one It was as if all the passengers hadn't heard it. The whistle blew once more, high-pitched and long, and then three more times in rapid succession, with such violence as to rupture the eardrums—too much aimlessness, no effect.Like the first siren, no one uttered a cry and took a step back; the passengers did not even move a muscle in their faces. Lines of fixed, parallel, tense and almost anxious gazes are passing—or trying to pass—the shrinking space that still stands between them and their targets, and the travelers are one by one. Next to each other, hold your head up in the same posture.The steamer let out a last puff of smoke soundlessly; it was so thick that it formed mushroom-shaped plumes on the men's heads, but it dissipated immediately.

Behind this puff of smoke, not far from the crowd, stood a passenger who was indifferent to the docking of the ship.The sound of the siren neither caught his attention nor dampened the excitement of the rest of the passengers.He stood like the others, his torso and limbs rigid; his eyes were on the ground. He often heard people tell him about it: twenty-five or thirty years ago, when he was a boy, he had a big cardboard box that used to hold shoes, and he Used to store the little strands of rope he collected.He didn't collect any little cords: he didn't want any of bad quality, any that were too worn, out of shape, or unthreaded, or too short and useless.

The little piece of rope in front of him must have met his needs.It was a fine little hemp rope, not faulty at all, carefully rolled into a figure-eight shape, with several tight turns at the knotted places.It must be very long: at least a meter, maybe even two.Someone must have rolled it up for future use, or put it in a collection, and then accidentally left it there. Mathias stooped to pick up the rope.When he straightened up, he found that a few steps away from him on the right, a little girl of seven or eight years old was staring at him seriously, looking at him quietly with her two big eyes.He smiled a little, but she didn't smile back; it was a few seconds before he saw her eyes turn to his chest, looking at the rope he held in his hand.He took a closer look at the little strand of rope and was not disappointed.It was a good catch indeed: the rope was shiny without being excessive, fine and neat, and obviously strong.

For an instant he seemed to recognize the little rope as something he himself had lost long ago.There must have been such an identical little rope in the past that once occupied a very important place in his heart.Is it the one hidden in the shoebox with the other little strings?His memory turned at once to a gloomy, rainy scene in which the little rope was of no importance. This little rope, he would just have to put it in his pocket.But as soon as he moved his arm, he stopped the movement, inspected his hand, and his arm was still hesitantly half-bent.He saw that his nails were too long, which he already knew.He also found that the nails were too sharp, which of course was not how he cut them.

The girl kept looking at him.But it was difficult to tell whether she was looking at him, at something behind him, or at nothing at all; her eyes seemed too wide to focus on an isolated object. , unless the object is very large.She must have been gazing out to sea. Mathias dropped his arms.The engine stopped suddenly.The vibration of the ship stopped instantly, and the noise that had been accompanying the ship since it sailed disappeared at the same time.All the passengers remained silent and motionless, standing shoulder to shoulder at the mouth of the crowded sidewalk from which they were about to disembark.They had been getting ready to disembark for a while, most with luggage in their hands.Everyone's faces were turned to the left, and their eyes were fixed on the face of the breakwater; there were about twenty people crowded together on the embankment, equally silent and motionless, looking at the passengers of the small steamer, looking for familiar faces.The expressions on the shore were the same as those on the boat: tense, almost anxious, stiff and eerily expressionless.

The ship moved forward, only the sound of sea water splitting and flowing to the sides of the ship was heard as the ship passed.A gray gull came from behind the boat, going a little faster than the boat; it passed slowly to the left in front of the breakwater, gliding motionless, as high as the bridge; it turned its head sideways, Peek down with one eye - a round, expressionless, feelingless eye. The electric bell rang once, and the machine started again.The ship turned an arc and slowly approached the pier.From the boat on the other side, you can see the scenery on the shore quickly unfolding: first, there is a fat lighthouse with black and white horizontal stripes, then the half-collapsed fortress blockhouse, the sluice lock of the water storage dock, and the rows of banks on the embankment. houses.

