Home in the Deep

On the floor of the Red Sea, 45 feet below the surface near Port Sudan, the seven inhabitants of an underwater village celebrated last week the end of a full month beneath the waves. For the village's mayor, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, 53, co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung that made modern skindiving possible, it was a double-barreled occasion. Down on the bottom, he celebrated his 26th wedding anniversary, and his wife Simone dropped in with a cake in a waterproof container.

The houses of Cousteau's underwater village are strong-walled steel chambers, roughly cylindrical. One of them has four rooms off a central hall. Their air is supplied by pipeline from the surface, and their purpose is to prove in a preliminary way that men can lead submarine lives for long periods under increased air pressure and sally periodically into the water to explore, catch fish or perform scientific experiments. If they do not return to the low-pressure surface, they will not suffer from the divers' nightmare, "the bends," which is caused by bubbles of nitrogen released in the blood during decompression.

The underwater houses have most of the comforts of home, including air conditioning, sparkling modern kitchens, refrigerators, telephones and closed-circuit TV. When the inhabitants get bored with indoor life, they put on their skindiving apparatus and step through the "front door": a hole in the floor. Once outside, they can range freely, gathering tasty seafood to be cooked in the dream kitchens, never going near the surface. Every day during the month-long test, a doctor swam down from the mother ship Calypso, which hovered overhead, and checked the villagers' health. Cousteau himself stayed topside on the Calypso most of the time. At the end of the month, he said, all of the men came up in mint condition.

Cousteau looks on the sea the way Daniel Boone looked on Kentucky, as a fine place to colonize. He thinks humans should do what porpoises, seals and other mammals have done already: adapt themselves to underwater living and beat the conservative fish at their own game. The Aqua-Lung, he says, is only the first step. It permits men to stay under water for considerable periods, but it involves a lot of expensive and bothersome apparatus. A better system, says Cousteau, would be to provide man with artificial "gills" through which his blood could flow and pick up oxygen. Even better would be a true Homo aquaticus, a fishman able to get his oxygen directly from the water as the fish do.

Cousteau does not explain too clearly how this might be done, but there is nothing unscientific about his idea that men can live under water for considerable periods. He thinks that in the not too distant future, the sea bottom will be inhabited, perhaps by underwater farmers growing algae and undersea cattlemen herding seafood.

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