Three more swelling waves, with wide irregular faces, almost vertical, and then hollowing and scooped and toppling; but no sign of the surfer. Sharkey turned his back on the wave; he kicked at the stones on the cliff, hating the ugliness of the land, feeling stifled and disgusted, stumbling slightly as he gasped for breath. Then a sudden shriek from the crowd, and more yelps, some agonized cheers, and he spun around.

A tiny figure had slipped across the top of the wave and dropped in, and was speeding across its face, carving a narrow furrow of froth.

The wave was still rising as the man grew smaller, cutting sideways—and when Sharkey looked through his binoculars again he saw something even more unusual than this dwarf tumbling down the wall of water. On the face of the wave were more waves, some like moguls on the black run of a ski slope, others like ridges, still more of them formal waves—surfable waves on the wave itself—taller than the surfer who was carving his way around them, speeding toward the bottom of the trough.

Sharkey willed him to stay upright, and when at last the man was struggling in the massive collapse of the wave, then lost to the fury of the foam, Sharkey cheered with the rest of the watchers on the cliff, the photographers, the exuberant locals, the sponsors in their distinctive jackets and caps, the team hurrying down to the beach.

João rushed to Sharkey and hugged him.

“Tomorrow your turn!”

He had no fear now. Seeing Garrett master the wave convinced him he could ride it, and if the wave was bigger tomorrow, so much the better. Yet he slept badly, remembering how the face of the wave had not been glassy, how there had been ridges and head-high waves protruding from it, the phenomenal scowl of the water monster, its vast bumpy face seen up close.

He was up and in his wetsuit before João’s wake-up call. The weather that early morning was bleak, a low sky of woolly gray clouds, a wind thick with the sourness of kelp and the tang of the deep sea.

He had his surfboard, he was dressed to surf. But his team, the sponsors, the film crew and photographers he’d expected, were nowhere to be seen. João stood with a warmly dressed woman and man, their faces scarcely visible inside their hoods.

Futile, surprised into his own language, João said, “Muitos carros.”

Sharkey was disconcerted to be among strangers and was aware of their indifference.

“Conferência de imprensa,”the woman remarked, pointing to a platform near the hotel that had not been there the day before, people gathered around it.

“Incrivel!” an old woman in black shrieked. “Grande onda!”