Book One: Andrias Scheuchzeri

1. Captain van Toch's Oddities

If you look for the island of Tana Masa on a map, you will find it right on the equator, a little west of Sumatra. But if you were to ask Captain J. van Toch, on the deck of the Kandong Bandoeng, what Tana Masa is, he would first curse, and then tell you that it is the filthiest hole in the whole of the Sunda Islands, worse than Tana Bala, worse even than Pini or Banjak; that its only white inhabitant, if you can call him that, is a drunken agent, a half-Kubu, half-Portuguese, and a bigger thief than all the Kubus and all the white men put together; and if you then asked him why he had dropped anchor there, he would tell you that it was none of your business, and that he went where his orders sent him.

And once he had got that off his chest, he would complain about the gentlemen in Amsterdam. They wanted pearls. Pearls! The pearl beds of Ceylon were finished, Formosa was finished; and still those fools in Amsterdam expected him to find new ones. He had been sailing these waters for thirty years and knew every island from Ceylon to Clipperton; he had two Sinhalese divers aboard, and a gadget for looking at the bottom; but he was no damned adventurer, he was an honest trading captain, see?

The agent, when sober enough, told him that no shells grew around Tana Masa, and that the Bataks there ate jellyfish. But there was a bay — Devil Bay — where nobody went, because of the tapa, the sea devils. He had seen one himself: a bald head, like a Batak's, with lower eyelids that closed over the whole eye. The captain said that devils could not live in water, and that native superstition was nonsense; but the agent, who had been to school in Badjoeng, was not convinced.

The captain had the headman summoned: a thin, naked old man chewing sugar cane, with the whole village standing round as if at the pictures. The headman spoke no Malay, so the agent translated. The captain wanted men to go after shells in Devil Bay. The village would not hear of it, and threatened to complain to the police in Padang. The captain promised to kill them all, burn their village and knock out their teeth. After long negotiations the fine was brought down, and the matter was settled with the gift of a cigarette lighter. The agent, as it happened, had three lighters but no wicks.

That afternoon the captain rowed out to Devil Bay with the Swede Jensen, the Icelander Gudmundson, the Finn Gillemainen and the two Sinhalese divers. He timed the first diver with his watch. The man came up after four minutes and twenty seconds, grey with fear, holding one shell, and in it a small pearl; and he wailed that there were devils down there, thousands of them, the size of children, dark, with tails and round heads, sitting on the rocks and watching him work. The second diver went down, and had to be hauled up half drowned, his knee skinned, his knife and his shells gone. When they had slapped him back to life, he said that the devils walked on two legs and swayed as they walked, that they had hands without claws, that they smacked their lips, and that they had crowded round him.

That evening the captain sat in his cabin with two pearls, one tiny, one pink, and a bottle of whisky. For several nights after that he drank toddy in the village in silence, and then went out alone to Devil Bay. Jensen and Gudmundson followed him one night in a dinghy and watched from behind the rocks. The captain was standing on a boulder, making a noise like ts-ts-ts, and talking to dark shapes that were climbing out of the water towards him; out in the bay a shark's fin cut slowly round and round. Then Jensen's oar splashed, and the captain fired his Browning at the dinghy, and the shapes fled into the sea with a noise like a thousand seals.

At dawn the captain came back in a filthy temper and told Jensen they were sailing. In Padang he cabled Amsterdam for a year's leave on grounds of health, posted a parcel insured for twelve hundred pounds sterling, and hired a Dayak from Borneo who was called Shark: a former shark hunter, his skin scraped raw, with sharks' teeth hanging in his nose and ears. And with Shark aboard, the captain went back to Tana Masa.

2. Mr Golombek and Mr Valenta

It was the dead season, and a certain Prague newspaper had nothing to put in tomorrow's edition. Then a compositor named Metér remembered that he had heard, in Jevíčko, that a sea captain was spending his holidays there, a captain who was supposed to have dived for pearls in Sumatra and Celebes; and the reporters Golombek and Valenta set off to see him.

