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could feel her glorious hair trailing over his body. And in the dream they made love with a moaning frenzy that brought him to climax in the shouts that echoed against the lonely cliffs, and, in his mind, drifted far out to sea in search of the lost love.
    He awoke in a sweat, his heart pounding, even his bones aching with the yearning. It could not be love. But she had made it seem to exist when it had not. Yet never had he hurt so deeply, longed so much, for one he could never have again.
    In the morning he again walked like a dead man, and the villagers watched him sadly. He went to the old man Hiapo and asked his advice. But the old man shook his head.
    "Stay away from the sea," he said. "You were not meant to live, and if you go back, this time it will be no more for you."
    So John instead took the winding dirt path that led along the foot of the great crater called Diamond Head to make his way among his own kind in Honolulu Port. He had too little to do among the people of the village, and it left him too much time to think. He found work as a dock laborer, loading sugar onto the big five-masted American clippers. He dodged the curiosity of the dock hands who asked how he had come to Oahu Island if he had not come by ship.
    "The things I can remember are like dreams that cannot be true," he said. And they all avoided him when they could.
    In his pockets he carried the three gold Spanish coins Siren had left with him. They were all he had left of a life that now a strange erotic dream that refused to fade. He could not live among the haoles , nor among the Oahuans. So he made himself a tiny shelter in the rugged hills beyond the port village.
    But no matter how hard he worked, how weary he was when he dragged himself back to his little lean-to made of branches and palm fronds, when he closed his eyes to sleep, the dreams came upon him. He hated their torment, yet longed for them, for in his dreams he was with his Siren again.
    "Come to me... come to me... come to me..."
    And in his dreams, his love was real, and he swam with his Siren in the warm, deep aqua waters of the Summer Sea, made love in her bed of sponges or tangled their bodies together in the weightlessness of the waters, placed garlands of summer flowers in her golden hair and necklaces of gold and emeralds that rested against her sleek pale skin.
    The ache in his heart would not go away.
    More and more, he dreaded going to sleep, so he sought the taverns where seamen and laborers celebrated their pay and drowned their sorrows.
    On a September morning, he spotted the ominous clouds of a gale on the horizon to the southeast. By afternoon, the dock closed down, but no ship was in port, anyway. There was not much point in going to his little lean-to in the hills, for the wind would soon be tearing it to shreds. So once again John walked to the one tavern which had become a comfort to him.
    As was his habit, he drank alone every Saturday night, standing at the bar with one foot on the worn brass rail, never looking another white man in the eye. That was not hard, for they all kept their distance from him.
    "I know you. You're John Wall. I met you in Singapore oncet."
    He looked up from his whisky. He remembered the face. The short, thickset fellow was called Tom Bartholomew. An American. Very drunk. John nodded.
    "You was captain of the Telesto . I heard she went down, all hands."
    "Off the Skeleton Coast," John replied.
    "How come the captain lived, and his men didn't?"
    "I don't know if they did or not. Last I saw, the long boat was headed for shore. They might've made it."
    "Then how come you're here?"
    "I can't say. I have no idea."
    "I'm saying. I say you're a coward, Captain Wall, and you saved yourself and left your crew to die."
    John frowned as he stared at the drunk who had begun to press his finger into the worn linen of John's shirt.
    "No," he said. He turned back to his whisky and stared into a dirty glass full of something he did not want.
    "Hey, I'm