Piracy and smuggling had formed the historic past of all the villages that Ulysses was visiting, some huddled in the shelter of the promontory crowned with a lighthouse, others opening on the concavity of a bay dotted with barren islands girdled with foam.  The old churches had turrets on their walls and loopholes in their doors for shooting with culverins and blunderbusses.  The entire neighborhood used to take refuge in them when the smoke columns from their watchmen would warn them of the landing of pirates from Algiers.  Following the curvings of the promontory there was a dotted line of reddish towers, each one accompanied by a smaller pair for lookouts.  This line extended along the south toward the Straits of Gibraltar, and on its northern side reached to France.

The doctor had seen their counterpart in all the islands of the western Mediterranean, on the coasts of Naples and in Sicily.  They were the fortifications of a thousand-year war, of a struggle ten centuries long between Moors and Christians for the domination of the blue sea, a struggle of piracy in which the Mediterranean men—­differentiated by religion, but identical at heart—­had prolonged the adventures of the Odyssey down to the beginnings of the nineteenth century.

Ferragut gradually became acquainted with many old men of the village who in their youth had been slaves in Algiers.  On winter evenings the oldest of them were still singing romances of captivity and speaking with terror of the Berber brigantines.  These thieves of the sea must have had a pact with the devil, who notified them of opportune occasions.  If in a convent some beautiful novices had just made their profession, the doors would give away at midnight under the hatchet-blows of the bearded demons who were advancing inland from the galleys prepared to receive their cargo of feminine freight.  If a girl of the coast, celebrated for her beauty, was going to be married, the infidels, lying in wait, would surround the door of the church, shooting their blunderbusses and knifing the unarmed men as they came out, in order to carry away the women in their festal robes.

On all the coast, the pirates stood in awe only of the navigators from the Marina, so fearless and warlike were they.  If their villages were ever attacked, it was because their seafaring defenders were on the Mediterranean and, in their turn, had gone to sack and burn some village on the coast of Africa.

The Triton and his nephew used to eat their supper under the arbor in the long summer twilights.  After the cloth was removed Ulysses would manipulate his grandfather’s little frigates, learning the technical parts and names of the different apparatus, and the management of the sets of sails.  Sometimes the two would stay out on the rustic porch until a late hour gazing out over the luminous sea sparkling under the splendor of the moon, or streaked with a slender wake of starry light in the murky nights.