Paracelsus was admonishing the energetic divers to beware the explosions that could signal demise of the great underwater city, because then they must escape quickly to not be prey to the horrors that would surely come to the surroundings. The divers were listening carefully, half engrossed in their own thoughts about the great underwater city--What were its streets like? How about its hotels? Were there prostitutes?
There were indeed some prostitutes, as diver Mike found out. Large ones, with great horned pates, and all male: not much to his liking. He eddied about in the great underwater city, furthering too his interests by jackknifing from one spot of some interest to the next and eyeballing each passing mongrel of the deep.
But then the city exploded as Paracelsus had warned, and Mike had time only to think of his buddy Alf, who was perched on a rock far away in the Mediterranean getting his bum buzzed pleasantly by the Rock of Gibraltar. The earthquake was "the pleasant one" of 1992, and that was that.
Alf meandered into the tiny hub of commercial activity so uncharacteristic of the surface of the Mediterranean, punctuated here by the hardness of the Rock of Gibraltar and allowing, for example, a bit of commercial activity including sock repairing, boot matching, and cortisone-injection trading: a shop or two for each, each with its friendly, large-knobbed face, ghastly cheek-points a point of advantage and beauty here on the Rock of Gibraltar, in contradistinction to their aspect elsewhere in the world.
Alf did a thing or two with some cortisone for his buddy Mike, with whom he had "exported casks." He thought, "This ought to get him." But Mike was virtually nothing now; in fact a bit of Mike was washing up onto the beach that Alf had slept on the night before, a chunklet that Alf would soon rub through his hair, thinking "deep, deep" for no particular reason.
Kim, in Idaho, was tending crops with a verve that gave his uncle a chill of joy, for he knew that in this boy's hands the farm would expand to the economic limits of the Valley Duchesne, sending power and glory abroad for their fair distribution by naked women of every concern and practice, no matter how bewildering.
Kim's uncle was daydreaming of a great underwater cy and a young man named Mike, the sometime needful lover of a young man named Alf, and their horrible experience with the death of Mike in the great underwater city whose base-rocking final explosions had been predicted by Paracelsus, who at this point, as luck would have it, was trudging severely across the vastnesses and relevances of the Idaho scenery, further, further, closer to Kim's uncle and Kim, who now was the first to see him--"There, uncle! There is the trudging, energetic figure of a sage!"
"You are right, nephew: there is a sage."
"I am very interested in buying some radishes," Paracelsus said in a high, raspy voice.
"Next farm," Kim and Kim's uncle said in unison, and sent Paracelsus off down the road with some friendly glances and a barrelful of good tidings for their neighbor, the friendly radish farmer.