Tap a sentence to see it in Spanish, and tap the book to study it. The speaker plays one sentence, the round button plays a paragraph, and the player at the bottom reads the whole story. Press T to show or hide every translation.
Early in the morning , a man climbs a steel tower in the middle of a boat . The tower stands about twenty meters above the deck . He reads the sea the way other people read a page . His job is to find one fish before anyone else sees it . This is the Strait of Messina , the narrow channel that separates Sicily from Calabria , on the Italian mainland . At its narrowest point , the strait is only about 3.1 kilometers wide . Strong tidal currents run through it and reverse direction roughly every six hours . In this turning water , the sea is never still . The man on the tower is hunting the swordfish . Every spring and summer , swordfish enter the strait to reproduce , and the narrow passage concentrates them in a small space . Where geography squeezes the sea , it also gathers life . That is why the hunt survives exactly here . His boat is a feluca , a design that exists only for this hunt . It also carries a narrow walkway at the bow . The walkway can reach up to forty meters , longer than the hull of the boat itself . At its far end , above open water , a harpooner waits . When the lookout sees a fin near the surface , he shouts directions to the crew below . The boat turns and follows the swordfish through the turning current . Then the harpooner throws his harpoon by hand , just as ancient fishermen here did . Ancient sailors feared this water so much that they turned it into monsters . In Homer 's Odyssey , Scylla and Charybdis guard the two sides of the strait , and the Calabrian town of Scilla still carries the monster 's name . But every year the swordfish return , and the boats follow . High above the deck , on a thin steel tower , a man is still reading the water .
