
Click, click, click is all the sound there is: that which her steel needles make as they tease the wool into a lengthening cable. Not tease, torment. She has made a black cable with them, which stretches from an inexhaustible skein into the darkness at the end of the passage.
"I've come to wake the captain," I tell her.
"The captain must not be wakened," she replies, without dropping a stitch. "You must know by now that it is in sleep that the ship moves and the cable is laid."
"But the ship does not move!" I cry. "And the cable is severed!"