第3章 The Old Man on the Sea[第1頁/共15頁]

I worked the deep wells for a week and did nothing,he thought.Today I'll work out where the schools of bonita and albacore are and maybe there will be a big one with them.

He could not see the green of the shore now but only the tops of the blue hills that showed white as though they were snow-capped and the clouds that looked like high snow mountains above them.The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water.The myriad flecks of the plankton were annulled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep.

He was rowing steadily and it was no effort for him since he kept well within his speed and the surface of the ocean was flat except for the occasional swirls of the current.He was letting the current do a third of the work and as it started to be light he saw he was already further out than he had hoped to be at this hour.

The boy had given him two fresh small tunas, or albacores,which hung on the two deepest lines like plummets and,on the others,he had a big blue runner and a yellow jack that had been used before;but they were in good condition still and had the excellent sardines to give them scent and attractiveness.Each line,as thick around as a big pencil,was looped onto a green-sapped stick so that any pull or touch on the bait would make the stick dip and each line had two forty-fathom coils which could be made fast to the other spare coils so that,if it were necessary,a fish could take out over three hundred fathoms of line.