Vlahutza studies the stars with the sextant and carefully reviews the nautical almanac to calculate our position. A task I carried out hours before and whose results he consults, making his own dead reckoning, to certify that his captain is not sending the Demeter into the abyss.

We have rounded the Cape of Matapan and the waters are calm. No surprises await in their currents or in the slow rhythm of the waves. The Messenian Gulf offers us the same tranquility that must exist in its depths.

The same illusory aspect as fragile ice ready to break under our feet.

And in order not to hear the lure of that spellbinding liquid, the promised peace awaiting us, motionless, the First Mate seeks order in the constellations, the position and distance that separate us from the end of our route: the port awaiting us in England.

At this moment, that distant border makes little sense, much like the hawsers that we will use to moor the schooner quayside.

The only certain thing is those stars that have not changed in generations, the imperturbable rhythm of the stopwatch, the magnetic compass that does not rest, the figures on our tide charts, the shipwrecks written down in logbooks full of salt that we rescue so that they point out the sites hidden, the other abysses located in the abyss of the sea.

The First Mate does well to anchor us in this world with the numbers written down in the logbook, the longitude and latitude that the Demeter occupies.

We are not in the middle of nowhere. We are en route. We know where we are going.

The men who walk along the deck, throwing some debris overboard, securing lines, repairing canvas, believe they have crossed the invisible routes so often that they know them beforehand. But they and I should be helpless without the markings on the maps, without the declensions noted in the almanac, without the navigation charts carefully transcribed by men who—mayhap—do not know the sea.

There must always be at least two men on each ship who can calculate the course, who know the weak secrets of navigation. Vlahutza and I know that each of us is here in case the other dies. We are continuations of truncated destinies, descendants of he who dies in the hypothetical catastrophe. Ghosts of each other.

Petrofsky also looks like a ghost up there, scrutinizing something high up in the rigging. We all regard him as though what he does is especially dangerous, but no blow of the wind, no movement of the Demeter justifies that apprehension in someone who daily trims the sails and secures the lines.

Something has changed since the darkness fell, as if we heard the world freezing rapidly around us, surrounded by the terrible rassol of the Bothnian Sea, salt ice forming needles in the white mantle that yearns to imprison ships.

The crew is dissatisfied with something, scared, but they refuse to talk, mayhap because their fears are formless and vague.

There are no signs of coming rain and, nevertheless, we regard the sky. Waiting for the water to drop upon us and dissolve our restlessness.

And here we are, salty dogs, veterans of a thousand trips, yearning for a storm to calm us.