16 The Wine-Dark Sea - Libro della tutto

Patrick O'Brian The Wine-Dark Sea
EIGHT
Long practice and a certain natural ability
enabled Stephen Maturin to compose a semiofficial
report of some length in his head and
to encode a condensed version from memory,
leaving no potentially dangerous papers after
the message itself had gone. This required an
exceptional power of recollection, but he had
an exceptional power of recollection and it
had been trained from boyhood in rotelearning:
he could repeat the entirety of the
Aeneid, and he had the private code by heart
– the code, that is to say, in which he and Sir
Joseph Blaine, the head of naval intelligence,
wrote to one another.