It would seem as if the fate of this wild adventurer should have brought pause to any who had thought to do even as he, and to call upon the wind in aid in passage of the sea paths, but with me it was not so. Eagerly had I noted the feats of Neco, and it had been borne in upon me that there was a degree of wisdom in his madness. Even his death, of which we became assured, brought me no fear. I, too, would seek to learn what might be done to make the wind our servant, and I set about this swiftly, being to my wonder well supported by both Malchus and Aradnus, who sometimes showed less hardihood than I, but who now, strangely enough, became as deeply lost in this dream of a new conquest for the toilers of the sea. We devised a curious plan whereby we thought we might try the issue with less risk of our lives than had been faced by Neco. We knew that the greater danger from the wind was that the boat might capsize in a storm, and our first care was to avoid this risk as best we might, though we were resolved to test these dreaded sea-blasts to the utmost. Truly we were half mad, but the zest of the thing had grown upon us. If the risk were great, the stake was great as well, and we fell together under some sort of spell of joyous madness over the prospect of we knew not what. And this was our crafty plan! [Illustration: “I, too, would seek to learn what might be done to make the wind our servant”] Often when ships laden with timber had been cast upon the rocks and crushed, those in dire peril had escaped by lashing together as many of the floating beams as they could, making a raft which would not easily overturn, and so drifting by good fortune to some place of safe landing. Our ship, so we devised, should be a raft; yet more than that; it should be a sort of boat as well, but one unsinkable, and thus we built it, working long with our two slaves, and hewing and spiking the seasoned cedar timbers, of which there was a great store at hand for purchase and of which we owned a part. For many days we hewed and shaped and fashioned until we had a great raft some thirty forearm cubits long, more than seven times the length of a tall man, and more than half its length in width. Of double depth were the dried timbers and so mortised and interset and spiked together that the whole was as one great piece of wood not to be torn apart by the mightiest seas. Caulked it was, though needlessly, for we knew that the water would often come aboard, and all about the sides was raised a stout timbered wall of the height of a man and having many openings at its bottom that the water might escape and we might walk dry shod when seas were calm. So much we allowed the strange craft the nature of a boat that it was tapered to a prow at either end and, furthermore, was hewn so that each prow swept upward from beneath, that the boat might rise on any sloping shore. At each end provision was made for a long steering oar such as we used on the biremes.