Living Silver 



ment, a stroke that hoisted the ball clean into the middle of the 

 terracing. And, when Jan came to think of it, the huge bill of the 

 solen-goose was shaped like a cricket bat, the same kind of hefty 

 arch, the yellow colour against the white flannels. So too when 

 the gannet swooped, its wings clapped flat against its body and its 

 whole form suddenly atrophied into the shape of a spear, piercing 

 to the heart of the ocean, it was like the totality and unity of 

 movement that is the sign of a great athlete. Jan heard stories of 

 an old method of torture, common among pirates in the sixteenth 

 and seventeenth centuries. Where gannets were to be found they 

 would float a man on a plank of wood, his head only above the 

 water, a natatory version of the stocks, and the gannets would dive 

 directly at this bobbing head and split the skull when they reached 

 it ; and it often happened that the impact was so great that the bird 

 itself was trapped, its beak so deeply imbedded in the man's head 

 that it could not dislodge itself and was left there, fluttering help- 

 lessly in the corpse, a living flag for the continent of human cruelty. 

 Jan could believe it. The strike of a gannet was heavier than a 

 spear and almost as fast as an arrow. It would certainly penetrate 

 a man's skull. And he had seen enough of torture during the war 

 to know that some such punishment would appeal to some kinds 

 of men. 



Then on past even these mobile milestones the ship would move 

 away from land into the territory of the petrels. There was no 

 sea without them. Inshore, they appeared wherever rocky ledges 

 could be found to support their nests, and over the most isolated 

 ocean abyss there would be one species of petrel or two or four. 

 Sometimes they would be completely isolated, skimming silently 

 through the evening within an inch of the water. Or again there 

 would be crowds of them, twenty or thirty at a time; but they 

 were well-behaved, rather shy crowds, quite unlike the raucous 

 congregations of the gulls. The fulmar was by far the commonest, 

 a clumsy fat bird that was obviously bothered by blubber round 

 the waistline and couldn't be expected to fly. Or so Jan thought, 

 when he saw them tumbling about within five yards of his ship on 



ISO 



