“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 the form of a ship with oars; and before that, far away in the dawn and infancy of the world, some seer had seen in a vision the raft before man had ventured to push out over the water on his two planks.  And since this shape that rode before Abel Keeling’s eyes was a shape in his, Abel Keeling’s dream, he, Abel Keeling, was the master of it.  His own brooding brain had contrived her, and she was launched upon the illimitable ocean of his own mind....

"And I will not unmindful be
  Of this, My covenant, passed
Twixt Me and you and every flesh
 Whiles that the world should last,"

sang Bligh, rapt....

But as a dreamer, even in his dream, will scratch upon the wall by his couch some key or word to put him in mind of his vision on the morrow when it has left him, so Abel Keeling found himself seeking some sign to be a proof to those to whom no vision is vouchsafed.  Even Bligh sought that—­could not be silent in his bliss, but lay on the deck there, uttering great passionate Amens and praising his Maker, as he said, upon an harp and an instrument of ten strings.  So with Abel Keeling.  It would be the Amen of his life to have praised God, not upon a harp, but upon a ship that should carry her own power, that should store wind or its equivalent as she stored her victuals, that should be something wrested from the chaos of uninvention and ordered and disciplined and subordinated to Abel Keeling’s will....  And there she was, that ship-shaped thing of spirit-grey, with the four pipes that resembled a phantom organ now broadside and of equal length.  And the ghost-crew of that ship were speaking again....

The interrupted silver chain by the quarterdeck balustrade had now become continuous, and the balusters made a herring-bone over their own motionless reflections.  The spilt water from the pipkin had dried, and the pipkin was not to be seen.  Abel Keeling stood beside the mast, erect as God made man to go.  With his leathery hand he smote upon the bell.  He waited for the space of a minute, and then cried: 

“Ahoy!...  Ship ahoy!...  What ship’s that?”

III

We are not conscious in a dream that we are playing a game the beginning and end of which are in ourselves.  In this dream of Abel Keeling’s a voice replied: