Individual cabins, the galley, some storage spaces, and a few other places were wholly or partially enclosed by skin. But elsewhere the wind, hot or cold, soft or savage, blew on the sailors night and day.
The bridge, or quarterdeck, was situated on the top of the vessel, aft, in a cockpit about two-thirds of the distance back from the bow. Here one steersman handled the wheel, the muscle to move the rudder being provided by headless, footless creatures whose sinews were grown to the end of lines of leather. These had been conditioned to respond to the tuggings and relaxations of lines attached at one end to their muscles and at the other to the shaft of the wheel.
The captain, Baramha, was a tall man on whose forehead was tattooed the symbol of his position: a black ship's wheel crested by a scarlet three-pointed crown. His orders were transmitted by voice to those near him, by signals of hands in the daytime and by lanterns, cages of huge firefly-like insects, at night.
Baramha, hearing Namalee's tale, turned gray and wept and wailed and gashed his chest with a stone knife. After this, he placed himself at the disposal of Namalee. She questioned him about the supply of water and food and shahamchiz, a fiery liquor. He assured her that there was enough for them to sail to Zalarapamtra, though the last seven days would find them on short rations. They had killed ten whales so far and stored flesh and water from the carcasses. And they had found in one of them a large vrishkaw. This, apparently, was the main reason for the hunting of the leviathans. Ishmael did not know what a vrishkaw was, but he determined to find out at the first chance.
The ship put about and sailed close-hauled to keep it in the general direction of the city, which lay to the northwest.
Namalee and Ishmael were conducted to the captain's cabin. This was on the bottom of the hull, directly below the bridge. Since the floor was transparent, Ishmael got an unhindered view of the world thousands of feet below. It also gave him a feeling of anxiety to be standing on such a seemingly frail floor. The skin sagged under each placing of his foot, and it was with relief that he sat on a bone chair which was firmly attached to a bone beam. The cabin was small but open at one end, privacy evidently not being desired by Zalarapamtrans. There was a many-angled desk of reddish bone with a small flat surface on which the captain made his navigational computations or wrote in his log. The log itself was a large book with thin, vellum-like pages on which were large characters in a black ink. The characters looked like no writing that Ishmael had ever seen.
Namalee seated herself while a cabin boy served the first cooked meal the two had eaten for a long time. The whale meat was strange but delicious; the familiar cockroach meat was well steamed and served with a delicious brown-red sauce; and there were piles of a rice-like grain, pale blue, on which a dark orange gravy was poured. The drink was served in skin vessels which had to be lifted up and tilted, the dark green fiery stuff jetting out into their mouths.
Ishimael found himself very comfortable, indeed, almost happy, within a short time. He also found that he was not as fluent talking with the captain as he had been with Namalee. He resolved to cut down on the quantity of shahamchiz the next time.
Neither the captain nor Namalee seemed to be affected by the liquor. They continued to pour down great drafts, though their large green eyes did glow as if fires had been lit behind them. Presently, the dishes being taken away, more skins of shahamchiz were brought in. Ishmael spoke to Namalee, who looked sharply at him. The captain seemed angered, and then Namalee suddenly smiled and explained that he was not aware of the protocol which he must observe now that they were on a part of Zalarapamtra.
Nevertheless, Ishmael was led away by the boy, who took him up several ladders to a small open-walled cubicle, where he was expected to sleep. He stretched out on his hammock, but he did not sleep at once. The ship did not sail smoothly but lifted and dropped unpredictably. He was glad to be away from the continual slight nausea caused by the never-ending shaking of the earth, but this was almost as bad. The vessel bucked with every updraft or downdraft of air. He would have thought that such a huge structure would sail smoothly on, disdaining the currents that played with lesser things. After a while he slept anyway, and he was to become accustomed to the motion of the vessel. It took him a long time, however, to get used to the transparent fragility on which he walked.
The third day, the first rain clouds he had seen since his arrival darkened the west. An hour later, a wind struck. It was a hard blow but not a typhoon, and the captain had ordered most of the sails furled before the wind reached them. The great ship rolled twenty-five degrees at the first impact and continued to sail leaning to the starboard. Ishmael had strapped himself to the pole of the bottom mat, which extended deep into the vessel. The captain had so ordered, and Ishmael could not understand at first why this particular place was his post. After a while he reasoned that, since he was useless as a hand, he was placed where his weight would give the most stability. He was at least useful as ballast.
The wind became stronger. The ship continued to sail close-hauled but it was being carried eastward off its course. And the wind, now close to typhoon strength, did not blow steadily. It came in gust after gust, as if some mammoth animal over the horizon were blowing, stopping to draw in breath and blowing again. Then rain struck, and lightning and thunder flashed and bellowed somewhere in the clouds.
The captain now had nothing to guide him. He did not possess a compass, since compasses were made of metal, and metal seemed to be absent or at least extremely rare in this world. It might be, Ishmael reasoned, that man had used up the earth's metals. He was well on his way even in the 1840's, if the extrapolations of some scientists could be trusted. How many millions of years had man survived without metals?
