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the sea, knowing (from other Jesuits accounts, or his own experience as a voyager, or seamen s tales?)
that it was more poisonous than the mortal boletus.
Of another fish yellow eyes, tumid mouth, teeth like nails Father Caspar said at once that it was a
creature of Beelzebub. It should be left to suffocate on deck until death took it, then away with it, to
whence it came. Did he declare this through acquired knowledge or was he judging by the thing s
appearance? In any case, all the fish Caspar considered edible proved to be excellent and, indeed, of
one he was able to specify that it was better boiled than baked.
Initiating Roberto into the mysteries of that Solomonic sea, the Jesuit also became more precise in
vouchsafing information about the Island, which theDaphne, on arriving, had circum-navigated
completely. Towards the east the Island had some little beaches, but they were too exposed to the
winds. Im-mediately after the southern promontory, where the crew had landed with the boat, there was
a calm bay, but the water there was too shallow to moor theDaphne. This point, where the ship now lay,
was the most suitable: closer to the Island, they would run aground, and farther away, they would find
themselves right in a very strong current that ran through the channel between the two islands from
southwest to north-east. It was easy to illustrate this to Roberto: Father Caspar asked him to throw the
carcass of Beelzebub s fish with all his strength into the sea to the west, and the corpse of the mon-ster,
while it could be seen floating, was violently yanked away by an invisible stream.
Caspar and the seamen had explored the Island, if not entirely, enough to allow them to decide that one
hill, chosen as site of the Specula, was the best to command with the eye all that land, vast as the city of
Rome.
In the interior there was a waterfall, and splendid vegeta-tion which included not only coconuts and
bananas but also some trees with star-shaped trunks, the tips of the star as sharp as blades.
As for the animals some of which Roberto had seen on the lower deck the Island was a paradise of
birds, and there were even flying foxes. The crew had sighted pigs in the un-derbrush but had not been
able to capture them. There were serpents, but none had proved venomous or fierce, while the varieties
of lizards were innumerable.
But the richest fauna were found along the coral barbican. Turtles, crabs, and oysters of every shape,
difficult to compare with those found in our seas, big as baskets, as pots, as serving platters, often difficult
to open, but once opened, revealing quantities of white flesh, soft and fat; and they were genuine
delicacies. Unfortunately they could not be brought on board ship: once out of the water, they
immediately spoiled in the sun s heat.
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They had seen none of the great ferocious animals in which other Asian countries are so rich, no
elephants or tigers or crocodiles. Or, for that matter, anything that resembled an ox, a bull, a horse, or a
dog. It appeared that in this land every form of life had been conceived not by an architect or a sculp-tor
but by a jeweller: the birds were colored crystal, the wood-land animals were delicate, the fish flat and
almost transparent.
It had not seemed to Father Caspar or to the captain or the sailors that in those waters there were Dog
Fish, easily recognized even from a distance thanks to that fin keen as an axe. And yet in those seas they
are found everywhere. The idea that there were no sharks around the Island was, in my opinion, an
illusion of that inspired explorer. But perhaps what he argued was true, namely that, as slightly to the west
there was a great current, those animals preferred to dwell there, where they were sure of finding more
plentiful sustenance. However it may have been, it is well for the story that follows that neither Caspar
nor Roberto feared the presence of sharks, otherwise they would not have had the heart to go down into
the water, and I would have no tale to tell.
As Roberto listened, he became more and more captivated by the distant Island; he tried to imagine its
shape, its color, the movement of the creatures Father Caspar described. And the corals? What were
these corals, which he knew only as jewels that according to poets had the color of a beautiful woman s
lips?
Regarding corals Father Caspar remained speechless; he merely raised his eyes to Heaven with an
expression of bliss. The corals of which Roberto spoke were dead corals, like the virtue of the
courtesans for whom libertines employed that trite simile. On the reef, too, there were dead corals, and it
was they that wounded anyone touching them. But they were nothing compared to living corals, which
were how to describe them? submarine flowers, anemone, hyacinth, ra-nunculus, gilli-flowers no,
that gave no idea they were a festival of galls, curls, berries, bowls, burrs, shoots, hearts,
twigs nO)no, they were something else: mobile, colorful as Armida s vale, and they imitated all the
vegetables of field, garden, wood, from cucumber to mushroom, even the frilled cabbage.... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]