They're called the mask men. Wearing only goggles, shorts, and a mouthpiece to suck air from a hose. the mask men are like soldiers in time of war: chances are big they'll come back only a name.
At Enggano Island, 175 km southwest of Bengkulu in the Indian Ocean off Sumatra, in depths of 25 to 35 metres, the mask men work to collect tripang, sea cucumber. As they work, they enjoy spectacular underwater scenery.
'Brilliant light seems to come from the sea floor', one of them said, 'bathing everything in brightness. Sea grass waves in the cusps of coral. Fish of many colours fly overhead like aeroplanes. Tiny fish chase the bubbles coming out of our breathing apparatus. Sometimes they swim between our legs.'
Cloud
But behind this enchanting scenery lies danger. Sometimes millions of tiny fish will move like a cloud towards the diver, darkening the scenery. They're fleeing the huge seer-fish named walo-walo, with its long snout full of spikes like a saw.
If the diver moves in panic, the seer-fish could attack with his saw-like mouth. If he is wounded even slightly, the blood will attract sharks up to six metres in length. Experienced divers know what to do when the cloud of tiny fish appears - they either give a quick tug to be pulled back up, or else lie face down on the sea floor, to avoid being attacked by the walo- walo.
Another danger is the poisonous sea snake (ular lacin) that hides among the branches of coral.
And then there's what the divers call the 'cramp water trap'. Suddenly an ice-cold current will come up from the deep and wrap itself around the diver's almost naked body, numbing it and making it difficult to breathe. If he is able to tug three times and his mates realise he is in danger, he might be pulled up before he has gone completely stiff and has lapsed into a coma.
The divers' equipment is simple. Air tanks are out of the question. An air compressor, normally used to inflate car tyres, allows them to breathe for up to an hour and a half, through a mouthpiece each diver grips between his teeth.
When they are old, they often suffer from poor eyesight from swimming without goggles, and from deafness due to ear drums burst at the great depths.
Prostitutes
Despite the danger, the divers are poor. If you visit the tripang divers' village at Dusunkandang, near Bengkulu, or at Lokal on Baai Island, you will see wooden huts with palm leaves on the roof. And the smell! Salted fish and garbage predominate.
Actually they earn reasonably well. A kilo of quality tripang (about five) sells for Rp 60,000 (AU$30). (That's to the middle man - the packaged product sells for Rp 250,000, and is prized for its medicinal qualities). After a month at sea, a boat with six or seven divers will bring back 500 or so tripang. After deducting costs, each diver takes home about Rp 400,000 (AU$200). That should be enough to live well.
But somehow the money disappears. After the dangers of the sea, the divers often spend big on entertainment - dancing, prostitutes, strong drink. They are very generous, and therefore much admired in the bar. When they get home, the wife and children get what's left.
Often, before finally going home, they will call at the house of their boss, the juragan, to ask for a loan. The juragan, who knows the rich man funding the operation, usually gives it to them straight away. That way the divers are tied to him another month.
If any of the divers, usually from Madura or South Sulawesi, manage to do well, it is an exception. Then why are their numbers ever growing? When tripang diving started at Enggano Island in the early 1980s there were only a hundred. Now about 160 boats regularly bring ten times that number to the same waters.
The fact is, even if their wives and children are poor, the divers have a fabulous reputation among the youth of the tripang village. They're regarded as heroes, who live for weeks at sea defying sea snakes and sharks. And they seem to have plenty of money when they come to the bar. So when a vacancy comes up due to someone not coming home or retiring, there are plenty of applicants.
Offering
The boats are no more than nine metres long. Leaving in the late afternoon, it takes them ten hours to do the 175 km from Bengkulu to Enggano Island. That's if there are no storms. In the morning they cast their anchor and rest for breakfast, then prepare their equipment. The juragan stands in the bows holding a coconut shell filled with a spoonful of sugar, a spoonful of coffee, a cigarette, and an egg. He asks the ruler of the seas for permission to dive and take tripang, then throws the offering on the water.
He then takes a diver's mask, washing it three times in the sea before putting it on. He puts on rubber shoes, bites the mouthpiece, buckles on the lead weights, pronounces the Islamic bismillah and the greeting assalammualaikum, then plunges to the bottom of the sea. As soon as he has touched bottom he returns to the surface.
That is the sign for the other divers to start their work. Sometimes the sea floor is an expanse of glistening white sand. Piles of beautiful coral are seen in every direction. That's where the tripang lie on the sand.
But another piece of equipment the boat never leaves behind is the funeral cloth. If a disaster occurs and someone dies, the mask men stop work and take their boat to a beach at a nearby island. There they bury their mate with a simple ceremony. The burial is often done secretly, not reporting to the local village chief unless they are seen. Actually most locals know what it is to be a tripang diver, and understand the meaning of the burial. So does the family when the boat finally returns to land.
Karim Abdul
'My home village is Mornene in Madura', says Karim Abdul, 38. 'I have been helping my older brother at sea since I was 15. Our father died when I was 20. So I started to travel, looking for work. First I went to Sibolga in North Sumatra. There I met Mr Mussarah, another Madurese, and I became like a son to him. In 1989 he asked me to go look for tripang, so from that moment on I became a mask man. Mr Mussarah was my juragan. I was not afraid of swimming under water.'
'In mid-1989 we were diving around Pini Island, off Sibolga. There were five of us, including Mr Mussarah. When it was my turn to look after the hose, I was amazed that my mate Peret had not tugged the hose to come up. He had been down for over an hour and a half. I asked Mr Mussarah, and he told me to pull it up. I pulled, it felt light. Hell, at the end of the hose there was only Peret's head, still biting the mouthpiece. To extract it from his jaws we had to break his teeth. We buried Peret on Pini Island.'
'After a number of unlucky incidents, Mr Mussarah moved to Bengkulu. I went with him, and we dived off Enggano Island. There, in 1992, I was attacked by 'cramp water'. After eating lunch I dived. I found a huge field of tripang. I was busy stuffing them into my nylon bag when suddenly I felt my whole body become freezing cold, colder than showering in iced water. I knew immediately it was the cramp water.'
'My stomach felt as though it was being sliced with a knife. My genitals and anus felt like they were being pinched. Fortunately I was still able to tug the hose. After that I don't know what happened. I was out to it for a day and a night. When I came to, I had been laid out like a corpse. Fortunately Mr Mussarah was experienced enough to be sure I was not dead. Otherwise I could have been buried by my own friends.'
'To make matters worse, when we got back to Bengkulu, my wife left me. For two months I was paralysed. Just eating and sleeping. Mr Mussarah then paid for me to return to Madura to recover. After a year I began to get better, but one leg had shrunk and I had become a cripple. In 1994 I came back to Bengkulu to go diving again. At home there was nothing for me to do.'
Hamid
Hamid, 27, is also from Madura. Apart from disasters, he said the divers often experience strangely beautiful things. 'Once, I suddenly saw several lovely girls gazing at me under water. They were walking along and one of them came up to me. Then I remembered what my teacher said at the Islamic school years ago. These are the evil spirits. So I went back up to the boat while pronouncing a prayer.'
'If someone dies at sea I really want to bring the body back to Bengkulu. But it's a long way. And a boat carrying a corpse will be much troubled by evil spirits, especially if it is not whole. That's why we bury it on the nearest island. Perhaps it's a good thing too - at least the family doesn't have to see it.'
Extracted from a feature in D&R magazine, 25 January 1997.
D&R (from Detektif dan Romantika) was a crime magazine that has
recently become a quality news weekly.
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