This story has taken me forty years to tell and I only finally relate it now in the firm conviction that nobody will believe a single word of it. In many respects that doesn’t concern me. I have other motives than those of persuading the reader of the veracity of my tale. I write it more to exorcise a ghost that has haunted me for most of my adult life and will doubtless continue to do so for the rest of my days. It is a story, the memory of which, has been my constant companion these past forty years and has dominated my life in the sense that everything I am today has been shaped by those events in my youth.
My name is Delilah Delmonte or, to be more precise, it is Doctor Delilah Delmonte for I have a doctorate in Greek mythology which, as you will come to see, is deliciously ironic. I’m an old woman now. I’m even a grandmother for heaven’s sake! But I was young back then. And what a time it was to be young! I was a teenager in Haight-Asbury, San Francisco during the “Summer of Love” in 1967. I don’t remember much about it. I think I was too stoned to know what was happening most of the time. In 1969 I was one of the half a million on Max Yasgur’s farm at Woodstock. I was tripping out on acid when somebody told me that Sullivan County had declared a state of emergency and I thought they were talking about me! I stayed on to the bitter end to watch Hendrix’s set. The next summer I saw him again on the Isle of Wight in England. There were six hundred thousand of us that time and what time I didn’t spend out on the road that year I spent living in a squat in London’s Swiss Cottage. The following year I drifted over to mainland Europe. I stayed awhile in a commune in Amsterdam: took too many d**gs and slept with too many people in Copenhagen: got raided by the police on a farm in France and avoided being deported by the skin of my teeth. By 1972 I ended up in Greece.
I still have some old faded photographs of myself from those days and I smile now when I look at them. I have a favourite that shows me stood on the Ponte dei Scalzi in Venice taken in 1971. I was a beauty then there is no doubt but I still cringe with amusement at the clothes! I was wearing a full length, flower patterned caftan and the sort of open, leather thonged sandals they used to call “Jesus boots” in London. I had a band around my forehead, bangles on my wrists and ethnic beads and amulets around my neck. In the photo I look every inch a c***d of my age. God I even had a flower in my long brown hair! I think I fancied myself as some sort of Earth Mother! I had my arm around a handsome looking Italian boy whose hair was nearly as long as mine. I’m damned if I can remember his name. He was an artist, I recall, or at least he was an artist when he wasn’t wasted on marijuana and cheap wine. Ah we were young then!
Greece, to begin with, was a great disappointment. It was the one place in Europe that I’d always really wanted to visit. Ever since I was very young I’d been fascinated by the old Greek myths and stories; The Iliad, The Odyssey, the stories of Herakles, Helen of Troy, Jason and the Argonauts, Pandora’s box, myths of Atlantis, you name it. One of my favourites (and I just have to laugh at this in retrospect) was the tale of Andromeda, the chained maiden sacrificed to the sea monster Cetus and awaiting the arrival of her hero, Perseus, flying in on his winged steed, Pegasus, to rescue her. I used to lap this stuff up as a k**; reading anything I could about it; even Aesop’s fables, anything that could transport to my fantasy world of Ancient Greece. Greece in my mind was this archipelago of sun baked land, islands and deep blue sea populated by jealous competing Gods, tragic maidens and bronzed heroes battling against multi headed serpents, minotaurs and giants or setting sail on perilous quests through seas infested with monsters and treacherous sirens attempting to lure them to their doom; all to win the heart of some maid and at the whim of assorted Gods and Goddesses. I pictured this world of great ruined classical buildings, enchanted olive groves and quaint villages nestled about the rocky shores of a mystical, tranquil sea. It was heady stuff for a small town girl from Iowa.
Nor had my years on the road done anything to dull my idealised image of this Greek fairyland. The culture of my youth was saturated in myth and fantasy. We took marijuana, LSD and magic mushrooms and fancied ourselves connected to some deep vein of ancient wisdom unconnected to the mundane reality of modern life. I’d spent mid-summer’s eve at Stonehenge in England and believed that I’d perceived some greater cosmic truth that had nothing to do with the two hundred and fifty micrograms of acid I’d taken and the Grateful Dead tracks we were playing on the portable cassette deck. We’d followed lay-lines; visited the supposed site of Camelot and talked to trees! We believed in Earth Spirits, reincarnation, Chinese fortune telling, astrology and Timothy Leary. The whole world becomes a Magical Mystery Tour with naive, youthful idealism and enough d**gs to fuel it! Greece was just to be the culmination of all these dreams; the repository of my most cherished fantasies.
Turning up in Athens, on a miserable February evening, threatened to undermine those long cultivated delusions. For one thing it had never occurred to me that even Greece has a winter of sorts. I just thought the sun shone perpetually there. It was pissing it down with rain in Athens! So much for my sun-drenched olive groves! My Euro-rail card deposited me at Athens’ Central Railway Station (Stathmos Larissis) at about eight o’clock in the evening after what had been almost certainly the dreariest and most miserably uncomfortable railway journey it had ever been my misfortune to experience. It was raining; it was cold and I was quite alone.
I hadn’t planned it that way. I’d been telling people for years that it was my ambition to go to Greece and soliciting their participation in the adventure. I had hoped that Dieter, the guy I’d shacked up with in Munich, would come along. But Dieter was a guitar player in a band and they went on tour at about that time. I nearly postponed my Greek trip to go with them. It sounded kind of exciting being on the road with a rock and roll band. In the end it was perhaps a good job that I stuck to my plans. The band got busted trying to sneak half a kilo of hash across the border, hidden in one of their bass speakers and the whole lot of them ended up in jail. Sandy, my English girlfriend, was another that was supposed to accompany me but she’d caught a nasty dose of religion at the Glastonbury Festival the summer before and she’d jetted out to stay in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal instead. Thus I was on my own.
To cap it all I discovered that some asshole had stolen all my traveller’s cheques on the train and I turned up in Athens penniless. I spent my first night in Greece trying to sleep in a bus shelter. The next three days were fraught with tension as I wrestled with banks, where hardly anybody spoke English it seemed, trying to recover my lost assets. I had to resort in the end to phoning collect back home and begging my long suffering father to send me some cash. He agreed in the end but only after extracting a solemn promise from me to return home in the summer in time for his and mom’s wedding anniversary in June. He’d been trying to get me to come home for years and now he’d finally had my absolute oath to do so. He didn’t have to try too hard to obtain it. I was so lonely, homesick and wretched that for the first time in a long time the thought of Iowa and family was suddenly very appealing. I would go home in June. Pa would forward the airplane ticket. I never made that plane. That anniversary was destined to be the most tragic in my parents’ marriage.
