When I looked out of the porthole that morning of New Year's Eve, I saw we were riding at anchor in a beautiful harbor. Sometime during the night, we had arrived from Madagascar at Victoria, capital of the Seychelles Archipelago. These tropical islands scattered in the Indian Ocean were not easy to get to in those days, somewhat more than a decade after World War II, because no runway existed to accommodate air traffic. I was told the islands were composed primarily of guano, droppings from the migrations of prehistoric birds headed south toward warmth during the Ice Age in Europe.

Only a few ships called in, such as the freighter I was on. Freighters were Victoria's outlet to the world's markets, bearing the archipelago's coconut products, its cinnamon and its vanilla beans. Its people comprised a melange of races from Africa, Asia and Europe. Both English and French were official languages, but most spoke a musical patois.

After I went ashore to look around, I found the men to be so handsome I could hardly believe it. They had a certain look almost as if they were all related. I took that to mean that there was common ancestry in a small island population divided into and then multiplied by countless generations of sailors. Whatever the origin of the common strain, it was immensely pleasing to my eyes. Victoria provided a microcosm of the world's races blended into a confection like a liqueur parfait with layers of color all different, all sweet, all intoxicating and all right!

I sat down for a sip of heady French eau de vie at a dockside cafe open on all sides to the ocean breeze and while I drank a crystal-clear brandy distilled from plums, I spied a nearby sign offering trips to other islands than this one, which was named Mahi. Having already spent a week at sea, with another several days to go after my ship would depart late that evening for Aden across from the Horn of Africa, a bit of local sailing smacked too much of a busman's holiday.

That is until I noticed an older woman whom I took to be English engaged in animated conversation with a lanky young Seychellois on the deck of a small yacht beyond the sign. He had all the attributes I had already noted about island men, but with the addition of an attraction that worked like a magnet for me. He wore a tight polo shirt cut off below the chest, showing a rounded midriff broken only by a deep navel of the type I could bury my tongue in and lick all night and day although such a thing with a man had never crossed my mind.

I paid my bill at the cafe and proceeded to the boarding plank where a sudden shift in the tide pitched me into the water just as I started to set foot on deck. I had been a superior swimmer in my youth, so the water held no fears for me. But before I could even grasp the closest pile, the lanky Seychellois had dived in beside me and lifted me topside, no mean feat with a hefty number like me. The older woman helped pull me in, all aflutter with concern. She was not English, as I had thought, but spoke in the throaty music of a Scottish brogue.

"Happy New Year, dearie," she said. "Now don't you worry! The water's clean as champagne, but champagne's for drinking on a day like this, not for dunking!" Her laugh was hearty. "I was a nurse in my day. I doubt there's a thing in that water to make you ill. It's not like Venice, I assure you. Why, I fell into a Venetian canal in '48, and do you know I have bouts of pink eye to this day?"

That was Hester, who had seen service in the Pacific during World War II. Retired from surgical nursing at a famous hospital in Coventry, she never made her age quite clear, but I took her for perhaps 75, still somewhat senior to me.

The young man who saved me, you might say, was captain of the yacht, as well as its only crew. A strapping 25, he had operated it alone for several weeks while his French father recovered from a stroke. Born of a local mother descended, he said, from the pirate captain who first discovered the distinctive black parrots of the neighboring island of Praslin, I suspected his lineage also included every race that had set foot there in the past several hundred years, each one bequeathing him its best.

He called himself Tim, and he was handsome indeed, his taffy-brown color deriving mostly from the sun. Hester and I agreed to share his fee, and when he bent over to haul anchor and set sail, the flesh revealed below the belt line of his wet bell-bottom pants was pale by comparison with what I could see on his arms, torso and head. His butt was firm, as tight as the powerful muscles of his arms, but his chocolate-drop eyes were soft as a calf's, the lashes curving upward nearly to his brow and downward to his wind-burnt cheeks. Although he rarely engaged my eyes directly, I caught him several times looking sidewise in Hester's direction with an expression of obvious amusement, and then my way with what I could only call an enigmatic smile, as if he already knew everything about me.