The Island of the Day Before [antikvár]

CHAPTER I D ap nne I take pride withal in my humiliation, and as I am to this privilege condemned, almost I find joy in an abhorrent salvation; I am, I believe, alone of all our race, the only man in human memory to have been shipwrecked and cast up upon a deserted ship. Thus, with unabashed conceits, wrote Roberto della Griva presumably in July or August of 1643- How many days had he been tossed by the waves, feverish surely, bound to a plank, prone during the hours of light to avoid the bhnding sun, his neck stiff, strained unnaturally so as not to imbibe the water, his lips burnt by the brine? His letters offer no answer to this question: though they suggest an eternity, the time cannot have been more than two days, for otherwise he would never have survived the lash of Phoebus (of which he so poetically complains), he, a sickly youth, as he describes himself, a creature condemned by a natural defect to live only at night. He was unable to keep track of time, but I believe the sea grew calm immediately after the tempest swept him from the deck of the Amaryllis, on that makeshift raft a sailor had