SOURCE: "Hemingway's Ancient Mariner," in Ernest Hemingway: Critiques of Four Major Novels, edited by Carlos Baker, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962, pp. 156-72.

[In the following revision of an essay that first appeared in his influential 1956 work Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, Baker argues that Hemingway's particular understanding of the notion of "Wahrheit," or "Truth, "finds its greatest expression in The Old Man and the Sea; that Santiago is a Christ-like hero in touch with his true nature; and that the boy Manolin stands for the old man's lost youth. He goes on to comment on the movement of struggle, deprivation, and triumph in the novella.]

I. TRUTH AND POETRY

Goethe called his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit, Poetry and Truth. The reverse of Goethe's title, as a strategy of emphasis, admirably fits the collected works of Hemingway. From the first he has been dedicated as a writer to the rendering of Wahrheit, the precise and at least partly naturalistic presentation of things as they are and were. Yet under all his brilliant surfaces lies the controlling Dichtung, the symbolic underpainting which gives so remarkable a sense of depth and vitality to what otherwise might seem flat and two-dimensional.

The literary histories commonly credit Hemingway with being the "archpriest of naturalists." This is something less than a half-truth because it tends, as a designation, to ignore what is always taking place down under. That Hemingway the technician achieves effects simply impossible to his naturalistic forebears or current imitators has sometimes been noticed. The cause behind the majority of these effects, the deep inner Dichtung which runs through all of his work from The Sun Also Rises to The Old Man and The Sea, has not until very recently been fully recognized or systematically explored.

Hemingway's conception of the meaning of Wahrheit has steadily increased in breadth and depth over the past thirty years, attaining a kind of apogee in The Old Man and The Sea. His earliest conviction, to which he still adheres with one facet of his artistic consciousness, is well summed up in a remark of Albert Schweitzer's on the Naturphilosophie of Goethe: "Only that knowledge is true which adds nothing to nature, either by thought or imagination; and which recognizes as valid only what comes from a research that is free from prejudices and preconceptions, from a firm and pure determination to find the truth, from a meditation which goes deeply into the heart of nature."

As a partial summary of Hemingway's esthetic and moral position, Schweitzer's statement would have to be qualified only by adding human nature to the rest of nature. Hemingway has rarely been interested in the passing show of the non-human universe unless it could serve him in some way to gain further understanding of one of nature's more complex phenomena, the human mind. A meditation which goes deeply enough into the heart of nature, whether along the banks of the Big Two-Hearted River, on the high slopes of the Guadarramas, or among the vast waters of the Gulf Stream, will often end, as it does in Hemingway, with a meditation which goes deeply into the heart of man.

Its grasp of reality, its content of Wahrheit, is one guaranty of the survival power of Hemingway's art. A second guaranty, not less important, is the use and control of Dichtung. The Dichtung in Hemingway might be provisionally defined as the artist's grasp of the relationship between the temporal and the eternal. That grasp is expressed, in his fiction, through the considered use of imaginative symbols. Most of these come, by way of the artist's imagination, from the visible material universe—the mountains and the plains, the rivers and the trees, the weather and the seasons, the land and the sea. To such natural images Hemingway has attached the strong emotional power of his artistic apprehension of them. With Wordsworth, he knows that natural "objects derive their influence, not from properties inherent in them, not from what they are actually in themselves, but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by those objects. Thus the poetry . . . proceeds, whence it ought to do, from the soul of man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the external world." At the same time, Hemingway has generally managed to render with fidelity each of the natural objects or scenes precisely for what, in itself, it really is. As a result of their union with imagination and emotion, the various phenomena rise up as operative symbols in all his art. They become thereby not less real but more real than they are in themselves because of the double or triple significations with which they have been imbued.

Hemingway hinted strongly at this point when he said in 1942 that the writer's "standard of fidelity to the truth should be so high that his invention, out of his experience, should produce a truer account than anything factual can be." The invention here could be defined as that form of symbolic logic which is the artist's rough equivalent to the rational logic of the philosophers. Hemingway well knows, with Niebuhr, that "the relation of time and eternity" cannot be expressed in simple rational terms, but "only in symbolic terms." In some writers, the symbols are made over from antecedent literatures. In Hemingway they are usually, though not invariably, derived from the nexus of nature by means of the imaginative apprehension of human experience in natural environs. . . .

II. ANCIENT MARINER

The Old Man and The Sea earned its author the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for 1952, and was instrumental in winning him the Nobel Prize two years later. This short novel, in the words of Eliot, explores yet "another intensity" beyond those which can be located in Hemingway's previous fictions. Among the vast waters of the petrel and the porpoise, he seemed to many of his readers to have found the means of establishing "a further union" and "a deeper communion" between Wahrheit and Dichtung than he had achieved before.

The old man of the title is a fisherman by trade. He bears the fitting name of Santiago. Early one morning after months of bad fishing luck, he rows out alone into the mile-deep Gulf Stream where it swings in above the long island of Cuba. Towards noon of the first day out, he hooks a gigantic marlin. For two days and two nights, it pulls him in his boat far to the northward and the eastward, while he hangs for dear life onto the heavy line, a human towing bitt, fighting a battle of endurance against the power of the fish. On the third day out, again nearly at noon, he succeeds in bringing the marlin to the surface and killing it with his harpoon. Since it is too large to put aboard, he lashes it alongside his skiff and sets his small, patched sail for the long voyage home. Then, one by one, two by two, and later in rapacious ripping packs, the sharks move in on his trophy. By the time he has reached his native harbor, there is nothing left of it except the skeleton, the bony head, and the proud, sail-like tail.

Heads or tails, the old man loses the battle he has won. The winner takes nothing but the sense of having fought the fight to the limits of his strength, of having shown what a man can do when it is necessary. Like many of the rest of us, he is undefeated only because he has gone on trying. There is no need for the corrupting forces of moth and rust: thieves have broken through Santiago's lines of defence and made off with all there is. As for the mariner himself, he has reached a condition of absolute physical exhaustion as well as, on the moral plane, an absolute but not an abject humility. Both have cost him very little less than everything, which is of course the price one must always finally pay. Santiago's victory is the moral victory of having lasted without permanent impairment of his belief in the worth of what he has been doing.

