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 to know if I’m awake.”

“See where?”

“There, on the starboard bow. (Stop that ventilating fan; I can’t hear myself think.) See anything?  Don’t tell me it’s that damned Dutchman—­don’t pitch me that old Vanderdecken tale—­give me an easy one first, something about a sea-serpent....  You did hear that bell, didn’t you?”

“Shut up a minute—­listen—­”

Again Bligh’s voice was lifted up.

"This is the cov’nant that I make: 
  From henceforth nevermore
Will I again the world destroy
  With water, as before."

Bligh’s voice died away again in Abel Keeling’s ears.

“Oh—­my—­fat—­Aunt—­Julia!” the voice that seemed to come from between sea and sky sounded again.  Then it spoke more loudly. “I say,” it began with careful politeness, “if you are a ship, do you mind telling us where the masquerade is to be?  Our wireless is out of order, and we hadn’t heard of it....  Oh, you do see it, Ward, don’t you?...  Please, please tell us what the hell you are!”

Again Abel Keeling had moved as a sleepwalker moves.  He had raised himself up by the belfry timbers, and Bligh had sunk in a heap on the 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—­”