Haggopian and Other Stories

“No matter—what I have to tell you makes a nonsense of all matters of sensibility. You strike me as a man not easily…frightened, Mr. Belton?”

“I can be surprised, Mr. Haggopian, and shocked—but frightened? Well, among other things I have been a war correspondent for some time, and—”

“Of course, I understand—but there are worse things than the man-made horrors of war!”

“That may be, but I’m a journalist. It’s my job. I’ll take a chance on being—frightened.”

“Good! And please put aside any doubts you may by now have conceived regarding my sanity, or any you may yet conceive during the telling of my story. The proofs, at the end, will be ample.”

I started to protest but he quickly cut me off: “No, no, Mr. Belton! You would have to be totally insensible not to have perceived the—strangeness here.”

He fell silent as for the third time the old woman appeared, placing a pitcher before him on the table. This time she almost fawned on him and he jerked away from her, nearly upsetting his chair. He rasped a few harsh words in Greek and I heard the strange, shrivelled creature sob as she turned to stumble away.

“What on earth is wrong with the woman?”

“In good time, Mr. Belton,” he held up his hand, “all in good time.” Again he drained his glass, refilling it from the pitcher before commencing his tale proper; a tale through which I sat for the most part silent, later hypnotised, and eventually horrified to the end.

II

“My first ten years of life were spent in the Cook Islands, and the next five in Cyprus,” Haggopian began, “always within shouting distance of the sea. My father died when I was sixteen, and though he had never acknowledged me in his lifetime he willed to me the equivalent of two-and-one-half millions of pounds sterling! When I was twenty-one I came into this money and found that I could now devote myself utterly to the ocean—my one real love in life. By that I mean all oceans. I love the warm Mediterranean and the South Pacific, but no less the chill Arctic Ocean and the teeming North Sea. Even now I love them—even now!

“At the end of the war I bought Haggopiana and began to build my collection here. I wrote about my work and was twenty-nine years old when I finished The Cradle Sea. Of course it was a labour of love. I paid for the publication of the first edition myself, and though money did not really matter, subsequent reprints repaid me more than adequately. It was my success with that book—I used to enjoy success—and with The Sea: A New Frontier, which prompted me to commence work upon Denizens of the Deep. I had been married to my first wife for five years by the time I had the first rough manuscript of my work ready, and I could have had the book published there and then but for the fact that I had become something of a perfectionist both in my writing and my studies. In short there were passages in the manuscript, whole chapters on certain species, with which I was not satisfied.

“One of these chapters was devoted to the sirenians. The dugong and the manatee, particularly the latter, had fascinated me for a long time in respect of their undeniable connections with the mermaid and siren legends of old renown; from which, of course, their order takes its name. However, it was more than merely this initially that took me off on my ‘Manatee Survey’, as I called those voyages, though at that time I could never have guessed at the importance of my quest. As it happened, my inquiries were to lead me to the first real pointer to my future—a frightful hint of my ultimate destination, though of course I never recognized it as such.” He paused.

“Destination?” I felt obliged to fill the silence. “Literary or scientific?”

“My ultimate destination!”

“Oh!”

I sat and waited, not quite knowing what to say, an odd position for a journalist! In a moment or two Haggopian continued, and as he spoke I could feel his eyes staring at me intently through the opaque lenses of his spectacles:

“You are aware perhaps of the theories of continental drift—those concepts outlined initially by Wegener and Lintz, modified by Vine, Matthews and others—which have it that the continents are gradually ‘floating’ apart and that they were once much closer to one another? Such theories are sound, I assure you; primal Pangaea did exist, and was trodden by feet other than those of men. Indeed, that first great continent knew life before man first swung down from the trees and up from the apes!

“But at any rate, it was partly to further the work of Wegener and the others that I decided upon my ‘Manatee Survey’—a comparison of the manatees of Liberia, Senegal and the Gulf of Guinea with those of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. You see, Mr. Belton, of all the shores of Earth these two are the only coastal stretches within which manatees occur in their natural state. Surely you would agree that this is excellent zoological evidence for continental drift?