On Blue's waters

The enormity of the oath I had taken so lightly back on the Tail had not yet sunk in, and would not until Babbie and I were sailing alone, north along the coast. If I had been able to reach New Viron, I would have gone to Marrow and the rest and declared that I had changed my mind, gone back to the sloop, and gone back to Lizard at once. But I could no more give up my errand than I could continue it. The reefs and rocks of the mainland waited immobile to my left. The horizon ducked away from my eyes to starboard. Nothing moved except the white bird, which flew back and forth with a slow, sad motion that seemed so weary that every time two wings rose I felt that it was about to fall into the sea, and the Short Sun, which crept down to the empty horizon as remorselessly as every man creeps toward his grave.

- 2- BECALMED

To do nothing is a talent, one I have not got. I have known a few people who possessed it to a superlative degree, as one of my scribes here does. They can, if they wish, sit or even stand for hours without occupation and without thought. Their eyes are open and they see the whorl before them, but see it only as the eyes of potatoes do.

Seriously, it is perceived but means nothing to the owner of the eyes. Silk said once that we are like a man who can see only shadows, and thinks the shadow of an ox the ox and a man’s shadow the man. These people reverse that. They see the man, but see him as a shadow cast by the leaves of a bough stirred by the wind. Or at least they see him like that unless he shouts at them or strikes them.

I have never struck the scribe I mentioned (his name is Hoop), although I have been severely tempted. I have shouted at him once or twice, or asked what he was writing before the ink dried upon his pen. But I have never asked him how he does nothing, or how I can learn to do it in case I find myself alone again in a boat upon a windless sea. I should.

There are always half a dozen little jobs waiting on a boat like the sloop. The standing rigging should be tightened here and there, simple though it is. It might be well to rake the mast a bit more-or a bit less. There is not much water in the bilge, but what there is can be removed with a little satisfying labor. The harpoon and its coil of line, carelessly stowed by Hide two days ago, can be stowed more neatly, so that they occupy a trifle less space. One by one I found them and did them all, and searched diligently for more, and took out the few belongings I had packed, and refolded and re-packed them all, except for our book.

And settled down to read, searching out Silk’s trip to Lake Limna with Chenille and reading about the poster they saw there and how he separated from Chenille, who had drawn his picture in colored chalks as soon as he was gone-all in my wife’s neat and almost clerkly hand.

How long and how diligently she had labored to produce copy after copy, until she had done six altogether and several persons were clamoring for more, and several others were copying the ones she had produced earlier (and producing with the wildest abandonment both abridgments and annotated editions in which their annotations were not always clearly distinguished, and sometimes were not distinguished at all). Then she-you, my own darling-although she had already labored for the better part of a year to satisfy what must have seemed a mere whim to her (as indeed it sometimes has to me), began, and toiled over, and at last completed that seventh fair copy, which she proudly presented to me.

I had been tempted to leave it at home. Not because I did not love it-I did, and almost certainly loved it too much; no man is so secure in his sanity that he can afford to lavish on a mere inanimate object the passionate affection that every good man at some time feels for another person. Loving it as I did, I had known I was carrying it into deadly danger when I resolved to take it to the Long Sun Whorl and present it to Silk. So it proved; I nearly lost it at once, and it did not remain with me long. I can only say that I knew the risk from the beginning, resolved with open eyes to run it, and am very glad I did.

So it has proved, and where is the Nettle who shall produce copy after copy of this, of this record of my travels and dangers and lucky escapes that I have begun, this Book of Horn? But you must surely think that in all this I have left my earlier self and our motionless sloop far behind.