Individual cabins, the galley, some storage spaces, and a few other places were wholly or partially enclosed by skin. But elsewhere the wind, hot or cold, soft or savage, blew on the sailors night and day.
The bridge, or quarterdeck, was situated on the top of the vessel, aft, in a cockpit about two-thirds of the distance back from the bow. Here one steersman handled the wheel, the muscle to move the rudder being provided by headless, footless creatures whose sinews were grown to the end of lines of leather. These had been conditioned to respond to the tuggings and relaxations of lines attached at one end to their muscles and at the other to the shaft of the wheel.
The captain, Baramha, was a tall man on whose forehead was tattooed the symbol of his position: a black ship's wheel crested by a scarlet three-pointed crown. His orders were transmitted by voice to those near him, by signals of hands in the daytime and by lanterns, cages of huge firefly-like insects, at night.
Baramha, hearing Namalee's tale, turned gray and wept and wailed and gashed his chest with a stone knife. After this, he placed himself at the disposal of Namalee. She questioned him about the supply of water and food and shahamchiz, a fiery liquor. He assured her that there was enough for them to sail to Zalarapamtra, though the last seven days would find them on short rations. They had killed ten whales so far and stored flesh and water from the carcasses. And they had found in one of them a large vrishkaw. This, apparently, was the main reason for the hunting of the leviathans. Ishmael did not know what a vrishkaw was, but he determined to find out at the first chance.
The ship put about and sailed close-hauled to keep it in the general direction of the city, which lay to the northwest.
Namalee and Ishmael were conducted to the captain's cabin. This was on the bottom of the hull, directly below the bridge. Since the floor was transparent, Ishmael got an unhindered view of the world thousands of feet below. It also gave him a feeling of anxiety to be standing on such a seemingly frail floor. The skin sagged under each placing of his foot, and it was with relief that he sat on a bone chair which was firmly attached to a bone beam. The cabin was small but open at one end, privacy evidently not being desired by Zalarapamtrans. There was a many-angled desk of reddish bone with a small flat surface on which the captain made his navigational computations or wrote in his log. The log itself was a large book with thin, vellum-like pages on which were large characters in a black ink. The characters looked like no writing that Ishmael had ever seen.
Namalee seated herself while a cabin boy served the first cooked meal the two had eaten for a long time. The whale meat was strange but delicious; the familiar cockroach meat was well steamed and served with a delicious brown-red sauce; and there were piles of a rice-like grain, pale blue, on which a dark orange gravy was poured. The drink was served in skin vessels which had to be lifted up and tilted, the dark green fiery stuff jetting out into their mouths.
Neither the captain nor Namalee seemed to be affected by the liquor. They continued to pour down great drafts, though their large green eyes did glow as if fires had been lit behind them. Presently, the dishes being taken away, more skins of shahamchiz were brought in. Ishmael spoke to Namalee, who looked sharply at him. The captain seemed angered, and then Namalee suddenly smiled and explained that he was not aware of the protocol which he must observe now that they were on a part of Zalarapamtra.
Nevertheless, Ishmael was led away by the boy, who took him up several ladders to a small open-walled cubicle, where he was expected to sleep. He stretched out on his hammock, but he did not sleep at once. The ship did not sail smoothly but lifted and dropped unpredictably. He was glad to be away from the continual slight nausea caused by the never-ending shaking of the earth, but this was almost as bad. The vessel bucked with every updraft or downdraft of air. He would have thought that such a huge structure would sail smoothly on, disdaining the currents that played with lesser things. After a while he slept anyway, and he was to become accustomed to the motion of the vessel. It took him a long time, however, to get used to the transparent fragility on which he walked.
The third day, the first rain clouds he had seen since his arrival darkened the west. An hour later, a wind struck. It was a hard blow but not a typhoon, and the captain had ordered most of the sails furled before the wind reached them. The great ship rolled twenty-five degrees at the first impact and continued to sail leaning to the starboard. Ishmael had strapped himself to the pole of the bottom mat, which extended deep into the vessel. The captain had so ordered, and Ishmael could not understand at first why this particular place was his post. After a while he reasoned that, since he was useless as a hand, he was placed where his weight would give the most stability. He was at least useful as ballast.
The wind became stronger. The ship continued to sail close-hauled but it was being carried eastward off its course. And the wind, now close to typhoon strength, did not blow steadily. It came in gust after gust, as if some mammoth animal over the horizon were blowing, stopping to draw in breath and blowing again. Then rain struck, and lightning and thunder flashed and bellowed somewhere in the clouds.
The captain now had nothing to guide him. He did not possess a compass, since compasses were made of metal, and metal seemed to be absent or at least extremely rare in this world. It might be, Ishmael reasoned, that man had used up the earth's metals. He was well on his way even in the 1840's, if the extrapolations of some scientists could be trusted. How many millions of years had man survived without metals?
That question did not matter. The fact was that the captain did not even have a lodestone. By day he navigated by the sun and the moon and at night by the stars and the moon. When visibility was cut off, he sailed blindly. He had nothing but the direction of the wind to guide him in this almost complete darkness; if the wind shifted, he would not know which way he was going.
Ishmael sat miserably for an unaccountable time. There were neither watches nor sand glasses in this world nor, for all he knew, even sundials. The human beings living in the days of the end of Time did not seem to care about time.
Occasionally he was replaced, and he slept as well as he could or ate in the galley. He saw no one except a few sailors and the cook. The galley was a cage of bonework. The stove was a securely fixed box of some fire-resistant wood, the heaviest object per cubic inch of anything aboard. The fuel was an oil, not derived from the wind whales, as he had expected, but from a free-floating plant.
Ishmael would have liked to have talked with Cookie for a long time and to study his character, as he did with everybody he met. But the man spoke little and shivered frequently, whenever the ship rolled too far or dropped or rose with shocking suddenness.
Ishmael returned to his seat in the "hold" and sat in a half-drowse most of the time, awakened now and then by the pitching and tossing. Three times, he was sure that the vessel, the Roolanga, had been completely swung around several times. If this was so, then the captain was sailing in the opposite direction, unless luck had turned the ship back to its original heading after the whirlings.
The Roolanga was headed northwest, but either the wind had carried it straight eastward or it had sailed southeast once or twice after the uncontrollable turnings. Captain Baramha announced that they were off course, which was a way of saying that they were lost. Not until near the end of the day did he know where they were.