Once my financial difficulties were solved I set out to look for the Greek fantasy that was slipping away from me. In Athens it proved elusive. Even back in the seventies Athens was a big, dirty, traffic congested and polluted city. It’s worse now if anything. I went around the usual attractions of Athens. I walked up the Acropolis and took a look at the Parthenon but the place was a tourist trap and full of boorish Germans. I was hampered by the fact that I knew no one, spoke no Greek whatsoever and the tourist authorities seemed more concerned with wealthy visitors than some impoverished wayward little hippy girl. After a couple of weeks of this I’d had enough and headed for the sea.
To a large extent much of my idealised imagery of Greece was associated with the sea and particularly the basin of the Aegean Sea and its myriads of islands. There are over six thousand Greek islands and islets all told, the majority of them in the Aegean. Of those six thousand there are only about two hundred and twenty inhabited ones and only seventy eight of those have more than a hundred inhabitants on them. You could spend a lifetime exploring all of them. It was now March and I was going home at the beginning of June. I had two months.
Among the islands of the Aegean Sea I began to find the Greece that I had started to think was lost to me. The spring was much kinder than my arrival in Athens and for day after day, week upon week, the sun shone in glory over the magical, azure waters of the Aegean. In the seventies tourism was just beginning to make its mark on the Aegean islands but most of them remained relatively unsullied by mass commercial exploitation. Among the islands and their people I found an unhurried peaceful existence that seemed little changed in many ways from Homer’s day.
Some people had warned me that many of the islanders were very conservative and unlikely to welcome some hippy girl of the sex and d**gs and rock and roll generation amidst them. In fact, for the most part, I was nearly everywhere treated with the warmest hospitality imaginable. I was often the only visitor to an island and I suppose there was always that air of a little lost waif about me that endeared me to the local people. Whatever the reason they took me under their wings. There were some places I stayed where the locals were literally squabbling among themselves for the honour of putting me up in their houses. One island I was on the locals threw a fiesta in my honour on the night before my departure and the whole village turned out to see me off the next day.
It was most welcome this hospitality because one of the major problems I faced was an ongoing battle with the infuriatingly haphazard schedule of the ferries that shuttled around the islands. The ship would drop you on one island and, after seeing all there was to see in an afternoon, you found that the next ship wasn’t due for week and that’s if the damn thing bothered to arrive at all! Helen’s face might have launched a thousand ships but you can bet your last dime that not one of the bastards turned up on time! On top of that the ships themselves were as motley a collection of rusting, derelict death traps as it would be possible to imagine. I’d have rather travelled on the Argo half the time!
Truthfully though I suffered these inconveniences gladly for it was an idyllic time, my passage through the Aegean islands. Not only did I benefit from the hospitality of the natives I also found myself relatively well off. Away from the tourist traps of Athens, Greece, in those days, was ridiculously cheap. I could eat out in a cafe or restaurant for a dollar fifty and get blind drunk for two. Even the ferry prices were reasonable. The vagaries of the ferries even suited me to some extent for I was in no real hurry to get anywhere in particular. I just kind of aimlessly wandered around, washing up like a piece of flotsam on whatever island the next ship happened to be going to. It suited me just dandy.
One thing I won’t tell you in this story are all the names of the various islands I happened upon. For one thing I can’t remember half of them and secondly I have my reasons for concealing the identity of those places that came to be of the most significant in this tale. I decided on this policy of secrecy long ago and I’ve stuck to it ever since. Not even to those few people that I have, in confidence, related the salient facts of this story previously have I revealed the exact geographical location where it took place. Some of those in possession of the broad outline of events that overtook me in that journey may well be able to piece together a rough idea of where I spent the summer of ‘72 but most of those are either sworn to secrecy, not fully informed of the precise details of my story or dead. I have my reasons for this deliberate obfus**tion and they are altruistic reasons for a higher purpose than those of my own personal dignity or reputation. I truly believed back then that it was important to hide the truth and, in so doing, protect the inhabitants from the destructive influence of human investigation. Those reasons have somewhat lessened in later years but I still hesitate to fully reveal those facts lest I bring a great evil upon an ancient and wondrous mystery of our world.
Thus I must beg the reader’s forgiveness if my geography is deliberately vague and ask them to understand that I have only the best intentions in being so. Oh I will mention a couple of the places I visited since they are fully on the tourist map now and they are quite revealing of the sort of wandering I was indulging in. I spent three days on Mykonos for example. These days Mykonos is a horribly spoiled tourist destination but it was a beautiful and charming place back then; an impossibly picturesque island of some thirty three square miles of quaint white washed villages crammed with tiny narrow paved streets nestled around clear blue bays and inlets, white sand beaches and the characteristic ancient, squat little, windmills that dot the hillsides around the island. Even then though, the first waves of new tourists were beginning to make their impact on the place. I was quite interested in these tourists to begin with because they seemed to consist largely of attractive young men. I spent three days naively trying to hit on them until it finally dawned on me that Mykonos was turning was turning into the tourist destination of choice for the cognoscenti among European gay men! I gave it up and made my way to Lesbos instead.
Before you ask, yes Lesbos did have some ulterior significance to me other than as another beautiful Greek island. I was a c***d of the love generation remember and every bit as likely, in those days, to jump into bed with another girl as I was with a man (not that my willingness has altered over the years; I just have less opportunities at my age now!). Actually Lesbos didn’t endear itself to me. Oh it’s a pretty place right enough and at six hundred and thirty square miles in size it’s the third largest Greek island, set just off the Turkish coast in the Eastern Aegean. I guess the reason I didn’t much take to it was that it was one of the few places among the islands where I encountered less than warm hospitality. Lesbians (and I use the term here in its demographic meaning to denote an inhabitant of the island of Lesbos) were less than amused by the fact that the title of their collective identity had been appropriated by gay women and disinclined to be welcoming to a young woman of presumably ambiguous sexuality turning up on their island and flaunting the fact in their faces. I hung around for a couple of days, bought a slim translation of Sappho’s poems and caught the next boat out of there.
Otherwise my ramblings were largely random and unplanned; just a journey through a bewitching seascape of impossibly blue water liberally sprinkled with exquisite islands of captivating beauty. I fell in love with Greece all over again. I was as happy as I’d ever been and if my idle wandering seemed of little purpose or reason it was enough then to be young, alive and in harmony with the world about me.
