

‘I went back, looked for your bag, and mine, and I spent a few hours searching, but unfortunately..’ ‘… You found bugger all….’ she said, finishing my sentence. A habit that I was to come to know …. and to be extremely irritated by at times!

I had saved a persons life! In fact I had had no choice in the matter, nobody I think would have done any differently, agreed, I had the knowledge of how to deal with a BRO bite, that was related to my job.

Silence again.

We both spoke at the same time again:

She to say ‘ Listen, Ade, I have no idea of how to thank you for saving my life, I owe you big, big big time’.

Me to say, ‘Erm, look, I have to get on, glad to see you’re OK, anybody would have done what I did, so don’t think that you owe me.’

With that I turned and walked away, I guess it was embarrassment, how do you chat to a person who’s life you’ve  saved?

My Russian was, like all the Russians I deal with, sombre apart from when he had poured half a dozen large glasses of red down his thick muscular neck and even then he was only slightly less sombre. The fact that I had been unable to get the shells he sought didn’t seem to worry him. He listed, just as he had at our last meeting, around a dozen shells that he was specifically seeking but these were mostly south Atlantic species.

‘Oh and I hear about your recent adventure.’ He slurred in a thickening accent.

‘How on…’ ‘ I speak with Rayn, she tell me, she flying to Patagonia for me in two day’ She say for me to give you her mail.’ His iPhone was out and mine  chimed gently in response to tell me that some data had been received. ‘I surprise you not know her, she best in business, get  my green morph Heliotropsis’. He belched, rose slightly unsteadily to his feet, ‘You get shells I want, you call OK?’. And with that he was gone, staggering out into the crowds of tourists thronging The Rocks.

Now I was wondering why I had not taken more time to at least talk to her, I didn’t even know her surname for chrissakes and apart from those grey eyes, I could not easily recall even what she looked like.

It was only the next day, waiting for my flight to Hong Kong, that I looked at my iPhone and saw what my Russian had sent:

Rayn Barton-Keynes , email. Rayn@littoralis.net

Littoralis was a name I knew as a clearing house for shells from old collections, bankrupt museums, private collections and auctions, or at least that is what I had assumed as they were often able to procure, at a price, shells of great rarity and perfection the likes of which are rarely seen .

Google and Wikipedia told me most of what I wanted to know: Dr Rayn Barton-Keynes, conchological consultant specializing in rare shells and other oceanic collectables, MD of Littoralis, supplier of the finest shells worldwide. And there she was, staring out at me from the screen of my laptop, those grey eyes, so serious and penetrating despite the put-on-for-the-camera smile. Dr  R Barton-Keynes, my god, author of Gastropoda Palearctica , an oft-thumbed copy of which was even now sitting on my study bookshelf. I had aways assumed the author was some crusty researcher, hidden away in a museum office, not a player. I never read about authors, I just wanted the information in the book. Rayn was The Dr R Barton-Keynes, amazing. Now I was hooked and wanted to find out more about the person I had rescued but there was a problem, apart from various citations in the usual papers, ‘Proceedings of the American conchological society, Cochologica Acta’ etc there was nothing. ‘An International woman of mystery’ I smiled to myself. And thought about those eyes.

The next months saw me back in the UK preparing specimens and studying marine charts preparatory to my visit to the Maldives for some prospecting work. I had heard that some superb large Dactyloglottus had been excavated from the sand at low tide on one of the less explored islands and was keen to get my hands on some decent specimens both for myself and also for my Russian who had listed them as a particular target. I knew that I could get perhaps fifteen thousand dollars for a really nice one and perhaps more if it was well marked and well, the prospect of some quality time in the Indian ocean was not unappealing.

I had mailed Rayn, as soon as I had got back to the UK, but my mail was rather perfunctory, I told her about ‘our’ Russian and even said that if she were to be in the UK to give me a call but had had no reply. Then there she was, sitting on a tall stool in a Mumbai airport bar sipping a gin and tonic and flicking though a sheaf of papers.

‘Hi’ I said and she turned.

‘Ade Withers’ she said even before she had actually seen me. She smiled and I fell into those eyes for a minute.

