They would all break into shouts and conjectures.  It was a buoy, a piece of masthead, the drift from a distant shipwreck.  For the women it was somebody drowned, so bloated that it was floating like a leather bottle, after having been many days in the water.

Suddenly the same supposition would arise in every perplexed mind.  “I wonder if it could be the Dotor!” A long silence....  The bit of wood was taking the form of a head; the corpse was moving.  Many could now perceive the bubble of foam around his chest that was advancing like the prow of a ship, and the vigorous strokes of his arms....  “Yes, it surely was the Dotor!"...  The old sea dogs loaned their telescopes to one another in order to recognize his beard sunk in the water and his face, contracted by his efforts or expanded by his snortings.

And the Dotor was soon treading the dry beach, naked and as serenely unashamed as a god, giving his hand to the men, while the women shrieked, lifting their aprons in front of one eye—­terrified, yet admiring the dripping vision.

All the capes of the promontory challenged him to double them, swimming like a dolphin; he felt impelled to measure all the bays and coves with his arms, like a proprietor who distrusts another’s measurements and rectifies them in order to affirm his right of possession.  He was a human bark who, with the keel of his breast, cut the foam, whirling through the sunken rocks and the pacific waters in whose depths sparkled fishes among mother-of-pearl twigs and stars moving like flowers.

He used to seat himself to rest on the black rocks with overskirts of seaweed that raised or lowered their fringe at the caprice of the wave, awaiting the night and the chance vessel that might come to dash against them like a piece of bark.  Like a marine reptile he had even penetrated certain caves of the coast, drowsy and glacial lakes illuminated by mysterious openings where the atmosphere is black and the water transparent, where the swimmer has a bust of ebony and legs of crystal.  In the course of these swimming expeditions he ate all the living beings he encountered fastened to the rocks by antennas and arms.  The friction of the great, terrified fish that fled, bumping against him with the violence of a projectile, used to make him laugh.

In the night hours passed before his grandfather’s little ships, Ulysses used to hear the Triton speak of the Peje Nicolao, a man-fish of the Straits of Messina mentioned by Cervantes and other authors, who lived in the water maintaining himself by the donations from the ships.  His uncle must be some relative of this Peje Nicolao.  At other times this uncle would mention a certain Greek who in order to see his lady-love swam the Hellespont every night.  And he, who used to know the Dardanelles, was longing to return there as a simple passenger merely that a poet named Lord Byron might not be the only one to imitate the legendary crossing.