“It’s⁠—hard,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection. “It has a superficial, glittering prettiness, without⁠—” I hesitated to find the word I wanted.

John Silence nodded his head with approval.

“Exactly,” he said. “The picturesqueness of stage scenery that is not real, not alive. It’s like a landscape by a clever painter, yet without true imagination. Soulless⁠—that’s the word you wanted.”

“Something like that,” I answered, watching the gusts of wind on the sails. “Not dead so much, as without soul. That’s it.”

“Of course,” he went on, in a voice calculated, it seemed to me, not to reach our companion in the bows, “to live long in a place like this⁠—long and alone⁠—might bring about a strange result in some men.”

I suddenly realised he was talking with a purpose and pricked up my ears.