The deep waters had embossed these petrified ornaments with strange arabesques that made one think of the art of another planet, and, twined in with the pottery that had held the wine and water of a shipwrecked Liburnian felucca, were bits of rope hardened by limey deposit and flukes of anchors whose metal was disintegrating into reddish scales.

Various little statues corroded by the salt sea inspired in the boy as much admiration as his grandfather's frigates.
He laughed and trembled before these _Cabiri_ coming from the Phoenician or Carthaginian biremes,--grotesque and terrible gods that contracted their faces with grimaces of lust and ferocity.
Some of these muscular and bearded marine divinities bore a remote resemblance to his uncle.

Ulysses had overheard certain strange conversations among the fishermen and had noticed, besides, the precipitation of the women and their uneasy glances when they found the doctor near them in a solitary part of the coast.

Only the presence of his nephew had made them recover tranquility and check their step.
At times the sea seemed to craze him with gusts of amorous fury.

He was Poseidon rising up unexpectedly on the banks in order to surprise goddesses and mortals.