r it, make yourself comfortable. Sorry we can't do
more than give you the seat to sleep on. But the chief thing in this
ship is fish. Try some sprats."

"Aye, try yon sprats," invited the Chief. "Ye'll get to like them well,
in time." After the fish there was cards, in which I took no hand, but
regarded four bent heads, so intent they might have been watching a
ritual of magic which might betray their fate; and, above those heads,
motionless blue cirrus clouds of tobacco smoke wreathing the still lamp.
The hush was so profound that we could have been anchored beyond the
confines of this life.

2

What the time was next morning when I woke I do not know, for the saloon
was too dark to show the clock, over the fireplace. But the skylight was
a pale cube of daylight, and through it I could see a halyard quivering
and swaying, apparently in a high wind. My bench was in a continuous
tremor.

We were off again. Somebody appeared at the doorway, a pull of cotton
waste in his hand, and turned a negroid face, made lugubrious by white
lines which sweat had channelled downwards through its coal dust. It
looked at me, this spectre with eyes brilliant yet full of unutterable
reproach, saw that I was awake, and winked slowly. It was the second
engineer. He said it was a clear morning. We had been under way an
hour. He had got sixty revolutions now. He then receded into the gloom
beyond; but materialized again, or, to be exact, the white stare of two
disembodied eyes appeared, and the same voice said that it had won
seventeen and six-pence last night, but there was something funny about
the way the skipper shuffled cards.

Feeling as though I were in one piece, I got up, made my joints bend
again, and went on deck. Our ship, tilting at the immobile world, might
have upset the morning, which was pouring a bath of cold air over us.
The overcoat of the skipper, who was pacing the bridge, flapped in this
steady current. A low coast was dim on either hand, hardly superior to
the flawless glass of the Thames. By the look of it, we were the first
ever to break the tranquillity of that stream. We ourselves made
scarcely a sound; we could have been attempting a swift, secret and, so
far, unchallenged escape. The shores unfolded in a panorama without
form. Once we spun past an anchored ship, or what had been a ship before
the world congealed to this filmed crystal, but now it was a frail ghost
shrouded in the still f