But I was running out of time. March came and went. April passed too in hazy days of balmy sunshine and, before I knew it, it was May. I was due to fly home at the end of the month and I reckoned I had but two weeks left of my Aegean idyll before I’d have to make my way back to the mainland and begin my preparations to fly home to Iowa. I set off for one last adventure to a group of islands I hadn’t visited yet on yet another rickety old ship. Somewhere, en route to that destination, in the middle of the Aegean Sea, I contrived to fall overboard.
Over the years I’ve told the story of how I managed to fall off a ship in the Aegean Sea in a number of imaginative ways. I apologise in advance therefore to all the people that know me and to whom I have related these edited and fictitious accounts. I’ve told that I tripped over some equipment, carelessly left by the deckhands, that precipitated my going over the rail. I’ve told others that I was caught by surprise by a sudden lurch from the ship that threw me through a gap in the rail and even to others yet that a rusted section of the rail gave way under my weight and dropped me into the sea. I think I’ve told some that it was a combination of all three things. I’m afraid it was none of these things and, since this is an account of the truth, I will tell that truth even though it reflects badly on me. The truth is that I was drunk on cheap ouzo and high as a kite on Moroccan hash I’d bought off a guy a week ago.
It was evening and I’d gone out onto the after deck to watch the sun set. I was barely dressed. All I wore was a floral patterned sari wrapped about me and quite naked underneath but I was alone of the afterdeck and cared not. The sun was setting in radiant fire in the west and turning the sea into a metallic sheen of molten copper. I had no idea where we were. I have a vague recollection of some tiny slivers of land far to the east. Feeling elevated by the glorious spectacle of the sunset I did something inordinately foolish. I climbed onto the middle bar of the guard rail and, exalting in the breeze in my hair, I spread my arms wide, fancying myself to appear like some Greek Goddess throwing her arms wide in benediction over the scene before me. Inevitably I lost my balance, fell forward and went straight over the stern of the ship.
You may take it from me that there is no better a combination than that of chill water and mortal danger to induce instant sobriety. I came spluttering to the surface, being tossed around in the white water being churned from under the ship’s stern by the screws, and yelled in panic for help. My cries went unheeded and the ship growled and rattled its way inexorably into the distance. The ship hadn’t seemed to be travelling very fast while I was aboard but it appeared to be disappearing alarmingly rapidly now. I yelled and yelled and yelled but even I knew it was futile. In those dreadful moments several realisations came to me in dreadful certainty: it was almost certain that nobody had seen me go over the side of the ship, the nearest land was miles away, I was an indifferent swimmer in any case and that I was surely going to die.
You think you’re going to live forever at that age. Your own mortality seems unthinkable until it suddenly rears up and stares you in the face. As the disturbed water of the ship’s passage evened out and calmed I cried. The ship was now a speck in the distance and as I bobbed alone in the darkening water as the sun set I cried in fear and grief; grief for my young life, full of promise, that I had thrown away in a moment of foolishness.
What does a young girl think about when faced with certain death? I think it was Samuel Johnson who coined the phrase that it concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully knowing he is to be hanged in the morning. Well the same goes for frightened little girls bobbing about in the Aegean Sea. I thought of my ill spent days of the past few years; too many d**gs and too much alcohol. I thought of my family back in Iowa who loved me and despaired of my dissolute life. I wanted so desperately to run to them now, beg their forgiveness and tell them I loved them. I wanted my father’s calm wisdom and my mother’s gentle compassion. But it was too late. I would never see them again. I think I prayed. The last sliver of the sun dipped below the horizon and I knew I would not live to see it rise again; the fall of night mirroring the darkness closing on my existence. I thought perhaps that I should end it quickly; allow myself to sink and get it over with. I’d read somewhere that drowning was supposed to be an easy way to die. But life is nothing if not stubborn and some tenacious inner resilience refused as yet to so quickly abandon my life.
I shivered in the water. Even the Aegean Sea can be cold in May. Then there was a splash in the water behind me. I whipped my head around in fear to see only the disturbance made presumably by some large creature from the depths below. My first thought was of sharks. I’d been contemplating the relatively peaceful death by drowning. Being eaten by sharks was another matter entirely. I felt a cold tingle of dread run the length of my spine. Something touched my leg and I screamed involuntarily in panic. There was another splash and the creature emerged at the surface at few feet away and I stared in stunned disbelief. It was a person’s head! Of all the most incredible miracles I could have thought of it was the realisation that there was somebody else in the water beside me in that vast expanse of sea. It was getting dark and I could make little of my companion’s features but I tried to gasp a greeting. There was no response. Like quicksilver the figure darted back beneath the surface. I cast my head about wildly trying to see them again but they had vanished. Where had they come from? What where they doing in the water so far out to sea? For a few seconds I began to think I had imagined them; that they were some hallucination born of my addled brain and desperation. Then suddenly they came back up behind me and grasped me about the chest gripping me beneath my arms. Incredibly I felt warm naked flesh against me and breasts against my back. It was a woman! Then she kicked with her legs and she was propelling me backwards through the water.
That girl could swim! I could feel the immense power in her limbs and she dragged me through the water as effortlessly as a rag doll. I couldn’t have made better pace on my own! I was content to lay inert and let her pull me along; suddenly feeling immensely safe in her strong arms. There seemed to be some purpose to her swimming too. She set a course and followed it doggedly heading for I knew not where.
If she could swim it seemed that conversation was not her strong suit. I tried to babble out some thanks but received only grunts in reply. I supposed she must be saving her breath for the effort of keeping me afloat and pulling me through the water so I held my peace. As darkness fell the girl propelled us both relentlessly though the water towards some destination I could only conjecture at.
I have only the most disjointed memories of that long swim. I think I must have been slipping in and out of consciousness and delirium. I know that on occasions she relinquished her grip on me but stayed close by to keep me afloat. I think she was just taking a rest before turning once more to the labour of hauling me through the water. She needed to rest certainly because she must have pulled me many miles throughout that long strange night. It was an incredible achievement and even now I can still wonder at the magnitude of it. Of course I didn’t know then that there was nobody else quite as well suited to the requirements of that task. It just seemed miraculous at the time. God she was strong and, whatever may have happened later, I still know that owe that girl my life. With inexorable determination she pulled that lost girl in the sea through the darkness to safety.
