“I went down on the Great Green Sea,” continued the speaker, “in a ship one hundred and fifty cubits[1] in length and forty cubits in breadth, and in it were a hundred and fifty sailors, picked men of Egypt.  They scanned the heavens and they scanned the earth, and their hearts were stouter than lions.  They foretold the storm or ever it came, and the tempest when as yet it was not.”

    [Footnote 1:  The average cubit was about 20-1/2 inches.]

A storm arose while they were out of sight of land, and rapidly increased in violence, until the waves, according to the very restrained estimate of the narrator, were eight cubits high—­that is to say, about thirteen or fourteen feet.  To one who was accustomed to the waves of the Nile this would be a great height; and the passage thus suggests that the scribe was an untravelled man.  A vessel of 150 cubits, or about 250 feet, in length might have been expected to ride out a storm of this magnitude; but, according to the story, she went to pieces, and the whole ship’s company, with the single exception of the teller of the tale, were drowned.  The survivor managed to cling to a plank of wood, which was driven by the wind towards the shores of an uncharted island, and here at length he was cast up by the waves.

Not far from the beach there was a small thicket, and to this the castaway hastened, sheltering therein from the fury of the storm.  For three days in deep despair he lay hidden, “without a companion,” as he said, “save my heart;” but at last the tempest subsided, the sun shone in the heavens once again, and the famished mariner was able to go in search of food, which, to his delight, he found in abundance.

The scene upon which he gazed as he plucked the fruit of the laden trees was most mysterious, and all that he saw around him must have had an appearance not altogether consistent with reality, for, indeed, the island was not real.  It had been called into existence, perhaps, at the bidding of some god to relieve the tedium of an eternal afternoon, and suddenly it had appeared, floating upon the blue waters of the ocean.  How long it had remained there, how long it would still remain, none could tell, for at any moment the mind of the god might be diverted, and instantly it would dissolve and vanish as would a dream.  Beneath the isle the seas moved, and there in the darkness the fishes of the deep, with luminous, round eyes, passed to and fro, nibbling the roots of the trees above them.  Overhead the heavens stretched, and around about spread the expanse of the sea upon which no living thing might be seen, save only the dolphins as they leapt into the sunshine and sank again amidst the gleaming spray.