They found him in a garden restaurant: a stout man in a white cap, drinking beer and drawing on the table with his finger. Valenta ordered raspberry soda, which the captain could not allow; he ordered him a beer instead. Yes, he was born in Jevíčko; yes, he had been a captain for twenty years; his ship was the Kandong Bandoeng, twelve thousand tons; he was on leave. He named a great many islands, but told no stories. Instead he proposed a piece of business: fifteen or sixteen million crowns, see? He laid five pink pearls the size of cherry stones on the table, and asked the gentlemen to put up the money for a ship, fifty-fifty. The gentlemen said they could not afford it. The captain decided they were not to be trusted, although he himself was honest and to be trusted absolutely. A good ship never sinks, he told them. There was an old Diesel ship going in Rotterdam. The bankers in Colombo were thieves.

Then Golombek mentioned G. H. Bondy, who had also been born in Jevíčko and was now a great industrialist in Prague, president of the MEAS company, chairman of some twenty boards, a captain of industry. The captain remembered him: little Gustl, with the freckles. He would go and see him; after all, he was a captain too.

The reporters left on the evening train. The captain waved them off with a big blue handkerchief, and out of it fell a large irregular pearl, which, as far as is known, nobody ever found.

3. G. H. Bondy and His Compatriot

The more important a man is, the less he puts on his door. Old Max Bondy in Jevíčko, whose shop of cloth and haberdashery had been founded in 1885, had his trade painted in letters a foot high across the front of the house. His son, G. H. Bondy, bore more honorary titles than could be listed; on his door in Prague there was a small black glass plate, and on it only the word BONDY. The Pope has nothing at all on his door; and God, as is well known, has no nameplate anywhere.

On a scorching day a stout man in a white sailor's cap stood at that door, mopping his neck with a blue handkerchief, and rang. The porter, Povondra, looked him over coldly. The visitor gave him a card, with an anchor on it, and the words: Captain J. van Toch, Surabaya. Povondra hesitated. The man fitted none of the categories by which a porter judges visitors; and on his own responsibility, Povondra announced him.

Mr Bondy read the card and was enchanted by its names: Surabaya, Java, Bandoeng. He had the gentleman shown in, and greeted him in English. The captain answered him in Czech. Why, didn't Mr Bondy remember? He was Vantoch, the cloth merchant's son, from Jevíčko. Mr Bondy was a little disappointed that he was not a Dutchman after all; but they remembered how they had fought as boys, and that Vantoch had been the stronger, and had once called little freckled Gustl an ugly name, and had then been sent away to school in Moravská Ostrava; and they both laughed.

The captain sat down heavily in a leather chair, dropped his cap on the floor, and said that he was in Europe on leave, see? He wanted beer. He turned out his pockets: a tobacco pouch, a knife, a compass, banknotes. Mr Bondy offered him a cigar; the captain sniffed it, said it was Lombok tobacco, crushed it in his fist and stuffed it into his pipe. Povondra was sent for a gallon of beer.

Mr Bondy waited for the business proposal: sewing machines for Tasmania, perhaps. But in his heart he wanted something else. Sinbad, he thought, the Magnet Mountain, the roc, cinnamon and bezoar — come on, Captain, tell me lies.

And the captain began to talk about lizards. On an island, which he would not name because it was worth millions, there were lizards: smooth, hairless, about the size of a seal on land, walking upright on their hind legs, with four fingers on their front paws, like little hands; and the sharks hunted them. The Sinhalese and the Bataks thought they were sea devils. And the captain got up and showed how they walked, squatting and waddling; and Mr Bondy was moved, and a little ashamed.

At Tana Masa — the captain corrected himself too late — he had sat on the beach one night, rather drunk, saying ts-ts-ts, and one of the lizards had come out of the water, and then a bigger one, holding a pearl shell in its paw. The captain had opened the shell with his knife: no pearl. He gave the mussel to the lizard, and it ate it. Then the lizards tried to open the shells themselves; some imitated him, some could not do it. He had found eighteen pearls that night, three of them as big as cherry stones. And he had decided to tame the lizards, and teach them to bring up shells. But the next evening he came back at dusk and saw a dozen sharks devour more than twenty of them. He loved animals, the captain said. And there, under the stars, he had sworn to help the tapa-boys.

4. Captain van Toch's Business Venture

So he had sent the pearls to Amsterdam, and hired the Dayak, who killed sharks underwater with a knife, and gone back to Tana Masa in a small steamer, to clear the bay of sharks so the lizards might live in peace.