It took all night. I don’t actually recall making landfall. I guess I must have been pretty far gone by then. My first memory of it was in waking up stretched out on some sand and feeling the warmth of the morning sunshine on my back. I remember choking up a lot of water so I guess I must have swallowed quite a bit throughout that long swim. As my eyes came slowly into focus the first thing I saw seemed so bizarre and absurdly incongruous that, for several seconds, I could only lie there, blinking at it foolishly. It was a battered old, enamelled sauce pan sat on the sand two feet away from my head. In confusion I eased up on my elbows to look at it more closely. It was half full of clear water. Tentatively I dipped a finger in the water and tasted it. Gloriously it was fresh water! I was parched and eagerly I snatched the pan up in both hands and drank deeply from it. I heard a noise from behind me and whipped around in surprise. The girl was sat on a rock ten yards away watching me carefully.
Somehow I staggered to my feet, perceiving as I did that I was on the beach of a tiny cove surrounded by rocks. I hadn’t managed to see with any clarity my saviour during the long night of our swim but now I saw her clearly by the light of day and I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise as a sudden, unearthly chill of fear came over me. For this was no ordinary woman squatting on that rock. I can still feel that eerie sensation I had when I first saw her as if it was yesterday; that instant recognition that I was looking at somebody that fell outside of my experience of humankind. There was an unworldly quality about her and something old and ancient as if the sight of her stirred some forgotten, archaic, ancestral memory buried in my consciousness.
She was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin and gazing at me fixedly with her eyes; those incredible eyes! She was quite naked bar a sort of belt fashioned about her waist, some odd beads and seashells braided into her hair and a curious amulet on a thong about her neck. Her skin seemed pale and translucent and her hair was silver. By silver I don’t mean the faded grey of the old lady or even the hue we call platinum blond. Her hair literally had the metallic sheen of polished silver and it grew strangely too. It fell down her back in a long mane but on the top of her head it stood up like the kind of hairstyles punk rockers affected in the eighties. I was later to learn that that hair of hers was actually mobile and a good indicator of her mood. When she was relaxed and tranquil her hair would lie flat on the top of her head but when she was wired, tense or, as she was at this moment, just intensely curious and excited it would bristle up.
Her ears were extraordinary and they came in time to be one of my favourite features about her. They were long and pointed like Mr Spock’s from Star Trek only more delicate and elegant. Ever since I’d been a c***d I’d always wanted to have pointy ears like a pixie’s. Well this girl had them and I found them unbearably cute. They were animated too and she constantly twitched them, especially when she was excited. When she was sad they appeared to droop.
Her nose was another expressive part of her features. It was turned up and slightly flattened and it was always twitching and sniffing the air about her. I came to recognise that she had an acute sense of smell and the scent of things was important to her. There was a territorial and possessive function to her sense of smell I was to discover in time for she marked her ground and her possessions with her scent including, and most particularly, me. But I’m getting ahead myself now.
The single most arresting features on her face were her eyes and these were truly remarkable. I had never seen such enormous eyes on a person. They were great expressive globes framed under exaggeratedly high arched eyebrows. And the colour of them! The irises were a startling and penetrating emerald green. Whenever she stared directly at you, which was often I might add, they were like great big laser beams boring into you. They were another thing that changed with her mood. If she was angry or tense they were like steely green flints but they became almost misty when she was wistful or contented.
As to the rest of her body it was shapely and womanly but with well defined muscles. Even had I not had the evidence of her efforts in swimming so far to bring me here to safety to go on I would have seen immediately that she was immensely strong. Her breasts were high and firm and I noticed no anomalies there although I was to learn in time that even they were possessed of their idiosyncrasies. She seemed to have very long legs and her feet were broad and sturdy looking. Her hands on the other hand were long and immensely tactile with long probing fingers. There was something odd about her hands and I didn’t understand what it was until I took a closer look. She had six fingers on her hands and the pattern was repeated on her feet.
Looking back over the brief description I’ve penned it may seem as if the girl I’ve described was perhaps rather unusual but by no means so far out of the ordinary. It’s very hard to convey that otherworldliness about her convincingly. Any one of her curious features alone might have been dismissed as a curiosity of hers but all of them together were strikingly strange. You just knew by looking at her, sat on her rock staring at you with her hair, nostrils and ears quivering in suppressed excitement, that you were looking at a person quite unlike any you had ever met before in your life. It was uncanny, disturbing and oddly frightening and at that point I hadn’t even seen some of the oddest features of her anatomy.
It was nearly impossible to tell how old she was. Superficially she seemed to have the body of a young woman no older than I was myself but there was that odd feeling of having no reference point to age her by. In fact, throughout the time I knew her, I never came to any satisfactory conclusion about her age. At times you had the feeling she was a sage and ancient woman but she could just as easily appear to be an excited or petulant c***d. You had the feeling that all your usual indicators regarding a person’s age had no relevance here. She might have been a precocious c***d or she might have been a thousand years old for all you knew. She didn’t fit into the mould or fall along the normal timelines of your experience.
I suppose I must have stood and stared at her for several seconds, so profound an impact did she have on me, before I remembered my manners. After all, for all her eerie oddity, this girl had saved my life and it was downright rude not to express my gratitude for that. I hadn’t exactly picked up fluent Greek on my travels but at least I had learned the words for hello and thank you. Well I tried them hesitantly on her but she just looked at me oddly without replying and showed not the slightest indication that she had understood a word I had said. More in hope than anything I tried her with English. Oddly this seemed to elicit some sort of reaction. She rocked back and forth on her rock and her ears twitched furiously. An odd unfathomable smile seemed to form on her face and a curious low growling purr seemed to come from the back of her throat; a sound I was later to recognise as a signal of her pleasure. Again I am certain that she hadn’t a clue what I was saying. She just liked hearing me talk.
With communications at an impasse I just kind of stood there flummoxed. I wondered briefly if she was perhaps simple and couldn’t talk at all for the only vocalisations I’d heard from her were grunts, snorts and that odd purring sound. No sooner had the notion occurred to me however than she suddenly, and without warning, gave voice to a long monologue. Well that settled one thing. She didn’t speak Greek! I’d heard enough of that language to recognise it by now and this was most certainly not it! In fact I’d never heard a language like it and forty years later I still haven’t heard the like again. It was the oddest fluid outpouring, rising and lowering in pitch and tone; extraordinarily melodious yet containing strange gurgling sounds and guttural notes. It ranged from sweet high tones to low soft growls, constantly shifting and changing from fast staccato patterns to slow harmonious phrases. You got the feeling that if water in the sea or a bubbling stream could talk that would have been the language it would have used. It was entrancing to listen to and completely incomprehensible.
