he is still weak,” Sensei uttered thoughtfully looking how the dark silouhette with a half-moon fin slowly moved away from the shore, disappearing from time to time among waves.”
“I wonder, too, whether he will survive,” Eugene said busily.
“Keep your fingers crossed,” Stas replied.
Eugene immediately followed his advice. He crossed his fingers, put off his hat and touched his head. Stas noticed his movements and smiled, “You should better touch wood, not the head.”
“Blockhead is like wood,” Eugene answered in such a manner as if it were just triffles.
We smiled. And having waved his hand towards Eugene Stas turned to us, “Help us bring the stuff. We have no longer desire to continue fishing.”
We didn’t need to be asked twice. We went all together to take out fishing tackle, rucksacks in order to unload the air-bag. The guys floated the boat to the shallow water and dragged it along the coast like barge haulers.
While we were making our preparations, the strong wind has risen. Leaving this place we threw again a glance at the sea looking for our dolphin. But he was not seen anywhere between the huge waves. We heard a sad cry of a seagull whirling over the water… Well, unfortunately, everything has its beginning and its end in this life.
We hung our heads. It seemed that nobody wanted to believe that our almost alive dolphin sank though the common sense told quite the contrary. For some time we were going not saying a word, looking back with hope at the place where the dolphin had been seen for the last time. But every time we lowered our gazes to the sand underfoot.
“Well, finally,” Eugene was the first who couldn’t stand this mournful general silence. “Dolphins don’t sink. They are fishes!”
“They do,” Sensei replied with even and calm voice, without a slight trace of any emotions. “There are cases when they sink within one minute, especially when they are excited or scared. But if they sink, it happens quickly… As far as that goes, dolphins are not fishes at all, they are warmblooded mammals like human beings. They possess well-developed brain. And by the way, the cerebral cortex of dolphins is bigger than the cortex of humans.”
“Therefore it has more convolutions than some Homo sapiens,” Nikolai Andreevich added in jest looking at Eugene.
Sensei smiled and went on, “Like humans, dolphins react to different situation, including the stressful ones. They also possess fear.”
“I can’t grasp it anyway, how can they sink?” Eugene shrugged his shoulders, either really not understanding or pretending.
“It’s simple,” Sensei answered. “They just swallow the wrong way like people. If a dolphin is under stress, it’s enough that water goes through blowhole to lungs… and that’s all.”
“Through a blowhole?” Ruslan asked again. “It’s something like human nostile, or what?”
“Right, but it is located in the very top of the head. It is directly connected with lungs.”
“That’s great! Just sneeze once and the whole sea…” Ruslan didn’t continue his phrase letting the inertly smiling crowd to finish his “brilliant guess” by itself.
“I wonder how he coughs in the water,” Andrew inquired.
“He doesn’t. Dolphins never cough.”
“Lucky they are … these warm-blooded mammals,” Victor envied because he suffered from coughing from the very morning. “They might never catch a chill.”
“Why am I not a dolphin?” Eugene uttered dreamingly.
“You are wrong,” Sensei replied to Victor. “They got sick the same way like us. We have even identical microorganisms which cause respiratory diseases. But unlike us dolphins endure badly the chill. Very often it turns into pneumonia and almost always it ends with the death of an animal.”
Eugene made a surprised glance, “Really? Then it’s good that I am not a dolphin.”
“But if they swallow water the wrong way, how can they live there?” Kostya inquired.
“They die only when they are seriously stressed, when they panic, actually the same way like people. Apart from that they live quite well! They have such a good system of muscular and respiratory valves which ideally functions in the most severe external conditions.”
“Well,” Nikolai Andreevich sighed. “It means that the fear equals all.” And he asked Sensei in a while, “Then it means that the psychological factor is the same way important for dolphins during apnoea as for people, isn’t it?”
“You are completely right.”
“Apnoea?” Ruslan wondered. “And what is this?”
Eugene hemmed.
“Here you are… Apnoea means breath-holding. Even I know that!”
Ruslan glanced at aqualungs in the air-bag and relied with a crooked smile, “Of course, you should know that.”
“Don’t worry,” Stas invigorated him. “If you dive like us, you will know it, too.”
“Right, with a head to the sand,” Eugene added with a smile and looked at Stas.
They both laughed, obviously having recollected some funny case from their past. Offended Ruslan said, “Am I an ostrich or what?”
“If not, you will become the one,” Eugene declared kindly, exchaning again glances with Stas. The guys felt some dirty trick in his words and insisted on telling what was hidden behind these grins. The fellows told a story about their first unlucky experiments when they had been learning diving. Actually there was nothing special but surely it looked quite comical due to Eugene’s interpretation. At the end Stas uttered, “It would be great if people were able to stay long time under water without additional devices like aqualungs.”
“It’s quite real,” Sensei remarked as if by the way. “The brain of the human has a lot of programs. You just have to know how to use these abilities… What is human breathing in fact? It’s an interchange of air breathes in and out. This process takes place due to diaphragm and ribs muscles contraction which causes the volume change of the thorax. The gas exchange takes place on the level of lungs alveolus and it enriches blood. The blood transports oxygen among cells and extracts carbonic acid. And what does regulate this breathing rhythm? The breathing center which is located in the medulla. There is hidden a golden key to the ‘switch of speed’.”
“Do you mean the programs?” Kostya asked.
“Right.”
Eugene grinned self-satisfied.
“Aha, and the key lies there like in a fairy tale, and nobody knows where it lies. And those who know keep silent as they cant’ reach it through the hole.”
“You are wrong,” Sensei smiled. “Those who want always will find… and will reach. There are plenty of such practices of breath-holding. You just have to look for them and not to be lazy, but don’t tell us stories that there no of them only because you are unaware of that. Let’s take for example a practice of breathing control in yoga. It’s called Pranayama. Though in its original form it