‘I’m transiting through to…’  ‘…Male…’ she finished off my sentence. ‘Me too’.

‘Let me guess, for…’   ‘…Dactyloglottus….’ She said and we both smiled.

We were perhaps the best shell finding team in the world for a while. We became as near to celebrities as it is possible to get as Conchologists, our client list was the royalty of the shell collectors world and we became more than modestly wealthy as the years went by. Lovers as well of course.

There is always a rarer, finer, more valuable prize to be found, often involving searching in more and more extreme or remote locations. The delicate pearl like shards that were the internal shell of Littorella a gastropod living deep within glacial lakes in the Andes meant diving in heated scuba suits with special gas mixtures suited to deep diving at high altitudes. The glittering and intricate  pink supports of the tropical by-the –wind-sailor Struthiolatis  meant days or weeks at sea staring at the water surface. But the day that Rayn announced that she was going after a perfect Anthroplexius  my heart sank.

There are many fragments of this shell on display in museums around the world, many  washed from oil shale deposits, there is, perhaps the largest piece together with an artists impression on public display at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London. So desirable that even coin sized shards exchanged hands for four figure sums, an intact specimen had never been found although some large pieces appearing exceptionally fresh had recently been washed up on a South African beach indicating that, contrary to my currently held view, the species was not extinct.  Nobody even knew what the animal actually looked like when alive.

Of course this was attracting some considerable attention and we heard that the Johnson brothers were already down there investigating. Just the day before I had spoken with Alex Kruger who reckoned that there were already two teams of the most unscrupulous eastern block prospectors diving off the coast using gas mixtures invented for deep oilrig repair. For me it was enough to sit and wait for the results, I was pretty certain that there would be none and the dangers posed by such deep dives together with the vanishing odds of finding a specimen meant it was not worth bothering with. Rayn disagreed. It was that competitive thing, despite the science, the commerce, the adventure, the fascination, despite the success we had garnered as a team it was the thrill and prestige of being the finder that drove all of us top collectors it can’t be denied.

But this was going too far I felt. There was the risk of the dive itself, the cost of hiring the boat, the support staff, the equipment.

‘Nothing to what we could make if we succeeded, I have a list of Chinese collectors who would pay, literally anything for an intact specimen’ she said, those solemn grey eyes challenging me to disagree.

I knew well enough to let her go, what could I do or say to stop her? ‘I saved your life once’ I told her as she stepped into the bathyscopic chamber at the Institute of Oceanic Sciences, Cape Town. It was important to do some dry land test ‘dives’ in the chamber to check her ability to use the gas mixtures that would be needed. She was to spend four hours breathing an advanced mixture of Argon, Oxygen and Xenon difluoride and her metabolism and life signs intensely monitored. We were paying thirty thousand dollars an hour just for the use of this equipment but better safe than sorry... She lapsed into unconsciousness after two hundred and fifteen minutes and I had to wait for nearly two hours before the heavy door could be unbolted. She was breathing, but only slightly and I watched helplessly as she was rushed to the waiting helicopter for the dash to the Nelson Mandela teaching hospital intensive care unit.

Twice during the night her eyes opened and I was subject to that intense stare that only her pale grey irises could give.

She died at 4.30 am without ever speaking and it was only then that I understood that I had loved her.

One of the Johnson brothers died as well on an actual dive and it was claimed that he was holding a superb and complete specimen but had dropped it around 200 feet from the surface. I didn’t believe it, surely he would have had it secured to his body? The Russians left empty handed and I was left to grieve, not sure what to do or where to go.

After the burial and the inevitable interviews and questioning by the police, I retired to try and make sense of what had happened. A life for a shell? No way. Days turned to weeks and then to months. On one occasion ‘our Russian’ called on me unexpectedly. We drank red wine in silence, shells were never mentioned, eventually he gathered himself up and we stood facing each other, there was a spontaneous and monstrous hug, I think we were both crying and then he left, stomping away up the street through early spring snow.

