I think it was also on my third day at sea that the last visible mountain peak of The One World disappeared below the horizon to the east. The current had carried me entirely out of sight of land, and there was nothing firm anywhere, and that was the first such experience I had ever had in my life. I wondered if I might eventually be cast up on The Islands of the Women, of which I had heard storytellers tell, though none ever claimed to have been there in person. According to the legends, those were islands inhabited entirely by females, who spent all their time in diving for oysters and extracting the pearl hearts from those oysters which had grown hearts. Only once a year did the women ever see men, when a number of men would canoe out from the mainland to trade cloth and other such supplies for the collected pearls—and, while there, to couple with the women. Of the babies later born of the brief mating, the island women kept only the female infants and drowned the males. Or so said the stories. I meditated on what would happen if I should land on The Islands of the Women uninvited and unexpected. Would I be immediately slain or subjected to a sort of mass rape in reverse?
As it happened, I found not those mythical islands nor any others. I merely drifted miserably across those endless waters. The ocean ringed me about on every side, and I was most unhappy, feeling like an ant at the very bottom and center of a blue urn whose sides were slippery and unclimbable. The nights were not so unnerving, if I put away my topaz so I could not see the overwhelming profusion of stars. In the dark I could pretend I was somewhere safe—anywhere solid—in a mainland forest or even inside my own house. I could pretend that the rocking boat was a gishe bed of rope-slung netting, and thus sleep soundly.
During the days, however, I could not pretend that I was anywhere but in the exact middle of that appalling blue, hot, shadeless vastness. Fortunately for my sanity, there were a few other things to see by daylight besides that unending, uncaring expanse of water. Some of those other things were not particularly comforting to contemplate either, but I forced myself to look at them with my crystal, and to examine them as closely as circumstances permitted, and to speculate on the nature of them.
A few of the things I saw, I knew what they were, though I had never seen them before. There was the blue and silver swordfish, bigger than I am, which likes to leap straight up from the water and dance for a moment on its tail. There was the even bigger sawfish, flat and brown, with elongated fins along its sides like the wavy skin flaps of a flying squirrel. I recognized both of those by their wicked beaks, which the warriors of some coastal tribes use for weapons. I dreaded the moment when one of those big fish would stave in my acáli with its sword or saw, but none ever did.
Other things I saw while adrift on that western ocean were totally unfamiliar to me. There were countless small creatures with long fins which they used like wings, to spurt from the water and glide prodigious distances. I would have thought them a kind of water insect, but one landed in my canoe, and I seized and ate him instantly, and he tasted like a fish. There were immense blue-gray fish which regarded me with intelligent eyes and a fixed grin, but they seemed more sympathetic than menacing. Numbers of them would accompany my acáli for long periods, and entertain me by doing water acrobatics in practiced unison.
But the fish that filled me with the most awe and apprehension were the biggest of alclass="underline" great gray ones which came once in a while to bask on the surface of the sea—one or two or crowds of them, and they might loll roundabout me for half a day—as if they craved a breath of fresh air and a touch of sun, which is most unfishlike behavior. What was even more unfishlike about them was that they were more huge than any other living creature I have ever seen. I do not blame you, reverend friars, if you disbelieve me, but each of those monsters was long enough to span the plaza outside the window there, and each was of a breadth and bulk to match its length. Once, when I was in the Xoconóchco, years before the time of which I now speak, I was served a meal of a fish called the yeyemichi, and the cook told me that the yeyemichi was the most tremendous fish in the sea. If what I ate on that occasion was indeed a small slice from one of those swimming Great Pyramids I was later to meet in the western ocean, well, I am heartily sorry now that I did not seek out and meet and express my admiration for the heroic man—or the army of men—who caught and beached the thing.
Any two of those mighty yeyemichtin, as they playfully nudged each other, could have crushed my acáli and me without even noticing. But they did not, and no other such mishap befell me, and on the sixth or seventh day of my involuntary voyage—just in time: I had licked my bowl dry of the last trace of fish water; I was gaunt and blistered and flaccid—a rain came sweeping like a gray veil across the ocean behind my craft, and caught up with me and swept over me. I was much refreshed by that, and filled my bowl and drank it empty two or three times. But then I began to worry a little, for the rain had brought with it a wind that put waves on the sea. My canoe bounced and jostled about like a mere chip of wood, and very soon I was using my bowl to bail out the water that sloshed in over the sides. But I took some heart from the fact that the rain and wind had come from behind me—from the southwest, I judged, remembering where the sun had been at the time—so at least I was not being blown farther out to sea.
Not that it mattered much where I sank at last, I thought wearily, for it appeared that I would have to sink eventually. Since the wind and rain continued without a pause, and the ocean continued to dance my acáli about, I could not sleep or even rest, but had to keep emptying out the water that slopped in. I was already so weak that my bowl felt as heavy as a great stone jar every time I dipped and filled and poured it overside.
Though I could not sleep, I gradually slipped into a sort of stupor, so I cannot now say how many days and nights passed thus, but evidently during all of them I continued the bailing as if it had become an unbreakable habit. I do recall that, toward the end, my movements dragged slower and slower, and the level of water in the boat was rising more rapidly than I could lower it. When finally I felt the canoe's bottom grate on the floor of the sea, and I knew that it had sunk at last, I could only mildly wonder at my not feeling the water close about me or the fishes playing in my hair.
I must have lost consciousness then, for when I again came to myself, the rain was gone and the sun was shining brightly, and I looked about me, marveling. I had sunk indeed, but not to any great depth. The water was only up to my waist, for the canoe had grounded just short of a gravelly beach that stretched out of sight, in both directions, with no sign of human habitation. Still weak and limp and moving slowly, I stepped out of the submerged acáli, dragging my soaked pack with me, and waded ashore. There were coconut palms beyond the beach, but I was too feeble to climb or even shake one, or to look for any other sort of food. I did make the effort of emptying out the contents of my pack to dry in the sun, but then I crept to the palm shade and went unconscious again.
I awoke in darkness, and it took me a few moments to realize that I was not still bobbing about on the sea surface. Where I was, I had no idea, but it seemed that I was no longer alone, for all about me I heard a mysterious and unnerving noise. It was a clicking that came from nowhere and everywhere, no single click very loud, but all of them together making a crackling like an invisible brush fire advancing upon me. Or it could have been multitudes of people trying to steal upon me, but not very stealthily, for they were either trampling every loose pebble on the beach or snapping every twig among the beach litter.