STRANGE DREAMS are dreamed at sea, for the sea is home to spirits all its own, the immaterial correlatives of its fishes, whales, and squids, and these spirits enter the minds of sleeping voyagers. As water roared in through the shattered skylight and portholes and stoved hatches, Will leapt from his bunk, ran through the main cabin and up the companion-way, and scaled the mainmast shrouds to its top. Like thousands of ship-wrecked sailors before him, he was trying to buy a few more minutes of life before the vessel sank. When he woke up, he was so startled to find himself aloft, in the middle of the night, that he almost fell. He didn’t know the hour—his pocket watch was in his trousers below—but by observing the Pleiades in the bottom quarter of the eastern heavens and the Dipper lying low on the northern horizon and almost parallel to it, he estimated that it was between one and two in the morning. The telltales on the shrouds fluttered in one direction, dropped, and fluttered in the opposite direction, then dropped and fluttered again in a third direction: Fingers of wind were swinging the compass, picking up the telltales and letting them fall, like an idle girl toying with the ribbons in her hair.

He climbed down and noticed that he could not see Sagittarius, which should have been visible as it dipped below the ecliptic in the southwest; nor could he see Rasalhague, the bright star of the constellation Ophirechus in the west. It and Sagittarius were blotted out by a solid-looking bluff blacker than the black sky. Turning his hand on its side, he extended it an arm’s length to measure the height of the clouds. At sunset, they had been merely a ruffle on the western horizon. He could have covered it with two fingers; now he needed three hands’ breadth. The sea was rising and falling very gently; there were none of the long, glassy swells that portended a cyclone. This did not reassure him, however; the schooner was anchored in the big basin ringed by the Tortugas reefs, and the one west of her—Loggerhead Reef, it was called—was probably flattening the swells, if any were out there, rolling across the Gulf of Mexico.

He went to his berth and looked at his watch. His guess at the time had been on the money: It was one forty-five. Going into the main cabin, he lit the gimbal lamp, peered at the barometer, and lost no time rousing the Braithwaites.

“Something’s coming and we’d better figure out what we’re going to do,” he said, as they gathered around him at the chart table, yawning, rubbing their eyes. “It was a thousand twenty millibars yesterday morning”—motioning at the barometer. “It’s a thousand six now and falling, and there’s a wall of clouds to the west, headed our way.”