The Black Pearl Read Free Page B

shells and once more told how he had found the great pearl in the Gulf of Persia, the same tale he had told before but longer. Again I had the feeling that his story was meant for me more than the others.
    And as I listened to him a dream began to take shape in my mind. It was a fanciful dream that made me forget the insults that I had suffered silently. I saw myself in a boat anchored in a secret lagoon somewhere on the Vermilion Sea. I put a knife in my belt and grasped the basket and the heavy sink stone and plunged to the bottom. There were sharks swimming around me in slow circles, but I gave no heed to them. I pried clump after clump of shells from the rocks, filling my basket. After I had been down for three or four minutes, I floated to the surface through the circling sharks, and climbed into the boat and pulled up the basket. Then I pried open the shells, one after the other. Nothing. At last there was only one shell left. Discouraged, I opened it and was about to toss it away when I saw before me a pearl larger than my fist that shone as if a fire burned inside...
    Right at that moment, just as I was about to clutch the pearl in my hand, the Sevillano stopped talking. Suddenly he stood up on the mound and pointed astern, along the path the moon was making on the sea.
    "Manta," he shouted, "Manta Diablo."
    I jumped to my feet. I could see nothing at first. Then the boat rose on a wave and I made out a silvery shape swimming half out of the water not more than a furlong away.
    Truthfully, I must say that for all its beauty the manta is a fearsome sight to those who sail our Vermilion Sea. There are small mantas, no larger when they are full grown than ten feet from one wing tip to the other. But there are some that measure twice that length and weigh most of three tons.
    Both kinds are shaped very much like a giant bat and they swim through the water with a regular upward and downward beat of their flippers. And both have a mouth so enormous that a man may easily put his head into it and on either side of this maw are large lobes like arms, which the manta pushes out and then draws in to capture its prey.
    Their prey surprisingly is not the shoals of fish that abound in our sea, but shrimp and crabs and such small things. Most of the mantas have a pilot fish that swims along beneath them. These fish swim in and out of their mouths, it is said, to clean up the pieces of food that catch in their plate-like teeth.
    And yet for all of his friendly ways, the manta is a fearsome beast. When aroused by some careless insult, it can break a man's neck with a flick of its long tail or lift one flipper and wreck the strongest boat.
    "Manta," the Sevillano shouted again. "El Manta Diablo!" His Indian helper quickly scrambled away and crouched down in the bow of the boat and began to mutter to himself.
    "No," said my father, "It is not the Diablo. Him I have seen and he is bigger by twice than this one."
    "Come where you can see better," said the Sevillano. "It is the Manta Diablo. I know him well."
    I was certain that he was trying to scare the Indian and my father was certain of it, too, for he lashed the tiller and climbed to where the Sevillano stood. He glanced astern for a moment and then went back to the tiller.
    "No," he said, loud enough for the Indian to hear, "It is not even the small sister of the Diablo."
    The Indian fell silent, but he was still frightened. And as I watched the manta swimming along behind us, its outstretched fins like vast silvery wings, I remembered that once I had also been frightened at the very sound of the name.
    At last the manta disappeared and near dawn we rounded El Magote, the lizard tongue of land that guards the harbor, and anchored our boats. As my father and I walked home in the moonlight, he said,
    "About the Sevillano, let me repeat to you. Treat him with courtesy. Listen to his boasts as if you believed them. For he is a very dangerous young man. Only last week I learned from a