V.

Early on the morning of 10 June 1919, Mehemet's xebec set sail from Lascaris Wharf. Seated on its counter, like some obsolete nautical fixture, was Sidney Stencil. No one had come to see him off. Veronica Manganese had kept him only as long as she had to. His eyes kept dead astern.

But as the xebec was passing Fort St. Elmo or thereabouts, a shining Benz was observed to pull, up near the wharf and a black-liveried driver with a mutilated face to come to the harbor's edge and gaze out at the ship. After a moment he raised his hand; waved with a curiously sentimental, feminine motion of the wrist. He called something in English, which none of the observers understood. He was crying.

Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a waterspout appeared and lasted for fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling, and creaking, Astarte's throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena - whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun's spectrum – showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day.

THE END