第3章 The Old Man on the Sea[第1頁/共14頁]

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.

He did not remember when he had first started to talk aloud when he was by himself.He had sung when he was by himself in the old days and he had sung at night sometimes when he was alone steering on his watch in the smacks or in the turtle boats.He had probably started to talk aloud, when alone,when the boy had left.But he did not remember. When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary.They talked at night or when they were stormbound by bad weather.It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so and respected it.But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.