The town was not very large, and Bastian had soon come to the edge of it. There he saw hundreds of ships of every size and shape. The town was a seaport, but of a most unusual kind, for all these ships were hanging from gigantic fishing poles and hovered, swaying gently, over a chasm full of swirling white mist. These ships, made of wickerwork like everything else, had neither sails nor masts nor oars nor rudders.
Bastian leaned over the railing and looked down into the Sea of Mist. He was able to gauge the length of the stakes supporting the town by the shadows they cast on the white surface below.
"At night," he heard a voice beside him say, "the mists rise to the level of the town. Then we can put out to sea. In the daytime the sun reduces the mist and level falls. That's what you wanted to know, isn't it, stranger?"
Three men were leaning against the railing beside Bastian. They seemed gentle and friendly. They got to talking and in the course of his conversation with them Bastian learned that the town was called Yskal or Basketville. Its inhabitants were known as Yskalnari. The word meant roughly "the partners." The three were mist sailors. Not wishing to give his name for fear of being recognized, Bastian introduced himself as "Someone." The three sailors told him the Yskalnari had no names for individuals and didn't find it necessary. They were all Yskalnari and that was enough for them.
Since it was lunchtime, they invited Bastian to join them, and he gratefully accepted. They went to a nearby inn, and during the meal Bastian learned all about Basketville and its inhabitants.
The Sea of Mist, which they called the Skaidan, was an enormous ocean of white vapor, which divided the two parts of Fantastica from each other. No one had ever found out how deep the Skaidan was or where all this mist came from. It was quite possible to breathe below the surface of the mist, and to walk some distance on the bottom of the sea near the coast, where the mist was relatively shallow, but only if one was tied to a rope and could be pulled back. For the mist had one strange property: it fuddled one's sense of direction. Any number of fools and daredevils had died in the attempt to cross the Skaidan alone and on foot. Only a few had been rescued. The only way to reach the other side was in the ships of the Yskalnari.
The wickerwork, from which the houses, implements, clothing, and ships of Yskal were made, was woven from a variety of rushes that grew under the surface of the sea not far from the shore. These rushes - as can easily be gathered from foregoing - could be cut only at the risk of one's life. Though unusually pliable and even limp in ordinary air, they stood upright in the sea, because they were lighter than the mist. That was what made the wickerwork ships mistworthy. And if any of the Yskalmari chanced to fall into the mist, his regular clothing served the purpose of a life jacket.
But the strangest thing about the Yskalnari, so it struck Bastian, was the word "I" seemed unknown to them. In any case, they never used it, but in speaking of what they thought or did always said "we."
When he gathered from the conversation that the three sailors would be putting out to sea that night, he asked if he could ship with them as a cabin boy. They informed him that a voyage on the Skaidan was very different from any other ocean voyage, because no one knew how long it would take or exactly where it would end up. When Bastian said that didn't worry him, they agreed to take him on.
At nightfall the mists began to rise and by midnight they had reached the level of Basketville. The ships that had been dangling in midair were now floating on the white surface. The moorings of the one on which Bastian found himself - a flat barge about a hundred feet long - were cast off, and it drifted slowly out into the Sea of Mist.
The moment he laid his eyes on it, Bastian wondered what propelled this sort of ship, since it had neither sails nor oars nor propeller. He soon found out that sails would have been useless, for there was seldom any wind on the Skaidan, and that oars and propellers do not function in mist. These ships were moved by an entirely different sort of power.
In the middle of the deck there was a round, slightly raised platform. Bastian had noticed it from the start and taken it for a sort of captain's bridge. Indeed, it was occupied throughout the voyage by two or more sailors. (The entire crew numbered fourteen.) The men on the platform held one another clasped by the shoulders and looked fixedly forward. At first sight, they seemed to be standing motionless. Actually they were swaying very slowly, in perfect unison - in a sort of dance, which they accompanied by chanting over and over again a simple and strangely beautiful tune.
At first Bastian regarded this song and dance as some sort of ceremony, the meaning of which escaped him. Then, on the third day of voyage, he asked one of his three friends about it. Evidently surprised at Bastian's ignorance, the sailor explained that those men were propelling the ship by thought-power.
More puzzled than ever, Bastian asked if some sort of hidden wheels were set in motion.
"No," one of the sailors replied. "When you want to move your legs, you have only to think about it. You don't need wheels, do you?"
The only difference between a person's body and a ship was that to move a ship at least two Yskalnair had to merge their thought-powers into one. It was this fusion of thought-powers that propelled the ship. If greater speed was desired, more men had to join in. Normally, thinkers worked in shifts of three; the others rested, for easy and pleasant as it looked, thought-propulsion was hard work, demanding intense and unbroken concentration. But there was no other way of sailing the Skaidan.
Bastian became the student of the mist navigators and learned the secret of their cooperation: dance and song without words.
