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