Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 3

It was a sparkling effervescence of yellowing flames, of bluish backs and rosy fins. Some came out from the caves silvered and vibrant as lightning flashes of mercury; others swam slowly, big-bellied, almost circular, with a golden coat of mail. Along the slopes, the crustaceans came scrambling along on their double row of claws attracted by this novelty that was changing the mortal calm of the under-sea where all follow and devour, only to be devoured in turn. Near the surface floated the medusae, living parasols of an opaline whiteness with circular borders of lilac or red bronze. Under their gelatinous domes was the skein of filaments that served them for locomotion, nutrition and reproduction.

The fishermen had only to pull in their lines and a new prisoner would fall into their boat. Their baskets were filling up so fast that the _Triton_ and his nephew grew tired of this easy fis.h.i.+ng.... The sun was now near the height of its curve, and every wavelet was carrying away a bit of the golden band that divided the blue immensity. The wood of the boat appeared to be on fire.

"We've earned our day's pay," said the _Triton_, looking at the sky and then at the baskets. "Now let's clean up a little bit."

And stripping off his clothing, he threw himself into the sea. Ulysses saw him descend from the center of the ring of foam opened by his body, and could gauge by it the profundity of that fantastic world composed of gla.s.sy rocks, animal plants and stone animals. As it went down, the tawny body of the swimmer took on the transparency of porcelain. It appeared of bluish crystal--a statue made of a Venetian mirror composition that was going to break as soon as it touched the bottom.

Like a G.o.d he was pa.s.sing through the deeps, s.n.a.t.c.hing plants out by the roots, pursuing with his hands the flashes of vermilion and gold hidden in the cracks of the rocks. Minutes would pa.s.s by; he was going to stay down forever; he would never come up again. And the boy was beginning to think uneasily of the possibility of having to guide the bark back to the coast all alone. Suddenly the body of white crystal began taking on a greenish hue, growing larger and larger, becoming dark and coppery, until above the surface appeared the head of the swimmer, who, spouting and snorting, was holding up all his submarine plunder to the little fellow.

"Now then, your turn!" he ordered in an imperious tone.

All attempts at resistance were useless. His uncle either insulted him with the harshest kind of words or coaxed him with promises of safety.

He never knew certainly whether he threw himself into the water or whether a tug from the doctor jerked him from the boat. The first surprise having pa.s.sed, he had the impression of remembering some long forgotten thing. He was swimming instinctively, divining what he ought to do before his master told him. Within him was awakening the ancestral experience of a race of sailors who had struggled with the sea and, sometimes, had remained forever in its bosom.

Recollection of what was existing beyond his feet suddenly made him lose his serenity,--his lively imagination making him shriek,

"Uncle!... Uncle!"

And he clutched convulsively at the hard island of bearded and smiling muscles. His uncle came up immovable, as though his feet of stone were fastened to the bottom of the ocean. He was like the nearby promontory that was darkening and chilling the water with its ebony shadow.

Thus would slip by the mornings devoted to fis.h.i.+ng and swimming; then in the afternoons there were tramps over the steep sh.o.r.es of the coast.

The _Dotor_ knew the heights of the promontory as well as its depths.

Up the pathways of the wild goat they clambered to its peaks in order to get a view of the Island of Ibiza. At sunset the distant Balearic Islands appeared like a rose-colored flame rising out of the waves. At other times the cronies made trips along the water's edge, and the _Triton_ would show his nephew hidden caves into which the Mediterranean was working its way with slow undulations. These were like maritime roadsteads where boats might anchor completely concealed from view. There the galleys of the Berbers had often hidden, in order to fall unexpectedly upon a nearby village.

In one of these caves, on a rocky pedestal, Ulysses often saw a heap of bundles.

"Well, now, what of it!" expostulated the doctor. "Every man must gain his living as best he can."

When they stumbled upon a solitary custom house officer resting upon his gun and looking out toward the sea, the doctor would offer him a cigar and give him medical advice if he were sick. "Poor men! so badly paid!"... But his sympathies were always going out to the others--to the enemies of the law. He was the son of his sea, and in the make-up of all Mediterranean heroes and sailors there had always been something of the pirate or smuggler. The Phoenicians, who by their navigation spread abroad the first works of civilization, inst.i.tuted this service, reaping their reward by filling their barks with stolen women, rich merchandise of easy transportation.

Piracy and smuggling had formed the historic past of all the villages that Ulysses was visiting, some huddled in the shelter of the promontory crowned with a lighthouse, others opening on the concavity of a bay dotted with barren islands girdled with foam. The old churches had turrets on their walls and loopholes in their doors for shooting with culverins and blunderbusses. The entire neighborhood used to take refuge in them when the smoke columns from their watchmen would warn them of the landing of pirates from Algiers. Following the curvings of the promontory there was a dotted line of reddish towers, each one accompanied by a smaller pair for lookouts. This line extended along the south toward the Straits of Gibraltar, and on its northern side reached to France.