He read Mr Bondy his notes from a notebook. Toby, a clever lizard, had pushed his fingers into the knife wound in a dead shark. The lizards had carried dry branches to his fire. They were building a dam at the north-west end of Devil Bay, like beavers. Albert's two fingers had been crushed by a boulder; the Dayak had eaten Albert, and afterwards smoked opium. Toby refused to work. The big one called Sergeant had been given a knife; and on the thirteenth of July Sergeant had killed, with that knife, a cuttlefish, a jellyfish and a small shark of seventy pounds; and the captain had wept with joy on the beach, and given Sergeant a harpoon.

It was a fair contract, he said. The lizards brought him pearl shells, and he gave them knives, harpoons, timber, and two iron wheelbarrows to carry stones. And he emptied a linen bag on the table: more than a thousand pearls. About thirty sharks had been killed that year. The Bataks rang bells all night to keep away the devils, and then wanted paying for it.

But Devil Bay was fished out. The lizards had multiplied, and there was not enough food for them. The captain's idea was this: to carry them in water tanks to other pearl islands, to feed them on potatoes and biscuits, to set up lizard farms. And for that he needed ships.

Mr Bondy thought the captain was a crank. But he trusted him; and he said he would think about buying ships, for a trading line to the South Seas. Come back in a fortnight, he said. And not a word about the lizards to anyone.

The captain wanted to send a couple of fine pearls to those two editors. But he could not remember their names.

5. Captain J. van Toch and His Trained Lizards

In a bar in Marseille an Irishman named Dingle recognised the Swede Jensen, whom he had sailed with long ago. Jensen was now on the Marseille–Saigon run; Dingle was on leave, going home to Ireland. And Jensen had once sailed with Captain van Toch, on the Kandong Bandoeng: a fat, bald man, foul-mouthed, but all right.

Dingle had heard more than that. The captain had a ship now, and on it, in tanks, he carried lizards: nearly black, as long as a man, with tails, walking upright, covered in warts; at night they roamed the deck. Dingle had kicked one and broken its back, and the captain would have thrown him overboard if the mate, Gregory, had not stopped him; Dingle had been put ashore at Kokopo. The captain had taught the lizards to talk; he shut himself up with them for hours; and near little islands he let them out into the sea, a dozen at a time, through a hatch, and at night went ashore with crates. A German named Peters swore that at the Manihiki Islands he had seen the lizards open the crates with chisels, and that the crates were full of knives and harpoons. They all came from Devil Bay, Dingle said, and they were no ordinary animals. The captain had sold his soul for pearls.

Jensen lost his temper, banged the table, and told Dingle to mind his own business. Dingle took it back: perhaps he had imagined it; he had had the horrors once before, in Frisco. But the lizards were real, said Jensen.

Then Dingle proposed that they have a Mass said for the captain's soul. Jensen, a Protestant, doubted that it would do any good, but he gave Dingle twelve francs for it, and Dingle wrote him an IOU on a scrap of paper. Dingle spent the money in Le Havre, and went not to Ireland but to Djibouti; and so the Mass was never said, and no higher power intervened in what followed.

6. The Yacht in the Lagoon

Mr Abe Loeb sat on the beach of a lagoon near the island of Tahuara and watched the sun go down. Out in the lagoon lay the yacht Gloria Pickford, a present from his father, Jesse Loeb, the film magnate, for passing his examinations. Beside him on the sand slept Li — Lilian Nowak, known in films as Miss Lily Valley — wrapped in her bathing cloak; and Abe was in love with her, and worried about his hairy legs, and about whether his parents would let him marry her. That afternoon Li and Judy had quarrelled over whose legs were prettier, after Fred had held a contest; Abe had called on the captain to judge, and the captain had gone off in a huff.

Li woke up with an idea for a film. She would be shipwrecked on this island, and a gorilla would look after her, and cannibals would capture her, and she would be courted by warriors and by a tenor, and Fred would be eaten by a shark. Abe objected to all of it. Then Li threw off her cloak and waded into the lagoon, singing.

