And that summers day fate came her musing way and the pearl dropped impossibly through his nimble fingers and plunged down into the depths taking along his idle dreams with it.

The sea bass named Bouilla was idling amongst her shoal when, on a current, a perfect orb gave her a pearly wink and dashed off on an adventure across the reefs.

Distracted, she followed, not from a catfish curiosity nor from a tuna temerity; there was something sea bass sublime in the pearl. So she swam down, her shoal barely a tremble on her fluttering fins, until that ethereal eyeball came to rest on the undulated bed of the ocean floor.

Even down here the pearl caught the light of the distant sun. And so Bouilla danced, to and fro, almost catching her own reflection in the inanimate eye which bore more life than those of any handsome fish, bird or fast and ever playful dolphin.

She failed to see the two soulless eyes that watched her dance atop their nose.

She failed to see the sunrays, reaching through the sea down to her precious pearl, bounce and weave their way across her elegant scales and back down into the depths of the great white shark's eyes. There those rays held, in the deepest depths of the mind of an animal that existed only to eat, that had never seen the beauty of the dance, only ever tasted the heat of a kill.

And so the shark fell in love, with an animal a hundredth of his size, one that he had scooped up in his jaws countless times.

Sometimes a dance can open the heart of those with none, and who can say that a pearl, oyster prised by a boy, destined to buy a man a wife, cannot still buy love of the impossible kind.

Then a cloud came across the sun, the sea turned to tar, the pearl lost its magic and the little lost lady found herself quite alone, with no comfort of the shoal and, one might say, a tad out of her depth she floundered.

For just an instant there was a glow in the two eyes the great shark and she saw where she really was, seduced by a stone and brought to, it must be said, the jaws of death.