第3章 The Old Man on the Sea[第3页/共12页]

If they don't travel too fast I will get into them,the old man thought,and he watched the school working the water white and the bird now dropping and dipping into the bait fish that were forced to the surface in their panic.

The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it.The water was a dark blue now,so dark that it was almost purple.As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now.He watched his lines to see them go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton because it meant fish.The strange light the sun made in the water,now that the sun was higher, meant good weather and so did the shape of the clouds over the land.But the bird was almost out of sight now and nothing showed on the surface of the water but some patches of yellow, sun-bleached Sargasso weed and the purple, formalized,iridescent ,gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war floating close beside the boat.It turned on its side and then righted itself.It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind it in the water.