In its main outlines, the story is simple in the extreme. Stripped, like the marlin, down to its bare bones, it looks not unlike the 200-word version which Hemingway first recorded in an article on the Gulf Stream during the spring of 1936.

An old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabanas hooked a great marlin that, on the heavy sashcord handline, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the old man was picked up by fishermen 60 miles to the eastward, the head and forward part of the marlin lashed alongside. What was left of the fish, less than half, weighed 800 pounds. The old man had stayed with him a day, a night, a day and another night while the fish swam deep and pulled the boat. When he had come up the old man had pulled the boat up on him and harpooned him. Lashed alongside the sharks had hit him and the old man had fought them out alone in the Gulf Stream in a skiff, clubbing them, stabbing at them, lunging at them with an oar until he was exhausted and the sharks had eaten all they could hold. He was crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat.

The difference between this anecdote and the finished work of art is of course immense. What makes the difference is the manner of the narration. Concentrating on the shape of the anecdote alone, the unsympathetic reader might argue that, except for its presumptive basis in historical fact, the story is nearly incredible. Or he might find too neat a balance in the narrative of a determined old man doing battle, first against an almost equally determined marlin, and then against a band of predators determined to make off with the catch. Such a reader might ask what the whole matter comes to. After the sharks' assault, the tangible loss precisely cancels out the tangible profit, leaving the reader neither in the red nor in the black, neither plus nor minus, but exactly at zero.

Yet the novel does not leave us that cold. The manner of its telling controls, one might say, the thermogenetic factor. The warmth of our sympathy can be traced in part to the way in which the portrait of Santiago himself has been drawn.

He was an old man, [the story begins,] who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat. The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown splotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

In a strictly objective view, the man Santiago is only a simple fisherman, like his namesake the son of Zebedee, mending his nets by the shore of Galilee. As Laurence Housman remarked of Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, another old man going about his lonely professional work on the undulating stretches of a British moorland, he is probably not in himself an exceptionally noble character. What has happened is that in both instances an individual has been singled out against such ancient backdrops of sea or moorland, and then staged so memorably, and in terms of a contest of endurance that seems itself a paradigm of human life, that he enters immediately, and perhaps not even tentatively, into the gallery of literary immortals.

Sean O'Faolain once commented on Hemingway's love for the spirit of gallantry, which has made him rove the world "in search of the flame of the spirit in men and beasts." Within the structure of the story, it may be said at once, the gallantry of Santiago is defined in part by the gallantry of his adversary. Aside from the essential valiance of the marlin's towing operation, which Santiago knows all too well because he is on one end of it, the adversary's courage and power are underscored in three stages. When he first sees one of his bobbing green sticks dip sharply, and feels the slight, nibbling, tentative yank on his line, Santiago knows that an event of some importance is in the offing. For this is the line set for a hundred fathoms, and six hundred feet down in the darkness a marlin is eating the sardines impaled on the point and shank of the hook.

After the gentle tugging comes the hard pull and heavy weight when the huge fish swims off with the bait in its mouth. As Santiago braces himself against the thwart and leans against the pull, weight against weight, the skiff moves slowly off towards the northwest. Four hours later the fish is still swimming steadily and the old man is still solidly braced with the line across his back. Like other Hemingway characters in not dissimilar positions, he is by now trying "not to think but only to endure." By sunset it is still the same. "I wish I could see him only once," thinks Santiago, "to know what I have against me." And again, near midnight: "We are joined together and have been since noon. And no one to help either of us." Gallantry against gallantry: but neither of them has seen his adversary.

The second stage comes with Santiago's first sight of the fish, in royal purple as befits a king, near noon of the second day. "The line rose slowly and steadily and then the surface of the ocean bulged ahead of the boat and the fish came out. He came out unendingly and water poured from his sides. He was bright in the sun and his head and back were dark purple and in the sun the stripes on his sides showed wide and a light lavender. His sword was as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier and he rose his full length from the water and then re-entered it, smoothly, like a diver and the old man saw the great scytheblade of his tail go under and the line commenced to race out." With awe, Santiago observes that the marlin is two feet longer than the skiff.

But Santiago knows, has known all along, that there are other standards of measurement than feet or inches on steel tape. That morning, at first light, while the boat still moved steadily, inexorable as the tick of time, he had spoken to the fish of his love and respect: "But I will kill you dead before this day ends." It is the huntsman's code—as in the pursuit of the kudu among the green hills of Africa—to admire the courage and the strength of that which one is out to kill. Breakfasting on raw bonito, the old man had reflected that he would like to pass some down to the fish his brother. Yet he knew he must kill the fish and keep strong to do it, and that by the same token the fish's strength must be worn down.

From his new knowledge of "what I have against me" Santiago becomes newly aware of what he has inside him that will enable him to win. It is this sense of proving worth against a worthy adversary which, as much as any other means at his disposal, sustains the old man in his time of stress. The first breaching, like the various slight changes in the slant of the line, suggest that by almost imperceptible degrees Santiago is gaining the advantage. The sight of the fish itself is a further spur, for here at last, expansed before his eyes, is the enormous quarry, the goal towards which he moves. But the chief way in which the power outside enlarges the power inside is through Santiago's resolute comparisons. "Let him think I am more man than I am, and I will be so." Or again: "I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures." If the old man wins, he has proved his own worth to himself once more, which is the proof men need in order to continue with the other and perpetual endurance contest into which birth precipitates them all.

Stage the third, the zenith of Santiago's struggle, which is also close to the nadir of his strength, comes on the morning of the third day. Now the marlin rises and slowly circles the boat while the old man sweats and strains to get him close enough for harpooning. "You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who." But he does care. Though his hands are pulped and he is nearly blind with fatigue, he tries one final time on the ninth circle. "He took all his pain and what was left of his strength and his long gone pride and he put it against the fish's agony and the fish came over onto his side and swam gently on his side, his bill almost touching the planking of the skiff." Now Santiago drives home the harpoon, the fish leaps and falls in death, and the first forty-eight hours are over.

