Человек-амфибия

ALEXANDER   
BELYAEV

THE AMPHIBIAN

УДК 372.8
ББК  81.2 Англ 

Б44

Беляев, Александр.

Б44  
Человек-амфибия : книга для чтения на ан
глийском языке / А. Беляев — СПб. : КАРО, 2018. — 
272 с. — (Russian classic literature).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1334-9

УДК 372.8

ББК 81.2 Англ

© КАРО, 2018 
Все права защищены

ALEXANDER BELYAEV

THE AMPHIBIAN

FROM THE PUBLISHERS

The Amphibian will throw you back to a time 
when skin and deep-sea diving had not yet made the 
Silent World begin yielding up its secrets on a really 
big scale, as aqualung and snorkel are doing today, and 
present to you Alexander Belyaev’s 1928 prevision of 
the ocean mastered by mankind.
Sea-devil has appeared in the Rio de la Plata. Weird 
cries out at sea, slashed fishermen’s nets, glimpses of 
a most queer creature astride a dolphin leave no room 
for doubt. The Spaniard Zurita, greed overcoming his 
superstition, tries to catch Sea-devil and force it to 
pearl-dive for him but fails.
On a lonely stretch of shore, not far from Buenos 
Aires, Dr. Salvator lives in seclusion behind a high wall, 
whose steel-plated gates only open to let in his Indian 
patients. The Indians revere him as a god but Zurita has 
a hunch that the god on land and the devil in the sea have 
something in common. Enlisting the help of two wily 
Araucanian brothers he sets out to probe the mystery.
As action shifts from the bottom of the sea to the 
Spaniard’s schooner The Jellyfish and back again, 

Alexander BELYAEV • THE AMPHIBIAN
4

with interludes in sun-drenched Buenos Aires and the 
countryside, the mystery of Ichthyander the sea-devil 
is unfolded before the reader in a narrative as gripping 
as it is informative.
Alexander Belyaev, the first-and very nearly the 
best-Soviet science-fiction writer, was born in 1884 
in Smolensk. When a little boy Alexander was full of 
ideas. One of them was to fly. And he did fly — from 
a rooftop — until one day he fractured his spine. This 
was put right, but at the age of 32 he developed bone 
tuberculosis and was bed-ridden for nearly six years 
and later for shorter stretches.
After school he studied law and music. To pay for 
his tuition he played in an orchestra, designed stage 
settings and did free lance journalism, which he continued after graduation. In 1925 he gave up law and 
devoted himself wholly to writing.
His first novel, Professor Dowell’s Head, serialized 
in a popular magazine in 1926, was an immediate success. Since then A. Belyaev wrote fifty-odd novels — 
many of them as topical as if written today — reaching 
the one-million copy mark by January 1942 when he 
died near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His best 
known books are The Amphibian, A Jump into Nothingness and The Island of Dead Ships.

PART I

“THE SEA-DEVIL”

The close night of the Argentine midsummer came 
down on the sea. Stars pricked out in a sky that was 
a deep violet. The schooner Jellyfish lay quietly at anchor, with not a splash round her, not a creak on board. 
Ship and ocean seemed in deep slumber.
Half-naked pearl-divers sprawled on the deck. 
Worn out by the day’s work under a parching sun they 
tossed and groaned and cried out in their nightmarish sleep. Their limbs would jerk and twitch; perhaps 
they were fighting off sharks — their deadly enemies. 
The hot windless weather of which they were having 
a spell made people so tired that they couldn’t even 
hoist the boats on board at the end of a day’s work. Not 
that it seemed necessary: nothing indicated a change 
in weather. So the boats were left afloat, made fast to 
the anchor chain. Nobody had thought of tightening 
the shrouds or sheeting home the jib which fluttered 
faintly at each stray whiff of wind. From bowsprit to 

Alexander BELYAEV • THE AMPHIBIAN
6

taffrail the schooner was strewn with heaps of pearl 
shells, pieces of coral, lengths of diving cord, canvas 
sacks for putting shells in and empty barrels.
Against the mizzen-mast stood a big water barrel 
with an iron mug on a chain. The deck immediately 
round was stained dark with spilt water.
Every now and then a diver struggled up and staggered along, sleep-drunk, to the water barrel. Never 
opening his eyes he swallowed a mugful and dropped 
down anywhere on his way back, as if it were not water he had drunk but neat spirit. The divers were always thirsty. They went without morning meals, for 
underwater pressure made diving on a full stomach 
dangerous, so they worked without eating all through 
the day, till it grew too dark underwater. They had 
their meal before turning in-and that was of salt meat.
The Indian Baltasar, right hand of the schooner’s 
owner Pedro Zurita, had the night watch.
In his time Baltasar had been known far and wide 
as an excellent pearl-diver. He could stay underwater for as much as a minute and a half or even two 
minutes which was about twice as long as an average 
diver.
“How did we do it? They knew how to train in 
my day and started early,” Baltasar would say to the 
young divers.