It was a language too and not just random vocalisations. There was meaning and significance in it. In time I got to be able to be able to recognise them. I can’t say that I ever came to understand it much less ever speak it. I don’t know if it would have even been possible, with my vocal organs, to speak in that tongue. Nevertheless I did, in time, begin to pick out meanings from it and begin to grasp some of the richness of it. God how I wish I could have had a tape recorder then to preserve that speech for posterity. I have made a study of language these past forty years and I am certain as I can be of anything that her language belonged to no linguistic family that I’ve ever come upon since. Even languages as diverse as English, Greek, German and French all belong to the same family and have their common roots in the Indo-European phylum of languages that dominate all of Europe, the Iranian plateau and South Asia. This was something entirely different. Had I been able to record it then I might have been the only person to have committed that tongue to the archives of human knowledge.
Having delivered her speech the girl suddenly snaked off her rock. I do not use the expression lightly. There was something almost reptilian about the way she suddenly uncoiled from her seating position to a stance in front of me. It was part of the strangeness about her those sudden fluid motions; so quick and yet so controlled and graceful. But that was not the thing that arrested my attention just then. While she had been hunched on her rock her private parts had been concealed from me. (not that she had any “private” parts of course because she never wore clothes). Now she was stood in front of me I was afforded a view of her groin and I recoiled in shock. She had no pubic hair whatever and, hanging between her legs, was a large and all too noticeable penis!
I stood rooted to the spot not knowing how to react. Until that moment there might have been many oddities about her but there had been nothing whatever to suggest that she was anything but female. She had in fact, in spite of her more curious features, the body of a young attractive woman. That single grotesque anomaly seemed ludicrously incongruous when set upon her female form. It wasn’t just a small anomaly either. Many a man who fancied himself a stud would have been proud to own the organ dangling so bizarrely from this girl’s loins.
In some ways I found this the most shocking aspect of her yet. In my defence I must point out that this was 1972. In those days the issues of transgendered people were still largely unknown and taboo. The Stonewall riots had only occurred in 1969 and even the gay rights movement was still in its infancy. Across most of mainstream America homosexuality was still largely considered a mental illness at best and a disgusting, criminal perversity at worst. Transgendered people were still well off the radar. If we thought of them at all it was in terms of sad lonely perverts putting on women’s clothes in their homes or drag queens in sleazy gay bars. Even today, with our thankfully far greater understanding and tolerance for the diversity of human sexuality and gender, many people are still uncomfortable with the whole idea and transgendered people are among the most widely discriminated against people in society. Back then it must have been horrible for them. Even I, who considered myself to be tolerant and after all of sufficient sexual ambiguity myself as to be considered bi-sexual, was taken aback to see somebody so clearly cross the boundary of gender identity we had always so fondly believed to be fixed and immutable.
When I could tear my eyes away from her sexual organs I noticed that she was tall. She was probably about six feet tall which put her well above me because I just about made a shade over five foot one. I was just a little slip of a thing. This girl towered over me. I saw the muscles rippling in her long legs and understood a little of the power in them that had driven us so many miles through the night.
She stalked up to me slowly. She seemed animated and excited. Her ears were quivering beguilingly; her nostrils twitching and sniffing as if trying to catch the scent of me. Her eyes were dancing all over me and I felt suddenly shy before their searching appraisal. My sari hadn’t been improved by a night of immersion in the Aegean Sea but I pulled it about myself protectively under her gaze. Nobody had told this girl that it was rude to stare when she was little it seemed. Curiously she began to walk in circles around me, examining me from different angles and emitting that odd little purring sound in her throat as she did so. Her walk became quicker and more agitated as she circled me and I felt more and more afraid. Then suddenly, in a lightning fast and fluid motion, she darted up and grasped the material of my sari, ripping it away from me so quickly that I was powerless to prevent it.
I squealed in alarm and tried to cover my nakedness with my hands. She flung the remnants of my sari aside carelessly and recommenced her circling of me. She seemed more excited than ever. Her hair was bristling on her head alarmingly. She seemed even stranger now as well for, so close to her I could detect other features about her which further persuaded me of the girl’s particular singularity. Her hair for instance didn’t just grow on her head. A slim mane of it actually extended down over her neck and down her back to just below her shoulder blades, following the line of a curious raised ridge that extended the length of her spine. Running too from the base of her neck and between her shoulder blades were two odd flaps of skin overlaying her shoulders. These were the oddest thing and quite clearly regular on both sides of her shoulders and the coverings of two openings into her body. I had no idea what they were although I later came to a conclusion about them. In the time as I came to know her they were not easy things to examine closely for she disliked being touched there and would slap my hand away if I tried. Nevertheless as I came to observe her on a daily basis their function became obvious. I’m going to stick my neck out here. They were the coverings to her gills.
At last she seemed to have seen enough and came to stand a few feet in front of me. Then she grinned and I swear I nearly fainted. Her teeth were two rows of curved and bluntly pointed daggers. She growled softly in her throat and, God help me, I thought she was going to EAT me! Then she growled more urgently and her true intention became startlingly obvious. Her penis (forgive me for that bizarre sounding personal pronoun but I could never think of her as anything but feminine) was fully erect. It was a horrifying sight. To my fevered eyes it looked gargantuan; a great quivering organ thrusting out from her loins with single-minded, malevolent intent and, as her eyes glittered with excited purpose, I knew instantly, exactly what she intended to do with it.
I squealed in panic, turned and ran; racing over the sand of that little beach towards the rocks beyond. In terror I glanced back over my shoulder as I reached the rocks. She was stalking after me with that unearthly grin on her face and that monstrous erection preceding her like the Sword of Damocles. Sobbing with fear I dashed inland. There was a scrubby rocky knoll and I scrambled up it seeking the summit. I’m not quite sure what I intended to do there. I think I had some notion about seeing if I could spy somebody from the top who could respond to my cries for help.
