Just when he was sleeping soundest, believing that the night would still be many hours longer, he would feel himself awakened by a violent tugging at his leg.  His uncle could not touch him in any other way.  “Get up, cabin boy!” In vain he would protest with the profound sleepiness of youth....  Was he, or was he not the “ship’s cat” of the bark of which his uncle was the captain and only crew?...

His uncle’s paws bared him to the blasts of salt air that were entering through the windows.  The sea was dark and veiled by a light fog.  The last stars were sparkling with twinkles of surprise, ready to flee.  A crack began to appear on the leaden horizon, growing redder and redder every minute, like a wound through which the blood is flowing.  The ship’s cat was loaded up with various empty baskets, the skipper marching before him like a warrior of the waves, carrying the oars on his shoulders, his feet rapidly making hollows on the sand.  Behind him the village was beginning to awaken and, over the dark waters, the sails of the fishermen, fleeing the inner sea, were slipping past like ghostly shrouds.

Two vigorous strokes of the oar sent their boat out from the little wharf of stones, and soon he was untying the sails from the gunwales and preparing the ropes.  The unfurled canvas whistled and swelled in bellying whiteness.  “There we are!  Now for a run!”

The water was beginning to sing, slipping past both sides of the prow.  Between it and the edge of the sail could be seen a bit of black sea, and coming little by little over its line, a great red streak.  The streak soon became a helmet, then a hemisphere, then an Arabian arch confined at the bottom, until finally it shot up out of the liquid mass as though it were a bomb sending forth flashes of flame.  The ash-colored clouds became stained with blood and the large rocks of the coast began to sparkle like copper mirrors.  As the last stars were extinguished, a swarm of fire-colored fishes came trailing along before the prow, forming a triangle with its point in the horizon.  The mist on the mountain tops was taking on a rose color as though its whiteness were reflecting a submarine eruption. “Bon dia!” called the doctor to Ulysses, who was occupied in warming his hands stiffened by the wind.

And, moved with childlike joy by the dawn of a new day, the Triton sent his bass voice booming across the maritime silence, several times intoning sentimental melodies that in his youth he had heard sung by a vaudeville prima donna dressed as a ship’s boy, at other times caroling in Valencian the chanteys of the coast—­fishermen’s songs invented as they drew in their nets, in which most shameless words were flung together on the chance of making them rhyme.  In certain windings of the coast the sail would be lowered, leaving the boat with no other motion than a gentle rocking around its anchor rope.