Abe heard her scream. Out of the water rose something dark, with a round head; then several more, which came up out of the sea and stood in a half-circle. They were saying ts-ts-ts, and something that sounded like "Knife," and "Li." Abe, in his bathing trunks, did not run. He picked up Li's cloak from the sand, faced the creatures, and waved it at them. One of them dropped three hard, shining little balls at his feet. Abe took them to Li and told her that the sea gods, the tritons, had given them to her. Li was enchanted, and asked whether she ought to thank them.

Abe carried her to the boat, while the creatures circled them. Li waved and blew them kisses, and was very pleased with her performance, and wondered what the pearls were worth. Abe said she should not have shown herself like that. Li told him he was not an artist, and that he should row, because she was cold.

7. The Yacht in the Lagoon, Continued

That night on the yacht there was a great argument. Fred, backed by Abe, said they were lizards. The captain said they were mammals, because lizards do not live in the sea. Li was glad they were tritons. Judy said it was all a publicity stunt and went to bed. And Li had a new idea for a film: the yacht sinks, she is cast away on an island, and the tritons fall in love with her and bring her pearls. Fred decided they would film the creatures the very next evening. The captain had three armed sailors at his disposal, by order of Mr Jesse Loeb.

The next day Li spent dressing with her maid Greta; the men planned their positions over drinks. A camera, a small machine gun, rifles, a picnic basket and a gramophone were taken ashore and hidden under palm leaves. At dusk dark heads came gliding across the lagoon. Li, in a white bathing costume and a transparent wrap, posed on the sand; Abe turned the handle of the camera; Judy was to switch on the light, and did not. The shadows crept closer to Li. She stood up, her wrap slipped off, and she cried out that something had touched her. Then the light flashed on; the creatures fled to the sea; a net was thrown over one of them; Greta fainted; shots were fired; and the light went out again.

Abe blamed Judy for switching on the light too late, and Judy was offended. The sailors brought in the creature in the net; it had sprayed them with something that blistered their hands. Then Li found a pearl, and everyone went searching the sand with torches, and in the end the captain's cap held twenty-one. On the way back they argued over titles: Fred proposed Baseball Fred Fights the Monsters; the captain, Antediluvian Fauna on a Pacific Island; Abe, In the Power of Poseidon. And Li had a new story: a mermaid queen who falls in love with a fisherman.

The consequences were these. The captured creature was kept in Li's bathtub for two days, then died, then began to smell, and was thrown away. Only two photographs came out: one of Li crouching in terror, and one of the gentlemen and Judy, which was suppressed. Newspapers all over the world printed the story, with pearls on black velvet; Li's career was made, and she refused the variety halls for the sake of Art. The experts said the creatures were salamanders, not lizards; Professor J. W. Hopkins of Yale declared the photographs a fake, and the matter was closed. And Abe married Judy, in a great wedding, with Fred as best man.

8. Andrias Scheuchzeri

Professor Hopkins was a great authority on reptiles, and he declared the whole thing humbug. But reports of unknown giant newts began to come in from all over the Pacific: from the Solomons, from Schouten Island, from Butaritari, Funafuti, Fakaofo, Pukapuka and a dozen other islands whose names nobody could pronounce. It was summer, and there was nothing else in the papers. In America sea monsters became the fashion; a revue called Poseidon ran in New York for three hundred performances, with three hundred tritons, nereids and sirens; and the young people of Miami and California went about dressed as mermen and mermaids, which is to say in strings of pearls and very little else. In reply, the movement against immorality grew mightily in the Middle West, and in the excitement, as so often, some Black men were lynched.

Then the bulletin of the Columbia University expedition, financed by J. S. Tincker, the King of Canned Goods, appeared in the National Geographic Magazine. Its authors were specialists in fish parasites, ringed worms, plants, ciliates and aphids. On Rakahanga they found footprints of a five-toed hind foot, and concluded that the animals walked on their hind legs; and since Rakahanga has no river or marsh, the animals must live in the sea, although no sea-dwelling newt was known to science. On Rakahanga they saw no live animal, though Mr Herrero found a new species of bug. But on Tongarewa, after sunset, large flattened heads rose out of the water; the animals crawled up onto the sand and stood upright, a little over a metre tall; they made a wide circle and began to sway the rear halves of their bodies, as if they were dancing. Dr Kleinschmidt stood up to see better. The animals turned their eyes on him, came quickly towards him, hissing and barking, and the expedition opened fire. Two lay dead on the beach. A third, with a broken spine, made a sound like ogod, and died when Dr Kleinschmidt opened its chest.

