“Then up beside him starts his brothers Vicente
and Francisco, and they say they are going too.
Fray Ignatio stands on the church steps and cries
that there are idolaters there, and he will go to
tell them about our Lord Jesus Christ! Then the
alcalde gets up and says that the Sovereigns must
be obeyed, and that the Santa Maria and the
Pinta shall be made ready. Then the pilots Sancho
Ruiz and Pedro Nino and Bartolomeo Roldan push out
together and say they’ll go, and others follow,
seeing they’ll have to anyhow! So it went
that day and the next and the next, until now they’ve
pressed all they need. So I say, we are here,
brother, flopping in the net!”
“When does he sail?”
“Day after to-morrow, ’tis said.
But we who don’t live in Palos have our orders
to be there to-night. Aren’t you going
too, mate?”
I answered that I hadn’t thought of it, and
immediately, out of the whole, there rose and faced
me, “You have thought of it all the time!”
Sancho spoke. “If you’ll go with
us to Captain Martin Pinzon, he’ll enter you.
He’d like to get another strong man.”
I said, “I don’t know. I’ll
have to think of it. Here is Palos, and yonder
the headland with La Rabida.”
We entered the town. They would have had me go
with them wherever they must report themselves.
But I said that I could not then, and at the mouth
of their street managed to leave them. I passed
through Palos and beyond its western limit came again
to that house of the poorest where I had lodged six
months before and waking all night had heard the Tinto
flowing by like the life of a man. Long ago I
had had some training in medicine, and in mind’s
medicine, and three years past I had brought a young
working man living then in Marchena out of illness
and melancholy. His parents dwelled here in this
house by the Tinto and they gave me shelter.
RISING at dawn, I walked to the sea and along it until
I came at last to those dunes beneath which I had
stretched myself that day of grayness. Now it
was deep summer, blue and gold, and the air all balm
and caressing. The evening before I had seen
the three ships where they rode in river mouth.
They were caravels, and only the Santa Maria,
the largest, was fully decked. Small craft with
which to find India, over a road of a thousand leagues
—or no road, for road means that men have
toiled there and traveled there—no road,
but a wilderness plain, a water desert! The Arabians
say that Jinn and Afrits live in the desert away from
the caravans. If you go that way you meet fearful
things and never come forth again. The Santa
Maria, the Pinta and the Nina. The Santa
Maria could be Master Christopherus’s ship.
Bright point that was his banner could be made out
at the fore.
Palos waterside, in a red-filtered dusk, had been
a noisy place, but the noise did not ring genially.
I gathered that this small port was more largely in
the mood of Pedro and Fernando than in that of Sancho.
It looked frightened and it looked sullen and it looked
angry.
