Ferragut felt a recurrence of the same uneasiness that he had experienced one morning in the temple of Virgil.
"She's crazy!" he said to himself.
But in spite of her craziness, he greatly enjoyed the faint perfume that exhaled through the opening at her throat.
He no longer saw the silent world that, sparkling with color, was swimming or paddling behind the crystal. She was now the only creature who existed for him. And he listened to her voice as though it were distant music as it continued explaining briefly all the particulars about those stones that were really animals, about those globes that, on distending themselves, showed their organs and again hid themselves under a gelatinous succession of waves.
They were a sac, a pocket, an elastic mask, in whose interior existed only water or air. Between their armpits was their mouth, armed with long jaw bones, like a parrot's beak. When breathing, a crack of their skin would open and close alternately. From one of their sides came forth a tube in the form of a tunnel that swallowed equally the respirable water and drew it through both entrances into its branching cavity. Their multiple arms, fitted out with cupping glasses, functioned like high-pressure apparatus for grasping and holding prey, for paddling and for running.
The glassy eye of one of the monsters appearing and disappearing among its soft folds, stirred Freya's memories. She began speaking in a low tone as if to herself, without paying any attention to Ferragut who was perplexed at the incoherence of her words. The appearance of this octopus brought to her mind "the eye of the morning."
The sailor asked: "What is the 'eye of the morning'?"… And he again told himself that Freya was crazy when he learned that this was the name of a tame serpent, a reptile of checkered sides that she wore as necklace or bracelet over there in her home in the island of Java,—an island where groves exhaled an irresistible perfume, covered in the sunlight with trembling and monstrous flowers like animals, peopled at night with phosphorescent stars that leaped from tree to tree.
"I used to dance naked, with a transparent veil tied around my hips and another floating from my head … I would dance for hours and hours, just like a Brahman priestess before the image of the terrible Siva, and the 'eye of the morning' would follow my dances with elegant undulations … I believe in the divine Siva. Don't you know who Siva is?…"
Ferragut uttered an impatient aside to the gloomy god. What he wanted to know was the reason that had taken her to Java, the paradisiacal and mysterious island.
"My husband was a Dutch commandant," she said. "We were married in
Amsterdam and I followed him to Asia."