As for Ruth, it seems to her that the wide sea is holding its breath, waiting for something, calling for something, but she believes it is not going to cover them. Besides, Aurora will not leave her home. “Ever,” the older woman says, hands on hips.

Soon even the river from inland slows to a stream, then to little more than a trickle. There is still enough groundwater for cooking and washing, for flushing toilets. Then, hardly enough water for people to cry, and at a time when weeping might help.

Afraid, no longer enjoying the weather, those who remain no longer let their children go to the long, wide, far-reaching shore in case the ocean tide really is holding still out there as the leavers said and might change its decision to stay away and return with full force, unwinding in one great curl, then another, swallowing them in dark green waves. But it is a very rocky place, the exposed land, and there are stories out there and the children yearn to search for treasures they know are there, metal from ships, Japanese glass, hunting harpoons of the old ones. There are also the European treasures, most longed for, from storm-wrecked ships. Who knows, maybe even the eyeballs of halibut, lenses they could look through and see a different world, large and curved?

With everything suspended, they are given time to think, as if thought and the ocean are both great existences, vast and able to change in a single stir of wind, a single moonlit night, a turn of mind with memory or hope.

They think about the whale and what they’ve done, who they have become in time, each person examining their own world. They do not feel the spirits that once lived in the fogs and clouds around them. The alive world is unfelt. They feel abandoned.

Nor do they know, as the stench of rotting seaweed stings their noses, about the flooding on small islands on the other side of the ocean, as if the earth has tilted somehow, been thrown off course.

Who would have thought this drought might continue past any remembered by the people before written history? It may last longer than the one that followed the signing of the treaty by the wrong people, those who were not the true leaders.

It had happened before, in smaller ways, for briefer times, as when the tree stumps from ancient trees that grew before the birth of Christ were revealed. Everyone had walked across the remains of the sea to touch the stumps with hands that needed a feel of the ancient, as if humans need to remember they are not solitary in time.

It happened most brilliantly in a coastal region of Asia when a sharp range of crystal mountains that lived beneath water, and were thought to be merely a myth, suddenly rose and shone like the mountains and caves of their ancient stories, as old as Confucius. The mountains everyone had believed in and dreamed about for years were suddenly revealed as prisms, reflecting a blinding light, making the heat in that place all the much worse. Sailors that arrived examined their maps. They thought at first they had lost their way and were in a place not of crystal mountains but of glaciers of ice. Then they tried to chip the clear mountains away to sell, the crystals even more valuable than fish. Then the water returned and everyone, except the fishermen, was grateful.