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