The number of turtles arriving on the beach in 1981 was only a tenth of what it was only a decade ago. And although 50,000 turtles reached the beach in 1981, almost twice that number were killed before they could lay their eggs. And 1981 was the sparest year for arribazónes in recent memory, which probably means that fewer turtles reached the beach than ever before, throughout the whole of time.

Juan José de la Vega says the mem­ory of 1973, when he saw 100,000 turtles lay their eggs on the beach in a single night, is a treasure no one can take from him. He likes to relive it now and again. He stood alone, surrounded by all that...biology, and the moon was full and bright. A gentle breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and the smell of the sea was strong. All around, on all sides, as far as the eye could see on this bright night, there were turtles: turtles coming in out of the ocean, turtles laying their eggs, turtles returning to the mystery of the sea. Juan José had a sensation of a time before man a sense of the fecundity of the sea and land. There was something deep and full expanding inside of him, something other people feel only inside a church.

There is an image that lives inside my memory as well. It is a vision of that slaughterhouse dump, those acres of death. The breeze I recall was heavy with the stench of rot, warm with the weight of decay.

Propemex is still dumping bodies there, and, according to Dr. Pritchard, still dumping eggs. These eggs are said to be too immature to be buried in the sand; either that or too fouled with the moth­er's intestines during the slaughtering process.

So these eggs are dumped where the bodies of the mothers are left to rot. But many of the eggs are not fouled; many are not immature. Many of them live, and hatchlings emerge to crawl over the rot­ting bodies of their slaughtered mothers. They crawl frantically, through the stench of death, toward a sea they will never reach.