The animals proved to be tailed amphibians, closest to the Japanese giant salamander and the American hellbender, but with better senses and longer, stronger limbs. And their skeletons matched exactly a fossil that the Swiss doctor Johann Jakob Scheuchzer had found in the quarries of Öhningen and published in 1726 in a book called Homo diluvii testis. Scheuchzer had believed the fossil to be a man drowned in the Flood: an unmistakable human figure, he wrote, needing no imagination to see it, a monument to a vanished race older than any Roman, Greek or Egyptian tomb. Cuvier later recognised it as a fossil salamander, and it was named Andrias Scheuchzeri, and considered long extinct. Scheuchzer, said the bulletin, would have been delighted to see his Adam of Öhningen come back to life.

The islanders said the animals had appeared only six or eight years before; that they could talk; that they built walls like little towns in quiet bays, dug long burrows, stole sweet potatoes and yams at night and carried off tools; and that people had moved away because of them. The scientists put this down to primitive superstition, prompted by the creatures' ugliness and their upright walk.

Soon every nation's science had its own giant newt. The Dutch discovered Megatriton moluccanus; the French, Cryptobranchus salamandroides; the English, Pelagotriton Spencei, of which a live specimen was sent to the London Zoo. There followed endless disputes about names and priority; each nation's newts were attacked by the scholars of the others; and so the matter was never cleared up scientifically.

9. Andrew Scheuchzer

One Thursday, when the London Zoo was closed to the public, the keeper Thomas Greggs was cleaning the tanks in the newt house, when a croaking voice asked, "Does it bite?" Greggs looked round. It was the big black Andrias Scheuchzeri, saying over the things it had heard visitors say. Greggs gave it a bit of bun. Within a few minutes the newt had learned his name, and kept repeating it. Greggs, who was not a talkative man, told it to hold its tongue, and promised to teach it to talk properly. The management did not approve of teaching animals tricks; so Greggs practised with Andy in secret, after hours. Nobody thought his solitary evenings strange; he was a widower.

One evening the director, Sir Charles Wiggam, was making his rounds, and at the newt tank a voice wished him good evening and said its name was Andy. Sir Charles shouted for Greggs, who admitted that he had taught it to talk, but said that Andy had started it. It must not happen again, said Sir Charles.

Later, Sir Charles was discussing animal intelligence with Professor Petrov, who thought a talking newt impossible: newts' tongues are fixed. Sir Charles took him to the tank. There they found Andy slowly reading the evening paper aloud, while Greggs swept. They took turns, Greggs explained; he had given Andy the paper to stop him chattering, and Andy had learned to read by himself. Andy told them his name, and that he read the paper every day; he was interested in court cases, horse racing and football, though he had never seen any of them. He asked whether there would be a war, and spoke of submarines and death rays, and recommended several excellent English products. Professor Petrov asked irritably whether they could show him an animal that did not read the newspapers.

A committee of scholars examined Andy. What was his name? Andrew Scheuchzer. How old was he? He did not know; he recommended a corset. What day was it? Monday; fine weather; and Gibraltar was running at Epsom on Saturday. Three times five? Why? Name the English rivers: the Thames. The ruler of England: King George, God bless him. The greatest English writer: Kipling; he had not read him; how did the gentlemen like Mae West? English history: Henry the Eighth, the best film of recent years; he recommended the Ford Baby. What would he most like to see? The Boat Race. How many parts of the world are there? Five: England and the others — Bolsheviks, Germans and Italy. Where were the Gilbert Islands? In England. And when they examined his tongue, he advised them to clean their teeth with a certain brand of toothpaste.

The protocol ran to sixteen pages, and the committee concluded: one, that Andy could speak, in a croaking voice, using about four hundred words, and said only what he had heard or read, with no thoughts of his own; two, that he read only the evening papers, and held the views of the average Englishman; three, that his intelligence was no higher than that of an average person of his time, and should not be overrated. Andy became the sensation of the zoo; people crowded round him to talk about the weather, the economic crisis and politics, and fed him so much chocolate and sweets that he got a dreadful catarrh of the stomach. The newt house was closed; but it was too late, and Andy died of his popularity. Fame, it seems, demoralises even newts.