I don’t think I even entertained the idea of any form of shell collecting for at least two years. Instead I wrote as catharsis. It was to be a work on the history of shell collecting, bringing together information on all of the greatest shell collections and collectors and of course it was to be dedicated to Rayn. This involved my visiting as many as the great collections around the world as I could and slowly I began to put my world back together. The more I worked, the more I became amazed at how these collections of nature’s beauty and subtlety put together at both financial and personal loss were so under appreciated by the public at large, at how the community of conchologists were almost completely cut off from other collectors. Not quite scientists and not quite ‘stamp-collectors’ , mostly rich and often eccentric individuals they lived for the beauty and rarity of their collections.

I was nearing the end of my researches when I received a call from  Akasi Taroda, a retired industrialist living in a small and quiet Eastern suburb of Tokyo. He asked me to come and see him as he had ‘a modest collection with one or two unusual specimens that I might like to see’. I had heard of this man once or twice as a discrete and tasteful collector who only bought specimens of extreme rarity and who never normally allowed anybody except his closest circle to see them. He had owned ‘The Shining Moon’, my most famous find for some years, or so I had heard, only to sell it on for a good profit when an even better specimen was discovered by a small group of Israeli prospectors, nobody knew how much he had paid for that one but the forums said well over four hundred thousand dollars.

‘Adrian-san’ he said to me when we were seated in his comfortable yet minimalist study, ‘ I am dying, a terminal condition I am afraid but I have come to find it a liberating experience’ his heavily lidded eyes looked deep into mine. ‘I have in my collection, an extremely interesting and quite possibly undescribed specimen. I have not wanted to bring it to public attention as I shun the publicity that this may possibly bring’. He paused and regarded me levelly. ‘ I should like you to evaluate it if you would be so kind’. It seemed to me that a twinkle had appeared in those eyes as he spoke but his impassive face gave nothing away.

‘Please to follow me’ and he rose and walked to a door which lead down a spiral staircase to a cool and spacious room with a low backlit table in the centre, the walls comprised hundreds of pale beachwood drawers, labeled in elegant Japanese brush strokes.

He walked directly to a draw and pushed on it gently, a spring mechanism sliding it silently open.

At first I could not quite make out what I was looking at. A voluptuously curved shape in translucent metallic peach, shot through with veins of deep red, probably 35 centimetres across.

‘You can touch it please’ he said ‘It is not as delicate as it looks’.

I had to wait until my hands steadied and my blood stopped pounding in my ears. When I finally lifted it clear of its mount and set it down on the illuminated table. I stepped back, unsure of what to say.

‘You realize of course what this is’ he said. And of course I did.

‘Anthroplexius’ I said, quite sure of my identification without recourse to any key or detailed examination.

‘Correct’ he replied, now openly smiling.

‘I am planning to break up this collection, it will be auctioned in Tokyo after my death but this, er, this specimen is unique no?’

‘As far as I know’ I replied.

‘And of a fairly high value?’

‘Well naturally, this is without question the most valuable shell in the world; tell me, how did you acquire it?’

‘I have an operative who occasionally undertakes particularly high risk prospecting for me, someone who I think you may know.’ His level look never wavered, the smile was gone’

‘Adrian-san, I know of your loss and for that I am truly sorry. When I heard about the possibility of a specimen in South Africa I was intrigued. After the loss of Dr Barton and Paul Johnson, it seemed to me that to give up on the task was wrong , I suppose you heard the rumors about Paul-san’s find?

I nodded, ‘Of course, but I discounted them.’.

‘I did not, I contracted your old partner, Malcolm-san to check out the seabed below where the Johnsons had been working and after two weeks and a very considerable amount of money spent, he found this. Unfortunately during depressurization there was an accident and he too expired, you had not heard? It seems that this shell has been collected at the expense of three lives and so I think it would be’ he paused ‘unseemly to sell it. Furthermore it has not been named, we only think it is Anthroplexius and it requires a specific name. I propose to place it into your custody both for  formal identification and for you to donate to an institution of your choice.’

Akasi Taroda was dead within a week of that meeting and the auction of his collection caused a sensation.

Not as big a sensation as when Anthroplexius raynii went on public display at the natural history museum though.