In this movement of the story, as in the phase of the sharks that is yet to come, Santiago bears a significant relationship to other characters in the Hemingway canon. For many years prior to the composition of The Old Man and The Sea, Hemingway had interested himself in the proposition that there must be a resemblance, in the nature of things, between Jesus Christ in his human aspect as the Son of Man and those countless and often nameless thousands in the history of Christendom who belong to the category of "good men," and may therefore be seen as disciples of Our Lord, whatever the professed degree of their Christian commitment. The young priest, friend to Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms, is an early example; the old Spaniard Anselmo, friend to Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a more recent instance.

Santiago shows, in his own right, certain qualities of mind and heart which are clearly associated with the character and personality of Jesus Christ in the Gospel stories. There is the essential gallantry, a kind of militance. There is the staying-power which helps him in his determination to last to the end of whatever is to come. There is the ability to ignore physical pain while concentrating on the larger object which is to be achieved. "Etched on the reader's mind," writes a recent commentator, "is the image of the old man as he settled against the wood of the bow . . . and took his suffering as it came, telling himself, 'Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing.'" The suffering, the gentleness, and the wood, it is noted, "blend magically into an image of Christ on the cross." So it may be. As the old man moves into and through the next phase of his operation, the force of the crucifixion idea is gradually intensified.

Besides the qualities already enumerated, three others deserve particular notice in this connection: Santiago's humility, his natural piety, and his compassion. His humility is of that well-tested kind which can co-exist with pride. "He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride." When his own disciple, the boy Manolo, calls him, as Jesus has many times been called, "the best fisherman," Santiago answers in character:

"No. I know others better."

"Qué va," the boy said. "There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you."

"Thank you. You make me happy. I hope no fish will come along so great that he will prove us wrong."

The great fish that Santiago is soon to be engaged with will not, of course, prove Manolo to be in error. Quite the contrary. But when the old man finally outfights his marlin, we are told that his pride has been gone for a long time—forced out through the openings in the sieve of his suffering. The humility remains as the natural companion of his immense fatigue.

However jocular he may be about his religion, however much, in his humility, he may deny himself the guerdon, Santiago is evidently a pious old man. The piety appears unobtrusively in his constant, accepted, and unquestioning awareness of supernal power, at once outside and potentially inside his personal struggle. His allusions to Christ, to God, and to the Virgin are never oaths, as one might expect to find them in the mouth of a professional fisherman out of Havana. They are rather simple petitions to a presumably available source of strength of which he feels the need. "Christ knows he can't have gone," he exclaims in the parlous interval before the fish is actually hooked. "God let him jump," he prays, soon after dawn on the second day, for if God will permit or urge the great fish to leap high and twist, "he'll fill the sacs along his backbone with air and then he cannot go deep to die." "God help me to have the cramp go," says Santiago once again, when his left hand has become temporarily useless. But he does not depend solely on God's intercession: he massages the hand, he exposes it to the sun, he eats raw tuna in the expectation of benefit. If he has to compel the hand to open, he will. He prefers to "let it open by itself and come back of its own accord." But like sun, diet, and massage, prayer may help.

One finds also the more formal prayers. "I am not religious," says the old man untruly. "But I will say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys that I should catch this fish, and I promise to make a pilgrimage to the Virgen de Cobre if I catch him. That is a promise." As he begins to say his prayers, he discovers that he is so fatigued that he cannot always remember the word-sequences. Concluding that "Hail Marys are easier to say than Our Fathers," he tries one of the former and completes it, appending a further petition to the Blessed Virgin: "Pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is." Then, "with his prayers said, and feeling much better, but suffering exactly as much and perhaps a little more," he leans once more against the wood of the bow of his boat, mechanically working the fingers of his recently uncramped left hand. Much later, at the battle's climax, prayer enters his mind again. This time he raises the ante of promised prayers tenfold. "Now that I have him coming so beautifully, God help me to endure. I'll say a hundred Our Fathers and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now."

According to the ancient mariner of Coleridge, "he prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small." Along with humility, pride, and piety, Hemingway's ancient mariner is richly endowed with the quality of compassion. Of course he is not so foolish as to love all creatures equally. He dislikes, for example, the Portuguese men-of-war, whose beautiful "purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous" bubbles serve to buoy up the "long deadly purple filaments" which trail a yard behind them in the water and contain a poison which will paralyze unwary passersby. "Agua mala," says the old man to one of them. "You whore." Outwardly handsome, inwardly lethal, these beings strike him as the falsest things in the sea. It is his landside sport to "walk on them on the beach after a storm and hear them pop when he stepped on them with the horny soles of his feet." He has another set of enemies in the waters of the tropic sea. For he genuinely hates, and gladly destroys, the voracious sharks which attack and disfigure the marlin he has fought so long to win.

But his hatred is more than overbalanced by his simple love and compassion for all those creatures which swim or blindly soar. His principal friends on the ocean are the flying fish. He loves the green turtles and the hawksbills "with their elegance and speed," and though the logger-heads are huge and stupid, happily gobbling the Portuguese men-of-war with shut eyes and an air of heavy contentment, the contempt he feels for them is friendly. Porpoises delight him. "They are good," he says. "They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish." Several times in the course of his struggle he feels pity for the great marlin he has hooked—so "wonderful and strange" in his power to pull the skiff for so many hours, without sustenance, without respite, and with the pain of the hook in his flesh.

For the lesser birds his compassion is greatest, "especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding." The birds, he reflects, "have a harder life than we do except for the robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea."

