This Rough Magic Read Free Page B

open sea … then curved in a long arc, heading back …
    I didn’t wait to see what it was. My ignorant mind, panic-stricken, screamed ‘
Sharks!
’ and I struck out madly for the rocks of the promontory.
    It was coming fast. Thirty yards off, the surface of the water bulged, swelled, and broke to the curved thrust of a huge, silver-black back. The water parted, and poured off its sides like liquid glass. There was a gasping puff of breath; I caught the glimpse of a dark bright eye, and a dorsal fin cusped like a crescent moon, then the creature submerged again, its wash lifting me a couple of yards forward towards my rock. I found a handhold, clung, and scrambled out, gasping, and thoroughly scared.
    It surely wasn’t a shark. Hundreds of adventure stories had told me that one knew a shark by the great triangular fin, and I had seen pictures of the terrible jaws and tiny, brutal eye. This creature had breathed air, and the eye had been big and dark, like a dog’s – like a seal’s, perhaps? But there were no seals in these warm waters, and besides, seals didn’t have dorsal fins. A porpoise, then? Too big …
    Then I had the answer, and with it a rush of relief and delight. This was the darling of the Aegean, ‘the lad who lives before the wind’, Apollo’s beloved, ‘desire of the sea’, the dolphin … the lovely names went rippling by with him, as I drew himself up on to the warm rock in the shade of the pines, clasped my knees, and settled down to watch.
    Here he came again, in a great curve, smooth and glistening, dark-backed and light-bellied, and as graceful as a racing yacht. This time he came right out, to lie on the surface watching me.
    He was large, as dolphins go, something over eight feet long. He lay rocking gently, with the powerful shoulders waiting curved for the plunge below, and the tail – crescent-shaped, and quite unlike a fish’s upright rudder – hugging the water flatly, holding the big body level. The dark-ringed eye watched me steadily, with what I could have sworn was a friendly and interested light. The smooth muzzle was curved into the perpetual dolphin-smile.
    Excitement and pleasure made me light-headed. ‘Oh, you darling!’ I said foolishly, and put out a hand, rather as one puts it out to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
    The dolphin, naturally, ignored it, but lay there placidly smiling, rocking a little closer, and watching me, entirely unafraid.
    So they were true, those stories … I knew of the legends, of course – ancient literature was studded with stories of dolphins who had befriended man; and while one couldn’t quite accept all the miraculous dolphinsof legend, there were also many more recent tales, sworn to with every kind of modern proof. There was the dolphin called Pelorus Jack, fifty years ago in New Zealand, who saw the ships through Cook Straight for twenty years; the Opononi dolphin of the fifties, who entertained the holiday-makers in the bay; the one more recently in Italy, who played with the children near the shore, attracting such large crowds that eventually a little group of business-men from a nearby resort, whose custom was being drawn away, lay in wait for the dolphin, and shot her dead as she came in to play. These, and others, gave the old legends rather more than the benefit of the doubt.
    And here, indeed, was the living proof. Here was I, Lucy Waring, being asked into the water for a game. The dolphin couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d been carrying a placard on that lovely moon’s-horn fin of his. He rocked himself, watching me, then half-turned, rolled, and came up again, nearer still …
    A stray breeze moved the pines, and I heard a bee go past my cheek, travelling like a bullet. The dolphin arched suddenly away in a deep dive. The sea sucked, swirled, and settled, rocking, back to emptiness.
    So that was that. With a disappointment so sharp that it felt like a bereavement, I turned my head to watch for him moving out to