That question did not matter. The fact was that the captain did not even have a lodestone. By day he navigated by the sun and the moon and at night by the stars and the moon. When visibility was cut off, he sailed blindly. He had nothing but the direction of the wind to guide him in this almost complete darkness; if the wind shifted, he would not know which way he was going.
Ishmael sat miserably for an unaccountable time. There were neither watches nor sand glasses in this world nor, for all he knew, even sundials. The human beings living in the days of the end of Time did not seem to care about time.
Occasionally he was replaced, and he slept as well as he could or ate in the galley. He saw no one except a few sailors and the cook. The galley was a cage of bonework. The stove was a securely fixed box of some fire-resistant wood, the heaviest object per cubic inch of anything aboard. The fuel was an oil, not derived from the wind whales, as he had expected, but from a free-floating plant.
Ishmael would have liked to have talked with Cookie for a long time and to study his character, as he did with everybody he met. But the man spoke little and shivered frequently, whenever the ship rolled too far or dropped or rose with shocking suddenness.
Ishmael returned to his seat in the "hold" and sat in a half-drowse most of the time, awakened now and then by the pitching and tossing. Three times, he was sure that the vessel, the Roolanga, had been completely swung around several times. If this was so, then the captain was sailing in the opposite direction, unless luck had turned the ship back to its original heading after the whirlings.
He was surprised when the storm suddenly ceased and the clouds began to break away. The red sun was at its zenith, having gone through it twice since the first wind struck. Ishmael had not seen it once during that time; he was taking a sailor's word for it.
The Roolanga was headed northwest, but either the wind had carried it straight eastward or it had sailed southeast once or twice after the uncontrollable turnings. Captain Baramha announced that they were off course, which was a way of saying that they were lost. Not until near the end of the day did he know where they were.
To their starboard rose a solid range of mountains that seemed to go up and up until they merged with the dark skies. The
y were reddish, grayish and blackish and much carved by winds.
Ishmael, lunching with the captain and Namalee, asked how high they went.
Baramha, who had just looked at the primitive altimeter of wood and water, said, "The Roolanga is ten thousand feet high. The top of these mountains must be at least four miles up or about twenty-one thousand feet from our altitude. I could take the Roolanga up to near the top, but the air would be too thin to breathe."
And so, thought Ishmael, the Earth had been losing its atmosphere for a billion years. The plateaus on top of those mountains must once have been the surface of a continent, probably South America. And there would be mountains on top of this mountain, the Andes. How high did they tower? Up where there was no air at all? Or did the Andes exist any more? Or was this South America? Had not some wild-eyed, shock-headed scholar once said that continents, like beans on a thin soup, drifted?
He looked at the terrible cliffs, and a piece fell off with a majestic shrug and a roar that reached him many seconds later. Slowly, perhaps not so slowly, considering the unending shaking, everything high was being brought down.
Captain Baramha had laid out a vellum map and indicated where Zalarapamtra was. Ishmael thought that it was on the intermediate plateau of a mountainside that had once been the submerged slope of one of the Samoas. The area to the right of the ship was marked EDGE OF THE WORLD.
From time to time, as he drank more shahamchiz, Ishmael looked down through the floor. The long furious rains had swollen the dead seas so that they had drowned their near shores and in many places had joined other seas. Where he had first landed, he would now find water and would have to dive a dozen feet or more to reach the roof of the jungle.
One of the seas they passed during that long lunch was red, and Ishmael, asking about it, was told that the red air brit had been forced down into the water by the rains.
"Does that explain why I have seen no clouds of brit?" he said.
"Yes," the captain said. "The rains are vitally needed, and they must come, or else all life dies. But they also bring some bad, as every good does. They wash out the brit, and it takes many days before the breeding grounds to the west can produce new. During this time, the great wind whales go hungry and get lean. And the smaller life which feeds on the brit also starves. And the sharks and other predators find that they can eat more of the weakened browsers. They stuff themselves and grow fat, and it is then that the sharks breed. But their eggs, which they produce by the billions, and which float in clouds like the brit, are eaten by the whales. Only a few of the eggs hatch. So I can also say that the bad brings some good with it.
"After a while, the seeds of the great plants that grow far to the west, at the base of the cliffs there" -- Africa? Ishmael thought, India? Indo-China? -- "explode and send the brit high. And the whales begin to eat that, and the sharks eat the smaller creatures and occasionally a sick or wounded whale, and everything is restored as it was before the rains came."
The conversation turned to other matters, including Ishmael's story of the world from which he had come and what had happened after he had met Namalee. Ishmael understood after a while that Namalee had said nothing of the times when he had touched her or they kept each other warm. She must not have been exaggerating when she had said that her people would kill him if he molested a "vestal virgin." By molesting, of course, she meant even an accidental touch.
After the lunch, the captain said that they must all give thanks to the little god of the Roolanga, Ishnuvakardi, who would in turn pass on their thanks and his, the little god's, to the great god, Zoomashmarta. They arose and climbed down a ladder to the central walkway and thence forward to a room walled in transparent skin but painted with religious scenes and symbols.
