Sir Richard looked relieved.  ’Then it may still be magic.  It was magic to us.  And so we voyaged.  When the wind served we hoisted sail, and lay all up along the windward rail, our shields on our backs to break the spray.  When it failed, they rowed with long oars; the Yellow Man sat by the Wise Iron, and Witta steered.  At first I feared the great white-flowering waves, but as I saw how wisely Witta led his ship among them I grew bolder.  Hugh liked it well from the first.  My skill is not upon the water; and rocks and whirlpools such as we saw by the West Isles of France, where an oar caught on a rock and broke, are much against my stomach.  We sailed South across a stormy sea, where by moonlight, between clouds, we saw a Flanders ship roll clean over and sink.  Again, though Hugh laboured with Witta all night, I lay under the deck with the Talking Bird, and cared not whether I lived or died.  There is a sickness of the sea which for three days is pure death!  When we next saw land Witta said it was Spain, and we stood out to sea.  That coast was full of ships busy in the Duke’s war against the Moors, and we feared to be hanged by the Duke’s men or sold into slavery by the Moors.  So we put into a small harbour which Witta knew.  At night men came down with loaded mules, and Witta exchanged amber out of the North against little wedges of iron and packets of beads in earthen pots.  The pots he put under the decks, and the wedges of iron he laid on the bottom of the ship after he had cast out the stones and shingle which till then had been our ballast.  Wine, too, he bought for lumps of sweet-smelling grey amber—­a little morsel no bigger than a thumbnail purchased a cask of wine.  But I speak like a merchant.’

‘No, no!  Tell us what you had to eat,’ cried Dan.

’Meat dried in the sun, and dried fish and ground beans, Witta took in; and corded frails of a certain sweet, soft fruit, which the Moors use, which is like paste of figs, but with thin, long stones.  Aha!  Dates is the name.

’"Now,” said Witta, when the ship was loaded, “I counsel you strangers to pray to your Gods, for from here on, our road is No Man’s road.”  He and his men killed a black goat for sacrifice on the bows; and the Yellow Man brought out a small, smiling image of dull-green stone and burned incense before it.  Hugh and I commended ourselves to God, and Saint Barnabas, and Our Lady of the Assumption, who was specially dear to my Lady.  We were not young, but I think no shame to say whenas we drove out of that secret harbour at sunrise over a still sea, we two rejoiced and sang as did the knights of old when they followed our great Duke to England.  Yet was our leader an heathen pirate; all our proud fleet but one galley perilously overloaded; for guidance we leaned on a pagan sorcerer; and our port was beyond the world’s end.  Witta told us that his father Guthrum had once in his life rowed along the shores of Africa to a land where naked men sold gold for iron and beads.  There had he bought much gold, and no few elephants’ teeth, and thither by help of the Wise Iron would Witta go.  Witta feared nothing—­except to be poor.