Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes, and Golden Sharks: Travels of a Water-Bound Adventurer. by, Bill Belleville University of Georgia Press, 2004; $29.95

Just about the time that you, dear reader, are pulling out of your driveway, beading for your daily aggression-filled hour on the expressway or inbound commuter train, Bill Belleville is probably tumbling backward off the gunwale of a diving boat into a crystal-blue ocean. An environmental journalist and filmmaker, Belleville has managed to make a decent living, as far as one can figure from these enjoyable essays, out of visiting ecologically engaging underwater sites in the West Indies and in Central and South America, and then writing about it for the folks at home. Nice work if you can get it.

It's not all dog-paddling in a heated pool, though. Belleville is an expert diver whose wanderlust takes him to places few sane people would venture. In one early scene in the book he is dangling in a harness fifty feet above the water level of an overgrown limestone cenote, or sinkhole, deep in the jungle of the Dominican Republic. From that precarious position, a winch will lower him down to an inflatable raft floating on the shadowed waters far below. With a team of scuba-clad archaeologists, he will dive more than a hundred feet farther down into the cenote, to a pinnacle of rock that rises from the pit's bottom (some 250 feet under water). From there, he and the rest of the team will get their bearings as they search for artifacts tossed into the sinkhole by pre-Columbian tribes as a sacrifice to their gods.
It's cold, dark, and claustrophobic down there, with practically no margin for carelessness. But the journey, which leads to the discovery of shards of ancient pottery and the bones of extinct sloths, makes for a story of great suspense.

Equally chilling is Belleville's account of a nocturnal dive off the coast of Cuba in search of the rarely seen, bioluminescent flashlight fish (Kryptophanaron alfredi). To spot its soft radiance, Belleville and a companion turn off their lamps before descending into near total darkness, aiming for an underwater cliff top. They can see neither their depth gauges, the research vessel above them, nor even one another. Except for the increasing crush of water pressure, the luminous flashes of the passing marine life, and the glow of their own ascending air bubbles (which roll the abundant plankton in the water), the effect is one of almost total sensory deprivation.

When Belleville finally pulls up, turns on his light, and looks at his digital wrist gauge, he finds that he's dropped almost 110 feet, probably overshooting the target. For a tense ten minutes Belleville wanders around alone searching for his partner, whose light, if it's on, is nowhere in sight. He's afraid to swim very far in any one direction, terrified that, should he be forced to surface too far from the boat, he'll be lost from sight, a helpless dot in the choppy waters that surround Cuba.

Fortunately for Belleville (and for readers with a low tolerance for stress), most of the brief excursions he describes in his book take place in far less threatening, though no less interesting, settings. Short essays describe travels to the interior of central Guyana, where rugged jungle and towering waterfalls become exotic destinations for ecotourism; to the ominously named Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, where conservationists try to enlist native fishermen in a project to preserve endangered sea turtles; and to the Peruvian Amazon, where a team of biologists is studying the behavior of the boto, an unusual, pink, freshwater dolphin. Belleville's account of the commercial conch farm he visits on one of the Turks and Caicos Islands, an archipelago southeast of the Bahamas, depicts an operation not unlike that of a Midwest cattle ranch--though the conchs, which look like foot-long garden slugs, are destined for soup pots around the Caribbean, not fast-food joints in Tulsa.

Yet such is Belleville's talent that even when he ventures into relatively familiar territory, he brings an unfamiliar perspective, finding adventure and wonderment in little-seen corners of the natural world. In one episode he describes cave-diving on the Suwannee River in northern Florida, and rejoices in "the singular wonder of being inside the living veins of the earth." In another, he and a college friend take a canoe trip into the heart of the Everglades. There, only a few dozen miles from the strip malls and beachfront condos where former commuters go to live out their days, are worlds out of time: transparent channels filled with needlefish, lone ospreys gliding past tangled mangrove shores, flocks of sulfur-winged butterflies.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid by Tim Ecott Grove Press, 2004; $22.00

What may be the first American recipe for vanilla ice cream, written in the same hand that penned the Declaration of Independence, is among Thomas Jefferson's papers at the Library of Congress. The vanilla flavoring Jefferson used in his kitchen, made from the seedpods of a rare tropical orchid [see "Age and Beauty," by Kenneth M. Cameron, June 2004], had already been popular in Europe for nearly three centuries. The Aztecs showed the Spaniards how vanilla could sweeten their chocolate and perfume their cigars, and the long, dark vanilla beans became part of the Spanish empire's rich colonial trade as early as the middle of the sixteenth century.