The doctor had seen their counterpart in all the islands of the western Mediterranean, on the coasts of Naples and in Sicily. They were the fortifications of a thousand-year war, of a struggle ten centuries long between Moors and Christians for the domination of the blue sea, a struggle of piracy in which the Mediterranean men--differentiated by religion, but identical at heart--had prolonged the adventures of the Odyssey down to the beginnings of the nineteenth century.

Ferragut gradually became acquainted with many old men of the village who in their youth had been slaves in Algiers. On winter evenings the oldest of them were still singing romances of captivity and speaking with terror of the Berber brigantines. These thieves of the sea must have had a pact with the devil, who notified them of opportune occasions. If in a convent some beautiful novices had just made their profession, the doors would give away at midnight under the hatchet-blows of the bearded demons who were advancing inland from the galleys prepared to receive their cargo of feminine freight. If a girl of the coast, celebrated for her beauty, was going to be married, the infidels, lying in wait, would surround the door of the church, shooting their blunderbusses and knifing the unarmed men as they came out, in order to carry away the women in their festal robes.

On all the coast, the pirates stood in awe only of the navigators from the _Marina_, so fearless and warlike were they. If their villages were ever attacked, it was because their seafaring defenders were on the Mediterranean and, in their turn, had gone to sack and burn some village on the coast of Africa.

The _Triton_ and his nephew used to eat their supper under the arbor in the long summer twilights. After the cloth was removed Ulysses would manipulate his grandfather's little frigates, learning the technical parts and names of the different apparatus, and the management of the sets of sails. Sometimes the two would stay out on the rustic porch until a late hour gazing out over the luminous sea sparkling under the splendor of the moon, or streaked with a slender wake of starry light in the murky nights.

All that mankind had ever written or dreamed about the Mediterranean, the doctor had in his library and could repeat to his eager little listener. In Ferragut's estimation the _mare nostrum_ ["Mare Nostrum"

(Our Sea), the cla.s.sic name for the Mediterranean.] was a species of blue beast, powerful and of great intelligence--a sacred animal like the dragons and serpents that certain religions adored, believing them to be the source of life. The rivers that threw themselves impetuously into its bosom in order to renew it were few and scanty. The Rhone and the Nile appeared to be pitiful little rivulets compared with the river courses of other continents that empty into the oceans.

Losing by evaporation three times more liquid than the rivers bring to it, this sunburnt sea would soon have been converted into a great salt desert were not the Atlantic sending it a rapid current of renewal that was precipitated through the Straits of Gibraltar. Under this superficial current existed still another, flowing in an opposite direction, that returned a part of the Mediterranean to the ocean, because the Mediterranean waters were more salt and dense than those of the Atlantic. The tide scarcely made itself felt on its strands. Its basin was mined by subterranean fires that were always seeking extraordinary outlets through Vesuvius and Aetna and breathed continually through the mouth of Stromboli. Sometimes these Plutonic ebullitions would come to the surface, making new islands rise up upon the waters like tumors of lava.

In its bosom exist still double the quant.i.ty of animal species that abound in other seas, although less numerous. The tunny fish, playful lambs of the blue pasture lands, were gamboling over its surface or pa.s.sing in schools under the furrows of the waves. Men were setting netted traps for them along the coasts of Spain and France, in Sardinia, the Straits of Messina and the waters of the Adriatic. But this wholesale slaughter scarcely lessened the compact, fishy squadrons. After wandering through the windings of the Grecian Archipelago, they pa.s.sed the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, stirring the two narrow pa.s.sageways with the violence of their invisible gallopade and making a turn at the bowl of the Black Sea, swimming back, decimated but impetuous, to the depths of the Mediterranean.

Red coral was forming immovable groves on the substrata of the Balearic Islands, and on the coasts of Naples and Africa. Ambergris was constantly being found on the steep sh.o.r.es of Sicily. Sponges were growing in the tranquil waters in the shadow of the great rocks of Mallorca and the Isles of Greece. Naked men without any equipment whatever, holding their breath, were still descending to the bottom as in primitive times, in order to s.n.a.t.c.h these treasures away.

The doctor gave up his geographic descriptions to discourse on the history of his sea, which had indeed been the history of civilization, and was more fascinating to him. At first miserable and scanty tribes had wandered along its coasts seeking their food from the crustaceans drawn from the waves--a life similar to that of the rudimentary people that Ferragut had seen in the islands of the Pacific. When stone saws had hollowed out the trunks of trees and human arms had ventured to spread the first rawhides to the forces of the atmosphere, the coasts became rapidly populated.