On an altar of bone was a bone box. Namalee took her place before it, donning a headdress of bone on which hundreds of the tiny red brit had been glued. A tiny fire burned in a wooden cup before the box.
All of the crew except those on duty were there. They fell to their knees when Namalee turned to them, intoning something in a language that was not the one she had taught Ishmael. He dropped to his knees too, because he felt that the others expected it. There was no reason to be stiff-necked or even discourteous. Nor was this the first time he had made obeisance to un-Christian gods, he thought. There was Hypocrisy and Greed and Hate and a pantheon of other deities of civilization. And he had taken part in the worship of Queequeg's idol, Yojo, with no afterqualms at all.
He got to his knees before the altar and the box, reflecting as the floor skin sagged under his weight and he looked down through thousands of feet of air, that he had never been so close to eternity before in a temple.
Namalee turned, still chanting, and lifted the box up. It had hidden an image about a foot high, carved of some ivory-white substance striated with red, green and black. It was half-whale and half-human, combining a bestial face with a human torso to the waist and a wind whale's tail where the legs should have been. It radiated an odor that was sweet and pleasant and, he was certain, intoxicating.
He had drunk enough shahamchiz to make him reel a little when he walked. But on sniffing the odor of the idol, he felt his senses staggering and after a while he fell flat on his face. Within a few seconds, he had passed out.
He awoke on the floor looking through several miles of air at the half-dead seas beneath. When he managed to sit up, groaning, he found that he was alone. His head ached as if he had been hit with a hammer. Or as if the Urfather of all hangovers had visited him just to show what gigantic aches the head of Adam had endured.
The box was over the idol. The remnants of the sweet and drunk-making odor were still in the room.
He staggered back to his cubicle and lay down and went to sleep.
When he awoke, he intended to ask about the perfume and its effects, but he found everybody too busy to talk to him. All the scurrying about and the transmission of orders was caused by the sighting of a pod of wind whales. The captain had decided that they must pause in their return homeward to hunt for food. Otherwise they would starve before they got near Zalarapamtra.
Ishmael felt much improved and, though his discretion told him that he was foolish, he asked the captain if he could take part in the hunt. He listed his qualifications, most of which consisted of a long and intense experience in hunting the monsters of the sea. But he could not see why he could not adapt himself to the requirements of the air.
"We could use an extra hand," Captain Baramha said. "But we can't have any clumsy or ignorant persons interfering at a critical moment. However, you do know how to sail, and the main difference between your experience and that of my crew is that you will be sailing in three dimensions instead of two. Very well. You will go with Karkri's boat. Go there at once and get your instructions."
The crew of an air ship never carried more than two extra hands because of weight restrictions. The Roolanga had lost one man early in its voyage when he had leaped or fallen off the ship while on night watch. Then Rashvarpa had died when thrown out of the boat, and a companion had broken his bones. So, needing all the help he could get, even if it was inexpert, the captain had accepted Ishmael.
Karkri, the harpooner, was not of the stature or musculature of the savage harpooners, men like lions, that Ishmael had known. No Daggoos, Tashtegos or Queequegs, these men were short and slight. Their legs were thin but their shoulders and arms were well developed. It did not take powerful muscles to drive a shaft into the head of a wind whale, if a man knew where to cast. There were many large openings in the skull under the thin tissue wrapping it. At the last moment the harpooner had to stand in the bow of the bucking boat as it ran alongside the monster and, hooking his feet under leather straps secured to the skin of the bottom of the boat, throw his lance. If it went through one of the wide gaps in the fragile and hollow structure, it would drive into the brain, the heart or the lungs. These organs were located inside the head, the kidneys, liv
er, spleen and others being strung out along the largely hollow interior of the whale's body. The whale, if stripped of his skin, would be revealed as mostly air and bladders enclosed in the bones. Ishmael, thinking of this and wondering if there was enough meat on the leviathan to justify the dangerous hunt, got into Karkri's boat. The harpooner looked dubious but said nothing. A sailor, Koojai, told Ishmael what he had to do. Ishmael had talked to some of the crew about the boats before the great storm and so knew the theory of sailing an air boat.
Once the four were strapped in, the boat was pushed out at the ends of long poles from its nest in the side of the ship. It drifted outward and was quickly left behind.
The two masts, one on top and one on the bottom, were swiveled to the horizontal by a joint near the butt and locked in place. The masts and yardarms were very slim and very light sections of bones fitting tightly into one another. After the boat was cast loose the crewmen rose, crouching. One reached down through a hole in the bottom of the hull, which was only a thin transparent skin, and unlocked the joint. Then, pulling on lines, they straightened the mast out and relocked it at the joint. The yardarm of the fore-and-aft rig was unlocked, straightened properly and relocked.
The upper mast was shorter and its sail smaller to ensure that it was more than counterbalanced by the mast beneath. After it was raised, the sail of the undermast was unfurled by lines attached to it. There were many small holes on the skin of the bottom so that a sailor could reach through to do his work. These had to be watched for when a crewman walked around the boat, but there was little walking once the sails were set.
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