The river valley there squeezes between two highlands and debouches into a long, deep crescent of beach embracing a great bay of turquoise water. There was a settlement of reed huts on the beach, but no people anywhere about; clearly the fisher folk, like those farther inland, had prudently decamped; but someone had left a small seagoing acáli drawn up on the beach, complete with its paddle. It gave me the notion of paddling out into the bay to watch, from a safe distance, when the seething rock met the sea. The shallow river had been unable to resist the lava's advance, but I knew the inexhaustible waters of the ocean would stop it. The encounter, I thought, would be something worth seeing.

It did not happen until the next day, and by then I had put my traveling pack in the canoe, and paddled out beyond the breakers, and I sat in the very middle of the bay. I could see through my topaz how the evilly smoldering lava spread and crept across the beach, advancing toward the waterline on a broad front. Not much was visible inland, except that I could just make out—through the obscuring smoke and falling ash—the pinkish flare and occasional brighter yellow twinkle of Tzeboruko still vomiting from the bowels of Mictlan.

Then the undulant, glowing-red muck on the beach seemed to hesitate and gather itself so that, instead of creeping forward, it launched itself ferociously into the ocean. During the days previous, up the river, when the hot rock and cold water had met, the sound had been an almost human screech and a hissing gasp. At the seaside, the sound was the thunderous bellow of an unexpectedly wounded god, a shocked and outraged god. It was a tumult compounded of two noises: an ocean heated to boiling so suddenly that it exploded into steam, and a lava chilled to hardness so suddenly that it exploded into fragments all along its leading edge. The steam towered up like a cliff made of cloud, and a hot spray came drizzling down on me, and my acáli jolted backward so abruptly that I nearly fell out of it. I clutched at its wooden sides, and so dropped the paddle overboard.

The canoe continued its backward swoop, as the ocean recoiled from the suddenly unfriendly land. Then the sea recovered from its apparent surprise, and sloshed toward the beach again. But the molten rock was still advancing; the thunder was uninterrupted and the cloud clawed upward as if trying to reach the sky where clouds belong; and the affronted ocean recoiled again. That whole vast bay surged seaward and landward again more times than I could count, for I was quite dizzied by the rocking and yawing of my canoe. But I was aware that each revulsion took me farther from land than each resurgence took me back. In the swirling waters about my curvetting canoe, fish and other sea creatures floated on the surface, most of them belly up.

All the rest of that day, as the twilight got ever darker, my acáli continued its progress of one wave shoreward, three waves seaward. With the very last of daylight, I saw that I was precisely between the two headlands of the bay entrance, but too far from either to swim the distance, and that beyond them was limitless empty ocean. There was nothing I could do, except two things. I leaned from the canoe and plucked out of the water every dead fish within my reach, and piled them in one end of my craft. Then I lay down with my head on my damp pack, and went to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, I might have thought I had dreamt all that turmoil, except that I was still helplessly adrift in an acáli and the shore was so far away that its only recognizable feature was the jagged profile of dim blue mountains. But the sun was rising in a clear sky, there was no pall of smoke and ash, there was no erupting Tzeboruko discernible among the distant mountains, the ocean was as calm as Lake Xaltócan on a summer day. Using my topaz, I fixed my eye on the landward horizon and attempted to imprint its profile on my vision. Then I closed my eyes for a few moments before opening them again to see any change from the remembered vision. After doing that several times, I was able to perceive that the closer mountains were moving past the farther ones, from left to right. Obviously, then, I was caught in an ocean current that was carrying me northward, but frighteningly far offshore.

I tried swerving the canoe by paddling with my hands on the side away from the land, but I quickly gave that up. There was a swirl in the formerly calm water alongside, and something struck the acáli so hard that it rocked. When I looked overside I saw a deep gouge in the hard mahogany, and an upright fin, like an oblong leather war shield, slicing through the water nearby. It circled my canoe two or three times before it disappeared with another ponderous swirl of the water, and thereafter I put not so much as a finger beyond the sheltering wood.

Well, I thought to myself, I have escaped any dangers posed by the volcano. Now I have nothing to fear except being eaten by sea monsters, or dying of hunger, or shriveling from heat and thirst, or drowning if the sea gets rough. I thought about Quetzalcoatl, the long-ago ruler of the Toltéca, who had similarly floated away alone into the other ocean to the east, and thereby had become the best beloved of all gods, the one god adored by far-apart peoples who had absolutely nothing else in common. Of course, I reminded myself, there had been a crowd of his worshipful subjects on the shore to watch his departure, and to weep when he did not turn back, and subsequently to go about informing other people that Quetzalcoatl the man was henceforth to be revered as Quetzalcoatl the god. Not a single person had seen me set off, or knew about it, or was likely—when I never came back—to start a popular demand for my elevation to godhood. So, I said to myself, if I have no hope of becoming a god, I had better do what I can to remain a man as long as possible.

I had twenty and three fish, from which I picked and laid aside ten which I recognized as being of edible species. Of those I cleaned two with my dagger and ate them raw—though not quite raw; they had been at least a little cooked in the cauldron of the bay back yonder. The thirteen questionable fish I gutted and filleted and then, getting my eating bowl from my pack, I wrung them like rags to extract every drop of their body moisture. I tucked the bowl of liquid and the eight remaining edible fish under the pack, so they were out of the sun's direct rays. Thus I was able to eat two more fish, still comparatively unspoiled, the next day. But by the third day I really had to force myself to eat two more—trying to swallow the chunks of them without chewing, they were so slimy and vile—and I threw the reeking last four over the side. For some while after that, my only sustenance—actually just a moistening of my painfully cracked lips—was a very occasional and restrained sip of the fish water from the bowl.

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?