“Buena suerte!”
“Gracias! Y a usted!”
He slipped past the last of the fleet. The sea was as wide open as the sky. Far bluer than the constrained and muddy British seas, it was the colour of a blue brocade ribbed with silver thread. The depth sounder, whose scale went up to forty fathoms, had stopped registering long ago, but George was keeping an eye on the black ant march of his pencilled crosses on the chart. They were over the Continental Shelf now, with the ground plunging away from under the boat. There were a thousand metres of water below, then two thousand, three thousand, four thousand. The sea was deeper than mountains were high.
Soaring clear of the falling ground, Calliope was flying, windborne, sustained on her diaphanous skin of blue water. Somewhere deep down, deeper than you could imagine, lay the dark and sludgy plain of ocean — the bottom of the world. Floating over it, George felt the floor sway a little underfoot. If there were monsters down there in the slime, he guessed they must be friendly monsters; blind herbivores, nourished on mud.
Invisible tunnymen were talking on the radio still. He switched them off — he had no need of other voices now. He stepped below, poured himself a prim quarter tumblerful of Chivas Regal, and watched the whisky wrinkle in the glass. Beyond the porthole, the sea was beginning to darken and the rags of hazy cloud were turning ochre and mauve.
“Cheers,” he said and took a single sip. The last dickering beam of sunlight was lighting the wool of the Wolof rug on the floor. He sat, arms spreadeagled on the starboard side settee, and felt the valves of his heart pumping blood in foxtrot time. The sea chuckled at his back, the abyss opened under the keel; but for now, with the barograph needle inking an even track up at the top of the turning drum, George was home and dry.