His grateful sense of brotherhood with the creatures of the water and the air is, though full of love, essentially realistic and unsentimental. His implied or overt comparisons between subhuman and human brothers often open out, therefore, in as many directions as our imaginations wish to follow. A memorable example of this tendency appears in the incident of the land-bird, a warbler, which comes to rest on Santiago's skiff far out at sea.

A small bird came toward the skiff from the north. He was a warbler and flying very low over the water. The old man could see that he was very tired. The bird made the stern of the boat and rested there. Then he flew around the old man's head and rested on the line where he was more comfortable.

"How old are you?" the old man asked the bird. "Is this your first trip?"

The bird looked at him when he spoke. He was too tired even to examine the line and he teetered on it as his delicate feet gripped it fast.

"It's steady," the old man told him. "It's too steady. You shouldn't be that tired after a windless night. What are birds coming to?"

The hawks, he thought, that come out to sea to meet them. But he said nothing of this to the bird who could not understand him anyway and who would learn about the hawks soon enough.

"Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish."

This gently humorous monologue with its serious undertone of implied commentary on the human condition encourages the old man at this stage of his struggle. "Stay at my house if you like, bird," he said. "I am sorry I cannot hoist the sail and take you in with the small breeze that is rising. But I am with a friend." It is just at this point that the marlin gives a sudden lurch, the tautened line jerks, and the warbler flies away—towards whatever it is that awaits him on the long voyage home. Hawks or sharks, the predators wait, whether for tired young birds or tired old men.

Coleridge's ancient mariner comes, one might say, to share with Hemingway's this quality of compassion. A major difference between the novel and the poem is that Santiago alreadys owns compassion as by a natural gift; Coleridge's wanderer must achieve it through an ordeal. The act of shooting the albatross is in no way comparable to Santiago's killing of the marlin. One is meaningless and wanton; the other is professional and necessary. In Coleridge's poem, the broken circuit, the failure of spiritual electricity, leads immediately and sequentially to the ordeal, which is by hunger and thirst, cold and heat (like Santiago's), but is chiefly an ordeal by loneliness. Precisely balancing the horror of aloneness is the sense of brotherhood and at-one-ment which floods in upon the mariner when by a simple act of contrition he subconsciously blesses the watersnakes as they coil and swim in the phosphorescent ocean of Coleridge's imagination. The central theme of the poem resides exactly here: in that projected sense of a breakable but reparable solidarity between us and the other life that is around us on the earth, or in the waters beneath the earth.

To their hazard or their sorrow, Hemingway's heroes sometimes lose touch with nature. Jake Barnes in the Parisian café-circle and Fred Henry in the toils of war on the plains of Italy are two memorable examples. Their health ordinarily returns when they re-ally themselves with the natural laws and forces which wait unchanged for the errants' return. But Santiago is never out of touch. The line which ties him to the fish is like a charged wire which guarantees that the circuit will remain unbroken. Saint Francis with his animals and birds is not more closely allied to God's creation than this Santiago with his birds and his fish. These are his brothers, in all the sizes. "I am with a friend," he cheerfully tells the warbler. When the bird has departed, he is momentarily smitten by a sense of his aloneness on the vast waters. Then he looks ahead of his skiff to see "a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again." Once more he is convinced of what he has only momentarily forgotten: no man is ever alone on the sea. This sense of solidarity with the visible universe and the natural creation is another of the factors which help to sustain him through his own long ordeal.

III. THE BOY AND THE LIONS

In the light of the experiment in symbolic representation which Hemingway tried in Across the River and Into The Trees, the meaning of the Santiago-Manolo relationship becomes clear. Renata stands, in one of her aspects, for Colonel Cantwell's lost youth. Manolo fulfills a similar purpose, and with greater success in that we do not have to overcome the doubt raised by the difference of sexes. To say this is not, of course, to discount Manolo's dramatic function, which is to heighten our sympathy for the old fisherman. At the beginning and end of the story, we see Santiago through the boy's sympathetic eyes. From the charitable and again fittingly named Martin, owner of the Terrace, Manolo brings Santiago a last supper of black beans, rice, fried bananas, stew, and two bottles of beer. On the morning of the expedition, Manolo arranges for the simple breakfast of coffee in condensed milk cans, and procures the fish and sardines which Santiago will use for baits. He helps launch the skiff, and sees Santiago off in the dark with a wish for luck on this eighty-fifth day. At the end of the story, after the ordeal, Manolo brings coffee and food for the old man's waking, and ointment for his injured hands, commiserating on the loss, planning for a future when they will work side by side again. The love of Manolo for Santiago is that of a disciple for a master in the arts of fishing; it is also the love of a son for an adopted father.

But from Santiago's point of view, the relationship runs deeper. He has known the boy for years, from the period of childhood up to this later time when Manolo, strong and lucky, stands confidently on the edge of young manhood. Like many other aging men, Santiago finds something reassuring about the overlay of the past upon the present. Through the agency of Manolo he is able to recapture in his imagination, and therefore to a certain degree in fact, the same strength and confidence which distinguished his own young manhood as a fisherman and earned him the title of El Campeón.

During his ordeal, the two phrases, "I wish the boy was here," and "I wish I had the boy," play across Santiago's mind nine separate times. In each instance, he means exactly what he says: the presence of the boy would be a help in a time of crisis. But he is also invoking by means of these phrases the strength and courage of his youth. Soon after he has hooked his marlin and knows that he must hang onto the line for some time, Santiago says, "I wish I had the boy." Immediately his resolution tightens. During the first night he says it again, reflecting that "no one should be alone in their old age," although in this case it is unavoidable. As if the mere mention of the boy were a kind of talisman, he then resolves to eat the tuna he has caught "in order to keep strong." Later the same night, he says aloud, "I wish the boy was here," and promptly settles himself against the planks of the bow for another period of endurance. Near dawn he says again, "I wish I had the boy." Then he upbraids himself for wishful thinking. "But you haven't got the boy, he thought. You have only yourself and you had better work back to the last line now . . . and cut it away and hook up the two reserve coils." So he does exactly that.