10. The Fair at Nové Strašecí

Mr Povondra, porter in the house of G. H. Bondy, spent his holidays in his home town of Nové Strašecí, and it happened to be the time of the fair. He went out with his son Frantík, aged eight; the town smelled of cakes. On the square, beside the gingerbread stalls, stood a booth of tarpaulin, and a small dry man on a ladder was hanging up a sign: "CAPTAIN J. VAN TOCH AND HIS TRAINED NEWTS." Mr Povondra remembered a big, heavy man in a captain's cap whom he had once let in to Mr Bondy, and was sorry he had come down so low. The second sign said: "TALKING NEWTS! THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC SENSATION! Admission 2 crowns, children half price."

Mr Povondra hesitated, but decided that the boy ought to learn something about the animals of distant lands. He asked the small man for Captain van Toch. The small man said he was van Toch himself, and showed an anchor tattooed on his wrist. Mr Povondra doubted it; the captain he knew had been a big man. Well, said the small man, the newts were Captain van Toch's newts, anyway. Australian lizards.

Inside, a very fat woman at a little table took three crowns. In the tent there was nothing but a zinc bathtub, and in it, motionless, lay a large black creature the size of an old catfish, with loose skin bulging behind its head. So that was the prehistoric newt from the papers, thought Mr Povondra, and felt he had been cheated. Frantík wanted to know why it lived in water, what it ate, and why it was so ugly. The small man prodded it with a stick, and it got up, its gills twitching, tied a knot in a piece of string, and tried to beat a drum, but dropped the stick in the water. Then it said "Guten Morgen," and good morning in Czech, and something in Italian; and that six times seven was forty-two; and that today was Saturday. It could not say what town it was in, because it was tired. The other one, said the small man, had died.

Then the small man offered to show them his wife, Maruška, formerly the fattest woman in the world, who lifted her skirt to show a leg in a red woollen stocking: eighty-four centimetres round the top, and she was no longer the fattest woman in the world only because of the competition. Mr Povondra hurried Frantík outside. Had he learned something? Yes, said Frantík. And why did the lady wear red stockings?

11. On the Man-Lizards

Talking newts were now the subject of the day, though the papers also had the coming war, the economic crisis, sport, vitamins and fashion. Professor Vladimír Uher of Brno University wrote in Lidové noviny that the newt's ability to imitate speech was a scientific trifle. The real riddles were these: where had Andrias Scheuchzeri come from; where had it survived through all the geological ages; why had it been unknown until now; and why was it now multiplying so fast across the equatorial Pacific? It was the only sea newt known; and perhaps Nature was making up for lost time. He ended in awe at the creative power of evolution.

A reader, J. V. Najman, had bought a house in Čáslav, and in the attic found a box of old scientific journals from the beginning of the nineteenth century; in one of the books, as a bookmark, was a yellowed newspaper cutting, which he sent to the professor. It was printed in the old spelling, and it told how an English sea captain, on a little coral island in the Australian sea with a salt lagoon, had seen strange creatures come out of the water: like salamanders, slimy and without scales, as big as seals, walking upright and dancing along the shore. The sailors had shot two, netted the lagoon and killed the rest, and taken two aboard alive in tubs of sea water, to bring them to England; but near Sumatra the creatures had got out of their tub, opened a porthole at night, and slipped into the sea. They were clever and sly, chattering and smacking their lips, and not dangerous to man; and the writer proposed to call them man-lizards.

The professor was vexed that the cutting had no date, no ship, no island and no captain's name. But he worked it out: an isolated lagoon had kept the creatures for ages like a coiled spring that could not unwind; the escaped pair had reached the equator, with food in plenty, and begun to multiply; and now, released, they might evolve fast, into who knows what — a kind of Miocene man. He wrote a new article, "Do the Newts Have a Future?" The paper turned it down. People were tired of newts.

