Daniel leaves America, becoming part of that country's stock of memories – the composted manure from which it's sending out fresh green shoots. The Old World reaches down to draw him in: a couple of lascars, their flesh and breath suffused with saffron, asafœtida, and cardamom, lean over the rail, snare his cold pale hands in their warm black ones, and haul him in like a fish. A roller slides under the hull at the same moment – they fall back to the deck in an orgiastic tangle. The lascars spring up and busy themselves drawing up his equipage on ropes. Compared to the little boat with the creaking and splashing of its oars and the grunting of the slaves, Minerva moves with the silence of a well-trimmed ship, signifying (or so he hopes) her harmony with the forces and fields of nature. Those Atlantic rollers make the deck beneath him accelerate gently up and down, effortlessly moving his body – it's like lying on a mother's bosom as she breathes. So Daniel lies there spreadeagled for a while, staring up at the stars – white geometric points on a slate, gridded by shadows of rigging, an explanatory network of catenary curves and Euclidean sections, like one of those geometric proofs out of Newton's Principia Mathematica.