"Today, it's shipwreck time," said one.Another person corrects: "Almost on time." Maybe it's the same person speaking first and second. Mathias looked at his watch.The crossing time is exactly three hours.The electric bell rang again; a few seconds later, it rang again.A gray gull, exactly like the first one, was flying in the same direction, at the same slow speed, along the same horizontal trajectory; move. The ship no longer seemed to be heading in any direction.But there was the sound of the water being violently stirred by the propeller from the stern.The breakwater was already close to the ship, a few meters above the deck; it must be low tide now.The lower half of the pier where the ship was about to berth was exposed. This part of the bridge deck was relatively smooth, brown by water, and half covered with green labor.As long as you pay attention, you can see that this stone bank is approaching the ship unconsciously.

The slope bank made of stones is an inclined trapezoid, which is cut into an acute angle by two vertical planes: one plane is the straight embankment of the breakwater, and the end of the lifting wall is connected with the wharf; The deck of the inclined bridge on the breakwater.The inclined bridges are connected by a horizontal line on the breakwater, leading directly to the pier. Due to the effect of perspective, the pier appears further away than it really is.With itself as the center, a bunch of parallel lines protrude from both sides of the main line, clearly delineating a series of rectangular planes; under the light of the morning light, these rectangular planes are more clear and distinct.The horizontal plane and the straight plane are spaced apart from each other: a horizontal rectangular plane is the top of the enclosure wall on the embankment, which is built on the seaside side of the breakwater to protect the walkway on the embankment; the other straight one is the inner wall of the enclosure wall; another The first one is the walkway on the embankment; the other straight one is the unsheltered embankment that goes straight into the water surface of the harbor.The two straight planes were shrouded in darkness; the two horizontal planes were illuminated by the sun—that is, the top of the entire wall and most of the embankment walkways, except for the one on the walkway that was obscured by the projection of the wall. The Panhandle is shady.Logically, the reflections of all the buildings should be visible on the water in the harbor, and according to the order of parallel lines, the reflections of the straight dikes leading to the pier should also be visible on the water.

At the end of the breakwater, the construction becomes more complicated; the embankment is divided into two parts: the side near the wall is a path leading to the signal station, and the other part is the inclined bridge that plunges into the water.What is striking is the oblique rectangle of the inclined bridge seen from the side.The shadow of the embankment next to it cut the deck of the inclined bridge in half diagonally, clearly showing a dark triangle and a bright triangle. The rest of the plane is cloudy.Since the water in the harbor is not calm enough, it is impossible to see the reflection of the breakwater clearly.Likewise, the shadow of the breakwater constitutes only a long, poorly defined band on the water, constantly disturbed by the undulations of the water.The reflection of the wall on the walkway on the embankment is also gradually integrated with the wall of the wall.Also, the walks and fences were piled with nets drying in the sun, empty boxes, and tall wicker baskets--crabs for prawns and lobsters, hampers for oysters, pots for crabs.The people rushing to pick up the boat struggled to make a detour among these piles of debris.

The steamer was so low on the ebbing water that from the deck it was almost impossible to see anything but the straight walls of the breakwater.The two horizontal lines above and below the embankment form a perspective line, leading to the pier, and not far in front of the signal station, the embankment is cut off by the inclined bridge for mooring ships.The inclined bridge is inclined, and the lower half of the bridge deck is relatively smooth, brown by water, half covered with green moss.The distance between the ship and the inclined bridge was always so great that it seemed as if the ship had come to a complete standstill.

