The night of the perigee arrives. The sea recedes like a held breath, revealing a staircase of black coral leading up a sheer cliff face. The air hums with an invisible pressure. Compasses spin like drunkards.
But Corto is faster. He doesn’t grab the Egg. He grabs the U-boat’s keel and kicks a loose stone. The stone flies into the Egg’s field – and hovers, perfectly still, defying gravity.
Here is the story, presented as if it were the lead tale in I Classici del Fumetto Nr. 01: Corto Maltese . Corto Maltese “The Serpent of the Magnetic Moon” Venice, 1921. A damp fog clings to the canals like a ghost’s shroud. In a dimly lit trattoria near the Ghetto, a man sits alone. Gold earring, dark curly hair, a slight smile that has seen too much. He stirs his coffee, watching a drop of milk spiral into oblivion. I Classici del Fumetto Nr 01 Corto Maltese
Inside the cave, the U-boat rests on a cradle of petrified giant clams. Its hull is scarred, but intact. And in the conning tower, embedded like a dark heart, is the : a sphere of rotating rings and mercury-filled glass tubes, crackling with silent blue lightning.
Next issue: I Classici del Fumetto Nr. 02 – “Corto Maltese and the Cobalt Cipher of the Inca” The night of the perigee arrives
As they sail past Borneo, Corto studies the chart. The “Magnetic Moon” is no moon, he realizes. It’s a – a mountain of lodestone that only becomes accessible when the real moon is at perigee, its gravity warping the local tides and revealing a hidden passage through the coral reefs.
Tawaret fires her grappling hook, snagging a rocky outcrop outside. The line goes taut. Corto swings himself and the boy out of the cave just as the entire ceiling collapses, burying the U-boat, the Egg, and the greed of men forever. Compasses spin like drunkards
One night, the boy, , asks Corto: “Why do you help people who betray you?”
He smiles. It is enough.
“Only the lost ones, Rasputin. Women are too easy to find.”