The doctor withdrew his eyes from the sea in order to observe his flattened nose.  He was recalling a night of Egyptian heat increased by the fumes of whiskey; the familiarity of the half-clad public women, the scuffle with some ruddy Northern sailors, the encounter in the dark which obliged him to flee with bleeding face to the ship that, fortunately, was weighing anchor at dawn.  Like all Mediterranean men, he never went ashore without wearing a dagger hidden on his person, and he had to “sting” with it in order to make way for himself.

“What times those were!” said the Triton with more regret and homesickness than remorse; and then he would add by way of excuse, “Ay, but then I was only twenty-four years old!”

These memories made him turn his eyes toward a huge bluish bulk extending out into the sea and looking to the casual spectator like a great barren island.  It was the promontory crowned by the Mongo, the great Ferrarian promontory of the ancient geographers, the, furthest-reaching point of the peninsula in the lower Mediterranean that closes the Gulf of Valencia on the south.

It had the form of a hand whose digits were mountains, but lacked the thumb.  The other four fingers extended out into the waves, forming the capes of San Antonio, San Martin, La Nao and Almoraira.  In one of their coves was the Triton’s native village, and the home of the Ferraguts—­hunters of black pirates in other days, contrabandists at times in modern days, sailors in all ages, appearing originally, perhaps, from those first wooden horses that came leaping over the foam seething around the promontory.

In that home in the Marina he wished to live and die, with no further desire of seeing more lands, with that sudden immovability that attacks the vagabonds of the waves and makes them fix themselves upon a ledge of the coast like a mollusk or bunch of seaweed.

Soon the Triton grew tired of these strolls to the harbor.  The sea of Valencia was not a real sea for him.  The waters of the river and of the irrigation canals disturbed him.  When it rained in the mountains of Aragon, an earthy liquid always discharged itself into the Gulf, tinting the waves with flesh color and the foam with yellow.  Besides, it was impossible to indulge in his daily sport of swimming.  One winter morning, when he began to undress himself on the beach, the crowd gathered around him as though attracted by a phenomenon.  Even the fish of the Gulf had to him an insufferable slimy taste.

“I’m going back home,” he would finally say to the notary and his wife.  “I can’t understand how in the world you are able to live here!”

In one of these retreats to the Marina he insisted upon taking Ulysses home with him.  The summer season was beginning, the boy would be free from school for three months, and the notary, who was not able to go far away from the city, was going to pass the summer with his family on the beach at Cabanal checkered by bad-smelling irrigation canals near a forlorn sea.  The little fellow was looking very pale and weak on account of his studies and hectoring.  His uncle would make him as strong and agile as a dolphin.  And in spite of some very lively disputes, he succeeded in snatching the child away from Dona Cristina.