But as long as you observe carefully, you can see that the slope made of stones is approaching imperceptibly. The morning sun was a little hazy as usual, making it almost impossible to distinguish shadows—but the sun was still bright enough to divide the inclined bridge into two symmetrical halves, one darker and the other brighter, forming a sharp beak pointing straight at the inclined bridge. The lower end of the bridge, where the water rises up the slope and laps among the seaweed. The little steamer moved closer and closer to this triangular rocky slope emerging from the shadows; the motion of the steamer itself was sideways, and slowed more and more to a complete stop. The sea water is balanced in the concave corner of the inclined bridge.It rises and falls rhythmically, although there are slight changes in the amplitude and rhythm of the rise and fall; these changes can be seen with the naked eye, but they do not exceed ten centimeters and two or three seconds.At the lower end of the inclined bridge, large clusters of green seaweed sometimes disappear and sometimes emerge from the water with the ebb and flow of the sea.From time to time, a strong back wave disrupted the rhythmic shaking of the sea: two streams of water collided with each other, making a crisp knocking sound, and the incoming and outgoing spray splashed to the higher places on the embankment.The distance between such back waves is obviously fixed, although the intervals may be long or short. The steamer continued to move, so that her side was parallel to the side of the inclined bridge; so long as the steamer continued along the breakwater--or assuming it continued--the distance that still existed between the ship and the inclined bridge gradually diminished.Mathias was trying to find a sign.In the concave corner of the inclined bridge, the sea water rose and fell against the brown stone embankment.It was quite far from the coast here, and the bits and pieces of flotsam that had made the harbor so dirty were no longer visible on the water.The seaweed at the foot of the leaning bridge appeared now and then with the waves--fresh and shiny, as if fished from the bottom of the sea; they probably had never been exposed to the water for a long time.Each little wave comes up with a few loose pieces of seaweed, only to carry them back again so that their tangled ribbons of rhizomes lie limply on the wet stones, down the slope. lying in the direction.Now and then a stronger wave came higher, and as it receded left a small pool of shining water in the clefts of the stones, reflecting the sky, but dried up in a few seconds. Ma Rongyasi finally found a figure-eight symbol on the straight embankment behind the inclined bridge; this symbol was carved quite clearly and could be used as a mark.The position of the symbol is just opposite to him, in other words, four or five meters away is the place where the inclined bridge protrudes from the embankment, and the mark is on the left side of that place.A tidal wave came and drowned the mark.Trying not to move his eyes, he continued to stare at where the marker had been.Three seconds later, he saw the spot again, but he wasn't sure it was the mark he was looking at: there were other bumps in the stone that looked exactly - and no more - like him. The two connected small circles in memory. Something fell and floated on the water, thrown from the jetty—a ball of paper the same color as an ordinary cigarette case.In the concave corner of the inclined bridge, the water surged up, just hitting a relatively strong back wave rushing down from the inclined bridge.This periodic impact happened exactly where the blue paper ball was floating, and the paper ball was drowned by the impact; a few drops of water splashed on the steep embankment, and at the same time a violent wave flooded the place again. Clusters of seaweed continued to rush up, submerging the gaps between the stones. The waves receded immediately; the soft seaweed lay flat on the wet stones, lying side by side in clumps towards the slope.In that bright triangle, the water of the small pool reflects the sky. Before the pool of water was completely drained, the light on the surface of the water suddenly dimmed, as if a big bird flew over it.Mathias looked up.A grim gray seagull flew from behind, and at the same slow speed, flew along the horizontal ballistic line again; the two wings did not move, and they spread to both sides, forming two arcs, and the two wing tips were slightly drooping. , with head tilted to the right, watching the water with one round eye—either the water or the ship, or nothing. If the pool of water is covered by the projection of a seagull, it is impossible to judge from the positions of both of them. In that bright triangle, the gaps between the stones have dried.Waves came up at the lowest end of the inclined bridge, and the seaweed was washed up and overturned.At a distance of four or five meters to the left, Mathias saw the mark engraved in the shape of a figure 8. It is a horizontal figure 8: two circles are equal in size, slightly less than ten centimeters in diameter, and the two circles are tangent.In the center of the figure 8, there is a reddish tumor, covered with rust, as if a nail had been needled here before.In the past, there may have been an iron ring fastened by a screw nail, which was perpendicular to the dike wall. When the tide