12. Salamander Syndicate

G. H. Bondy, as chairman, opened the extraordinary general meeting of the Pacific Export Company, and announced, first of all, that Captain Jan van Toch, the company's founder and its first captain, had died at the beginning of the year, aboard the company's ship Šárka, off Fanning Island, of a stroke, while on duty. The meeting rose in silence. Mr Bondy wondered, privately, whether they had simply tipped the body overboard; and he remembered that van Toch had had kind blue eyes.

Director Volavka gave the report. The pearl market was in a bad way: after a record harvest, prices had fallen by as much as sixty-five per cent, and about two hundred thousand pearls were lying unsold in Amsterdam. Several pearl beds were exhausted. The trade in textiles, enamel pots, radios and gloves to the islands was doing a little better. No dividend could be expected; the board had waived its fees.

Questions followed. Should the company be wound up? Why had the pearl-gathering not been supervised by agents on the spot? — Three hundred agents would cost too much, and would need watching themselves. Could the newts be trusted to hand over every pearl? Mr Bondy observed that the company's name had been chosen to attract no attention, and that this was the first time the newts had been mentioned openly; he vouched for their honesty and industry. Colonel Bright said van Toch had spoiled them with first-class knives and expensive food. Mr Gilbert replied that the captain had had personal obligations to the newts. And how many newts were there now? About six million, said Mr Bondy; each pair produced about a hundred young a year; and they had to be fed. They were not good to eat, and their skins were worthless.

Then Mr Bondy rose. Gentlemen, he said, this company once paid twenty-three per cent. Its methods are exhausted. Captain van Toch's pearl business was a romance, a story out of Jack London or Joseph Conrad; and that age is over. Commerce, gentlemen, is an art; it needs imagination, as poetry does, but a new imagination. Sinbad is dead. Six million newts, multiplying as they do, would be three hundred million, and then fifteen thousand million, within three years. What do we do with them? Someone called out, let them die. Mr Bondy said that every newt was a labour force; but fifteen thousand million newts, unemployed, would devour the company. He took the responsibility on himself, and offered to buy back the shares of anyone who wished, at full value. There was a ten-minute break.

After it, Mr Brinkelaer proposed that the newts should be sold as labour to anyone who needed work done under water, at three hundred francs a pair. Director Volavka listed the work: dams, breakwaters, harbours, canals, dredging, the shaping of coasts, the making of new land. Dr Hubka suggested leasing them in work gangs. The newts could not be guarded, said Volavka; many had already been stolen for zoos. Colonel Bright suggested selling only males; Mr Gilbert said that males kept alone grew idle and died of melancholy. Mr Weissberger, of the society for the protection of animals, asked for humane treatment, and Mr Gilbert promised trained staff.

And then Mr Bondy laid before the meeting the board's proposal: a trust, the Salamander Syndicate, which would unite the manufacturers of patent tools for newts, a chemical and food cartel to make cheap newt fodder, the shipping companies with their patent hygienic tanks, an insurance group to insure the newts, and banks; with a starting capital of four hundred million pounds sterling. Twelve thousand newts were already building the new docks and moles of Saigon. And he painted a picture of a remade world: new islands, bridges between continents, new lands in the oceans, built by the workers of the sea. The board promised a dividend of at least ten per cent, from reserves. Eighty-seven per cent of the shares voted in favour, thirteen against; and the Salamander Syndicate was founded.

Afterwards Sigi Weissberger congratulated Mr Bondy on his speech, and asked what had inspired it. Mr Bondy admitted that he had done it partly for van Toch's sake: the captain had cared about those creatures, and Bondy did not want them ill-treated. But they were vermin, really, and fit only for some kind of utopia. And what did a newt actually look like? asked Weissberger. Mr Bondy said he had no idea. He had never bothered to look.

To this book Čapek adds an appendix, "On the Sexual Life of the Newts," a parody of learned writing. It reports that the newts pair in spring and the female lays her eggs in batches; that, according to one researcher's experiments, fertilisation is caused by a chemical change in the water rather than by the male as such, so that the male is a mere impersonal agent; that the nightly "newt dance" of the males on the shore is read by some as religious, by others as erotic; and that a certain Charles J. Powell concludes from all this that the newts are a society of males, whose technical and organising talent is a sexual character, so that the newt is an "animal faber," who may one day surpass mankind.