“The amount of beating we took! Not everybody could stick it out. But it made a diver out of me-and the best in the district. And earned me a pretty penny too.”

Then the time had come when Baltasar had to give up the hazardous trade of a pearl-diver. He was no longer young and his left leg bore the terrible scars of a shark’s teeth and his side the marks of an anchor chain. He bought a small shop in Buenos Aires and started a trade in pearls, corals, shells and sea curios. But shore life bored him and once in a while he decided he needed a break and put out to sea with pearl-divers.

He was always sure of a welcome, for what he didn’t know about the Rio de la Plata and its pearling grounds was just not worth knowing. He was welcomed by all-he knew how to please divers and owners alike. The young divers he taught the tricks of the trade: how to hold their breath underwater and to fight off sharks, and-when in specially expansive mood-how to keep an extra fine pearl out of the boss’s sight.

The owners he helped to sort out pearls and evaluate the best.

Baltasar was sitting on an upturned barrel, a thick cigar between his fingers, his face picked out of the darkness by the light of a lantern fixed to the mast. It was an elongated face with a finely cut nose and large handsome eyes — the face of an Araucanian. He was drowsing. But even when his eyes were asleep, his ears were not. They registered sounds and gave him warning in the deepest of sleep. There was nothing but the divers’ sighing and murmuring to hear. The smell of rotting pearl oysters wafted from offshore. It was part of the job: the shell of a dead mollusc opens more easily. What would have been an overpowering stench for an unaccustomed nose was near perfume for Baltasar’s. For him, a sea tramp that he was it meant all the pleasures and dangers of life at sea.