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The waves of the sea are a reflection of our mood: there are days when we can describe with shining eyes how different each one of them can be. And there are times when all of them look identical to our eyes, quite as though Mother Nature’s mood has seen to it that the same spray of surf on a beach in the Pacific or Indian Ocean splatters the very next moment over the coast of Senegal. Hektor Maille felt, at that moment that he too was made up of a fluid consistency, a capricious organism flowing swiftly through time and space. Here a moment, there a moment. At one moment he felt as though he was in his summery garden in Senpauv, sitting by the salad patch and smelling the lopop being roasted in the kitchen by Odette for her magnificent mango-and-shrimp cocktail. At another, just a couple of Happy Gourmet Sky meals later, he was standing on the corniche of the Dakar coast and staring out at the isle of Goree, where a local agent named Ross had located a radio signal that had emanated from the wristwatch of the vanished physicist.

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