Word: diver
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Rapture of the Depths. Cousteau perfected his seagoing lung in 1945. The key to its operation is an automatic compensating valve that adjusts the air supply to the diver's demand and the water pressure. The outfit weighs about 45 lbs. above water; submerged, the man and the machine when properly ballasted weigh hardly a pound...
...diver, merely by filling or emptying his lungs, can change his waterborne weight by as much as 12 lbs. Let a diver deflate his lungs and he sinks like a stone; inflate them, he pops up like a cork; intermediate effects are easily learned. But descent below 300 ft. becomes increasingly dangerous. One reason for this is something Author Cousteau calls, from experience, the "rapture of the great depths...
...rapture, which comes on at about 200 ft., is apparently caused by the oversaturation of the nervous system with nitrogen or carbon dioxide under the increased pressure. "The first stage," writes Cousteau, "is a mild anesthesia, after Which the diver becomes a god. If a passing fish seems to require air, the crazed diver may tear out his air pipe or mouth grip [and offer it to the fish] as a sublime gift...
...ball. My lips swelled grotesquely on the mouth grip. The air was syrup. The water jelled around me as though I were smothered in aspic. I hung witless on the rope. Standing aside was a smiling, jaunty man, my second self, perfectly self-contained, grinning sardonically at the wretched diver. [He] ordered that I unloose the rope and go on down...
...their girls, a diver,was particularly nice. She could speak a little English and did a lot of interpreting for the others. This same girl, according to Hawkins broke out of the Russian camp one night and went out with an Australian diver. They went to a club and in a movie in downtown Helsinki, all against Soviet training rules...