“Very well: you tell me how it is. I can’t understand it, and the more I try the more puzzled I am. It’s horrible, that’s what it is, and I feel sometimes as if we had been carried away by the tide to nowhere, or the place where the tides come and go in the hollows of the earth.”
“We shall be out at sea directly, and then we shall be all right.”
“No, we shan’t be out at sea directly, and we shan’t be all right; for we’ve got into some horrible great whirlpool.”
“What!” cried Mike excitedly. “A whirlpool?”
“Yes, that’s it; and we’re going round and round, and that’s why it is that we are sometimes looking south and sometimes north.”
“But you don’t think—if it is as you say—that at last we shall be sucked down some awful pit in the middle?”
“I don’t know,” said Vince. “I can’t think properly now. I feel just as if my head was all shut up, and that nothing would come out of it. I say, Mike!”
There was no reply, for Mike was gazing wildly up at the stars, trying to convince himself of the truth or falsity of his companion’s words; but he only crouched lower at last, with a feeling of despair creeping over him, and then he turned angrily, as Vince began to speak again, in a low, dreamy voice.
“That’s it,” he said: “we are going round and round. I wish we’d had some more of old Jarks’ dinner, and then gone to sleep quietly in our bunks. We couldn’t have been so badly off as we are now.”
“Then why did you propose for us to escape?”