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On board the ship, he requested permission to be admitted to the captain. There he asked that a boat be sent back to pick up the coffin. At first Captain Baramha was outraged at the expenditure of time and energy if this were done. But Namalee overruled his denial, and Baramha accepted her ruling without apparent resentment. This was because she said that the coffin was a religious matter, and in religion she had the final word. Ishmael did not follow her reasoning, unless she thought that the coffin was his god, but he did not ask her to clarify. He was content to have the deed; the explanation could wait.
Two boats went down, and the coffin was taken aboard and lashed down, one half supported on one boat and the other half on the second boat. The two crafts had been tied together for greater buoyancy and each had only two crewmen. Then the double-craft arose slowly, the mouth-creatures of the bladders eating triple portions of food to generate gas. Eventually, while the captain strode back and forth on his bridge, his lips moving soundlessly, the boats were drawn into the ports of the ship. The coffin was tied down in the center of gravity of the ship, and the boatmen went to work to help cut up and store the two whales that had been killed.
Later the boats went out again, this time drawing pieces of meat behind them on bladders. When the air sharks came in for passes at the bait, they were harpooned. Those not killed at once followed the same rising and diving tactics as the whales, but they lacked the gas-generating capabilities or the weight of the leviathans.
After a dozen sharks were killed, the ship resumed sailing. But it still lacked enough meat, so the first time it encountered another cloud of atmospheric brit, it hunted again. It was not until near the end of the long day that there was enough meat aboard to supply them until they reached Zalarapamtra.
The last whale killed gave up to the cutting butchers a prize that would have been the cause of a great celebration at any other time.
It was a round ivory-hard substance two feet in diameter, alternately striated with red, blue and black. It exuded a powerful perfume that caused drunke
The ball was found in one of the smaller stomachs of the whale, the creature having many stomachs distributed along the bony framework of the tail. Namalee said that a certain small creature of the air, a vrishwanka, was sometimes swallowed by a whale. It passed through the entrails that climbed around the skeleton of the tail until it was either eliminated or caught in a blind corner of a sac. If the latter happened, the digestive system of the whale secreted a substance around the vrishwanka just as an oyster did around a grain of sand.
Namalee, during one of their many talks during the long, long journey back, told him of how the gods of Zalarapamtra were found and "born," as she called the process of carving.
She also told him of how, when old whales died, their flesh fed their own bladders, and they rose upward where the sky became totally black in the daytime and there was little air. The mighty corpses drifted with the high winds eastward and then began to sink as, one after the other, the bladders burst from corruption. And somewhere at the foot of the insurmountable mountains to the east (which Ishmael knew were the once submarine slopes of continents) was a place where the dead whales ended up. There was a tangle of bones almost as high as the cliffs, since the beasts had been drifting there since time began. And there, of course, was an immense treasure of vrishkaw, of perfume-exuding unborn gods.
The city that found the ancient burial grounds of the wind whales would be the richest in the world and hence the most powerful.
And also the drunkenest, Ishmael thought. He envisioned a city thronged with such gods, the citizens reeling during waking hours, falling soddenly into bed, rising as intoxicated as when they went to bed.
Many a ship from many a city had put out with the sole purpose of locating the burial ground, Namalee said. But it was near the eastern cliffs that the Purple Beasts of the Stinging Death were most numerous.
"How do you know that?" Ishmael said.
"Because none of the ships that look for the burial ground ever come back," she said. "Obviously they were caught by a Purple Beast."
He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
She said, "What are you thinking?"
"That, strange as you and your people are to my way of thinking, you are still much like me and my people. The essential human has not changed. Whether that is good or not, I ca
What the white whale had been to Ahab, time was to Ishmael.
The red sun finally went down, and the slowly chilling night came. Days and nights followed, though not swiftly. Ishmael learned everything there was to learn about sailing and navigating a ship of the air and also much about building one. He was a forecastle hand, yet he sometimes ate with the captain and Namalee. That he was clearly of a different race, of a totally unknown race, and that he claimed to be the son of a different sun and a different world, raised him above class distinctions.
There was also the possibility that they thought him insane, though quite capable in many respects. They delighted to hear him talk of his own world, but they could not comprehend much of what he said. When they heard him say that the very air through which they sailed, so many thousands of feet above the ground, had once been filled with water, and that this water was filled with life unlike that which they knew, they could not believe him.
Equally incredible was his insistence that the earth he had known shook only now and then and quite briefly.
As the Roolanga neared Zalarapamtra, its crew became silent. The sailors talked, but only in very low tones, and they said little most of the time. They seemed lost in themselves, as if they were searching in their own minds for what they would do if they indeed did find their native country desolated. They went frequently into the chapel, as Ishmael called it, where Namalee was spending most of her waking and many of her sleeping hours. The box was off the little god all the time now, and Ishmael could not go by the open room without feeling his senses stumble.
Namalee sat on the floor, facing the god, with her body leaning forward almost parallel to the floor and her head bent almost touching the floor. Her long black hair was thrown forward so that it spread out like a cloud of incense.
Then the top of a mountain leaned out over the northwest horizon, and the captain called everybody to his post. They sailed all that day and into the night and when the red sun reluctantly came up again, they were overshadowed by the colossus. Dead ahead was a tremendous shelf of stone, and on the stone was the city of Zalarapamtra.
A cry arose from the ship.
The shelf was a jumble of rocks and debris.
Ishmael had asked Namalee how men could live in stone chambers that shook and trembled and threatened to come down on their heads every instant.
The answer was that few lived in the stone chambers. These were used for storage, for retreat from storms or enemies, and as places of worship they constituted the lower half of the city. The upper part was, in essence, a floating city. It consisted of two levels of hundreds of houses and larger buildings attached together and buoyed by thousands of great gas-bladders. The floating residential half was anchored at many places to the surface of the shelf, and passage between the floating city and the stone city was by means of ladders or flexible stairways.