No, because we can tell we are sometimes going forward and sometimes
back."

"But look! we're going north now."

"Yes, I know we are," said Vince; "and I'm beginning to know how it is."

"Well, tell me. It's so horrible to be puzzled like this."

Vince was silent.

"Why don't you speak?"

"Because I was thinking. Ladle, old chap, we've gone through too much,
what with the seals' cave, and being caught and then put down in that
stifling hole over the gunpowder. We're both off our heads--in a sort
of fever."

"I'm not," said Mike shortly. "You are, or else you wouldn't talk such
stuff."

"I talk such stuff, as you call it, because my father's a doctor, and
I've heard him tell my mother about what queer fancies people have when
their heads are wrong."

"Two people couldn't be queer in the same way and with the same things.
What's the good of talking like that?"

"Very well: you tell me how it is. I can't understand it, and the more
I try the more puzzled I am. It's horrible, that's what it is, and I
feel sometimes as if we had been carried away by the tide to nowhere, or
the place where the tides come and go in the hollows of the earth."

"We shall be out at sea directly, and then we shall be all right."

"No, we shan't be out at sea directly, and we shan't be all right; for
we've got into some horrible great whirlpool."

"What!" cried Mike excitedly. "A whirlpool?"

"Yes, that's it; and we're going round and round, and that's why it is
that we are sometimes looking south and sometimes north."

"But you don't think--if it is as you say--that at last we shall be
sucked down some awful pit in the middle?"

"I don't know," said Vince. "I can't think properly now. I feel just
as if my head was all shut up, and that nothing would come out of it. I
say, Mike!"

There was no reply, for Mike was gazing wildly up at the stars, trying
to convince himself of the truth or falsity of his companion's words;
but he only crouched lower at last, with a feeling of despair creeping
over him, and then he turned angrily, as Vince began to speak again, in
a low, dreamy voice.

"That's it," he said: "we are going round and round. I wish we'd had
some more of old Jarks' dinner, and then gone to sleep quietly in our
bunks. We couldn't have been so badly off as we are now."

"Then why did you propose for us to escape?"

"Because I thought we ought to try," said Vince sharply, as he suddenly
changed his tone. "