On calm, moonless nights, processions of lights weave slowly along the serpentine channels separating the islands of the Adriatic from one another and from the sea. So deliberate, so orderly is the movement of these lights that there seems a solemn piety about them, as if their carriers are embarked on a holy pilgrimage. And so they are. On moonless nights, these fishing boats leave their ancient villages and steer where vessels have navigated for thousands of years. In waterways claimed by the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, Goths, Byzantines, Venetians, Turks, Moors, Austrians, Germans, and Italians, they search for mackerel, for sardine, for mullet, bream, tuna, and hake, the mainstays of the markets of their home ports on the islands of Vis, Brac, Hvar, Solta, Krk, Korkula, Lastovo, Mljet. As their ancestors did, the Dalmatian fishermen use lamps to beckon the fish to their nets.

Fish are attracted to light. Once the discovery was made, fires were built on iron grates to feed torches fashioned from pitch and pine boughs held by a man in the prow of a small wooden boat. Another man would row, luring the fish toward the beach, where men waited with nets.

In 1908, a Dalmatian fisherman by the name of Kuljis substituted an acetylene lamp for the torch and enhanced the technique. Except for the modern diesel engine, which pushed boats farther from their homeports, and a power block for pulling the nets from the water, the method has seen little improvement over the decades.

Now, as they always have, the boats proceed at sunset and sometime in the night they spread out in a circle of light. Their engines fall silent. The fishermen wait. They pour red wine from the vineyards of their home islands; they unwrap bread and dried fish and olives and cheese. They curse their poverty, their hard lives, and they pray to St. Nicholas, the fisherman's patron. They say they are poor, but it is a measure of richness in the villages to sail your own boat away from the land and to have your family on board. Fathers, sons, brothers, cousins, grandsons peer into the water where the light is dancing and hope to catch the first glimmer, hoping to be the first to pass the word: "Get ready with the nets. They are rising.''

And in the walled, webbed medi-eval villages, the women would be waiting, watching the lamplights on the horizon. They would be clad in black headscarves, mourning, according to tradition, the loss of an ancestor or an immediate family member to an unfamiliar reef, or grieving the loss of another villager to a sudden storm, although their losses would be rare because Dalmatian fishermen defer to the weather and never stray far from protection. But the women wear the black headscarves all the same, as much for their symbolism as anything, to tell others they are fishermen's wives and to express their own dread of becoming widows or childless themselves some day.

Such was the convention of the Dalmatian Coast. And it exists today.

The legend of the Adriatic people was extolled by the wandering Greeks, who called their sun-ripened island universe the land of the Lotus-eaters, because the inhabitants lived on honey-sweet fruit, fresh fish and wine, and seemed without care or want of anything. Ulysses was said to have found not only sustenance there during his wanderings but sub-limeness. The people of Dalmatia argue to this day that Ulysses was not lost during his 10-year odyssey but simply sampled the local hospitality and elected to postpone coming from the caves in the hills. Today, guides can show you the way. Ascending vineyards and lavender fields and stands of pine and cypress on terraced hillsides above the harbor of Hvar, they can point out the limestone caves where Neolithic discoveries have been made, yielding evidence that these caves were indeed the dwellings of some sort of mythic creature.

On the neighboring island of Korkula, another guide will escort you up the steep hill overlooking the ancient harbor of Vela Luka and point out that "the harbor is really three harbors in one, just as Homer described.'' In 1992 and 1993, Serbian gunboats entered these harbors and shelled the town occasionally during the three-year civil war between Croatia and Yugoslavia. And the guide will lead you into another limestone cave where the villagers had fled during the shelling and contend, convincingly, that, based on Homer's account, this must have been the home of the fearsome Cyclops Polyphemus. It is impossible to stand in this cave overlooking the harbor and the islands that appear to be floating above the lavender blue sea and not believe him. It is impossible not to be grateful that the war is long over and that the beaches and villages are once again tourist-safe. And it is equally impossible to understand, from this vantage point, why anybody would ever want to leave.

Nanko Separovic is a tall, wiry, mischievous-looking man of 63, who appears to have worked with his hands his entire life. By hand, and with the help of his two sons, he builds beautiful, double-ended wooden boats for the fishermen of Vela Luka. In the village, he is referred to as "the master,'' and when those words are spoken it is with a tone that might be reserved for a sculptor from Zagreb or Florence. Like many artists, he cannot precisely explain his technique. He says he spends about 800 hours on each boat. "I keep these things in my head. The keel, it is from Bosnia. For the ribs and the skin we use our own pine. My boys (Drozen, 30, and Tadynko, 28, who were thinking of opening a café to attract tourists), we climb over that hill,'' he says, pointing in the direction of the cave of the Cyclops. "When we reach the top, we climb over to the next hill and to the next one. There, where it is driest, where there is no water and where the trees are the ugliest, we select the wood. Want wood from the trees that have struggled the hardest to survive. That is the wood for the heart of the sea.''

