WTWHTAS
Chap 10, part 4

One or two stanza from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" came back to me then and I thought it fitted our situation pretty well. I have reread it since, and except that we had no mast or deck boards, there are four verses that might have been written about our party. They tell it so graphically it puts me back in that raft to read them. These are the stanzas:

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down -

"Twas sad as sad could be;

And we did speak only to break

The silence of the sea.

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody sun, at noon,

Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the moon.

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water everywhere

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.