ebbed, the waves hit the iron ring and swung it to the left and right. Over time, two circles were left on both sides.This iron ring must have been used in those days to fasten the cables for mooring the boats in front of the docks. But the hoop is so low that it is almost always submerged in water—sometimes even several meters below the surface.Moreover, the diameter of the iron ring is not large, which is not commensurate with the size of the cables usually used, not even the cables of small fishing boats. It seems that they can only be used to tie some thicker small ropes.Mathias turned his gaze at a ninety-degree angle to the crowded passengers, then lowered his head to stare at the deck.He was often told this story: one rainy day, when his parents left him alone in the house, instead of doing the arithmetic homework due the next day, he spent the whole afternoon sitting in front of the back window, drawing a picture. A seagull perched on a stake in a garden fence. It was a rainy day—outwardly like any other rainy day.He sat facing the window, leaning against the heavy table embedded in the window sill, and took two thick books and padded them on the chair, making it easier to use a pen.The room was doubtless very dark, except perhaps for the tabletop which received enough extra light to make the waxed oak shine--but hardly any.A blank sheet of paper in an exercise book is the only really bright white spot, and maybe the child's face—and, more strictly speaking, his hands.He was sitting on top of two dictionaries—had probably been sitting there for hours.His drawing is almost complete. The room was very dark.It's raining outside.The fat seagull was perched motionless on the stake.He didn't see it coming.Nor did he know when it had inhabited there.Seagulls do not usually fly so close to the house, not even in the worst weather, although there is only three hundred meters of bare open land between the garden and the sea.The wilderness undulates to a notch in the coast, and to the left of the notch is the foot of the cliff.The garden is nothing more than a square wasteland, where potatoes are planted every year, and in order to prevent the sheep from breaking in, it is surrounded by wooden stakes and wires.The stakes were too bulky and unnecessary, showing that they were not originally intended for this purpose.The stake at the end of the central path was thicker than the rest, and the latticed door it supported was light.This cylindrical stake is the trunk of a pine tree, the bark of which has not been peeled clean. Its top is almost flat a meter and a half above the ground, which is the ideal habitat for seagulls.The seagull was out in profile, with its head in the direction of the fence, one eye looking at the sea and the other at the house. In the square garden between the fence and the house, there is no green grass to be seen at this time of year; there is a large carpet of dead vegetation on the ground, which has been soaked in rainwater for several days. Get out of this carpet. It was a very quiet day, with no wind at all.The continuous, non-violent drizzle, even though it broke the horizon, was not enough to blur the vision at close range.On the contrary, it may be said that the washed air does the nearest objects a favor: it adds a brilliance to them--this is especially true of light-coloured objects, such as sea-gulls.He not only drew the outline of the seagull's body, its folded gray wings, its only foot (which happened to cover the other one), its white head and its round eyes, but also its top and bottom images. The curve that converges, the rafters that bend down, the feathers on the tail and tip, even the scales that overlap each other on the entire leg. His drawings were on a perfectly smooth paper; he used a hard lead pencil, sharpened to a fine point.Although he drew very lightly so as not to leave marks on the following pages, the lines he drew were clear and jet-black oil, and he took great care to portray the seagulls faithfully, so that no rubbing was necessary.His head bent down to the painting, his forearms resting on the oak table, his legs dangling in the air, he began to feel tired from sitting too long in this uncomfortable seat.But he didn't want to move. Behind him, the whole room was empty and dark.The front rooms facing the street were darker than the others, except in the morning sun.The room in which he sat painting had only one window that let in light; it was a small square window set deep in the thick wall.The color of the wallpaper on the walls is very dark, and the furniture is tall and heavy, all made of dark wood, squeezed together one by one.There were at least three large wardrobes in the room, two of which stood side by side facing the door leading to the corridor.In the right corner of the bottom shelf of the third closet is the shoebox where he kept the little rope. The sea water in the concave corner of the inclined bridge rises and falls.The blue ball of paper, soon completely soaked, was already half-unfolded, swimming between two water waves a few centimeters below the water's surface.It can now be seen more clearly that it is an ordinary cigarette box.It rose and fell with the waves of the sea, but it was always on the same vertical line—neither approaching nor leaving the dike, neither moving to the left nor to the right.For Mathias, its location was easy to determine, because he