As he summons courage to eat the raw tuna for his breakfast on the second day, he links the boy and salt in what amounts to an image with double meanings: "I wish the boy were here and that I had some salt." Then he proves to himself that he has enough of both in their metaphorical meaning to eat the tuna and renew his waning strength. While he wills to unknot the cramp, he thinks that "if the boy was here" a little massaging would loosen the forearm and maybe help the still useless gnarled claw of the hand. Yet when, soon afterwards, his great marlin breaches, Santiago summons the strength he needs to play his fish.

On the next breaching it is the same. While the marlin leaps again and again in an attempt to throw the hook, and while the old man and his line are both strained and stretched to the breaking-point, he triples the refrain: "If the boy was here he would wet the coils of line . . . Yes. If the boy were here. If the boy were here." Once more the effect of the invocation is nearly magical as if, by means of it, some of the strength of youth flowed in to sustain the limited powers of age. Always, we notice, just after he has said the words, Santiago manages to reach down into the well of his courage for one more dipperful. Then he goes on.

From this point onwards, having served its purpose, the refrain vanishes. It is not until the return voyage, while the old man reflects Job-like upon the problem of the connection between sin and suffering and while the sharks collect their squadrons in the dark waters, that the boy's image returns again. "Everything kills everything else in some way," he tells himself. "Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive." Then he corrects the misapprehensions that can come from false philosophizing. "The boy keeps me alive . . . . I must not deceive myself too much." It is good, at this point, that the old man has the thought of the boy to keep him alive. The sharks wait, and a very bad time is just ahead.

In the night in which he is preparing for betrayal by the avaricious sharks, Santiago has recourse to another sustaining image—a pride of lions he has seen at play on the beaches of Africa when he was a young man like Manolo. Hemingway early establishes a clear symbolic connection between the boy and the lions. "When I was your age," Santiago says, "I was before the mast on a square rigged ship that ran to Africa and I have seen lions on the beaches in the evening." Manolo's answer—"I know. You told me."—indicates not only that the reminiscence has arisen before in their conversations, but also that the incident of the lions is a pleasant obsession in Santiago's mind. "There is for every man," writes the poet Yeats, "some one scene, some one adventure, some one picture that is the image of his secret life, and this one image, if he would but brood over it his life long, would lead his soul." Santiago finds such an image in the lions of his youthful experience.

The night before his ordeal, after the boy has left him to sleep, the old man dreams of the lions.

He was asleep in a short time and he dreamed of Africa when he was a boy and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes, and the high capes and the great brown mountains. He lived along that coast now every night and in his dreams he heard the surf roar and saw the native boats come riding through it. He smelled the tar and oakum of the deck as he slept and he smelled the smell of Africa that the land breeze brought at morning. Usually when he smelled the land breeze he woke up and dressed to go to wake the boy. But tonight the smell of the land breeze came very early and he knew it was too early in his dream and went on dreaming to see the white peaks of the Islands rising from the sea and then he dreamed of the different harbours and roadsteads of the Canary Islands.

Santiago "no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy."

Early in the afternoon of his second day out, having said his prayers and strengthened his resolution by this means, Santiago thinks again about his lions. The marlin is pulling steadily. "I wish he'd sleep and I could sleep and dream about the lions," thinks Santiago. "Why are the lions the main thing that is left? Don't think, old man . . . Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing. He is working. Work as little as you can." Much later that day, "cramping himself against the line with all his body," and "putting all his weight onto his right hand," the old man manages to sleep. Presently then, he begins to dream "of the long yellow beach." In the dream, we are told, "he saw the first of the lions come down onto it in the early dark and then the other lions came and he rested his chin on the wood of the bows where the ship lay anchored with the evening offshore breeze and he waited to see if there would be more lions and he was happy." In his old age and the time of his suffering, Santiago is sustained by the memory of his youth and the strength of his youth. Living so, in the past, he is happy. Luckily for him, he has also the thought of the strength of the boy Manolo, a young lion of just the age Santiago was when he first sailed to Africa. These together enable him to go on.

They help in a very notable way. For the boy and the lions are related to one of the fundamental psychological laws of Santiago's—and indeed of human—nature: the constant wavelike operation of bracing and relaxation. The boy braces, the lions relax, as in the systolic-diastolic movement of the human heart. It is related, as a phenomenon, to the alternation of sleep and waking through the whole range of physical nature. But it is also a law which operates on the level of mentality, and its effects can be seen in our reactions to works of literature like this story of the acquisition and the loss of the great marlin. In its maritime sections, at any rate, the basic rhythms of the novel resemble those of the groundswell of the sea. Again and again as the action unfolds, the reader may find that he is gradually brought up to a degree of quiet tension just barely endurable, as in the ascent by a small craft of a slow enormous wave. When he has reached the presumptive peak of his resistance, the crest passes and he suddenly relaxes towards a trough of rest. The rhythm of the story appears to be built on such a stress-yield, brace-relax alternation. The impression is furthered by the constant tension which Santiago and his fish maintain on the line which joins them. Again and again one finds the old man telling himself that he has stretched the cord to a tension just short of the breaking-point. Then and only then, the stress relaxes, and the involved reader relaxes with it. This prolonged tug-of-war involves not only the fisherman and his fish but also the reader and his own emotions.

The planned contiguity of the old man with the boy and the lions pulls the story of Santiago, in one of its meanings, in the direction of a parable of youth and age. There is a distinct possibility that Hemingway, who read the whole of Conrad during the days of his writing apprenticeship in Paris and Toronto, has recollected if not the details at least the central strategy of Conrad's long short story, "Youth." For that story is brilliantly organized in terms of the contrast of age and youth. The ill-fated voyage of the barque Judea, out of London, bound for Bangkok, shows young Marlow, with all the illusions and prowess of his youth, side by side with old Captain Beard, the ship's master and a brave man. "He was sixty, if a day," says Marlow of the captain. "And he had blue eyes in that old face of his, which were amazingly like a boy's, with that candid expression some quite common men preserve to the end of their days by a rare internal gift of simplicity of heart and rectitude of soul." Again Marlow says, as the fated ship beats her way through a sea of trouble, that Beard was "immense in the singleness of his idea." It may of course be a coincidence that these are qualities which Santiago shares. Two "quite common men" rise to the level of the heroic through simplicity of heart, rectitude of soul, and that immensity in the singleness of their respective ideas which enables each to stick out the voyage to the end. "Do or die," the motto which adorns in flaking gilt the stern-timbers of the old Judea, might with equal justice be carved into the weather-beaten wood of Santiago's skiff.

