The world was rocking gently underneath me.  No... it was not the world, it was the raft rocking.

Waking, I began to remember that there had been moments of clarity before this.  But they had been seldom.  Most of the time I had been in a world in which I had found Swannee - but a changed Swannee - after all; and we had settled down in an Omaha untouched by the time storm.  But, slowly, that world had begun to wear thin; and more and more often there had been moments when I was not in Omaha but here, seeing the raft and the rest of it from my present position.  Now, there was no doubt which world I lived in.

So I was back for good.  I could feel that; along with a grim, aching hunger in my belly.  For the first time I began to wonder where the raft was going, and to worry about Sunday and the girl.

I looked around, identifying things from the hazy periods earlier.  It was a beautiful, clear day at sea, or at whatever equivalent of a sea it was upon which we were afloat.  A few inches from my nose were saplings, tree branches or what-have-you, that had been woven into a sort of cage about me.  Beyond the cage, there was a little distance - perhaps ten feet - of open log surface to an edge of the raft, studded with the ever-sprouting twigs that tried to grow from the raft logs, though these had been neatly and recently bitten off for this day.  Beyond the logs was the restlessly heaving surface of the gray-blue water, stretching away to the curve of the horizon.

I rolled over and looked out in the opposite direction, through another cage-side of loosely woven withes, at the rest of the raft.

It was about a hundred or so feet in length.  At one end was a stand of - I had to call them "trees" for want of any better name - their thick-leaved, almost furry-looking tops taking advantage of whatever breeze was blowing to push the raft along before it.  Around their base grew the carefully cultivated stand of shoots from which my cage, and just about everything else the lizard-people seemed to make with their hands, had been constructed.

Behind the trees and the shoots were a couple of other cages holding the girl and Sunday, plus a pile of shells and stones that apparently had some value for the lizards.  They looked all right.  They were both perhaps a little thinner; but they seemed lively enough; and, in fact, the girl was looking brighter and more in charge of herself than I could ever remember seeing her.  From her cage on back, except for piles of assorted rubble and junk - everything from sand itself to what looked like a heap of furs - were the various members of the crew.  I found myself calling them a crew for lack of a better term.  For all I knew, most of them may have been passengers.  Or perhaps they were all members of one family; there was no way of telling.

But in any case, there were thirty or forty of them, most simply lying on their bellies or sides, absolutely still in the sunlight, but with dark eyes open and heads up, not as if they were sleeping.  The few on their feet were moving about aimlessly.  There were only four who seemed to have any occupation.  One was an individual who was working his way down the far side of the raft on all fours, delicately biting off the newly sprouted twigs from the logs of the raft as he went, and three others at the rear of the raft.  These three were holding the heavy shaft of a great steering oar, which evidently gave the raft what little directional purpose it could have while floating before the wind.