The Magus - John Fowles [60]
a trick like the one with the loaded die. On the other, I felt that he had after all taken a sort of liking for me. I thought, as I heaved at the engine, if he wants me to seem his dupe, I'll seem his dupe; but not be his dupe. We headed out of the cove. It was difficult to talk with the engine going, and I stared down through fifty or sixty feet of water to patches of pale rock starred black with sea urchins. On Conchis's left side were two puckered scars. They were both back and front, obviously bullet wounds; and there was another old wound high on his right arm. I guessed that they came from the execution during the second War. Sitting there steering he looked ascetic, Ghandi-like; but as we approached Petrocaravi, he stood up and steered the tiller expertly against his dark thigh. Years of sunlight had tanned him to the same mahogany brown as the island fishermen. The rocks were gigantic boulders of conglomerate, monstrous in their barren strangeness, much larger now we were close to them than I had ever realised from the island. We anchored about fifty yards away. He handed me a mask and snorkel. At that time they were unobtainable in Greece, and I had never used them before. I followed the slow, pausing thresh of his feet over a petrified landscape of immense blocks of stone, among which drifted and hovered shoals of fish. There were flat fish, silvered, aldermanic; slim, darting fish; Bosch-like fish that peered foully out of crevices; minute poised fish of electric blue, fluttering red-and-black fish, slinking azure-and-green fish. He showed me an underwater grotto, a light-shafted nave of pale blue shadows, where the large wrasse floated as if in a trance. On the far side of the islet the rocks plunged precipitously away into a mesmeric blind dark blue. Conchis raised his head above the surface. "I am going back to fetch the boat. Stay here." I swam on. A shoal of several hundred golden-grey fish followed me. I turned, they turned. I swam on, they followed, truly Greek in their obsessive curiosity. Then I lay over a great slab of rock which warmed the water almost to bath heat. The shadow of the boat fell across it. Conchis led me a little way to a deep fissure between two boulders, and there suspended a piece of white cloth on the end of a line. I hung like a bird in the water overhead, watching for the Octopus he was trying to entice. Soon a sinuous tentacle slipped out and groped the bait, then other swift tentacles, and he began skillfully to coax the octopus up; I had tried this myself and knew it was not nearly as simple as the village boys made it seem. The octopus came reluctantly but inevitably, slow-whirling, flesh of drowned sailors, its suckered arms stretching, reaching, searching. Conchis suddenly gaffed it into the boat, slashed its sac with a knife, turned it inside out in a moment. I levered myself aboard. "I have caught a thousand in this place. Tonight another will move into that same hole. And he will let himself be caught as easily." "Poor thing." "You notice reality is not necessary. Even the octopus prefers the ideal." A piece of old white sheeting, from which he had torn his "bait," lay beside him. I remembered it was Sunday morning; the time for sermons and parables. He looked up from the puddle of sepia. "Well, how do you like the world below?" "Fantastic. Like a dream." "Like humanity. But in the vocabulary of millions of years ago." He threw the octopus under the thwart. "Do you think that has a life after death?" I looked down at the viscid mess and up to meet his dry smile. The red-and-white skullcap had tilted slightly. Now he looked like Picasso imitating Ghandi imitating a buccaneer. He let in the clutch lever and we moved forward. I thought of the Maine, of Neuve Chapelle; and shook my head. He nodded, and raised the white sheeting. His even teeth gleamed falsely, vividly in the intense sunlight. Stupidity is lethal, he implied; and look at me, I have survived.
23
We had lunch, a simple Greek meal of goat's-milk cheese and greenpepper salad with eggs, under the colonnade. The