Again Abel Keeling had moved as a sleepwalker moves. He had raised himself up by the belfry timbers, and Bligh had sunk in a heap on the deck. Abel Keeling's movement overturned the pipkin, which raced the little trickle of its contents down the deck and lodged where the still and brimming sea made, as it were, a chain with the carved balustrade of the quarter-deck--one link a still gleaming edge, then a dark baluster, and then another gleaming link. For one moment only Abel Keeling found himself noticing that that which had driven Bligh aft had been the rising of the water in the waist as the galleon settled by the head--the waist was now entirely submerged; then once more he was absorbed in his dream, its voices, and its shape in the mist, which had again taken the form of a pyramid before his eyeballs. "_Of course_," a voice seemed to be complaining anew, and still through that confused dinning in Abel Keeling's ears, "_we can't turn a four-inch on it.... And, of course, Ward, I don't believe in 'em. D'you hear, Ward? I don't believe in 'em, I say.... Shall we call down to old A. B.? This might interest His Scientific Skippership...._" "Oh, lower a boat and pull out to it--into it--over it--through it--" "Look at our chaps crowded on the barbette yonder. They've seen it. Better not give an order you know won't be obeyed...." Abel Keeling, cramped against the antique belfry, had begun to find his dream interesting. For, though he did not know her build, that mirage was the shape of a ship. No doubt it was projected from his brooding on ships of half an hour before; and that was odd.... But perhaps, after all, it was not very odd. He knew that she did not really exist; only the appearance of her existed; but things had to exist like that before they really existed. Before the _Mary of the Tower_ had existed she had been a shape in some man's imagination; before that, some dreamer had dreamed the form of a ship with oars; and before that, far away in the dawn and infancy of the world, some seer had seen in a vision the raft before man had ventured to push out over the water on his two planks. And since this shape that rode before Abel Keeling's eyes was a shape in his, Abel Keeling's dream, he, Abel Keeling, was the master of it. His own brooding brain had contrived her, and she was launched upon the illimitable ocean of his own mind.... _"And I will not unmindful be Of this, My covenant, passed Twixt Me and you and every flesh Whiles that the world should last,"_ sang Bligh, rapt....