Then conscious thought left him for a space, and when he resumed it was without obvious connection.

Oars, of course, were the thing.  With oars, men could laugh at calms.  Oars, that only pinnaces and galliasses now used, had had their advantages.  But oars (which was to say a method, for you could say if you liked that the Hand of God grasped the oar-loom, as the Breath of God filled the sail)—­oars were antiquated, belonged to the past, and meant a throwing-over of all that was good and new and a return to fine lines, a battle-formation abreast to give effect to the shock of the ram, and a day or two at sea and then to port again for provisions.  Oars ... no.  Abel Keeling was one of the new men, the men who swore by the line-ahead, the broadside fire of sakers and demi-cannon, and weeks and months without a landfall.  Perhaps one day the wits of such men as he would devise a craft, not oar-driven (because oars could not penetrate into the remote seas of the world)—­not sail-driven (because men who trusted to sails found themselves in an airless, three-mile strait, suspended motionless between cloud and water, ever gliding to a wall of rock)—­but a ship ... a ship ...

“To Noah and his sons with him
  God spake, and thus said He: 
A covenant set I up with you
  And your posterity—­”

It was Bligh again, wandering somewhere in the waist.  Abel Keeling’s mind was once more a blank.  Then slowly, slowly, as the water drops collected on the collar of rope, his thought took shape again.

A galliasse?  No, not a galliasse.  The galliasse made shift to be two things, and was neither.  This ship, that the hand of man should one day make for the Hand of God to manage, should be a ship that should take and conserve the force of the wind, take it and store it as she stored her victuals; at rest when she wished, going ahead when she wished; turning the forces both of calm and storm against themselves.  For, of course, her force must be wind—­stored wind—­a bag of the winds, as the children’s tale had it—­wind probably directed upon the water astern, driving it away and urging forward the ship, acting by reaction.  She would have a wind-chamber, into which wind would be pumped with pumps....  Bligh would call that equally the Hand of God, this driving-force of the ship of the future that Abel Keeling dimly foreshadowed as he lay between the mainmast and the belfry, turning his eyes now and then from ashy white timbers to the vivid green bronze-rust of the bell above him....

Bligh’s face, liver-coloured with the sun and ravaged from inwards by the faith that consumed him, appeared at the head of the quarter-deck steps.  His voice beat uncontrolledly out.

"And in the earth here is no place
    Of refuge to be found,
Nor in the deep and water-course
    That passeth under ground—­“

II