They told me the waters around the atoll were protected. I asked the captain directly. He said: we are anchored outside the boundary.

The next morning I went in off the stern.

The reef is four minutes by tender from where Narcissus sits.

A world that has been here for four hundred million years, going about its business. And above it, breaking the surface — the hull. Imposing its geometry on a world that preceded geometry by an unimaginable distance.

The reef does not look back.