He had learned that expression in a school in Salisbury, a long time ago as it seemed.
The stone on which he lay dipped and rose to a rhythm which he knew well enough. He had felt it when he and his mother went in a [p78 little boat from Keyhaven to Alum Bay in the Isle of Wight. There was no doubt in his mind. He was on a ship. But how, but why? Who could have carried him all that way without waking him? Was it magic? Accidental magic? The St. John’s wort perhaps? And the stone—it was not the same. It was new, clean cut, and, where the wind displaced a corner of the curtain, dazzlingly white in the sunlight.
There was the pat pat of bare feet on the deck, a dull sort of shuffling as though people were arranging themselves. And then people outside the awning began to sing. It was a strange song, not at all like any music you or I have ever heard. It had no tune, no more tune than a drum has, or a trumpet, but it had a sort of wild rough glorious exciting splendour about it, and gave you the sort of intense all-alive feeling that drums and trumpets give.
Quentin lifted a corner of the purple curtain and looked out.
Instantly the song stopped, drowned in the deepest silence Quentin had ever imagined. It was only broken by the flip-flapping of the sheets against the masts of the ship. For it was a ship, Quentin saw that as the bulwark dipped to show him an unending waste of sea, broken by bigger waves than he had ever [p79 dreamed of. He saw also a crowd of men, dressed in white and blue and purple and gold. Their right arms were raised towards the sun, half of whose face showed across the sea—but they seemed to be, as my old nurse used to say, ‘struck so,’ for their eyes were not fixed on the sun, but on Quentin. And not in anger, he noticed curiously, but with surprise and … could it be that they were afraid of him?
‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘Answer, I adjure you by the sacred Tau!’
Quentin was shivering with the surprise and newness of it all. He had read about magic, but he had not wholly believed in it, and yet, now, if this was not magic, what was it? You go to sleep on an old stone in a ruin. You wake on the same stone, quite new, on a ship. Magic, magic, if ever there was magic in this wonderful, mysterious world!
The silence became awkward. Some one had to say something.