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their parts.
    “This boy reads your dreams.”
    “This man talks in his sleep.”
    Dira lowered her gaze to her accounts once more. She did not even raise her voice.
    “Scat.”
    They scatted.

CHAPTER 6

    B ECAUSE B ARON C AREWALL had never seen the sea. His lands were land: stones,
hills, marshes, fields, crags, mountains, woods, glades. Land. There was no sea.
    For him the sea was an idea. Or, more correctly, an itinerary of the imagination. It was something born in the Red Sea—divided in two by the hand of God—then amplified by the thought
of the Deluge, in which it was lost, to be found later in the bulging outline of an Ark and immediately connected to the thought of whales—never seen but often imagined—and thence it
streamed back, fairly clear once more, into the few stories that had reached his ears of monstrous fish and dragons and submerged cities, in a crescendo of fantastic splendor that abruptly
shriveled up into the harsh features of one of his forebears—framed and eternal in the gallery—who was said to have been a freebooter with Vasco da Gama: in his subtly wicked eyes, the
thought of the sea took a sinister turn, caromed off some uncertain chronicles of piratical hyperbole, got entangled in a quotation from Saint Augustine according to which the ocean was the home of
the devil, turned back to a name—Thessala—that was perhaps a wrecked ship or a wet-nurse who used to spin yarns of ships and wars, nearly surfaced in the redolence of certain cloths
that had arrived there from distant lands, and finally reemerged in the eyes of a woman from overseas, encountered many years before and never seen since, to come to a halt, at the end of this
circumnavigation of the mind, in the fragrance of a fruit that, they had told him, grew only along the seashore of the southern lands: and if you ate it you tasted the flavor of the sun. Since
Baron Carewall had never seen it, the sea journeyed in his mind like a stowaway aboard a sailing ship moored in port with sails furled: inoffensive and superfluous.
    It could have remained there forever. But, in an instant, it was aroused by the words of a man dressed in black called Atterdel, the verdict of an implacable man of science called in to make a
miracle.
    “I will save your daughter, sir. And I will do it with the
sea.
”
    In
THE SEA . It was hard to believe. The polluted and putrid sea, receptacle of horrors, and anthropophagous monster of the abyss—ancient
and pagan—ever feared and now, suddenly
    they invite you, as if for a walk, they order you, because it is a cure, they push you with implacable courtesy
    into the sea. It is a fashionable cure, by now. A sea preferably cold, very salty, and choppy, because the dreadful content of the waves is an integral part of the cure, to be overcome
technically and dominated morally, in a fearful challenge that is, if you think about it, fearful. And all in the certainty—let’s say the conviction—that the great womb of the sea
may sunder the outer shell of the malady, reactivate the pathways of life, increase the redeeming secretions of the central and peripheral glands
    the ideal liniment for the hydrophobic, the melancholy, the impotent, the anemic, the lonely, the wicked, the envious,
    and the mad. Like the madman they took to Brixton, under the impermeable gaze of doctors and scientists, and forcibly immersed in the gelid water, shaken violently by the waves, and then dragged
out again and, reactions and counter reactions having been measured, again immersed, forcibly, let it be well understood,
    eight degrees centigrade, his head under the water, he resurfacing like a scream and the brute force with which he frees himself of nurses and various personnel, excellent swimmers all, but this
is absolutely useless in the face of the blind frenzy of the animal, who flees—flees—running through the water, nude, and screaming out the frenzy of that unbearable anguish, the shame,
the terror. The