Panait Istrati (1884-1935) attained worldwide fame with his stories and short novels featuring the young Adrien Zograffi, a Romanian vagabond modeled after Istrati himself. In "The Sponge Diver," first published in 1930 as "Le pêcheur d'éponges," Istrati returns to Zograffi's adventures, this time in Greece, where Zograffi meets a countryman who tells him his tale of a season of forced labor aboard a small ship plying the shallow waters above the rich sponge beds of the Eastern Mediterranean. story 8,633 words