The dark circling things on the ocean had joined and formed a writhing spiderweb. Illuminated by the thousands of coldly burning tapers at the corners where the snakes had joined, the sea looked like a cracked mirror.

Ishmael felt that the world was indeed cracking and that the pieces would fall on his head any moment.

It was a terrifying feeling, one that drove him to pray out loud, which even the events of the last three days on the Pequod had not made him do.

The flames went out.

The black web disappeared.

There was utter silence.

No man dared say a word or even sigh. Each feared that if he brought the attention of whatever force it was that crouched above them, he would bring something down that would be worse than death.

A wind blew in from the west, rippling the sea, fluttering the sails, then pushing them.

The Rachel heeled to starboard; the wind passed; the Rachel righted herself.

Silence again. Ishmael wondered if he had been spared from the horrible but quick doom of the men of the Pequod for something unimaginably dreadful. Something that God might imagine but would repress in His mind.

What followed could be recalled afterward only because he, Ishmael, could look back and reconstruct. So that he did not so much remember as imagine. At the time, he could not possibly have known what was happening. All was strangeness and horror.

With no more noise than of a ghost gliding over the ocean, the sea disappeared.

Night was replaced by day.

The Rachel was falling.

Ishmael was too terrified to cry out, or, if he did cry out, he was too stunned to hear himself.

Falling through air, the Rachel turned over quickly, the weight of the masts and sails revolving her to starboard because she had been leaning very slightly in that direction when the sea evaporated so quickly.

As if shot from a sling, Ishmael went out into the abyss and then was sinking through the whistling sea of atmosphere by the side of the ship. He waved his arms and kicked his feet as if he were trying to swim.

The moon was with them, though its companion, night, had deserted it. But the moon was enormous, fully three times as large, perhaps four times as large, as that he had known.

The sun was at its zenith. It was a sullenly red ball that had swelled fourfold.

The sky was a dark blue.

The air screamed past him and through him.

Below him -- no, below the Rachel -- was a strange craft sailing through the air.

He had no time to learn anything but its alienness and the sensation that it had been built by intelligence. He did see some human beings running about it, and then the tip of the mainmast of the Rachel crashed into it, and the rest of the ship followed, and the strange vessel of the air broke in two.

Perhaps a hundred feet below the two vessels, and below him, was what he had thought was the top of the mountain. It was a vast russet-streaked, mushroom-colored thing which was the plateau-land of the peak of a mountain that towered miles high.

He struck it, was hurt, and passed through a layer of something like thin flesh.

Again and again, he struck a layer and tore through it, each time feeling a jar that hurt but each time being slowed.

Then something ropy flashed by. He grabbed for it, missed, felt another ropy thing slide through his hands, burning them. He cried out, plunged on through layer after layer, struck something solid that exploded like a balloon, deafening him and filling his nose and burning his eyes with a choking and burning gas.

His hands closed on something he could not see.

He swung out, far out, almost losing his grip. He blinked his eyes to wash out the pain with tears. Then he swung back and, still swiftly, but not fatally, fell at the end of a pulpy root attached to a corpse-colored bladder which was flesh or plant or a mixture thereof.

He was still breaking through paper-thin skins. He understood, without thinking about it, that there were thousands of bladders of many sizes that must hold up the thing, whatever it was.

The last layer broke beneath his feet so reluctantly that he thought for a moment that he would have to kick through it. He feared to keep on falling, but he feared even more being stranded inside this fragile, treacherous being.

Then he went through the hole, the bladder which he was holding sticking for a moment before his weight pulled it through with a tearing of a skin layer. He was below a vast cloudlike mass of russet streaks and mushroom-pale tissue. Below him was the edge of a dark blue sea and a jungle. The Rachel had struck the sea and split into a hundred parts, which were lying on top of the sea as if it were made of a jelly. The parts of the airship had not yet fallen to the sea. In fact, one part, being carried by the wind The second and smaller half struck the surface of the sea hard enough to split it into a dozen parts. Some rebounded and floated westward for a considerable distance before settling down again.

He wondered if he was falling swiftly enough to be smashed against the waters.

It was then that he saw that he was not alone in the sky.

So far away that he could determine only that it was human, but not its features or its sex, another figure, clinging to the ropy snout of a flesh-colored bladder, was also falling slowly.

Something indefinable made him think that the other survivor was not of the crew of the Rachel.

The other person was higher than he, which meant that he had fallen later than Ishmael. Or perhaps his bladder was larger than Ishmael's.

During one of his swings, for he was like a pendulum whose energy is decaying, he looked upward past the round of the balloon-bladder. Near the center of the vast mass were several huge holes torn by the bulks of the Rachel and the two parts of the airship. The holes that he and the other being had made were invisible.

A moment later he struck the surface of the ocean feet first. He went completely under and came up choking. The water stung his eyes strongly; what he swallowed seemed almost solid with salt.

The bladder had burst on impact, being carried into the water with him. The gas made him cough even more and his eyes felt as if a white-hot blade had been passed before them.

He found that he did not have to swim or make any special efforts to keep floating. This was a sea even deader than the Dead Sea of Palestine or the Great Salt Lake of Utah. He could lie on his back and look up at the great limburger-cheese-colored moon and the enormous red wheel of the sun and not have to move a muscle.

Yet, though thick with the minerals, the waters moved with a current. The current was not, however, with the wind but against it. And it was not a steady current. It was formed with the sluggish waves that wandered westward and did not seem to be of the nature of waves he knew. Though he was too numb with terror, past and present, to do much analyzing or speculating, he did feel that the waves were more those of the land than of the sea. That is, they were generated by earthquakes.

Then that strange thought passed, and he slept. Lifted up and lowered gently, moved slowly but irresistibly to the west, face up, arms crossed (though he did not know that until he awoke) he slept.

When consciousness returned, the sun had not descended much from the zenith, though he felt as if he had slept eight hours or more.

Something bumping into his head had brought him out of a sleep deep in dreams that circled his wounded mind like sharks around a man thrashing in the water.

He reached up and pushed himself away, sliding only a foot or so in the stiffly yielding waters. Then he swam to one side and found that he had collided with Queequeg's coffin-buoy. It floated with only an inch or two draft and seemed to say, "Here I am again, your burial boat, also undestroyed by the fall."