The tremendous red disk rose slowly again, bringing some warmth immediately.  They found themselves being supped off by creepers and waited until the vegetables had had their fill.  Then they rose and washed themselves with water from pods and drank.  The water paralyzed them as usual, but the creepers, as if knowing that the two had given their share, did not approach them.

They continued north, sleeping four times, catching the twin-noses and cockroaches, which tasted much like crabs, and several other animals, including a flying snake.  This was one of the few beasts of the air which lacked a gas bladder.  Some of its ribs had developed into great wings which it was able to flap up and down in crude imitation of a bird's wings.

Another night passed with its perils, and another sun arose.

"How long before we reach your city?" Ishmael said.

"I do not know," she said.  "By ship, it would take us, I calculate, about twenty days.  Perhaps it will take us five times that long."

"About four hundred of the days of my world," he said.  He did not groan, because time was not such a precious currency to a whaler.  But he would have preferred to ride.  It was heavy and exasperating labor to force a path through this dense complex.  He envied the beasts that sailed with such seeming effortlessness through the clouds.

At noon of that day, they saw another of the many immense clouds of billions of tiny red animals, each borne by its umbrella-shaped head.  And there were the leviathans that followed and fed upon the air brit.

And there was a great ship of the air.

Namalee stood up, dropping the white meat of the insect she had caught only an hour before.  She stood silent for a long time after an initial gasp.  Then she smiled.

"It is from Zalarapamtra!"

The ship looked like a huge, rather elongated cigar beneath which hung a very thin mast and yardarms and sails and on both sides of which, at right angles to the hull, were two masts and sails.  The sails, fore-and-aft rigged, were so thin that the dark-blue sky could be seen through them.  At the stern were horizontal and vertical rudders.

"It's not as flat as it looks from here," she said in answer to his question.  "If you could see it closer up, you would see that in profile it is twelve men high."