Temples were constructed on the promontories, and maritime cities--the first nuclei of modern civilization--came into existence. On this landlocked sea mankind had learned the art of navigation. Every one looked at the waves before looking at the sky. Over this blue highway had arrived the miracles of life, and out of its depths the G.o.ds were born. The Phoenicians--Jews, become navigators--abandoned their cities in the depths of the Mediterranean sack, in order to spread the mysterious knowledge of Egypt and the Asiatic monarchies all along the sh.o.r.es of the interior sea. Afterwards the Greeks of the maritime republics took their places.

In Ferragut's estimation the greatest honor to which Athens could lay claim was that she had been a democracy of sailors, her freemen serving their country as rowers and all her famous men as great marine officials.

"Themistocles and Pericles," he added, "were admirals of fleets, and after commanding s.h.i.+ps, governed their country."

On that account Grecian civilization had spread itself everywhere and had become immortal instead of lessening and disappearing without fruit as in the interior lands. Then Rome, terrestrial Rome, in order to hold its own against the superiority of the Semitic navigators of Carthage, had to teach the management of the oar and marine combat to the inhabitants of Latium, to their legionaries with faces hardened by the chin straps of their helmets, who did not know how to adjust their world-dominating iron-shod feet to the slippery planks of a vessel.

The divinities of _mare nostrum_ always inspired a most loving devotion in the doctor. He knew that they had not existed, but he, nevertheless, believed in them as poetic phantasms of natural forces.

The ancient world only knew the immense ocean in hypothesis, giving it the form of an aquatic girdle around the earth. Ocea.n.u.s was an old G.o.d with a long beard and horned head who lived in a maritime cavern with his wife, Tethys, and his three hundred daughters, the Oceanides. No Argonaut had ever dared to come in contact with these mysterious divinities. Only the grave Aeschylus had dared to portray the Oceanides--virgins fresh and demure, weeping around the rock to which Prometheus was bound.

Other more approachable deities were those of the eternal sea on whose borders were founded the opulent cities of the Syrian coast; the Egyptian cities that sent sparks of their ritual civilization to Greece; the h.e.l.lenic cities, hearths of clear fire that had fused all knowledge, giving it eternal form; Rome, mistress of the world; Carthage, famed for her audacious geographical discoveries, and Ma.r.s.eilles, which had made western Europe share in the civilization of the Greeks, scattering it along the lower coast from settlement to settlement, even to the Straits of Cadiz.

A brother of the Oceanides, the prudent Nereus, used to reign in the depths of the Mediterranean. This son of Ocea.n.u.s had a blue beard, green eyes, and bunches of sea rushes on his eyebrows and breast. His fifty daughters, the Nereids, bore his orders across the waves or frolicked around the s.h.i.+ps, splas.h.i.+ng in the faces of the rowers the foam tossed up by their arms. But the sons of Father Time, on conquering the giant, had reapportioned the world, determining its rulers by lot. Zeus remained lord of the land, the obscure Hades, lord of the underworld, reigned in the Plutonic abysses, and Poseidon became master of the blue surfaces.

Nereus, the dispossessed monarch, fled to a cavern of the h.e.l.lenic sea in order to live the calm existence of the philosopher-counselor of mankind, and Poseidon installed himself in the mother-of-pearl palaces with his white steeds tossing helmets of bronze and manes of gold.

His amorous eyes were fixed on the fifty Mediterranean princesses, the Nereids, who took their names from the aspect of the waves--the Blue, the Green, the Swift, the Gentle.... "Nymphs of the green abysses with faces fresh as a rosebud, fragrant virgins that took the forms of all the monsters of the deep," sang the Orphic hymn on the Grecian sh.o.r.e.

And Poseidon singled out among them all the Nereid of the Foam, the white Amphitrite who refused to accept his love.

She knew about this new G.o.d. The coasts were peopled with cyclops like Polyphemus, with frightful monsters born of the union of Olympian G.o.ddesses and simple mortals; but an obliging dolphin came and went, carrying messages between Poseidon and the Nereid, until, overwhelmed by the eloquence of this restless rover of the wave, Amphitrite agreed to become the wife of the G.o.d, and the Mediterranean appeared to take on still greater beauty.

She was the aurora that shows her rosy finger-tips through the immense cleft between sky and sea, the warm hour of midday that makes the waters drowsy under its robe of restless gold, the bifurcated tongue of foam that laps the two faces of the hissing prow, the aroma-laden breeze that like a virgin's breath swells the sail, the compa.s.sionate kiss that lulls the drowned to rest, without wrath and without resistance, before sinking forever into the fathomless abyss.