looked over and happened to be in the same direction as the figure 8 mark carved on the stone. After he confirmed this, he found a second horizontal figure-eight shape at a place about one meter away from the mark at the same height—two circles side by side, with a reddish pain-like substance in the middle, very Like the remnant of a nail.So, it turns out that there should be two iron rings installed there.A wave hit, and the horizontal figure 8 near the inclined bridge disappeared immediately; then the other one was also submerged. The water receded to the straight embankment, and came back again, just in time to collide with a back wave rushing over the inclined bridge, stirring up a conical water column, and there was a slapping sound, and a few drops of water fell in all directions. , and everything goes back to how it was.Mathias looked for the cigarette box floating in the water with his eyes—it was no longer certain where it would float.He sat facing the window on the heavy table seat set into the recessed window. The windows were roughly square—a meter wide and about the same height; with four identical panes of glass, without curtains or windscreens.It is raining.Although the sea is very close, you can't see the sea.It was already broad daylight, and the light coming in from the window could only make a very weak reflection on the waxed tabletop.The rest of the room was very dark, for although it was a large room, it had only this one window, and because of the thickness of the walls, the window seemed to be sunken in a hollow.The square table is made of dark oak and is half recessed into the window sill.The exercise book on the table is parallel to the edge of the table, and the white page in the book constitutes the only white spot in the room-not counting the four larger rectangular squares above the table, that is, the four squares facing the fog. Windowpane in medium view. He sat in a heavy chair with two dictionaries under his buttocks.He is painting.He was drawing a fat gray-and-white gull, of the kind commonly called a white gull.Seagull is shown in profile, head to the right.In the picture, we can see the arc of the seagull's up and down, the feathers on the tail and the end of the tail, and even the overlapping scales on its legs.But the picture gives the impression that something is missing from the picture. Something was still missing from the painting, but it was hard to tell what it was.It's just that Mathias thinks there must be something wrong with the painting—or something missing.In his right hand now he held not a pencil but the bundle of rope he had just picked up from the deck of the steamer.He looked at the group of passengers in front of him, as if he wanted to see among them the owner of the lost property smiling and coming to ask him for the lost property.But no one paid any attention to him, nor to what he had picked up; they continued to turn their backs to him.A little later, the little girl also had an air of abandonment.She was standing against an iron post; the iron post supported a corner of the upper deck.She held her hands behind her back and stuck them to her waist; her legs were stiff and slightly separated, and her head was leaning on the pillar. Even in this slightly too rigid posture, she still maintained an elegant posture.Her face had the confident, thoughtful expression of tenderness that a good student with a rich imagination has.She had maintained the same posture since Mathias had noticed her; always gazing in the same direction--that direction had been the sea before, and now the rising, steep wall of the breakwater--away from them. very close. Mathias stuffed the little rope into his short pocket.He found that his right hand was empty, the nails were too long and too sharp.In order to give them something to hold, he carried in them the handle of the small case which he had always carried in his left hand.This is a stylish box with a reassuringly solid appearance: the material is a very tough "fiber" and the color is reddish brown, and the reinforced eight corners are darker - somewhere between jet black and coffee between.The handle is made of imitation leather, relatively soft material, and is fastened on the box with two metal rings. The lock, the two cross-links and the three big round nails outside the corners of each box seem to be It seems to be made of copper, like the buckle on the handle, but the heads of the four round nails at the bottom of the box have been slightly worn away, revealing their true colors: they turned out to be white metal with a thin layer of copper plating; The two studs were evidently of the same kind, and no doubt the rest of the metal of the chest. The inside of the case was lined with calico, which at first glance appeared to be of the same print as is usual for this type of linen, and even suitcases used by women or young girls were lined with this calico, which in fact was not. It's not like this: the pattern design on it is neither a bunch of flowers nor a small flower, but a doll one by one, just like the pattern on the curtains in a child's bedroom.But if you don't get very close, you can't tell, just the creamy white cloth is dotted with brightly colored spots - which can also be seen as bunches of flowers.Inside the box were a medium-sized memorandum, several instructions, and eighty-nine watches, each in a box of ten, embedded in nine