Mitch lost his Bristol racing-yachtsman attitude: spit-and-polish was fine in a slip, but here you saved your energy for more important things, like singing and meditating, and slept as much as you could. You quit splicing and tied bowlines instead. You did not even wash down at sea: you let the squalls do it, or the odd rogue wave.

Again, she wished they would never arrive. But inevitably, as the curve on the chart arched closer to the minute dots northeast of Tahiti, he looked up from plotting his noon fix one day.

“Tomorrow morning, my sweet,” he announced ponderously, picking off a distance with his dividers and measuring it on the side of the chart, “if you will climb to the spreader at precisely zero-nine-one-eight, and look dead-ahead, you will see the Island of Nuku Hiva rear its head from the limitless deep.”

The next morning she clung there, waiting. For ten aching minutes she searched, while he pretended nonchalance in the cockpit. After all his hours of work, it was not fair that it hadn’t appeared on the instant.

At 9:28 she raised the peak of the island, 3800 feet high. In half an hour they could smell flowers, thirty miles away.

She did not know whether she was happy or sad.

Down to a sunless sea...

She was swallowing too much salt water: it increased her thirst, but it was hard to time her breathing to avoid whitecaps she could not even see. Fits of trembling shook her, would pass, and would grab her again. Her jacket was growing less buoyant. She thought of slipping it off and supporting herself on the jug alone. But when she fumbled with the zipper, her fingers were too cold to work, and she was afraid that if the jug somehow slipped from her hands, she would never find it again. The whistle was tied to the jacket, too; she must not let the whistle slip away.

If the jacket began actually to drag her down, she had no idea what she’d do.

She began to tread water again to warm her legs. There were no sharks, she decided suddenly, any more than in the Doldrums. The motion felt good.

She felt herself suddenly soaring into the featureless night, impelled by a force from below. It rushed her upward, and when she peaked she was hurled under as a breaker curled over her head. She surfaced, choking and gasping.

Nothing but a swell, a grandaddy swell, larger than the rest. Somewhere not far away a storm must be lashing the water. She waited for the next crest and raised her head.