We swing gradually around a promontory. Wreckage in the water by the breakers, and two vast dun red-laced ribs sticking out of the waves like fingers pointed toward us. The ship must have been far larger than ours. Fragments of it are spilled out along the rocks—I imagine a ruptured hull slopping its contents onto the studded shore at the base of the cliffs like a disemboweled whale, and shreds of bulkhead sinking out of sight. The ribs are motionless. They might be part of the island. Looking at their uncannily clean lines, the rust scoring them, and the paltry few clumps of foliage or sea stuff that have managed to attach themselves to the metal, a resounding accumulation of time thrums around me, and without being told I know this is an ancient wreck.

I feel Thrushchurl’s hand engulf my shoulder, and he points to the water in what strikes me as a classical sort of gesture, one of the things only human beings seem to do. There’s something white coming up in the gloomy water by the wreck; I recoil for a moment, and would leave the rail if Thrushchurl weren’t unwittingly blocking me, but now I see I didn’t recognize something after all. I don’t know what I took it for, but as I shrink away at first sight Thrushchurl says, confiding and explaining and grinning,

“Bones.”

It’s a humerus. An upwelling current, tumbling shipwrecked bones here round and round from bottom to surface, for how long? There’s a fountain of small bones, from the hands and feet, and back bones in with them, spinning there in that spot; a pelvis makes a long arching pass away from us, up from the dark and then down into it again, like a white ray; I see a witty mandible spin there for a moment, and then an actual rib in the shade of the metal ones. Thrushchurl doffs his hat and holds it meditatively to his chest.

“Bones,” I hear Jil Punkinflake say softly beside me. I peer surreptitiously into his face. For the first time since we embarked, I see there a resurgance of his old self; maybe the bones are calling him back, or perhaps it’s the land. His dog sits pragmatically down beside him and pants, looking relieved. Together we watch the wreck go. It takes a long time for it to fall away. The day should have ended hours ago.