I called to Declan, who had the helm, that he ought perhaps to swing her to port. I felt foolish even as the words left me—who was I to be calling such manoeuvres?—and he shot me a look of unconcealed scepticism. He looked to the master, who nodded faintly, and brought us round. As the rudder bit the water, the sky appeared over us and the fog receded. And what did I expect to see when distorted sound became vision?

I will try to describe what appeared, though a great many things happened at once.

The sudden spear of the cliff, so very close. Boulders dry and round marking a shallow cleft, not enough to call a bay. Tussocks above the rocks, overtaken on the rise by low, twisting timber and shrubs in lush greens that fed on the mist. Exposed columns of rock and then, higher up, great trees projecting out from the rock face and over us. A continuous run of vertical rock, perhaps fifty feet of it; between that and the commencement of the tree line there was a small, flat space. We were so close to the island now that it was impossible to see the surface of it—I imagined it was clear grass.

What I could see, as the last breaths of fog drew away, was a nest of small huts joined to each other to form a continuous roof. The timbers were of various kinds: boughs that appeared silver from immersion; planks and boards that were milled, some curved to betray their origins as the bones of ships. Iron bolts rusted in the air where the builders had neglected to pull them free. The structures huddled in a saw-cut ridge running horizon-tally across the cliffs; shrubs grown up over their low sides showed that these people had been here a very long time. But none of these things were my concern. What concerned me was the men.

They had pressed forward at sea level, six of them that I could see, but I felt certain there were others hiding among the shrubs and wreckage and boulders. Two men advanced in the water to ankle depth. A dull sound emanated, gathered mutters that blurred into one constant low and malignant stirring.

They were armed. Some carried clubs fashioned from scraps. One or two bore a hook or a crude blade of scrap iron. There were short swords that looked to be of naval issue. One of the men at water level had a rifle, and now I saw that another was braced higher, supported by a boulder, with a carbine levelled at the Moonbird. We had sailed deep enough into the small bay that they were able to cover us from three sides.

Nothing about their faces or any of the sounds from the island gave a clue as to their intentions. They just watched us.