Conrad's story depends for its effects not only upon the contrast of young Marlow and old Beard but also, since the story is told some twenty years after the event, upon the contrast of the aging Marlow and his own remembrance of his youthful self. The aging Santiago happily recalls the lions on the shore of Africa. The aging Marlow recollects, with mingled happiness and sorrow, that time, far back now, when the small boats from the wrecked Judea at last pulled into a port on the Javanese coast. "I remember my youth," says Marlow, "and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires." This feeling, which Hazlitt has well described as "the feeling of immortality in youth," is closely associated in Marlow's mind with the East—"the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of the brown nations." For me, he tells his auditors, "all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea—and I was young—and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that is left of it! Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour—of youth!"

For Santiago it is not the coast of Java but that of Africa, not the faces of the brown men crowding the jetty but the playing lions, which carry the associations of youth, strength, and even immortality. "This is all that is left of it," cries Marlow of his youthful vision. "Why are the lions the main thing that is left?" says Hemingway's old man in the midst of his ordeal. For both of them, in Marlow's words, it is "the time to remember." But Santiago, luckily, is able to do more with his vision than remember it. He puts it to work once more in the great trial of his old age. "I told the boy I was a strange old man," he says. "Now is when I must prove it." And the author adds: "The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it." But if he does not, at these times, think about the past to brood upon it, he periodically calls back what it means to him through the double vision of the boy and the lions. If he can prove his mettle for the thousand-and-first time, there is no reason why he cannot prove it again and again, as long as his vision lasts.

Of how many events in the course of human life may this not be said? It is Marlow once more who reminds us of the way in which one account of one man on one journey can extend outwards in our imaginations until it easily becomes a paradigm of the course of men's lives. "You fellows know," says Marlow, beginning his account of the Judea, "there are those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something—and you can't. Not from any fault of yours." If it is so with the Judea, out of London bound for Bangkok, do or die, it is so likewise with Santiago of Havana, bound for home, with the sharks just beginning to nose the blood of his great fish. Do or die. In such works as this we all put to sea, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows. Santiago makes his voyage on what used to be known as the Spanish Main. But it is also, we are persuaded, that more extensive main or mainstream where we all drift or sail, with or against the wind, in fair weather or foul, with our prize catches and our predatory sharks, and each of us, perhaps, like the ancient mariner of Coleridge, with some kind of albatross hanging around his neck.

IV. THE CAUTERY OF CIRCUMSTANCE

It is provided in the essence of things, writes the stoical philosopher, that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary. With such a sentiment Santiago would no doubt agree. For the second major movement of the novel confronts him with a struggle which, though shorter in duration, is at least as intense as the fight with the marlin just brought to a successful conclusion. This comes, too, at a time when he has used all his strength, and as much more as he could summon, to attain his object; when his hands are stiffening round the edges of his wounds, when the muscles of his back and shoulders are knotted with pain, and when his fatigue runs bone-deep.

Having secured his catch alongside, stepped his mast, rigged his boom, and moved off with the beneficent tradewind towards the southwest and home, Santiago enjoys (though not to the full because of his tiredness) that brief respite which follows work well done. Side by side like brothers the old man and the marlin move through the sea. Up to now, they have been, as Santiago believes, friendly and mutually respectful adversaries. Now they join together in league against the common enemy. "If sharks come," the old man has long ago reflected, "God pity him and me." It is a full hour before the first shark arrives.

With its arrival begins a tragedy of deprivation as piteous as that which King Lear undergoes at the hands of his sharkhearted daughters. Lear's hundred knights, the only remaining sign of his power and the badge of his kingly dignity, are taken from him in batches of twenty-five. A series of forty-pound rippings and tearings are now gradually to reduce Santiago's eighteen-foot, fifteen-hundred-pound marlin to the skeleton he brings finally to shore.

The first of the sharks is a Mako. "Everything about him was beautiful except his jaws . . . Inside the closed double lip . . . all of his eight rows of teeth were slanted inwards. They were not the ordinary pyramid-shaped teeth of most sharks. They were shaped like a man's fingers when they are crisped like claws. They were nearly as long as the fingers of the old man and they had razor sharp cutting edges on both sides." Santiago, standing poised with his harpoon, hears the clicking chop of these great jaws and the rending and tearing of the marlin's flesh just before he drives the point of his weapon "with resolution and complete malignancy" into the Mako's brain. Death is immediate but the loss is heavy. When the shark sinks, he takes with him forty pounds of the marlin, the harpoon, and all the rope. The marlin's blood will attract other sharks. But worse than this is the mutilation of the long-fought-for prize. Santiago "did not like to look at the fish anymore since he had been mutilated. When the fish had been hit it was as though he himself were hit." The process of crucifixion is now intensified.

At first sight of the second shark, Santiago utters the single word Ay. "There is no translation for this word," writes Hemingway, "and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood." For some hours now, of course, Santiago's hands have shown the fisherman's equivalent of the stigmata of a saint. Both have been cut in the "working part," which is the palm, by the unpredictable lurchings of his quarry. The right hand is cut first, at a time when the old man's attention is momentarily diverted by the warbler's visit. Another of the marlin's sudden accelerations awakens him from the only sleep he permits himself. The line is burning out through his already wounded right hand. When he brings up his left for use as a brake, it takes all the strain and cuts deep.