The view from the summit offered no comfort though. Instead it drove me to despair. It had always been a pretty fair bet that I was on an island. I had had no idea however that it was such a small one. I could see the whole thing from the summit of that knoll. It could not have been more than six or seven hundred yards wide at its widest point; just a few acres of rocky scrub and, even from the most superficial observation, quite obviously uninhabited apart from myself and that frightening creature now beginning to slowly climb the knoll behind me. In panic I looked around for refuge. I could see a depression in the centre of the island and there the only trees of the island grew; a sad little group of gnarled olives close by the ruins of an ancient villa that showed at least that somebody had once lived here. I fled from the top of the knoll, scrambling through the scrub whose thorns caught at my naked flesh and across the rocky ground which hurt my bare feet, making for that copse of trees and the ruined villa, seeking some place to hide.
She was still stalking me patiently. I could hear snatches of what sounded like some eerie song coming from her throat. I realised later that she could have caught me easily at any time she wished. She was not only taller and stronger than I she was also a hell of a lot faster. It would have been simplicity itself for her to overtake me. She was just taking the time to relish her pursuit; her excitement increasing with the chase. She was playing with me.
The olive grove and the ruined villa held no sanctuary. Even if there had been some hiding place she would have sniffed me out in no time. I later learned that her sense of smell was so acute that she could track me down anywhere by scent alone. Nor did there seem much mileage in climbing a tree to evade her. The olive trees were a pretty stunted little lot and I had no reason to assume that she was any less arboreal than I was in any case. As she appeared at the edge of the olive grove I turned and bolted for the shore line. I was on the far side of the island by now and there was another little beach there. I dashed down it to the water’s edge. God only knows what I intended to do! Did I have some fool notion about jumping into the water and trying to swim away? If I’d stopped for a moment to think I must have surely realised how futile that would have been. This woman could have creamed any Olympic standard swimmer on the planet! You do the craziest things when you’re fleeing in panic.
My evasive schemes were academic in any case, for, before I reached the water she abandoned her slow stalking and suddenly exploded into a blur of motion and caught me by my hair in her fist. I screamed and tried to beat her arm away with my hands but she ignored my feeble flailing and turned to drag me by my hair back up the beach. I struggled but the agonising pull on my hair was relentless and I stumbled after her. In a little corner among some rocks she turned, without relinquishing her grip on my hair, and looked at me. I was squealing and gibbering hysterically and pulling at her arm trying to dislodge its hold on my hair. In one of those terrifyingly fast movements of hers she raised her free hand and slapped me hard across the face.
The sudden stinging blow to my face shocked me into silence. She hissed at me. I swear this is the truth. She hissed at me like a snake and parted her lips to expose her teeth. I cowered in terror and she treated me to another monologue of her incomprehensible speech before twisting her fist in my hair and forcing me to my knees; her eyes blazing in green fire. I grovelled on the sand before her pleading with her not to hurt me. She regarded me thoughtfully, it seemed, for a few seconds and then dropped to squat in the sand beside me. She opened her mouth and leaned toward me. I recoiled with a squeak of fear thinking that she was going to bite me.
Instead she did the most curious thing. She put out her tongue and licked me on the side of my face. Her tongue seemed incredibly long and mobile, and its surface was rough and rasped like a cat’s. She rolled her tongue around in her mouth as if savouring the taste of me and gave a little purr of contentment. Evidently she liked the taste. Then she took a firm hold of me and began to explore my body with her hands and her tongue. It was not the slightest use in resisting her. She was terrifyingly strong. She held me immobile as she rasped her tongue all across my face, purring softly as she did so and pausing occasionally to twitch her nostrils and take a deep draught of my scent. She even wriggled her tongue into my ears and I cringed at the tickling sensation of the curiously hard end of it squirming in my ear. She took a firm hold on my face and forced my mouth open to probe inside with her tongue. It was not by any stretch of imagination a kiss. She was just exploring the inside of my mouth and tasting my saliva.
She grasped my wrists together firmly in one hand and then began to run her tongue over my body. She licked my neck and shoulders, raised my arms to lap away in my armpit and grasped my breast with her free hand and ran her tongue over it, the rough surface chafing at my nipple. There was no sense of seduction in this action of licking me. It was almost as if she was grooming me or just taking pleasure in the flavour of my skin. And she couldn’t seem to get enough of the smell of me for she sniffed every part of my body with intense concentration. I had stopped struggling by now. I just squatted there inertly as if hypnotised, staring at her in horrified silence and feeling her tongue rasp against my flesh. She was touching me with her fingers too, probing every inch of my body; squeezing, kneading and stroking as if to extract the maximum tactile sensation from the feel of me.
Inevitably her probing fingers found my sex and I started violently as I felt her touch me there. She shook me roughly with a low growl and taking a firmer grip she began to explore my sex with her fingers. I bit my lip to choke back a whimper as I felt a long, tactile finger worm its way into my vagina. She wriggled her finger about inside experimentally for a second or two and then withdrew it. She lifted her finger to her face and took a deep breath of the smell of it. Her hair rippled in delight at the scent of it and she gave a low deep purr of satisfaction. Her eyes seemed to grow misty as she put out her tongue and licked her finger to savour the taste of my sex. It appeared to whet her appetite for she gazed down meaningfully at my groin.
Almost instantly I knew what she wanted to do and I began to struggle again. But her excitement was growing and, without warning, she upended me and laid me flat on my back on the sand. She grasped my ankles and drew my legs up over my body to a point where my knees were near my ears. Then she swung her legs over mine trapping my calves under her knees facing toward my rear and pinioning my arms with her legs. I think I’ve seen wrestlers pin a person in this fashion and doubtless there is some technical name for the hold. For all practical purposes though it meant that my rear was raised in the air and my exposed sex lay completely at her mercy inches away from her face.
From my prone position beneath her rump I had the unwelcome opportunity to observe her own sexual organs at close quarters. What I saw shocked me even more. I hope the reader will forgive me for the following graphic details I am about to describe but this is important for an understanding of this woman and there really is no way of telling this delicately. This creature who was so delightedly abusing me was possessed not only of a large and prominent penis but also an obviously swollen and glistening vagina too! She was a hermaphrodite! Oddly there was no scrotal sac but there were a pair of swellings under the skin which I was later to conclude corresponded to her testes. The darker folded skin which should have formed the scrotum instead became the labia majora surrounding her vagina. Nor, I noted, was her penis simply an enlarged clitoris as might have been expected in a person with ambiguous genitalia for there was a quite separate clitoris. In fact her female and male genitalia seemed almost completely separate from each other. Even in the impossible situation I was in I still found time to wonder where exactly she peed from! It was a mystery I was never to solve by the way. She always went out into the sea to rid herself of bodily wastes.
