Off Atauro the sea floor gives out about twenty strokes from the sand. The island is a steep, dry volcanic cone 25 kilometres north of Dili, in Timor-Leste, and its fringing reef runs off the shelf into a deep strait swept by current. Surveys here average 253 fish species per site, the highest count measured anywhere on Earth. You wade off the beach in front of the guesthouses, stand a moment, and the floor vanishes: a wall of hard and soft coral falling into blue with schools stacked along it. Guides work the overhangs for the small things: feather stars folded into the coral, giant clams that close like a door when your shadow crosses them. In the dry months the plankton thins and you see thirty metres down that wall.
From mid-October pygmy blue whales come through the strait, and the boats that carry you out are the open boats the men fish from. A twenty-metre animal surfaces within sight of the shore, and you hear the blow before you see the back. Above the waterline Atauro is the reverse of its reefs. The path up Manucoco climbs dry slopes of uplifted coral limestone, reef you walk on rather than swim over, with Timor on one horizon and Wetar on the other. Islanders speak Wetarese, a language that belongs to Wetar across the strait rather than to Timor in sight to the south. That tells you which way this island has always faced. The week turns on the Dili ferry: on Saturday morning the market at Beloi runs from the pier along the beach, fish, rice, fruit and embroidered dolls. Between 1980 and 1984 the Indonesian military held about 4,000 East Timorese here, most of them women, children and the old, and the rag doll the island sews is named for that exile. The reef itself has no ranger service. It is held by tara bandu, prohibition by hanging: the ban is announced by a marker hung where it applies, and answers to the village, not the state. The fishermen of Adara hung theirs over water they had always fished.