rectangular pieces of cardboard, one of which had a place vacant for a watch. That morning, before boarding the ship, Mathias had sold his first watch.Although the watch was one of the cheaper ones—115 crowns a piece—which did not bring him much profit, he still tried to take this beginning as a good omen.This island is his hometown, and he knows many people here; even if his ability to recognize people is very poor, since he has collected some information the day before, at least he may as well pretend to remember the past; so he is here It is possible to sell most of his merchandise in a few hours.Although he would have to take this boat back again at four o'clock in the afternoon, it was still possible—in fact, it was not impossible—to sell all the goods he had brought with him in as little as half a day.What's more, he doesn't have to be limited by the goods in the box. He has also tried the method of accepting the order first and then sending the goods to collect payment. On the basis of the ninety watches he carried alone, the profit was considerable: ten 115 crowns worth 1,150 crowns; ten 130 crowns worth 1,000 crowns. Three hundred and three hundred, two thousand four hundred and fifty crowns in total; ten ones of one hundred and fifty crowns, four of which have special watch chains, and only five crowns are added each... To simplify the calculation, Mathias assumed a unified watch chain. Average price: two hundred crowns.He had calculated the exact price last week for another shipment of a similar variety, and two hundred crowns happened to be a very close figure.The total selling price he thus obtained was about eighteen thousand crowns.His gross profit was between twenty-six and thirty-eight percent, assuming an average of thirty percent—three eight twenty-four, one three for three, three for five and two—for gross The total amounted to just over five thousand crowns, in other words, practically equivalent to what one would usually get from a full week on land - and a good job at that.As for special expenses, there is only a one-way ferry fee of 60 crowns, which is actually nothing. Mathias had decided on this trip in the hope of securing this particularly profitable business, which he had not originally included in his travel sales plan.Otherwise, two three-hour voyages at sea in succession would be a nuisance and a waste of time, for the island was too small--hardly two thousand houses--and there was nothing else to attract him. : I have no friends from my youth, nor any past events worth remembering.The houses on the island were so much alike that he wasn't even sure which one he had spent most of his childhood in—he had been born in one of those houses, if he was not mistaken. of it. They told him that nothing had changed on the island for thirty years; but often a house had only to be put up next to the attic, or the front of the house decorated, to render a house completely unrecognizable. .Even if nothing has changed, and even the tiniest point remains the same as when he left, he still has to take into account his own memory, experience tells him that his memory is unreliable, often unclear and inaccurate .So it wasn't the actual renovations that he should worry about, nor even the vague impressions--although they were so numerous that he couldn't remember most of them--but the clear, practical ones. Inaccurate memories, which often replace the original foundations and masonry. In short, all the houses on the island are alike: in the front there is a low door between two small square windows, and the same in the back.A stone-paved corridor divided the house in half from the front door to the back door, and the four rooms in the house were divided into two symmetrical groups: one was the kitchen and a bedroom, the other was another bedroom and a bedroom. An empty room; this empty room may be used as a drawing room, or as a dining room for entertaining guests, or as a utility room.The kitchen and the front rooms face the street and face east, so the morning sun floods in.The two rooms at the back faced directly the cliff - a cliff overlooking a bare field of three hundred meters, slightly undulating, dropping on the right to a notch in the coast.The westerly wind and winter rain beat hard on the windows, and the shutters could only be opened in better weather.He once spent an entire afternoon there, sitting at a table built into the windowsill, sketching a seagull perched on a stake in the garden fence. He could find no markings recognizable, either by design or orientation of the house.As for the cliffs, they are exactly the same all around the island, even on the opposite coast of the mainland.The undulations of the land and the indentations of the shore were everywhere the same and difficult to discern, any more than pebbles on the beach, or gray gulls, were easy to tell from one another. Fortunately Mathias doesn't care about all this.He didn't want to look for the house on the edge of the moor, or the gull perched on a stake.On the eve of boarding the ship, he carefully inquired about the topography of the island and the conditions of the residents on the island, which he had long forgotten. It's understandable joy to see people again.The extra zeal his profession required of him, and the exercise of his rich imagination, would be more than compensated for by the five thousand crowns he expected to earn in profit.