Her husband--Poseidon on the Greek coast and Neptune on the Latin--on mounting his chariot, used to awaken the tempest. The brazen-hoofed horses with their stamping would paw up the huge waves and swallow up the s.h.i.+ps. The tritons of his cortege would send forth from their white sh.e.l.ls the bellowing blasts that snap off the masts like reeds.

_O, mater Amphitrite_!... and Ferragut would describe her as though she were just pa.s.sing before his eyes. Sometimes when swimming around the promontories, feeling himself enveloped like primitive man in the blind forces of Nature, he used to believe that he saw the white G.o.ddess issuing forth from the rocks with all her smiling train after a rest in some marine cave.

A sh.e.l.l of pearl was her chariot and six dolphins harnessed with purpling coral used to draw it along. The tritons, her sons, handled the reins. The Naiads, their sisters, lashed the sea with their scaly tails, lifting their mermaid bodies wrapped in the magnificence of their sea-green tresses between whose ringlets might be seen their heaving bosoms. White seagulls, cooing like the doves of Aphrodite, fluttered around their nude sea-queen, serenely contemplating them from her movable throne, crowned with pearls and phosph.o.r.escent stars drawn from the depths of her dominion. White as the cloud, white as the sail, white as the foam, entirely, dazzlingly white was her fair majesty except where a rosy blush tinted the petal-like skin of her heels or her bosom.

The entire history of European man--forty centuries of wars, emigrations, and racial impact--was due, according to the doctor, to the desire of possessing this harmoniously framed sea, of enjoying the transparency of its atmosphere and the vivacity of its light.

The men from the North who needed the burning log and alcoholic drink in order to defend their life from the clutches of the cold, were always thinking of these Mediterranean sh.o.r.es. All their warlike or pacific movements were with intent to descend from the coasts of the glacial seas to the beaches of the warm _mare nostrum_. They were eager to gain possession of the country where the sacred olive alternates its stiff old age with the joyous vineyard; where the pine rears its cupola and the cypress erects its minaret. They longed to dream under the perfumed snow of the interminable orange groves; to be masters of the sheltered valleys where the myrtle and the jasmine spice the salty air; where the aloe and the cactus grow between the stones of extinct volcanoes; where the mountains of marble extend their white veins down even into the depths of the sea and refract the African heat emitted by the opposite coast.

The South had replied to the invasion from the North with defensive wars that had extended even into the center of Europe. And thus history had gone on repeating itself with the same flux and reflux of human waves--mankind struggling for thousands of years to gain or hold the blue vault of Amphitrite.

The Mediterranean peoples were to Ferragut the aristocracy of humanity.

Its potent climate had tempered mankind as in no other part of the planet, giving him a dry and resilient power. Tanned and bronzed by the profound absorption of the sun and the energy of the atmosphere, its navigators were trans.m.u.ted into pure metal. The men from the North were stronger, but less robust, less acclimitable than the Catalan sailor, the Provencal, the Genoese or the Greek. The sailors of the Mediterranean made themselves at home in all parts of the world. Upon their sea man had developed his highest energies. Ancient Greece had converted human flesh into spiritual steel.

Exactly the same landscapes and races bordered the two sh.o.r.es. The mountains and the flowers on both sh.o.r.es were identical. The Catalan, the Provencal and the South Italian were more like the inhabitants of the African coast than their kindred who lived inland back of them.

This fraternity had shown itself instinctively in the thousand-year war. The Berber pirates, the Genoese sailors, the Spaniards, and the Knights of Malta used implacably to behead each other on the decks of their galleys and, upon becoming conquerors, would respect the life of their prisoners, treating them like gentlemen. The Admiral Barbarossa, eighty-four years of age, used to call Doria, his eternal rival nearly ninety years old, "my brother." The Grand Master of Malta clasped the hand of the terrible Dragut upon finding him his captive.

The Mediterranean man, fixed on the sh.o.r.es that gave him birth, was accustomed to accept all the changes of history, as the mollusks fastened to the rocks endure the tempests. For him the only important thing was not to lose sight of his blue sea. The Spaniard used to pull an oar on the Liburnian felucca, the Christian would join the crews of the Saracen s.h.i.+ps of the Middle Ages; the subjects of Charles V would pa.s.s through the fortunes of war from the galleys of the Cross to those of the Crescent, and would end by becoming rulers of Algiers, rich captains of the sea, or by making their names famous as renegades.

In the eighth century the inhabitants of the Valencian coast united with the Andalusian Moors to carry the war to the ends of the Mediterranean and to the island of Crete, taking possession of it and giving it the name of Candia. This nest of pirates was the terror of Byzantium, taking Salonica by a.s.sault and selling as slaves the patricians and most important ladies of the realm. Years afterwards, when dislodged from Candia, the Valencian adventurers returned to their native sh.o.r.es and there established a town in a fertile valley, giving it the name of the distant island which was changed to Gandia.