The old man's involuntary epithet, and Hemingway's explanation of it, is fully in line with what has gone before. Throughout the ordeal, Santiago has been as conscious of his hands as any crucified man might be. He speaks to them as to fellow-sufferers, wills them to do the work they must do, and makes due allowances for them as if they were, what he once calls them, "my brothers." He also carefully distinguishes between them in a manner which should not be lost on any student of paintings of the Crucifixion. The right hand is the good one, dextrous and trustworthy. The left hand, the hand sinister, has "always been a traitor."

Our Lord might well have entertained a similar reflection about the man who was crucified on his own left. The allusions to Santiago's hands are so carefully stylized that such a statement becomes possible. On the naturalistic plane, of course, the meaning of the distinction between the two hands is apparent to all normally right-handed persons; the left is never as good as the right. But on the plane of what we have called Dichtung, and in the light of the tradition of Christian art as it pertains to the Crucifixion, it is clear that a moral judgment is to be inferred. Of the two who were crucified with Jesus Christ, the one on the left failed Him, insulting and upbraiding him. But the man crucified on Jesus' right hand rebuked his companion, and put his fortunes into the hands of the Savior. In paintings of the Crucifixion, as Hemingway is well aware, the distinction between the two malefactors is always carefully maintained. It even carries over into pictures of the Last Judgment, where those who are to be saved are ranged on the right hand of the Savior, while the damned stand dejectedly on the left.

Santiago vanquishes the second and third sharks, hateful, bad smelling, "scavengers as well as killers" with his knife lashed to an oar. But when the galanos sink into the sea, they take with them fully a quarter of the marlin's best meat. "I wish it were a dream and that I had never hooked him," says the old man. "I'm sorry about it, fish. It makes everything wrong." The fourth shark, a single shovel-nose, adds yet another degree to our sense of wronged rightness. "He came like a pig to the trough if a pig had a mouth so wide that you could put your head in it." This one breaks Santiago's knife, bearing the blade in its brainpan as it follows the galanos to death.

By the time the old man has clubbed the fifth and sixth sharks into submission just at sunset, a full half of the marlin has been gouged away. "What will you do now if they come in the night?" asks the voice inside Santiago. "Fight them," says the old man aloud. "I'll fight them until I die." But when he tries to stand off a whole ravaging pack at midnight, striking at whatever heads he can see, he knows the fight is almost useless. Something seizes his club and it disappears; he hits out with the unshipped tiller until it breaks, and then lunges at another of the sharks with the splintered butt. When this one lets go of the marlin and rolls away, the massacre is ended. A few more come to hit the carcass in the night, "as someone might pick up crumbs from the table." But the old man ignores them and sails on. There is nothing left of the great fish except the skeleton, the bony head, and the vertical tail.

This story of great gain and great loss is esthetically satisfying partly because of its symmetry. Hemingway has little trouble, either, in persuading his readers of the inevitability of the process. For with so fine a prize in a tropical sea where hungry sharks constantly swim, Santiago's return with a whole fish would be nothing short of miraculous. In assessing the old man's total experience, one is reminded of the experiences of younger men in some of Hemingway's earlier novels: Lieutenant Henry's gain and loss of a new wife, for example, in A Farewell to Arms, or Robert Jordan's gain and loss of a new life in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Yet in this latter-day return to the theme of winner-take-nothing, on which Hemingway has so often and so successfully played his variations, he seems to have added a new dimension. This is the dimension of transfiguration, anticipated (it is true) in the story of Robert Jordan, but never made quite so nearly explicit as in the instance of Santiago.

Santiago's experience is a form of martyrdom. We do not object: it is his by right of eminent domain. The old man's only fault, if it is a fault, consists in doing to the best of his ability what he was born to do. When the man on the right rebuked his companion for crass raillery at the expense of Jesus Christ, he raised the essential moral problem. "We receive," said he, "the due reward of our deeds: but this man [Jesus Christ] hath done nothing amiss." Neither has Santiago, but this does not prevent his martyrdom. Tried out through an ordeal by endurance comparable to a crucifixion, he earns, by virtue of his valiance, a form of apotheosis.

His humility and simplicity will not allow entry to any taint of conscious martyrdom. "Man is not made for defeat," he says at one point. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated." His resolution is always stiffened by some such thought as this, and he acts in accordance with it. Being native to his character, these qualities of resolution and action sustain him up to that point when he knows that his only remaining recourse is to take what comes when it comes. Arrival at this point does not unbalance him. He is not a rebel, like the mariner Ahab, against the ruling powers of the universe. Nor does he imagine, as he drives his harpoon into the marlin's heart, that he is destroying anything except a prize fish with whom he has fought long and fairly. The arrival of the sharks on the scene does not surprise him. He does not expect for a moment that they will let him run their sabertoothed gauntlet unscathed. Santiago is a moral realist.

Yet he is too human not to be troubled, like Job before him, by certain moral and metaphysical questions. One is the problem of whether any connection exists between sin and suffering. "It is silly not to hope," he thinks to himself after the killing of the Mako shark. "Besides I believe it is a sin." In this way he launches himself into a consideration of the problem. At first his realistic capacity for self-criticism cautions him that this is dangerous ground. "There are enough problems without sin. Also I have no understanding of it and I am not sure that I believe in it . . . Do not think about sin. It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it. Let them think about it."

The problem will not be put down so easily. "Perhaps," he speculates, "it was a sin to kill the fish. I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people." After all, "San Pedro was a fisherman," and who would accuse him of sin? But once more the cautionary voice chimes in. "You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?"

On this double allusion to pride and to love, greatest of sins and greatest of virtues, hangs the philosophic crux of the problem. Was his real motivation the blameless one of doing his professional duty and feeding people? Probably not basically. He did it for pride: to show that he was still El Campeón. "I'll kill him," he boasted during the battle. "In all his greatness and his glory . . . I will show him what a man can do and what a man endures." Yet all through the struggle he was never without love and compassion for his marlin, or for most of the lesser creatures in God's marine creation.