As he imparts this secret, his face alters into a muse. "We use fire and water. We know how to bend the wood, just so. We know how to allow for the swelling when it touches water.'' And suddenly, the reverie is interrupted by a flaw his large, coarse hand has found on one of the pine planks forming the epidermis of a 25-foot work in progress. What his hand has bumped might be imperceptible to another's. But it causes his face to contort. He grabs a formidable-looking clawed tool and tears at the side of his boat. The strokes are bold, rapid as if he means to scuttle his work before it hits the water. Yet his attack is not vicious. Shavings fly, curled, light as feathers, they float just as tackfully. And he runs his hand pleasurably back over the spot, massaging this boat as if it were destined for some Venetian gallery. The master sighs and concludes his discourse.

"I started when I was 11. I apprenticed for 16 years with a master before I was ever allowed to make my first boat,'' he says. "This boat here, it will be good for the high seas. You could take to Italy. If you are careful, you could take to America. And when you go, you will take a little of me with you in this boat. That is my pride. When I started, my family was the poorest in the village. Now I have three houses and two women. Why would I ever want to leave?''

Still, there is so little land, and little that is arable. The ground is steep and the good soil is shallow. To clear even the smallest patch for grapes or olives or orange trees, stone after stone must be gathered and carted away, to be piled into walls or stacked into the sides of houses and abbeys or cobbled for pathways. You look at the land. It sends a pearly-white reflection back.

A crystalline, gem-blue purity predominates in the water. Because the Adriatic is especially shallow and relatively small, because the white limestone bottom is often in evidence and influences the holding and bending of light, the sea appears more as a mythical limpid pool, carved by glaciers and gods from the limestone. The sea influences the air, too, sending salty mists aloft. Because it is small, the Adriatic is especially salty. Salt in the mist refracts light in an unusual way. It captures the sun's glare and converts it into a soft, honey-colored, amniotic glow that can be felt on the breeze and brings with it an almost childish sense of well-being.

Limestone and light, then, determine the character of the islands.

The stone is remarkable, glossy, grayish-white, enduringly hard but not brittle. It conveys a cool, wet, delicious texture prized by master builders and sculptors. It can be cut and shaped into stone walls, statuary, lacy church spires, Gothic or Romanesque or Italianate palaces, fountains, towers, ramparts, tombstones, paving stones. Limestone from the islands of the Dalmatian Coast has been quarried for nearly 2,000 years, since the Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered the stone from the island of Brac for his summer palace, which is now occupied by merchants, as is the main market square in the ancient port city of Split. Brac limestone also gave the White House, in Washington, D.C., its face, just as it provided faces along the Champs-Elysee and the palazzos of Rome and Venice, and for the Grecian temples and temples along the ancient trade route that Marco Polo followed east.

Limestone gives the harbor villages their quays, where boats are launched and the women receive their men and crates loaded with their catch, which the women then carry on their heads short distances to market as they have forever. Limestone gives the villages their squares, where children play barefoot in the cool and safe shadow of a cathedral while swallows cavort overhead. Limestone provides the seaside pathways where adults promenade arm in arm at dusk. And on the limestone benches around the squares and along the quays, every morning and every evening, the old men take their customary places, places afforded by a covenant with time and habit. They sit, always facing the harbor and the sea beyond, assessing.

They assess the weather: "It can change its mind more times than a merchant from Venice.'' The old men are more reliable than barometers, their forecasts never far off. They know how to assess the horizon. They know the smell of a changing wind. With a well-trained nose, they argue, a good seaman will never lose his way, even in the densest fog. If it is in July and he smells lavender, he is edging up on the island of Hvar. If the wind smells of pine or myrtle, then it surely is Mljet. Rosemary and orange? That would be Korkula. They assess the upkeep and apparent seaworthiness of each boat as it ties up. They assess the quality of the catch, the prowess of the captain, the upkeep of the web of his nets, the neatness of the knots, the snap-to of the deckhands. They recycle one another's sea tales and reassess them, the disappointments they'd been part of, how far they had to travel, "sometimes all the way to Algeria to have bad luck.'' And they assess how much more time they will be allowed until their women come for them or whether they should reconvene while they have the opportunity, over a little local wine or plum brandy at the café, at least until their sons or nephews return safely to port.

Patrick Dillon is executive editor of California magazine.