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By Root 1601 0

persisted with, as a focus for the mind, something, in the monotony of these southward-sailing days, to give him a sense of choice, of independent being, some relief from the oppression of passivity which stalked his days and nights. He felt as subject to external forces as the ship was, or as the sea itself, whose every twitch was determined, whose rages and calms were equally docile. Docile too the vast forces that ruled her and the shores she nibbled at. Paris thought of it as a maze of concentric circles on a single plane, each continuous with the next, like a flattened spiral, with himself a speck on some interior rim. Somewhere beyond and above was that principle of harmony eloquently espoused by Mr Pope in his ‘Essay on Man’. The couplet ran through his mind now:

All discord, harmony not understood.

All partial evil, universal good.

The followers of this harmonizing God, in a spurt of partial evil, had killed all his hopes and ruined his life. And now, at some other rim of the maze, there were flying-fish, which Ruth had never seen.

They are, as Jar as I can judge, some eighteen inches in length, with tails forked like a swallow’s, but one side is shorter. They have two wings, which are not properly speaking wings at all but which I take to be the fins of the breast enlarged and shaped to this purpose of flight. (It is a large question how this shaping came about.) I did not observe the fishes to flap their wings, but to glide rather. They appear to build up speed under the water and, on gaining the surface, make rapid beats of the still-submerged tail, and it is this which gives them the final impetus they need to rise up into the air. Once airborne thus, they are capable of performing several consecutive glides over the water, the tail propelling them up again each time they sink below the surface.

These creatures are fashioned precisely to their purpose. The fashioning is open to observation, but the purpose remains obscure. Why should these fish alone, among the denizens of ocean, be equipped for flight? Can there be aspiration among fishes? A question I could put to our good captain, if only to see him struggle with the furious contempt it would cause him. If aspiration determines development, the eagle would be judged superior to the wren … It occurs to me as a legitimate question, whether these flying-fish could replace their fins if damaged. We now know a lizard can do so with its tail; and Réaumur has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that a crayfish can grow a new claw. These are strong arguments against a fixed creation and an unchanging order. If a crayfish can grow a new claw, why cannot a bird? If a lizard was given this particular attribute at the moment of creation, why were other creatures not given it?

Paris paused. The door of his cabin was open and from where he sat he could see the stern of the punt, which was hoisted amidships just forward of the mainmast. It made a beaker-shaped angle with the boom on which it rested, and the beaker filled and drained with exact regularity as the ship dipped her bows and raised them. The liquid, pale cobalt in colour, was not at first associated in his mind with the sea at all; for some moments, seeing this calm filling of the beaker, he was back in his student days, at a long, stained bench with others, testing for acids with litmus, holding up the glass vessel to see the obedient stain. He was distressed now at the memory. Those days were like a time before a fall; the ruin of his life lay between. How wonderful he had thought that suffusion of red … The memory of Wilson’s flogging came suddenly to him, the start of blood across the man’s back, the pattern of drops on the deck, Thurso’s expression of fulfilment … Conviction pierced Paris before he could summon any customary defence: this was not some other point in that maze of circles, he and Wilson occupied the same point. My back, my blood, me sullen in chains, me calling for help …

He started away from this as from some appalling temptation, hastily closing and stowing away his journal