swimming baths, and pergolas, I was naturally
puzzled by the inconsequential behaviour of the first-class passengers
at the hotel. They were leaving by the liner which was to take me, and,
I gathered, were going to cross a bridge to England in the morning. Of
course, this might have been merely the innocent profanity of the
simple-minded.

Embarking at the quay next day, I could not see that our ship had
either a beginning or an end. There was a blank wall which ran out of
sight to the right and left. How far it went, and what it enclosed,
were beyond me. Hundreds of us in a slow procession mounted stairs to
the upper floor of a warehouse, and from thence a bridge led us to a
door in the wall half-way in its height. No funnels could be seen.
Looking straight up from the embarkation gangway, along what seemed the
parapet of the wall was a row of far-off indistinguishable faces
peering straight down at us. There was no evidence that this building
we were entering, of which the high black wall was a part, was not an
important and permanent feature of the city. It was in keeping with the
magnitude of New York's skyscrapers, which this planet's occasionally
non-irritant skin permits to stand there to afford man an apparent
reason to be gratified with his own capacity and daring.

But with the knowledge that this wall must be afloat there came no
sense of security when, going through that little opening in its
altitude, I found myself in a spacious decorated interior which hinted
nothing of a ship, for I was puzzled as to direction. My last ship
could be surveyed in two glances; she looked, and was, a comprehensible
ship, no more than a manageable handful for an able master. In that
ship you could see at once where you were and what to do. But in this
liner you could not see where you were, and would never know which way
to take unless you had a good memory. No understanding came to me in
that hall of a measured and shapely body, designed with a cunning
informed by ages of sea-lore to move buoyantly and surely among the
ranging seas, to balance delicately, a quick and sensitive being, to
every precarious slope, to recover a lost poise easily and with the
grace natural to a quick creature controlled by an alert mind.

There was no shape at all to this structure. I could see no line the
run of which gave me warrant that it was comprised in the rondure of a
ship. The lines were all of straight corridors, which, for all I knew,