That’s all I’m good to you for. To hell, I’m no shopkeeper. I’m a visionary. I’m a poet in my way. Tell me, Sindbad the sailor, about Surabaya or the Phoenix Islands. Have you not been drawn off course by the Magnetic Mountain? Have you never been carried off by the bird Roc? And are you not returning home with a cargo of pearls, cinnamon and bezoar? OK, man, let’s have your lies!)

‘Maybe I’ll start with that scorpion,’ the captain announced.

‘What scorpion?’ Commercial Counsellor Bondy wondered.

‘That is, I probably mean lizard. You do say lizards, don’t you?’

‘Lizards?’

‘Hell, yes, lizards. You should see those lizards out there, Mr Bondy.’

‘Where?’

‘On an island. Can’t tell you its name, old boy. That’s a great secret. Worth millions.’ Captain van Toch mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. ‘Damn it, where’s that beer?’

‘Be here in a minute, captain.’

‘Yes. Very well then. Let me tell you, Mr Bondy, they are very nice and good animals, those lizards. I know them, old boy.’ The captain brought his hand down sharply on the table. ‘To say they’re devils is a lie. A damned lie, sir. You’d sooner be a devil and I’d sooner be a devil - yes, I, Captain van Toch, sir. You may believe me.’

G. H. Bondy began to be alarmed. Delirious, he thought. Where the devil was Povondra?

‘There are several thousands of them there, those lizards I mean, but a lot of them have been eaten by - hell, what do you call them?’

‘Sharks?’

‘That’s it, sharks. That’s why those lizards are so rare, sir, and why they are only found in that bay whose name I can’t tell you.’

‘So these lizards live in the sea?’

‘Sure. In the sea. They only come ashore at night, but after a while they’ve got to go back into the water.’

‘And what do they look like?’ (Mr Bondy was playing for time pending that damned Povondra’s return.)

‘Well, about the size of seals, but when they’s strutting on their hindlegs they’re as tall as this,’ the captain demonstrated. ‘Can’t say they’re exactly pretty. But they’ve got no flakes on them.’

‘Scales?’

‘Sure, scales. They’re entirely naked, Mr Bondy, like some kind of frog or those salamanders. And those front paws of theirs, they’re just like children’s hands, except that they have only four fingers.