"Wait a minute! wait a minute!" I said. "You don't understand. Didn't I tell you?" "Tell what?" he asked. "About the ship I spotted," I said. "I thought you knew!" "No," he said. "When?" "Why," I replied. "You know when the Old Man sent me away from the wheel?" "Yes," he answered. "You mean in the morning watch, day before yesterday?" "Yes," I said. "Well, don't you know what was the matter?" "No," he replied. "That is, I heard you were snoozing at the wheel, and the Old Man came up and caught you." "That's all a darned silly yarn!" I said. And then I told him the whole truth of the affair. After I had done that, I explained my idea about it, to him. "Now you see what I mean?" I asked. "You mean that this strange atmosphere--or whatever it is--we're in, would not allow us to see another ship?" he asked, a bit awestruck. "Yes," I said. "But the point I wanted you to see, is that if we can't see another vessel, even when she's quite close, then, in the same way, we shouldn't be able to see land. To all intents and purposes we're blind. Just you think of it! We're out in the middle of the briny, doing a sort of eternal blind man's hop. The Old Man couldn't put into port, even if he wanted to. He'd run us bang on shore, without our ever seeing it." "What are we going to do, then?" he asked, in a despairing sort of way. "Do you mean to say we can't do anything? Surely something can be done! It's terrible!" For perhaps a minute, we walked up and down, in the light from the different lanterns. Then he spoke again. "We might be run down, then," he said, "and never even see the other vessel?" "It's possible," I replied. "Though, from what I saw, it's evident that _we're_ quite visible; so that it would be easy for them to see us, and steer clear of us, even though we couldn't see them." "And we might run into something, and never see it?" he asked me, following up the train of thought. "Yes," I said. "Only there's nothing to stop the other ship from getting out of our way." "But if it wasn't a vessel?" he persisted. "It might be an iceberg, or a rock, or even a derelict." "In that case," I said, putting it a bit flippantly, naturally, "we'd probably damage it." He made no answer to this and for a few moments, we were quiet. Then he spoke abruptly, as though the idea had come suddenly to him. "Those lights the other night!" he said. "Were they a ship's lights?" "Yes," I replied. "Why?" "Why," he answered. "Don't you see, if they were really lights, we _could_ see them?" "Well, I should think I ought to know that," I replied. "You seem to forget that the Second Mate slung me off the look-out for daring to do that very thing." "I don't mean that," he said. "Don't you see that if we could see them at all, it showed that the atmosphere-thing wasn't round us then?"