Slowly the pain faded to a strange numbness, not entirely unpleasant. De Maillet straightened his back, then bent to pick up his silver-headed cane and his spectacles. It had been a long time since he had bent so easily. He sat on the campstool without puffing for breath.
He noted with interest that his sensibilities seemed heightened. When he felt the smooth ebony of his cane, it was as if he had never felt it before. Even his eyesight seemed improved; the blue summer sky over the crystalline Mediterranean seemed to shimmer as if it had just been created. Even the sand grains on his silver-buckled pumps seemed to have been placed each just so, forming a tiny constellation of their own against the black leather.
He was just contemplating filling his other nostril when he saw a young townsman running toward him from a rockier section of the coast. Here there were a number of secluded dells and hollows where the young gallants of Marseille were wont to take their mistresses, or other young women whom they wished to persuade to assume that estate. The stranger was a handsome fellow of the commercial class with a face slightly marred by smallpox.
"Did you hear a cry for help?" the young man demanded, stopping in the broad shadow of de Maillet's parasol.
"My word," said de Maillet, embarrassed. "I'm afraid that I myself cried out. I, er, am somewhat troubled with the gout. I wasn't aware that there was anyone within earshot."
"It can't have been you, monsieur," the young man said reasonably, tucking in his linen shirttail. "It was followed by a spate of the most horrible cursing, some of it in a foreign language. My companion was so frightened that she fled immediately."
"Oh," de Maillet said. Suddenly he smiled. "Well, perhaps there was a boatload of sailors, then. My eyes are not so good as they were. I might have missed them completely."
The young man grinned. "All is well. Women always want to prolong a rendezvous long after its natural summation." His eyes fell on de Maillet's cane, a presentation item from the city fathers of Marseille. "Forgive me," the young man said. "You are the Sieur de Maillet, the famous savant, are you not?"
De Maillet smiled. "You know I am. You just read my name from the cane."
"Nonsense," said the young tradesman vigorously. "Everyone knows who Monsieur de Maillet is. Marseille owes its prosperity to you. My father is Jean Martine of the Martine Oriental Import- Export Company. I am his eldest son, Jean Martine the Younger." He bowed. "He has spoken of you often. My family owes you a very large debt of gratitude."
"Yes, I believe I know your father," de Maillet said generously. He loved flattery. "He deals in Egyptian trade-stuffs, does he not? Bitumen, antiquities, and the like." De Maillet shrugged with an aristocrat's proper vagueness about such matters.
"The very same," said Martine. "We have sometimes had the honor of supplying Your Excellency with curios for your very famous cabinet of natural wonders." He hesitated. "Without meaning to intrude, Your Excellency, I cannot help but wonder why I find you alone here on this deserted beach."
De Maillet looked at the tradesman's open, guileless face and felt the natural urge of the old, the learned, and the garrulous to instruct the young. "It has to do with my System," he said. "My life's work in natural philosophy, upon which my posthumous fame will rest. For many years, in my travels, I have examined seashores, and studied the history of the world as revealed in its rocks. It is my contention that the level of the sea is dropping, at a rate I calculate at perhaps three feet every thousand years. During my life I have amassed evidence of this diminution, and I believe it to be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt."
"Very remarkable," said Martine slowly. "But surely you are not sitting here in order to watch it drop."
"No," said de Maillet, "but when the weather is fine, I often come here, to think over old times, to examine my notes and journals, and to extend my chain of deductions.
"For instance. If you grant that the sea is diminishing, then it follows quite rigorously that there must have been a time, many thousands of centuries ago, when the entire earth was covered by the sea. And you may prove this quite easily. I have examined the cabinet of Herr Scheuchzer in Zurich, which contains a great many fossilized fish that that worthy man pried from the stones of the Swiss mountains. In the writings of the savant Fulgose we find the story of an entire ship, with its sails, cordage, and anchors, and the bones of forty of its crew, found fossilized a hundred fathoms down an iron mine in the Canton of Bern. Herodotus writes of iron mooring-rings found far up the slopes of the mountains of Mokatan, near Memphis. How else can we account for these vestiges, than to assume that the sea was once deep enough to drown these mountains?"
De Maillet jabbed his cane into the sand. "So. It follows, then, that life must have arisen from the sea, and that such creatures as sea adders, sea apes, sea dogs, and sea lions must have swarmed in the depths when there was no land at all. Similarly, sea grapes, sea lettuce, sea moss, and sea trees must have supplied the land with its greenery."
"This is very troubling," the young man said. "What of men, then? Do you believe that men, too, arose from the sea?"
"To be sure, it is troubling," de Maillet said. "But the evidence, young man; one cannot ignore the evidence. I admit that I have never seen mermen. But I have seen the bones of giants. Thirty years ago, in the quarry of Cape Coronne, just a few miles from here, I saw the bones of a giant, lying on his back, enclosed in the stone. When you have seen a marvel like that with your own eyes, you may confidently put aside your doubts--" A strange feeling was creeping up and down the length of de Maillet's spine. He closed his eyes and felt a weird tremor below the soles of his feet, as if the bowels of the earth had shifted. When he opened his eyes, with a crawling sense of vertigo, he saw a phenomenon so odd that he rejected it almost at once as a trick of the light.
It was as if the hand of God had dropped a formless pane of tinted glass on the horizon. Then this mighty pane, or this wall of invisible essence, had swept forward from out of the distance and flashed past him. It was as if this formless wall had combed the sea to its depths, and had passed through the very substance of the earth, leaving no ripple of its passage, yet leaving everything somehow subtly changed. He himself felt different, stirred somehow, with an odd tingling sensation, as he sometimes had before a thunderstorm. A strange cool breeze began to blow steadily off the sea. It seemed to de Maillet that the suspicious breeze had a faint marshy reek of roiled mud, from the subaqueous depths of the world.
He looked at the young man sitting in the sand at his feet. Some manner of subtle transformation had affected the young tradesman. He was eyeing de Maillet with a bold and speculative look, as if he were about to buy the world and was ready to offer de Maillet as a down payment. De Maillet said faintly, "You didn't see...?"
"See what, Your Excellency?"
"A certain... flash, a certain wind? No? No, of course not." De Maillet shivered. "Where were we?"
"Your Excellency was speaking of mermen."
"Mermen." Although it was one of his favorite topics, the word sounded strange to de Maillet, as if in a single instant the word had aged a thousand years and was now some dusty and totally discredited apparition from the remote past. Had he ever really believed in mermen and merwomen? Surely he must have, for they merited an entire subchapter in his masterwork.
"Ah yes, mermen. Though I have never seen one, I have garnered many references from writers of unquestioned veracity. We must omit the tales of ancients such as Pliny, who speaks of flute-playing tritons and the like; they were entirely too credulous.