Then the weather changed for the worse. The easterner lashed up a big swell; sand whipped from the sea-bed made the water so opaque that nothing could be seen beneath the foamy crests.

Zurita could spend hours on the shore, watching one huge white-headed breaker after another pound the beach. Broken, they hissed their way through the sand, rolling over pebbles and oyster shells, onto his very feet.

“This can’t go on,” Zurita said to himself one day. “Something must be done about it. The creature’s got his den at the bottom of the sea and he won’t stir from it. Very well. So he who wants to catch him must pay him a visit. Plain as the nose on your face.” And turning to Baltasar who was making another trap for the “devil” he said:

“Go straightway to Buenos Aires and get two diving outfits with oxygen sets. Ordinary ones won’t do. The ‘devil’s’ sure to cut the breathing tubes. Besides we might have to make quite a trip underwater. And mind you don’t forget electric torches as well.”

“Thinking of giving the ‘devil’ a look-up?” asked Baltasar.

“In your company, old cock. Yes.”

Baltasar nodded and set off on his errand.

When he returned he showed Zurita besides two diving suits and torches two long elaborately-curved bronze knives.

“They don’t make their kind nowadays,” he said. “These’re ancient knives my forefathers used to slit open the bellies of your forefathers with — if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Zurita didn’t care for the history part of it but he liked the knives.

Early at dawn the next day, despite a choppy sea, Zurita and Baltasar got into their diving suits and went down. It cost them considerable effort to find a way through their own nets to the mouth of the cave. Complete darkness met them. They unsheathed their knives and switched on their torches. Small fish darted away, scared by the sudden glare, then came back, swarming, mosquito-like, in the two bluish beams.