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prospect. Because nobody had done it before, there was
no telling how one of these supersize predators might react to a person at close range. To give ourselves the best chance of the footage we needed, we enlisted veteran underwater cameraman Rick
Rosenthal, whose interest we managed to pique. Rick is a passionate fish conservationist, whose work is all about getting close to the ocean’s largest and rarest creatures and showing their
intimate lives to those of us who cannot go where he goes. Waiting on the edge of a bait ball, while marlin spear and slash just feet away, is all in a day’s work for Rick, and having such
experience in our team was an enormous boon. Part of the key to Rick’s success over the years is that, where possible, he doesn’t use air tanks and all the other scuba paraphernalia.
His normal diving kit is a mask and snorkel – and one breath of air. And this was all we were going to use in India. Scuba diving, in contrast, would have been a logistical nightmare,
requiring us to drag a compressor, tanks, and other bulky gear into the mountains. The size of the team and the cost would have multiplied too. All that to turn ourselves into large underwater
objects blowing off clouds of noisy bubbles, which would very likely send all other underwater life heading for the horizon.
    Although nervous about this mission, I was not a complete novice underwater, having learned to scuba dive in British coastal waters in the early 1990s. I took it up out of a desire to see my
imagined landscapes for real. But diving in rivers and lakes held no attraction for other divers, who saw this as looking for ‘brown fish in brown water’. So I did what they did, and I
clocked up the hours sucking bottled air on reefs and wrecks. But free-diving, or breath-hold diving, beyond wandering around on the surface with a snorkel and the odd short duck-dive, was totally
new for me. So before going to India I took a course at the British navy’s Submarine Escape Training Tower (SETT) at Gosport near Southampton.
    Free-diving is as much a mental discipline as it is a physical one. Borrowing much from yoga, it is anything but a macho activity. A relaxed body and mind means slower oxygen consumption and
more time until you need to breathe. In the weeks before the course I’d done exercises to stretch and loosen my ribcage and abdominal muscles along with breathing routines to increase my
tolerance to carbon dioxide build-up in the lungs, the trigger that makes you involuntarily inhale well before you’ve exhausted available oxygen. Lying on my back, I could empty my mind and
let time slowly pass, not wanting to hurry it along, familiar now with the spasms that start to ripple through the diaphragm, which I gently ride, aware but detached as I slowly check my watch, now
nearing the end of its second, third, or even fourth revolution. But in water the body is more active, as is the mind, which cuts the breath-hold time. In the tank I managed to pull myself feet
first down a rope to thirty feet, pushing tiny squirts of precious air through my Eustachian tubes to relieve the pressure on my eardrums, and puffing through my nose to ease the squeeze on my
low-volume mask. But for some reason I couldn’t descend head first. My ears, always a bit ‘slow’, refused to equalise in this position, probably a result of nervous tension
constricting the tubes. At ten feet, the pain would stop me going any further, which was immensely frustrating, as I had plenty of air left. My pulse was insistent and loud, and the more I tried to
shut it out, the more it hammered for attention. Maybe part of my mind was thinking ahead to cold gloomy water and hidden monsters in caves.
    Then we were in India, where news came from our intended location, Corbett National Park (named after the celebrated hunter, conservationist and author, Jim Corbett), that suddenly made our task
seem near-impossible. We would not, after all, be allowed to