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the margin of rocks below the house and begins to talk quietly, explaining his practice. Midges begin to fly into our faces and we draw down our sleeves to cover our arms. He rows standing up and turning his oars without breaking the surface—since it is into this spotless mirror that we must gaze, and the least motion of wind smears all vision.
    Presently the carbide lamp is lit and the whole miraculous underworld of the lagoon bursts into a hollow bloom—it is like the soft beautiful incandescence of a gas mantle lighting. Transformed, like figures in a miracle, we gaze down upon a seafloor drifting with its canyons and forests and families in the faint undertow of the sea—like a just-breathing heart.
    Now hoarse in the darkness beyond the point the Brindisi packet boat brays once; and nearer a grampus gives a Blimp-like snort. Then we are alone again.
    Anastasius talks quietly. When I am tired I must not hesitate to tell him, he says. He himself is indefatigable and in good weather fishes half the night. But he isnot really talking to me; he is talking himself into the receptive watchfulness of the hunter—the unreasoning abstraction which will allow him to anticipate the movement of fish; he is like a chess player combining possibilities in his own mind and testing them, so to speak, upon futurity.
    We move in a concave ripple. Deep rock surfaces, yellow and green and moving like a human scalp with marine fucus. Fishes, a school, the silver-white ofdawdle to the entrance of a cave and goggle at us. Each wears a black dapple on the back, and they look, in their surprise, like a row of semiquavers. Then, as if frightened by some purely marine event they disappear with the suddenness of a thrown switch. An eddy of wind purls the surface and Anastasius dips his twig of almond into the bottle of olive oil hanging at the prow. He scatters a few drops before us and the water clears again and steadies. I catch my breath, for there, crouching on a patch of reddish sand is the famous and eatable(I take him to be the sea scorpion) with his bulldog head flattened upon a stone. Anastasius gets him squarely through the body at the first lunge and soon he is fluttering and ebbing in the darkness at my feet—a small dying pulse, uncomfortably tapping against the dry wood. Twice I put him in the basket and twice he leaps out and beats against the wood like the pulse of a dying bird.
    We do not speak now, but proceed slowly along the edge of the lagoon in silence, surveying the hauntedunderworld which seems so like a panorama of the moon’s surface. We stop where the fig trees overhang and he tells me to look down. I can see nothing. Gingerly he lowers the trident and strikes; it is buried in a small white shape which begins to flutter madly. The small frightened eyes of the squid. As it breaks surface it spits a mouthful of ink over his face and arms and begins to wheeze like a sick kitten. Cursing softly and laughing he scrapes it off the trident against the gunwale and lets it drop into the basket where the contact of its fluttering hardly dead body suddenly rouses the stiffened body of the Scorpion to a small fluttering gasp of life. The air is cold tonight, and the sudden chill is fruitful, for within an hour we have several squid and two unnameable white fish besides the scorpion.
    Anchored in a tiny bay we smoke a cigarette and Anastasius breaks off a piece of dry bread in his teeth. The air makes one hungry. The lamp is guttering and he charges it again with rock carbide. Once more the underworld flares into bloom. It is time, says Anastasius, for us to land an octopus, and to this end he ships the tridents and lets down his hooked staff, with its floating decoy of parsley training dispiritedly from it. He begins probing gently under rocks, turning this way and that. From the darkness of the cliff edge above us a fir cone falls with a little plop into the water. “Look,” says Anastasius suddenly between his teeth, and I