It was the Southern Packer, not some Panamanian clown under a flag of convenience, but a good American vessel out of New York under the Starbuck Line pennant. Mitch grimly logged the time, the latitude, and the longitude. He swore that when they got to civilization he would write the Coast Guard. In the meantime, they would scan the horizon, day and night, every thirty minutes.

She was more angry at the intrusion than the carelessness. Quite simply, she thought of the trade-wind belt as their own.

They could not, of course, stay in the trades forever. The next day the northeasterlies slackened at noon, then picked up and blew for a while, then died again. The following morning the sun rose on lazy, slapping sails.

They had run smack into the Doldrums, and it seemed for a while that they would never get out.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

She soared and plummeted in unseen swells. The sky was black velvet. She was horribly thirsty and her teeth chattered from the cold. She had the dim sense that some distant squall was raising the seas, but she saw no lightning.

Furtive clouds blanked the starlight and hid the moon, if it had risen. She was blind. When a lip of foam would bear down on her she was helpless unless she glimpsed a green glow as it raced down the face of a swell. With the fading of the last faint band of orange at sunset had gone her sense of up, down, north, south, east, or west.

“Through caverns measureless to man,” she chanted suddenly. From Xanadu. With an “X”. By whom? Wordsworth? Keats? Anyway, engraved on a brass plaque set in a massive steel frame of Jean-Paul’s boat, Xanadu.

Where Alph, the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea...

Where are you, Jean-Paul, with Xanadu, now that I need you? She could hear his voice, faintly accented, quoting the poet. Not Wordsworth or Keats, Coleridge! Sorry, Coleridge. Remember: Cold Ridge. As in “a cold ridge of high pressure...”

She was past feeling cold. Her legs were numb. She began to move them. She looked down. Her feet trailed green bubbles of phosphorescence. She had a sudden vision of them as seen from the ebony vastness below, from the eyes of a cruising shark. She was a living go-signal. She stopped moving her legs.

There was a thing about sharks, Mitch and sharks. Like Coleridge, it lurked just behind memory, teasing her. There was fear in it, play-fear, and warmth, too, and safety.

It washed over her suddenly. She was a year back in time and two thousand miles north, swimming in flat-calm, sunlit seas.