n--something dreadful. I just _know_ it!"

"Oh--be sensible, Vilma!" There was a hint of impatience in Cliff's
deep voice. A gorgeous girl in his arms--dark-haired, dark-eyed, made
for love--and she talked of dreadful things which were going to happen
because the moon looked screwy.

She released herself and glanced out over the sea. "I know I'm silly,
but----" Her voice froze and her slender body stiffened.
"Cliff--look!"

Darrell spun around, and as he stared, he felt a dryness seeping into
his throat, choking him....

Out of the winding-sheet of fog into the moonlight crept a strange,
strange craft, her crumbling timbers blackened and rotted with
incredible age. The corpse of a ship, she seemed, resurrected from the
grave of the sea. Her prow thrust upward like a scimitar bent
backward, hovering over the gaunt ruin of a cabin whose seaward sides
were formed by port and starboard bows. From a shallow pit amidships
jutted the broken arm of a mast, its splintered tip pointing toward
the blindly watching moon. The stern, thickly covered with the
moldering encrustations of age, curved inward above the strange high
poop, beneath which lay another cabin. And along either side of her
worm-eaten freeboard ran a row of apertures like oblong portholes. Out
of these projected great oars, long, unwieldy, as somberly black as
the rest of the ancient hulk.

Now a sound drifted across the waters, the steady, rhythmic
_br-rr-oom, br-rr-oom, br-rr-oom_ of a drum beating time for the
rowers. Its hollow thud checked the heart, set it to throbbing in
tempo with its own weary pulse. Ghostly fingers, dripping dread,
crawled up Darrell's spine.

Stiff-lipped, Vilma gasped: "What--what is it?"

Cliff answered in a dry husky voice, the words seeming to trip over an
awkward tongue. "It's--it's--it _can't_ be, damn it!--but it's a
galley, a ship from the days of Alexander the Great! What's it
doing--here--_now_?"

Closer she came through the moon-path, a frothing lip of brine curling
away from her swelling prow. Closer--her course crossing that of the
_Ariel_--and the watchers saw her crew! They gasped, and the blood
ebbed from their faces.

Men of ancient Persia, clad in leather kirtles and rusted armor, and
they were hideous! In the yellow moon-glow Cliff could see them
clearly now--a lookout standing motionless in the stem, the steersman
on the poop-deck, the drummer squatting beside the broken mast, the
rowers in the pit--and a