One thing was certain; her sexual organs had quite separate sources of fluid lubrication. Her vagina was dripping wet with her excitement. I say dripping not as a mere turn of phrase. It was quite literally dripping. I could feel drops of fluid falling on my face. It was not alone either for there were drops of liquid seeping from the head of her penis as well. I could feel them landing on my breasts. I felt my head reeling with the implications of this dual sexuality of hers. Could it be really possible that she could function biologically as both male and female? Was it possible, God forbid, that she could even impregnate herself?
Even as I stared in horror at her sexual organs she was obviously entranced by mine. She took a long deep smell of my sex and then, parting the lips bent to lick it. Her purring became almost a low rumbling growl as she lapped at my sex, for all the world, like a cat lapping a saucer of milk. I lay helplessly pinned beneath her whimpering softly in humiliation as she licked away there obviously relishing every taste of my private sanctum. She seemed intent upon extracting every last morsel of my juices from me on her tongue even penetrating my vagina with her long tongue to wriggle it about inside me. She became ever more excited by her tasting too for, to my shame and in spite of my bizarre situation, my body reacted involuntarily to the stimulation of her tongue and my sex produced fluid of its own which she lapped up eagerly, clearly enjoying the flavour of it.
There is one thing I haven’t mentioned and I should do for it is important. Ever since I had come into close contact with this girl I had become aware of her scent. In fact it was strong and unavoidable. This is not to say that it was unpleasant. On the contrary it was quite a pleasant, if somewhat strange, and evocative aroma. It was very difficult to pin down exactly what it smelled of though, although it did spark some odd feeling of having come upon it before even if exactly where proved elusive to the memory. It was the scent that I would always associate with her but for many years I failed to find its equivalent. Finally I did find something very like it. She smelled in fact very like ambergris. Ambergris, for those unfamiliar with it, is a curious substance, found floating in the oceans, that is the partially digested remnants of the beaks of Giant Squid which have been vomited up from the stomachs of Sperm Whales. Put like that it sounds horrible but in fact ambergris is a rare and valuable substance. In the days when whaling was allowed it was one of the most valuable products from Sperm Whale carcasses. It’s used as an ingredient and fixative agent in expensive perfumes. This girl smelled like that and the parts of her from which she smelled most strongly of it were her sexual organs.
Finally she ceased her probing of my sex with her tongue and jumped aside releasing me. I scrambled to my knees and regarded her warily. Oddly she seemed to have changed colour. When I had first seen her, her skin had been very pale. Now it was much darker as if she had spent a day or two sunbathing. It was another of her oddities that I would recognise in time. When fresh from the sea she would always appear pale but just a short time in the sun and her skin would darken as if her body produced natural colouration quickly to protect her from the sun. I suppose it’s the same process as a body tanning in ultra-violet light but it was much faster and ephemeral.
But this was not the thing that most impressed me as I looked at her fearfully. Her excitement was clearly reaching a fever. She was giving vent to a continuous low growling and her penis, that monstrous penis, was literally quivering and twitching, fluid seeping from its tip, as she stared fixedly at my sex. I think I had just time to mouth “Please no!” before she grasped me and spun me around on my knees. She was behind me and she gripped my hips tightly. I squealed in alarm as I felt the head of that dreadful penis questing urgently at the opening of my vagina. I tried desperately to squirm away but she gripped me tighter and punished my wriggling with a hard slap on my rump. Then, with a grunt of satisfaction, she impaled me on that frightful organ, driving it inexorably into me until I thought I would split asunder with its violation of me.
Once she had buried that terrible thing in me to the hilt she began to thrust at me urgently. I never would have thought that it was even physically possible for me to take the full length of that thick penis into my body. It was as if somebody had forced their fist and their arm deep into me. Yet it was not some inert object upon which I was now skewered. It felt like something alive inside me like some strange thick snake squirming deep into my vagina. It seemed to have concentric ridges around it like raised knobbly rings and I could feel it literally pulsating within me.
She was not what you might have described as gentle with me. I can remember shrieking in pain and humiliation, digging my nails into the sand, as she violated me, her urgency increasing as her hips slapped hard against my backside with her thrusts. She was growling alarmingly and the v******e of her thrusts became such that she was literally lifting me off my knees and pushing me along the sand. I was sobbing in anguish and pleading with her but if she even understood my distress she ignored it under the imperatives of her need. For a second time my body betrayed me for I felt a rising arousal in my loins at her thrusting. In some way this was the most terrible thing of all that my treacherous body could so react to this unspeakable violation of it. I whimpered in shame and prayed for deliverance.
Then the growling in her throat turned to a high keening wail as she rammed her engorged organ into me to its maximum penetration and abandoned herself to orgasm. I could feel her distended member pulsing violently within me and I thought it would never stop as it pumped its ejaculation deep into me, flooding my womb with her seminal fluid. This latter may seem fanciful but it is anything but. How much semen does a man ejaculate on orgasm... a tablespoonful... two perhaps? Well from my observations (and I assure you that, over the coming days, I had all too many opportunities to observe it) her average ejaculation would have filled a half pint mug generously. There seemed no end to it. You wondered where it was all coming from.
That fearful climax seemed to have spent her for she half collapsed against me breathing heavily with odd wheezing notes and purring softly in her throat. Then, mercifully, she withdrew that awful thing from me. It was like pulling the stopper from a bottle of soda you have shaken too much for, as she withdrew, her semen gushed from my vagina and poured down my thighs. She squatted back on her heels purring to herself and I collapsed on my side weeping piteously.
She regarded the semen pouring from my sex interestedly for a second or two. Then she wriggled up to me and began to scoop it up with her fingers. She tasted it with satisfaction on her tongue and I thought that she was going to lick it all up. Instead she began to smear it all over my body; across my back, my belly, my breasts and even on my face and in my hair. I didn’t know what she was doing at the time but later I would come to recognise it. She was marking me with her scent. I reeked of her. It was her way of taking possession of me.
This task completed to her satisfaction, she suddenly jumped to her feet. She seemed mighty pleased with herself for she was chuckling in an odd way and she began to dash about the beach jumping up on rocks and giving vent to long bursts of her unfathomable tongue. Finally she dashed to a low cliff bordering the cove, clambered up and, with a grace that would have made an Olympic diver despair, launched herself off into the sea. She vanished underwater for a long time and then emerged by the side of a rock protruding out of the sea perhaps a hundred yards off the beach. She clambered up this rock, perched herself on top and began to sing.
