But, as sometimes a sleeper sits up in his dream, or rises from his couch and walks, so all of a sudden Abel Keeling found himself on his hands and knees on the deck, looking back over his shoulder. In some deep-seated region of his consciousness he was dimly aware that the cant of the deck had become more perilous, but his brain received the intelligence and forgot it again. He was looking out into the bright and baffling mists. The buckler of the sun was of a more ardent silver; the sea below it was lost in brilliant evaporation; and between them, suspended in the haze, no more substantial than the vague darknesses that float before dazzled eyes, a pyramidal phantom-shape hung. Abel Keeling passed his hand over his eyes, but when he removed it the shape was still there, gliding slowly towards the _Mary's_ quarter. Its form changed as he watched it. The spirit-grey shape that had been a pyramid seemed to dissolve into four upright members, slightly graduated in tallness, that nearest the _Mary's_ stern the tallest and that to the left the lowest. It might have been the shadow of the gigantic set of reed-pipes on which that vacant mournful note had been sounded. And as he looked, with fooled eyes, again his ears became fooled: _"Ahoy there! What ship's that? Are you a ship?... Here, give me that trumpet--"_ Then a metallic barking. _"Ahoy there! What the devil are you? Didn't you ring a bell? Ring it again, or blow a blast or something, and go dead slow!"_ All this came, as it were, indistinctly, and through a sort of high singing in Abel Keeling's own ears. Then he fancied a short bewildered laugh, followed by a colloquy from somewhere between sea and sky. "Here, Ward, just pinch me, will you? Tell me what you see there. I want to know if I'm awake." "See where?" "There, on the starboard bow. (Stop that ventilating fan; I can't hear myself think.) See anything? Don't tell me it's that damned Dutchman--don't pitch me that old Vanderdecken tale--give me an easy one first, something about a sea-serpent.... You did hear that bell, didn't you?" "Shut up a minute--listen--" Again Bligh's voice was lifted up. _"This is the cov'nant that I make: From henceforth nevermore Will I again the world destroy With water, as before."_ Bligh's voice died away again in Abel Keeling's ears. "_Oh--my--fat--Aunt--Julia!_" the voice that seemed to come from between sea and sky sounded again. Then it spoke more loudly. "_I say,_" it began with careful politeness, "_if you are a ship, do you mind telling us where the masquerade is to be? Our wireless is out of order, and we hadn't heard of it.... Oh, you do see it, Ward, don't you?... Please, please tell us what the hell you are!_"