The blackness in the beginning was so absolute, so deep, that I cannot, even in imagination, recreate the improbable intensity of it. It enveloped the ship from all sides: it clung to its superstructure like tar. It muffled every sound, even the rhythmic thumping of the engine. Sometimes it seemed that the people on the bridge stopped breathing, because no sound was heard. And yet, when after endless waiting the Pilot announced, “Steer 192 now,” the helmsman’s voice repeated, like echo in mountain wilderness: “192, Sir.”

“Steady.”

“Steady, Sir.”

These voices seemed to emanate tiny flickers of light, but in between—periods of silence lasted for ages—everything was submerged in that absolute darkness.

“Stop her.”

The engine telegraph rang, and the engine stopped. But nobody on the bridge felt any difference: the ship could only be suspended in the void on invisible wings, stuck fast in a drydock, or floating noiselessly on the bottom of a fathomless depth.

Years of silence passed: and now the few people on the bridge, though tense and concentrated on their tasks, felt balanced on the verge of nothingness. It was as if out of the impenetrable darkness a spell seeped in, silently but steadily blanketing their awareness.

The Captain was the first to shake it off. He coughed and said: “What next, Pilot?” The Pilot did not answer; Perhaps he simply disappeared, the Captain thought, illogically, after having brought us into this mess. He disliked the Pilot from the first moment, when he saw him arriving in a whaler, rowed by four men. “No,” he said aloud, watching the boat through his glasses. “No, this cannot be, anno domini 1960. Pilots do not come on board in row-boats any more. This was good forty years ago. In Conrad’s books perhaps. Not now. Not in a civilized country.”

“They called it once ‘Ultima Thule’,” the Chief Mate remarked: he liked to display his liberal education at times: though without stressing too strongly the others’ ignorance: this could eventually make his captain angry. “Never mind what they called it once,” the Captain said. “There are places much further North, decent civilized ports: and this is Northern Ireland, not a wilderness, and one has the right to expect normal harbor services here, pilots coming in motor-launches like anywhere else, and for sure in the United Kingdom. Look at the buggers.”

The four men in the whaler pulled hard against the waves to bring their boat alongside the ship. The captain dropped his binoculars and shook his head again.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he breaks his head trying to reach this pilot ladder.”

But he did not: he jumped in the right moment, climbed the ladder with remarkable agility and a minute later arrived on the bridge in his wet, black oilcloth, very stern, unsmiling, almost hostile. He warmed his big hands on the hot tea-cup, and his “thanks” was in such low register, that the steward was not sure at all if he heard it, and looked at him curiously. “What is your draught, Captain?” he asked, when the ship entered cautiously the mouth of the river and the fog and the darkness grew thicker and thicker every minute.

“Eighteen.”

He murmured under his nose.

“The Pilot Book says the river is dredged to twenty,” the captain said defiantly.

“The Pilot Book,” repeated the Pilot. “We should not miss the tide.”

“Scandalous,” confessed the captain in the chart room to the Chief Engineer in a low voice.

“All this in order to load a few hundred tons of rotten potatoes and probably get stuck in this port for God knows how long.” But there was no choice now but to continue creeping up the shallow and narrow river, under the guidance of this morose pilot, straining to see the buoys that marked the passageway. Or were they, too, the product of imagination of those who drew this chart eighty years ago, and had then their sons perhaps added innumerable corrections throughout the years, just to prove that they acknowledged, reluctantly, the passage of time?

“What next, Pilot?”

The Pilot shrugged; the Captain felt the shrug, but did not see it. The Captain’s impatience, his rising anger, could be well heard in his voice. “Well, Pilot, what next?”

The engine telegraph rang sharply when an invisible hand moved it from “dead slow ahead” to “stop.” “What a bloody entrance!” the Captain said. “And this damned fog, on top of it! This beats the East Coast, London included, all right: never seen anything thicker than this!”

The Pilot, barely visible, was a big man, very broad in his shoulders: or perhaps it was only the oilcloth that made him so big.

“What now, Pilot?” His face, lit from beneath by the faint light of the radar screen, was a green mask. But the radar in fog was useless: it showed fantastic groups of islands, phantom vessels, nonexistent shores. In reality, there was only a narrow, twisted, and very long channel, full of shoals and submerged rocks invisible in the darkness.