At the beginning of my march in this haze-covered sea-wilderness I had tried to keep upon the outer edge of it; but insensibly--having to pass from ship to ship rather by the way that was open to me than by the way that I wished to go--I had wandered into the thick of it more and more. And so, when at last I took thought of my whereabouts, and stopped to look around me that I might shape a course back again, I found that in whatever direction I turned I saw only what I had seen ahead of me when my hulk was drawing in upon its borders: a dense confusion of broken and ruined ships which fell away from me vaguely under the golden haze. It had been a dismal sight then; but what gave a fresh note to it, and a thrilling one, was that it no longer was only in front of me but was all around me--stretching away on every side of the wreck on which I was standing, and growing fainter and fainter as the haze shut down thick upon it until it vanished softly into the golden blur. Yet even then the full meaning of my outlook did not take hold of me. That I was in something of a coil, out of which I could not find my way easily, was plain enough; but that I really was lost in it did not cross my mind. With all my wanderings, I knew that I could not have traversed any great distance; and the certainty that I had passed always from one ship to the ship next touching it seemed to make finding my way back again entirely open and plain. And so I laughed at myself a little--though that was not much of a place for laughter--because of my touch of panic fright; and then I turned back from the ship on which I was standing to the one next to it, over which I had just come--and so on to the next, and in the same way to three or four more. Yet even in that short distance--though my way was unmistakable, for these ships touched only each other as it happened--I was surprised by finding how differently things looked to me as I took my course backward: all the ups and downs of my scrambling walk being inverted, and the lay of the ships one to another and the look of them being entirely changed.