It was the first time I ever heard her sing and to this day I can close my eyes and still hear the haunting ululating melodies of that eerie yet compelling refrain that drifted across the water to me as I squatted there on the beach in my misery. Forgive me but I find no words adequate enough to describe that song. Perhaps had I been a poet or a musician I might have found some way to express that mesmerising melody in words. It was enchanting in the fullest meaning of that word as if it cast a spell over you, hypnotising you and touching you in deep forgotten places in your soul you never even knew existed. Oh God how I wish I could have recorded it! How I wish I could reproduce it. As it was, even in the desolated despair of my violation, I sat there entranced and wished it would never end.
She sang for I suppose about twenty minutes which was short by her standards. I have heard her sing for hours on end. But she ended her song and plunged back into the water to return to the beach. Perhaps she thought she was neglecting me. I huddled abjectly as she strode up to me and talked to me. Of course I had no idea what she was saying but she made her point clear as she grasped my hair and pulled me to me feet. She made as if to lead me away by dragging me by my hair put I squealed and patted her hand with mine. She stopped with a strange frown and growled at me. This I was to learn indicated that she was mildly annoyed with me. If she hissed at me and bared her teeth then she was really pissed with me. I shook my head furiously and pointed at her hand in my hair. Her puzzlement grew. Shaking the head meant something different in her body language. She had other ways to express emphatic negatives with gestures. But I held my ground stubbornly, patted her hand once more and held out my own to her.
Slowly she grasped the point and relinquished her grip in my hair, taking hold of my wrist instead to lead me. It was a minor victory but a landmark in our relationship for it was the first time we ever managed any inter-communication between us even though all I had managed to convey was that I didn’t like to be pulled around by my hair and, if she must drag me around, then take my arm instead. It was a major concession to win. Thereafter she would pull me along by my arm. She would only grab my hair if she was angry with me.
She led me along the beach and round the rocks along the shore line. We had to wade through some shallow water full of seaweed. You’ll think me foolish but I remember being afraid that a crab might nip my toes! In the next little bay I had a surprise for there was an old derelict, rusting fishing boat stranded on the rocks there. It was full of holes and would obviously never float again even if she had not, as I was to learn, already stripped it of anything of use to her.
She unceremoniously dumped me on the sand and strode over to this boat. Hanging off the side of this boat into the water was a length of nylon rope and, as she hauled it up, I saw that it was attached to a largish sac fashioned it seemed out of some old fishing net. She had, I was to learn, a genius for scavenging the detritus of human society for her own purposes. At the time though I was puzzled for I had started to think that she was primitive, even bestial in a way. I was clearly not thinking properly. The belt around her waist and the ornamentation she wore were clear signs that she was possessed of creative tool manipulating intelligence. The contents of the bag puzzled me further. It seemed to be full of odd knobbly, barnacle encrusted pieces of dark grey rock. As she carried the bag back toward me however I took a closer look. They were oysters. I did not know it at the time but there were significant beds of oysters around the island and she guarded them jealously and harvested them diligently.
She squatted down on the sand beside me and emptied the shellfish onto the ground. Then she took, from her belt, a short but sturdy knife set in a handle of what appeared to be bone. I blinked in surprise for it was the first irrefutable indication that she used tools and it appeared to be steel as well; fashioned perhaps from some odd piece of metal. She used this knife to pry open the oysters. I would later see that some shellfish she could crack open in her teeth but the tough gnarled oysters defeated even her formidable dentures. She extracted the meat from the inside of the oysters and began to feed it to me. By this I mean she literally fed me with her fingers as if I was a baby incapable of feeding myself. I hadn’t eaten for I suppose nearly twenty four hours but even so I had never eaten oysters. They didn’t exactly figure too much on the menu back in Iowa! So I was a little reluctant to eat them to begin with. But she was persistent and eventually I tried them. To my surprise I quite enjoyed them. An expert later told me that this type of oyster, although edible, was not considered one of the gourmet types you’d find in high class restaurants. They were almost certainly a species called, in the Latin, Pinctada radiate which were harvested for other reasons than their edible qualities. Those other purposes would have become clear had I known that the common name for the species was Gulf Pearl Oyster, one of the most widely distributed species of pearl producing oysters whose range extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the shores of Australia and Japan.
We were in luck too for, as she conscientiously fed me, she opened one oyster to find a small pearl resting inside. She crooned in delight and dashed to the boat to return with a small tin. It appeared to be an old tobacco tin but inside she kept her treasure. It was half full of pearls! Reverently the new find was placed inside and the box resealed and replaced in its hiding place. I know little about the value of pearls but there must have been a considerable amount’s worth in that tin.
Once I had been fed she led me by the wrist once more into the interior of the island near the old ruined villa. Here she led me to the strangest feature of the island yet. In a hollow beneath some rocks was a pool of clear cool fresh water. How that pool of water came to be there on that otherwise parched island I do not know. Perhaps it bubbled up from some subterranean aquifer of perhaps gathered in that hollow from precipitation gathered on the surrounding rocks. Yet it must have been regularly replenished otherwise it would have quickly evaporated under the hot Aegean sunshine. Whatever the mysterious source of it was, it was a Godsend for it was the only source of freshwater on the island other than the occasional rainfall. I could drink my fill.
Once I had quenched my thirst she pulled me into the shade of the little olive grove and there she used me again. It seemed throughout that day she was on a mission to violate me in as many different places around the island as she could. She took me on the crest of the knoll I had first fled to. Then a little later she pulled me to the beach where I had first landed on the island and had me there as well. That was somewhat different for that time she took me laid flat on my back with my legs over her shoulders as she pounded her organ into me. She withdrew as she climaxed as well and drenched me with her semen from my face to my loins, marking me with her strong scent even more unmistakeably. Under this assault I observed another curiosity about her. She not only ejaculated from her penis as she came to orgasm but also from her vagina as well! The clear liquid from her vagina gushed out in a stream down her thighs. She must have needed a high liquid intake for she seemed to expend gallons of it over me!
In all I suppose she used me about six times that first day which was quite restrained by her standards. I have known her to pleasure herself on me up to over a dozen times in a single day. Perhaps that long swim dragging me had sapped h