PART I • “THE SEA-DEVIL”

“Just turned ten I was. My father took me to Jose, 
who owned a tender, for training. There were twelve 
of us, all kids like me. And this is the way he trained 
us. He’d throw a white pebble or shell into the water 
and order one of us to go and get it. And each time 
he found deeper and deeper places. If one of us had 
nothing to show for his diving Jose’d give him a lash or 
two of his whip and shove Mm overboard to try again. 
And it worked. Then he started to train us to keep 
longer times underwater. An experienced diver’d go 
down and make a basket or piece of netting fast to the 
anchor chain. Then down we went to untie the knots. 
And we weren’t allowed to come up before all the 
knots were undone. If we did we got the whip again.
“The amount of beating we took! Not everybody 
could stick it out. But it made a diver out of me-and the 
best in the district. And earned me a pretty penny too.”
Then the time had come when Baltasar had to give 
up the hazardous trade of a pearl-diver. He was no 
longer young and his left leg bore the terrible scars 
of a shark’s teeth and his side the marks of an anchor chain. He bought a small shop in Buenos Aires 
and started a trade in pearls, corals, shells and sea 
curios. But shore life bored him and once in a while 
he decided he needed a break and put out to sea with 
pearl-divers.

Alexander BELYAEV • THE AMPHIBIAN
8

He was always sure of a welcome, for what he 
didn’t know about the Rio de la Plata and its pearling grounds was just not worth knowing. He was 
welcomed by all-he knew how to please divers and 
owners alike. The young divers he taught the tricks of 
the trade: how to hold their breath underwater and 
to fight off sharks, and-when in specially expansive 
mood-how to keep an extra fine pearl out of the boss’s 
sight.
The owners he helped to sort out pearls and evaluate the best.
Baltasar was sitting on an upturned barrel, a thick 
cigar between his fingers, his face picked out of the 
darkness by the light of a lantern fixed to the mast. It 
was an elongated face with a finely cut nose and large 
handsome eyes — the face of an Araucanian. He was 
drowsing. But even when his eyes were asleep, his 
ears were not. They registered sounds and gave him 
warning in the deepest of sleep. There was nothing 
but the divers’ sighing and murmuring to hear. The 
smell of rotting pearl oysters wafted from offshore. It 
was part of the job: the shell of a dead mollusc opens 
more easily. What would have been an overpowering 
stench for an unaccustomed nose was near perfume 
for Baltasar’s. For him, a sea tramp that he was it 
meant all the pleasures and dangers of life at sea.

PART I • “THE SEA-DEVIL”

After the last pearl was extracted the largest shells 
were brought on board the Jellyfish. Zurita wasn’t one 
to let anything go to waste. He sold the shells to a factory where they made buttons and studs out of them.

Baltasar was asleep. The cigar had slipped from 
between his fingers. His chin rested on his chest.
A sound from far out at sea broke in on his sleep. 
Then it came nearer. Baltasar opened his eyes. What 
seemed to him the blast of a horn sounded again, followed by the cheerful ring of a young voice, repeated 
after an interval in a higher pitch.
The blast of the horn bore no resemblance to the 
harsh blare of ship’s siren, nor the cheerful voice to 
the cries of a man, fallen overboard. In fact it didn’t 
sound like anything Baltasar could think of. He rose. 
His sleep seemed blown away by a breeze. He went 
up to the rail and peered into darkness. His eye and 
ear detected nothing. Baltasar prodded with his foot 
a sleeping Indian into wakefulness.
“I heard a cry. That must be him,” he told the diver 
softly.
“I can’t hear a thing,” the Gurona Indian, now up 
on his knees and listening, said as softly. Suddenly the 
horn and voice pierced the heavy silence again.
The Gurona shrank as from a whip lash.

Alexander BELYAEV • THE AMPHIBIAN
10

“Yes, that’s him,” he said through his clattering 
teeth.
Other divers were waking up. They crawled towards the blotch of lantern light as though seeking in 
the yellowish beam protection from dreadful darkness. There they squatted, huddling together and 
straining their ears. The horn and voice came from 
far off again and was heard no more.
“That’s him-the ‘sea-devil’,” the divers were whispering.
“We ought to be clearing out of here.”
“A shark’s a kitten compared to him! “
“Let’s speak to the boss.”
There was a patter of bare feet. Yawning and 
scratching a hairy chest Pedro Zurita came on deck. 
A pair of canvas trousers was all he had on; a revolver holster dangled from a broad leather belt. Zurita 
approached the divers. The lantern light revealed 
a swarthy face, crumpled with sleep, curls of thick hair 
escaping onto the forehead, black eyebrows, a pointed 
moustache and greying goatee.
“What’s up?”
His self-assured voice and deliberate movements 
calmed the divers.
They spoke all at once.
Baltasar raised a hand to silence them.