Learning the Ropes 



helplessly into the soil in an effort to stop this damaging progress 

 and hold up the ship. His chain lips and his bobbin teeth were 

 also glued to the ground. But it was no good. The legs of taut 

 wire that held him to the vessel were too strong and too fast for 

 anything to break them. They dangled high above him, with him 

 prostrated, ludicrously abject, at the mercy of their slightest pull. 

 They had already driven his cap backwards until it lay on the nape 

 of his neck at the back, or upper, side ; barely touching the top 

 of his head in front. And yet the dunce was unworried. He did 

 not even bother to wake from his incessant sleep : for it was more 



Cnou/ndry^ofae. 



Codl-jZnoC 



OTTER TRAWL 



valuable to him than the alert vigils of such wakeful intellectuals 

 as the angler's rod and line. He went on allowing himself to be 

 pulled along the worst parts of the sea-bottom. Whatever fish or 

 stones or bits of an aeroplane or fragments of wrecked ships 

 happened in his way were promptly stuffed into the conical depths 

 that sat, in symbolic emptiness, on the back of his head. He was 

 far too sleepy and much too stupid to care whether they were 

 valuable or not. Only if they were big enough to beat him in a 

 fair tussle, break his nose and knock his magic cap from his head, 

 only then did he leave them alone ; and by the time he had given 

 up his sleep-walking fight he was usually so battered that he had 

 to be hauled aboard the ship where he would lie in a maudlin 

 heap, a broken puppet, until the men of the crew had stitched 



21 