As in other tragic literatures, the whole process consists ultimately in the readjustment of moral proportions. What begins as a balanced mixture of pride and love slowly alters through the catalysis of circumstance. When Santiago brings his marlin to the gaff, his pride has been gone for a long time. Statements like "I'll fight them until I die," made during the encounter with the sharks, are not so much the evidence of pride as of the resolute determination to preserve something loved and earned from the distortion that comes with mutilation. The direction of the process then comes clear. Where pride and love exist together, the pride must be burned out, as by the cautery of fire. Love will remain as the natural concomitant of true humility.

Though Santiago admits to pride and lays claim to love, his moral sense is not fully satisfied by this way of resolving the problem. He looks for some other explanation of the profit-and-loss pattern. What he seems finally to settle on is the notion that he has gone, as he often puts it, "too far out." This concept of "too-far-outness" is not simply what Colonel Cantwell might describe as over-extension: lines of communication stretched past the breakingpoint, possible support abandoned, danger courted for its own sake, excess of bravery spilling over into foolhardiness. It is rather what Melville described as "the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea"—a willingness to take the greater risk where the greater prize is involved.

Very early in the book the contrast is established between the 1ee shore and the Gulf Stream. There are the inshore men, those who work within sight of land because it is easier, safer, and less frightening, and those like Santiago who have the intrepidity to reach beyond the known towards the possible. "Where are you going?" Manolo asks him, on the eve of the eighty-fifth day. "Far out," replies Santiago, "to come in when the wind shifts." The boy hopes to persuade his father to work far out that day in order to provide help for Santiago if it should be necessary. But this will not happen. Manolo's father is plainly an inshore man, one who does not like to work far out, one who prefers not to take chances, no matter how great the potential gain might be.

Santiago does not hesitate. On the morning of the eighty-fifth day, we are told that he "knew he was going far out." This is why he passes over, even before dawn, the inshore fishing-ground which fishermen call "the great well"—an easy place teeming with provender, where thousands of fish congregate to feed and to be caught. By seven he is already so far out that only three fishing boats are remotely visible inshore; by noon only the tops of the blue Cuban hills show on the horizon. No other boats are now in sight. Here, somewhere, lurk the great fish of this September season. When Santiago is passed by a school of dolphin, he guesses that marlin may be nearby. "My big fish," he tells himself, "must be somewhere."

Even as he speaks the marlin is approaching, the lordly denizen of this farout domain. In coming there, in the process of invasion, the old man has made his choice—not to stay inshore where the going might be easier but to throw out a challenge to what might be waiting, far out and down deep at the hundred-fathom level. As for the marlin, "his choice had been to stay in the deep dark water far out beyond all snares and traps and treacheries." Yet he accepts, in effect rises to, the old man's challenge. From then on Santiago is tied by a strong line to his doom. "My choice," he reflects, "was to go there to find him beyond all people. Beyond all people in the world. Now we are joined together." The long battle is also joined. Since it came about through Santiago's free choice, he has no alternative but to accept the consequences.

These follow inevitably. For to have gone far out is to have invited the depredations of the sharks on the equally long homeward voyage. When the first three have done their work, Santiago apologizes. "I shouldn't have gone so far out, fish. Neither for you nor for me. I'm sorry, fish." When the mutilation has developed to the point where he cannot bear to look at it, he apologizes again. "You violated your luck," says his speaking self, "when you went too far outside." Inshore again, with the marlin destroyed and the old man's weapons gone, there is another dialogue of the soul with itself. "And what beat you?" "Nothing," answers the second voice. "I went out too far." Urged on by pride, by the love of his trade, by his refusal to take continuing bad luck as his portion, and by a resurgent belief that he might win, Santiago made trial of the impossible. In the tragic process he achieved the moral triumph.

It is not necessarily a Christian victory. Yet it is clear that Hemingway has artfully enhanced the native power of his tragic parable by enlisting the further power of Christian symbolism. Standing solus on the rocky shore in the darkness before the dawn of the fourth day, Santiago shows the wounded hands. Dried blood is on his face as from a crown of thorns. He has known the ugly coppery taste in his mouth as from a sponge filled with vinegar. And in the agony of his fatigue he is very much alone. "There was no one to help him so he pulled the boat up as far as he could. Then he stepped out and made her fast to a rock. He unstepped the mast and furled the sail and tied it. Then he shouldered the mast and started to climb."

Once he paused to look back at the remains of his fish. At the top of the hill "he fell and lay for some time with the mast across his shoulder. He tried to get up. But it was too difficult and he sat there with the mast on his shoulder and looked at the road. A cat passed on the far side going about its business and the old man watched it. Then he just watched the road." The loneliness of the ascent of any Calvary is brilliantly emphasized by the presence of the cat. The Old Masters, as Auden wrote long ago, were never wrong about suffering. "How well they understood its human position; how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along . . . They never forgot that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course anyhow in some corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggy life"—and where the innocence of ignorance never so much as bats an eye. The cat on the far side of the road from Santiago is also proceeding about its private business. It could not help the old man even if it would. Santiago knows and accepts this as he has accepted the rest. There is nothing else to be done—except to reach home, which he manages at last to do, though he has to sit down five times to rest between the hilltop and the door of his shack.

On the newspapers that cover the springs of the bed, and below the colored chromos of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Cobre, the old man now falls heavily asleep. He sleeps face down with his arms out straight and his body straight up and down: cruciform, as if to sum up by that symbolic position, naturally assumed, all the suffering through which he has passed. In hoc signo vinces. Santiago has made it to his house. When Manolo looks in next morning, he is still asleep. There is a short conversation as he drinks the coffee the boy brings, and they lay plans for the future even as they allude laconically to the immediate past. "How much did you suffer?" Manolo asks. "Plenty," the old man answers. Outside, a three-day blow has begun. Inside the shack, the book concludes, the old man falls again into the deep sleep of renewal, of diurnal resurrection. "He was still sleeping on his face and the boy was sitting by him watching him. The old man was dreaming about the lions." In my end is my beginning.