It was the way of life and of the world he knew.

His hazy awareness was no more than an awareness of something--which, by the way, corresponds very fairly with the hazy awareness of the average human of the mysteries of birth and death and of the beyondness about which they have no definiteness of comprehension.
For all that any man may gainsay, the ketch _Arangi_, trader and blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the human mind.

Out of the nothingness men came.

Into the nothingness they went.
And they came and went always on the _Arangi_.
And to the _Arangi_, this hot-white tropic morning, Jerry went on the whaleboat under the arm of his _Mister_ Haggin, while on the beach Biddy moaned her woe, and Michael, not sophisticated, barked the eternal challenge of youth to the Unknown..