After school he studied law and music. To pay for his tuition he played in an orchestra, designed stage settings and did free lance journalism, which he continued after graduation. In 1925 he gave up law and devoted himself wholly to writing.
His first novel, Professor Dowell’s Head, serialized in a popular magazine in 1926, was an immediate success. Since then A. Belyaev wrote fifty-odd novels — many of them as topical as if written today — reaching the one-million copy mark by January 1942 when he died near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His best known books are The Amphibian, A Jump into Nothingness and The Island of Dead Ships.
PART I
“THE SEA-DEVIL”
The close night of the Argentine midsummer came down on the sea. Stars pricked out in a sky that was a deep violet. The schooner Jellyfish lay quietly at anchor, with not a splash round her, not a creak on board. Ship and ocean seemed in deep slumber.
Half-naked pearl-divers sprawled on the deck. Worn out by the day’s work under a parching sun they tossed and groaned and cried out in their nightmarish sleep. Their limbs would jerk and twitch; perhaps they were fighting off sharks — their deadly enemies. The hot windless weather of which they were having a spell made people so tired that they couldn’t even hoist the boats on board at the end of a day’s work. Not that it seemed necessary: nothing indicated a change in weather. So the boats were left afloat, made fast to the anchor chain. Nobody had thought of tightening the shrouds or sheeting home the jib which fluttered faintly at each stray whiff of wind. From bowsprit to taffrail the schooner was strewn with heaps of pearl shells, pieces of coral, lengths of diving cord, canvas sacks for putting shells in and empty barrels.