His eyes also received a caress from the past upon taking in the panorama of the port—­steamers smoking, sailboats with their canvas spread out in the sunlight, bulwarks of orange crates, pyramids of onions, walls of sacks of rice and compact rows of wine casks paunch to paunch.  And coming to meet the outgoing cargo were long lines of unloaded goods being lined up as they arrived—­hills of coal coming from England, sacks of cereal from the Black Sea, dried codfish from Newfoundland sounding like parchment skins as they thudded down on the dock, impregnating the atmosphere with their salty dust, and yellow lumber from Norway that still held a perfume of the pine woods.

Oranges and onions fallen from the crates were rotting in the sun, scattering their sweet and acrid juices.  The sparrows were hopping around the mountains of wheat, flitting timidly away when hearing approaching footsteps.  Over the blue surface of the harbor waters the sea gulls of the Mediterranean, small, fine and white as doves, twined in and out in their interminable contra-dances.

The Triton went on enumerating to his nephew the class and specialty of every kind of vessel; and upon discovering that Ulysses was capable of confusing a brigantine with a frigate, he would roar in scandalized amazement.

“Heavens!  Then what in the devil do they teach your in school?...”

Upon passing near the citizens of Valencia seated on the wharves, fishing rod in hand, he would shoot a glance of commiseration toward their empty baskets.  Over there by his house on the coast, before the sun would be up, he would already have covered the bottom of his boat with enough to eat for a week.  The misery of the cities!

Standing on the last points of the rocky ledge, his glance would sweep the immense plain, describing to his nephew the mysteries hidden beyond the horizon.  At their left, beyond the blue mountains of Oropesa, which bound the Valencian gulf, he could see in imagination Barcelona, where he had numerous friends, Marseilles, that prolongation of the Orient fastened on the European coast, and Genoa with its terraced palaces on hills covered with gardens.  Then his vision would lose itself on the horizon stretching out in front of him.  That was the road of his happy youth.

Straight ahead in a direct line was Naples with its smoking mountain, its music and its swarthy dancing girls with hoop earrings; further on, the Isles of Greece; at the foot of an Aquatic Street, Constantinople; and still beyond, bordering the great liquid court of the Black Sea, a series of ports where the Argonauts—­sunk in a seething mass of races, fondled by the felinism of slaves, the voluptuosity of the Orientals, and the avarice of the Jews—­were fast forgetting their origin.

At their right was Africa; the Egyptian ports with their traditional corruption that at sunset was beginning to tremble and steam like a fetid morass; Alexandria in whose low coffee houses were imitation Oriental dancers with no more clothes than a pocket handkerchief, every woman of a different nation and shrieking in chorus all the languages of the earth....