O, mater Amphitrite!... and Ferragut would describe her as though she were just passing before his eyes.  Sometimes when swimming around the promontories, feeling himself enveloped like primitive man in the blind forces of Nature, he used to believe that he saw the white goddess issuing forth from the rocks with all her smiling train after a rest in some marine cave.

A shell of pearl was her chariot and six dolphins harnessed with purpling coral used to draw it along.  The tritons, her sons, handled the reins.  The Naiads, their sisters, lashed the sea with their scaly tails, lifting their mermaid bodies wrapped in the magnificence of their sea-green tresses between whose ringlets might be seen their heaving bosoms.  White seagulls, cooing like the doves of Aphrodite, fluttered around their nude sea-queen, serenely contemplating them from her movable throne, crowned with pearls and phosphorescent stars drawn from the depths of her dominion.  White as the cloud, white as the sail, white as the foam, entirely, dazzlingly white was her fair majesty except where a rosy blush tinted the petal-like skin of her heels or her bosom.

The entire history of European man—­forty centuries of wars, emigrations, and racial impact—­was due, according to the doctor, to the desire of possessing this harmoniously framed sea, of enjoying the transparency of its atmosphere and the vivacity of its light.

The men from the North who needed the burning log and alcoholic drink in order to defend their life from the clutches of the cold, were always thinking of these Mediterranean shores.  All their warlike or pacific movements were with intent to descend from the coasts of the glacial seas to the beaches of the warm mare nostrum.  They were eager to gain possession of the country where the sacred olive alternates its stiff old age with the joyous vineyard; where the pine rears its cupola and the cypress erects its minaret.  They longed to dream under the perfumed snow of the interminable orange groves; to be masters of the sheltered valleys where the myrtle and the jasmine spice the salty air; where the aloe and the cactus grow between the stones of extinct volcanoes; where the mountains of marble extend their white veins down even into the depths of the sea and refract the African heat emitted by the opposite coast.

The South had replied to the invasion from the North with defensive wars that had extended even into the center of Europe.  And thus history had gone on repeating itself with the same flux and reflux of human waves—­mankind struggling for thousands of years to gain or hold the blue vault of Amphitrite.

The Mediterranean peoples were to Ferragut the aristocracy of humanity.  Its potent climate had tempered mankind as in no other part of the planet, giving him a dry and resilient power.  Tanned and bronzed by the profound absorption of the sun and the energy of the atmosphere, its navigators were transmuted into pure metal.  The men from the North were stronger, but less robust, less acclimitable than the Catalan sailor, the Provencal, the Genoese or the Greek.  The sailors of the Mediterranean made themselves at home in all parts of the world.  Upon their sea man had developed his highest energies.  Ancient Greece had converted human flesh into spiritual steel.