Privateers from European nations were soon looking for the stuff during their raids of Spanish galleons, and their booty was directly responsible for Queen Elizabeth I's passion for vanilla-flavored desserts. By the end of the seventeenth century such influential Englishmen as Samuel Pepys and Christopher Wren were frequenting coffeehouses where cocoa drinks, flavored with vanilla, were popular menu items. Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs, and the myriad of other food and drink purveyors that rely on vanilla today are thus the beneficiaries of a venerable and pleasant addiction.

The vanilla bean has been prized throughout its long history, not only for its flavor, but also for its great scarcity. Even today only about 2,200 metric tons of beans reach the world's agricultural markets each year, and the going price for the good stuff in 2004 was close to $275 a pound. Such precious commodities breed violence, and Tim Ecott, whose book recounts his travels to the principal growing sites of the vanilla orchid, needed the steel nerves of a war correspondent to cover this story.

Buyers for the major companies that trade in vanilla travel to remote jungle locations in Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, and Papua New Guinea, chartering private planes under aliases to confuse competitors. They carry suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars in cash and visit wealthy growers whose warehouses are surrounded by razor wire and armed guards. Stories of extortion, fraud, and murder in the vanilla trade are as brutal as those told of diamond dealers or heroin smugglers.

The vanilla orchid, its essence so easy on the tongue, has not made things easy for the grower. Although its vine flourishes in many tropical climates, the plant produces no seedpods unless it is fertilized. In nature, that work is done--but only rarely--by a species of tropical bee native to Mexico and Central America. The bee preserved the Spanish domination of the vanilla trade for many centuries. Early vanilla-lovers from other countries, hoping to break the monopoly, managed to transplant cuttings to other parts of the globe, but it was not until the middle of the 1800s that a slave named Edmond, on the French colony of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, devised a way to manually inseminate the plants.

Edmond's discovery laid the groundwork for the global trade Ecott writes about, but producing vanilla remains a tedious and time consuming process. It takes months for the seedpods to develop, and months more to cure the seeds. Once the vanilla beans reach the processing factory, extracting the concentrated flavoring can take weeks more, because the dried beans must be steeped in alcohol. Ecott's fascinating travelogue makes it clear that the high price of that little vial of natural vanilla extract is, by any measure, a bargain.

Modern chemists have learned to synthesize the principal ingredient of vanilla, and more than 90 percent of vanilla-flavored foods now contain the artificial stuff. But the real beans contain an estimated 400 trace components that greatly enhance the flavor, and natural vanilla will surely reign supreme for a long time among lovers of good food.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

The Discovery of Egypt: Vivant Denon's Travels with Napoleon's Army. Terence M. Russell. Sutton Publishing. [pounds sterling]20.00. xxii + 266 pages. ISBN 0-7509-4145-6. This fascinating study sheds light on a man whose exploits are largely unknown outside his native France. Denon (1747-1825) was a talented painter and engraver, an antiquarian and a courageous man from an aristocratic background. Despite his work for Louix XV, he survived the Terror through the patronage of David and then Bonaparte who later chose him as his adviser on artistic matters when the expedition to Egypt was launched. Fame was guaranteed when, on his return to France, he published his Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute-Egypte ... in 1802. He has been called the first Egyptologist and Mr Russell, by quoting extensively from Denon's account, describes the artist's adventures and achievements in Egypt. Unusually, Denon was also superb in observing local people whose 'freedom' the French had theoretically come to secure. The book is lavishly illustrated with many of Denon's own works. Somewhat ironically, whilst the French attempt to create an Egyptian empire came to nothing, Denon's work has survived and is here given the recognition it deserves. (D.T.D.)