All was danger and mystery in the kingdom of the waves.  The abysses roared, the rocks moaned; on the ledges were singing sirens who, with their music, attracted ships in order to dash them to pieces.  There was not an island without its particular god, without its monster and cyclops, or its magician contriving artifices.

Before domesticating the elements, mankind had attributed to them their most superstitious fears.

A material factor had powerfully influenced the dangers of Mediterranean life.  The sand, moved by the caprice of the current, was constantly ruining the villages or raising them to peaks of unexpected prosperity.  Cities celebrated in history were to-day no more than streets of ruins at the foot of a hillock crowned with the remains of a Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine or Saracen castle, or with a fortress contemporary with the Crusades.  In other centuries these had been famous ports; before their walls had taken place naval battles; now from their ruined acropolis one could scarcely see the Mediterranean except as a light blue belt at the end of a low and marshy plain.  The accumulating sand had driven the sea back miles....  On the other hand, inland cities had come to be places of embarkation because of the continual perforation of the waves that were forcing their way in.

The wickedness of mankind had imitated the destructive work of nature.  When a maritime republic conquered a rival republic, the first thing that it thought of was to obstruct its harbor with sand and stones in order to divert the course of its waters so as to convert it into an inland city, thereby ruining its fleets and its traffic.  The Genoese, triumphant over Pisa, stopped up its harbor with the sands of the Arno; and the city of the first conquerors of Mallorca, of the navigators to the Holy Land, of the Knights of St. Stephen, guardians of the Mediterranean, came to be Pisa the Dead,—­a settlement that knew the sea only by hearsay.

“Sand,” continued Ferragut, “has changed the commercial routes and historic destinies of the Mediterranean.”

Of the many deeds which had stretched along the scenes of the mare nostrum, the most famous in the captain’s opinion was the unheard-of epic of Roger de Flor which he had known from childhood through the stories told him by the poet Labarta, by the Triton, and by that poor secretary who was always dreaming of the great past of the Catalan marine.

All the world was now talking about the blockade of the Dardanelles.  The boats that furrowed the Mediterranean, merchant vessels as well as battleships, were furthering the great military operation that was developing opposite Gallipoli.  The name of the long, narrow maritime pass which separates Europe and Asia was in every mouth.  To-day the eyes of mankind were converged on this point just as, in remote centuries, they had been fixed on the war of Troy.

“We also have been there,” said Ferragut with pride.  “The Dardanelles have been frequented for many years by the Catalans and the Aragonese.  Gallipoli was one of our cities governed by the Valencian, Ramon Muntaner.”