We were sitting in the waist of his caique, over the remnants of his lamb and my ouzo. He was cleaning his revolver, a huge, ancient Webley. He smuggled whatever was profitable: hashish, antiquities. White slaves, for all I knew. I can't imagine what he was doing in Corfu. It never occurred to me to ask, though I was curious.

«So you don't believe in ghosts, eh?» Demetrios squinted through the barrel of the Webley, holding it aloft to catch the light of the westering sun. The Greeks all look as though they've been hired by a brilliant casting director. Demetrios was no exception. Bearded black curls under a black cap, white teeth, weather-darkened skin, a barrel chest, surprisingly beautiful eyes.

«No,» I said.

«Perhaps it is as well, so,» he said. «Perhaps your skepticism protects you. Who can say?» But I thought I heard a tincture of pity in his words, which annoyed me a little.

«And you? Do you believer?»

He laughed. «I am Greek.»

«Is there a better reason?» My annoyance caused me to speak in a slightly jeering tone, which I instantly regretted, for Demetrios scowled and snapped the Webley closed.

«Many reasons, yes,» he said darkly, giving me a suddenly unfriendly glance.

I was more than a little afraid; to cover my confusion, I refilled our glasses with the last of the ouzo. It's surprising how many of life's difficulties, small and large, can be managed in this fashion.

It worked yet again. In Greece, you must toast the man who gives you a drink. To do otherwise would be unforgiveably rude, and though Demetrios was a bloody-handed criminal, his manners were flawless. He raised his glass to me, and said, «Would you like to hear about the time I met the sea nymph?»

«Yes, please,» I said, with no trace of condescension now. Writers should never miss an opportunity to gather material, and so I never do, though it hasn't brought me any notable success.

«All right, then.» He settled back against the bulwark and put his revolver aside.

«A FEW YEARS ago it was,» he said. «Where I had been, what I had done. . these things don't matter. This much I tell you: blood still stained my boat's hull. She looked as rusty as your old tub — but it was the blood of men, not the blood of steel.»

I was somewhat offended by this criticism of Olympias, but he went on, already lost in vivid memory, beyond paying any attention to me.

«I was alone, the only survivor. Unfitting, unfitting; a capain who loses his men and keeps his own life must have great shame. Great shame. It was night, and the mistral screamed in my ears, a killing wind. It wrenched at my boat's bones, so that she was never the same again, and I had to give her to the shipbreakers.» He looked sad, perhaps more genuinely so than at the memory of his lost crew.

«My despair then was as deep as the sea. I think that's important; I think that she comes only to men who feel no hope; I think that she offers a kind of redemption, a final grace.»

«'She?»

«The ghost, the sea nymph. Or goddess. Or demon. Who knows? Still, this is my theory: she comes only to those who despair. Other men have seen her, men who claim not to have despaired, but men lie. Who knows what cankers can lie in the stranger's heart?

I was a mad man, for the space of a few hours. I cried; I screamed; I raved — I called out the names of my friends, as if they could hear, rotting in the ditch where the Turk dumped them.

She came when I was almost blind with tears and the salty knives of the spray, when the boat had become almost unmanageable, when we were a heartbeat away from broaching and rolling under.»

«I was as good as dead.»

«But in the blackness came a light, a soft golden light, as strange as sunlight at midnight. And the waves slowed. . and then grew still. The sea looked like one of those bad paintings the English tourists love to buy, The Tempest or The Shipwreck, with the waves rearing up like frozen taffy, soaked through with a green glow.»

He looked at me angrily, as if he expected me to be insultingly skeptical, but I wore my Observer face, a bland, attentive mask. «I thought I was mad for certain then; I thought perhaps we had already gone deep, and th is was some death dream, filling my brain in the crevice between living and dying. Maybe we were drifting downward through the quiet, all done.

„Then she came, as though she had stepped from a door in the sea. She stood there on one of those frozen waves, as close to me as I am to you.“

„You called her a goddess,“ I said. '„Was she beautiful?“

He gave me a look of cool amusement. „Tell me,“ he said. „Do you find our islands beautiful?“ And he made a sweeping, eloquent gesture that somehow indicated the summer sea, with its crop of lovely, sterile rock piles.

„Yes, of course,“ I answered.

„Then she was beautiful.“ He leaned toward me and dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper. „She looked at me with eyes so crazy that I gave up my pretext of madness, ashamed again. And then she spoke, in a voice like a lost child. Do you know what she said?“

I shook my head.

„She said, „Where is Alexander the Great? Where is he?“ She spoke with all the confusion of an old person who has forgotten his name, or a baby who has yet to learn his.“

„What did you do?“

His shoulders slumped slightly. „I discovered that my despair was not so deep as I had imagined. . so I answered as one who fears to die must. I said, Great Alexander lives and rules.“

A silence fell, and the sun sank into waves beyond the harbor mole.

Finally I spoke. „And if you had not answered so?“

„Then she would have given me the swift, painless death I thought I craved.“

„And then? What happened next?“

His face seemed oddly naked, for such a hard, secretive man. „She smiled at me, as sweetly as an infant. Then she went away, like a blown-out candle. The sea regained its strength, but only for a few minutes. The mistral eased, and I lived. . to tell you this tale.“

I know that I envied Demetrios his memory — for it was clear he believed his story, that it had for him a significance deeper than any I can imagine. I envy everyone who does not live the synthetic life I live, always removed from the intensity of the moment by my crippled writer's observance. Always I wonder how best to record what I see, what I feel, what I do — and neglect to see, to feel, to do.

My affair with the sea is a failure of a different sort. When I was very young, I read about the sea with the same starry-eyed fervor that other children read about cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. As a young man, I continued this long-distance romance; I lived in an inland city, far from any reality that might injure my illusions. I read all the great sailing chronicles: Voss, Slocum, Gerbault, the Smeetons, the Hiscocks, Robinson, Chichester, Barton, Allcard, Villiers. . the names roll off the tongue sweetly, and they all mean freedom, the excitement of faraway lands and people, self-reliance, adventure, the crunch of the bow wave, the spicy smell of the island. All good things, of course. I don't deny it, even now.

Anyway, tonight, plunging through the sea in a strengthening gale, I think particularly of Bernard Moitessier, that magnificent eccentric. The sea is Moitessier's religion, and his books are full of overwrought spiritual mania, though they are far more readable than the books of other French seamen, who seem for the most part to be so afflicted with hysterical Gallic chauvinism as to become caricatures of men, walking, talking tricolors.

However, Moitessier's devotion to the sea now seems to me utterly irrational. He sailed in the first single-handed, round-the-world, nonstop race. His steel ketch Joshua was the fastest boat in the race, and he was well ahead of the others, almost to the finish line, when he decided that all the months he had already spent alone at sea were not enough. He dipped back down in to the high southern latitudes and rounded th e Cape of Good Hope again, sailed through the Indian Ocean and in to the Pacific, and didn't drop anchor until he reached Tahiti.