the little corner where he lay asleep, curled up in his sacking with the
inside-out school cap, doubled twice, for pillow.

He fell asleep on the smooth, solid, steady stone.

He awoke on the stone in a world that rocked as sea-boats rock on a
choppy sea.

He went to sleep between fallen moveless pillars of a ruin older than
any world that history knows.

He awoke in the shade of a purple awning through which strong sunlight
filtered, and purple curtains that flapped and strained in the wind; and
there was a smell, a sweet familiar smell, of tarred ropes and the sea.

'I say,' said Quentin to himself, 'here's a rum go.'

He had learned that expression in a school in Salisbury, a long time ago
as it seemed.

The stone on which he lay dipped and rose to a rhythm which he knew well
enough. He had felt it when he and his mother went in a little boat from
Keyhaven to Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight. There was no doubt in his
mind. He was on a ship. But how, but why? Who could have carried him all
that way without waking him? Was it magic? Accidental magic? The St.
John's wort perhaps? And the stone--it was not the same. It was new,
clean cut, and, where the wind displaced a corner of the curtain,
dazzlingly white in the sunlight.

There was the pat pat of bare feet on the deck, a dull sort of shuffling
as though people were arranging themselves. And then people outside the
awning began to sing. It was a strange song, not at all like any music
you or I have ever heard. It had no tune, no more tune than a drum has,
or a trumpet, but it had a sort of wild rough glorious exciting
splendour about it, and gave you the sort of intense all-alive feeling
that drums and trumpets give.

Quentin lifted a corner of the purple curtain and looked out.

Instantly the song stopped, drowned in the deepest silence Quentin had
ever imagined. It was only broken by the flip-flapping of the sheets
against the masts of the ship. For it was a ship, Quentin saw that as
the bulwark dipped to show him an unending waste of sea, broken by
bigger waves than he had ever dreamed of. He saw also a crowd of men,
dressed in white and blue and purple and gold. Their right arms were
raised towards the sun, half of whose face showed across the sea--but
they seemed to be, as my old nurse used to say, 'struck so,' for their
eyes were not fixed on the sun, but on Quentin. And not in anger, he
noticed curiously, but with surprise and ... could it be that th