The sloop from Harkness' wharf had stolen a long time without lights through the depth of a May night until fog closed in around her. Then she crept on most gently, slowly, under mainsail and jib, head on to a leisured march of smooth rollers, her captain aware that _Artemis_ would be fogbound too. Ben had known nothing of that. Ben was asleep. He woke late that morning, his head throbbing wildly, in the stench of a dark hole in a universe which was swaying impossibly back and forth, and from side to side too, with a grand inexorable calm. In this pocket of dimness he found he was alone with a human-like thing that could bob its misshapen head, and grin, but not speak. He dimly remembered this creature from some faraway evening: it was harmless. Steps led out of the cavity to a grayness of daylight. The cavity--oh, it was harmless too, it was the tiny cabin of a sloop, one that Mr. Shawn had been hired to sail to the Banks for somebody named Harkness, all fair enough. But why, Ben wanted to know, why was she at sea now, and why was his head one great blind snarl of pain? Toward the daylight he reeled, asking questions. Up in wet salt air, he learned that everything was gray--under him a gray sliver of deck, above him muttering and sobbing canvas gray with damp, before him a shaft of gray wood--that was a solid mast, harmless, and he grabbed it frantically to save himself as gravity dropped away from his feet, and he could see all around him one heaving gray of ocean to the end of the world. Behind him a cackling voice inquired: "Mr. Shawn, sir, Mr. Shawn--be that there thing a sailor?" "Why, steady as she goes, Joey Mills! I shall make it one, Mother of God, and you kissing his boots one day." Ben forced himself around. In the act he lost the mast somehow, the sloop gravely but mirthfully tossing his feet elsewhere. He fetched up against the larboard rail and grasped it with all his power, retching. The cackler was another mass of gray, small, hunched at the tiller, an old man and shriveled, who observed Ben's situation with an uncommunicating, not unfriendly eye, and cackled again and spat astern.