But where was our barge, the Lizzie?  I became aware abruptly of the skipper of this ship for our midnight voyage among the stars.  He had his coat-collar raised.  The Lizzie, he said, was now free of the mud, and he was going to push off.  Sitting on a bollard, and pulling out his tobacco-pouch, he said he hadn’t had her out before.  Sorry he’d got to do it now.  She was a bitch.  She bucked her other man overboard three days ago.  They hadn’t found him yet.  They found her down by Gallions Reach.  Jack Jones was the other chap.  Old Rarzo they called him.  Took more than a little to give him that colour.  But he was All Right.  They were going to give a benefit concert for his wife and kids.  Jack’s brother was going to sing; good as Harry Lauder, he is.

Below us a swirl of water broke into mirth, instantly suppressed.  We could see the Lizzie now.  The ripples slipped round her to the tune of they-’avn’t-found-’im-yet, they-’avn’t-found-’im-yet-they ’avn’t.  The skipper and crew rose, fumbling at his feet for a rope.  There did not seem to be much of the Lizzie.  She was but a little raft to drift out on those tides which move among the stars.  “Now’s your chance,” said her crew, and I took it, on all fours.  The last remnant of London was then pushed from us with a pole.  We were launched on night, which had begun its ebb towards morning.

The punt sidled away obliquely for mid-stream.  I stood at one end of it.  The figure of Charon could be seen at the other, of long acquaintance with this passage, using his sweep with the indifference of habitude.  Perhaps it was not Charon.  Yet there was some obstruction to the belief that we were bound for no more than the steamer Aldebaran, anchored in Bugsby’s Reach.  From the low deck of the barge it was surprising that the River, whose name was Night, was content with the height to which it had risen.  Perhaps it was taking its time.  It might soon receive an influx from space, rise then in a silent upheaval, and those low shadows that were London, even now half foundered, would at once go.  This darkness was an irresponsible power.  It was the same flood which had sunk Knossos and Memphis.  It was tranquil, indifferent, knowing us not, reckoning us all one with the Sumerians.  They were below it.  It had risen above them.  Now the time had come when it was laving the base of London.

The crew cried out to us that over there was the entrance to the West India Dock.  We knew that place in another life.  But should Charon joke with us?  We saw only chaos, in which the beams from a reputed city glimmered without purpose.

The shadow of the master of our black barge pulled at his sweep with a slow confidence that was fearful amid what was sightless and unknown.  His pipe glowed, as with the profanity of an immortal to whom eternity and infinity are of the usual significance.  Then a red and green eye appeared astern, and there was a steady throbbing as if some monster were in pursuit of us.  A tug shaped near us, drew level, and exposed with its fires, as it went ahead, a radiant Lizzie on an area of water that leaped in red flames.  The furnace door of the tug was shut, and at once we were blind.  “Hold hard,” yelled our skipper, and the Lizzie slipped into the turmoil of the tug’s wake.