Neville recalls crossing the Atlantic from Europe in 1925 on a ship caught in waves so violent that it listed at a forty-degree angle for forty-eight straight hours, with all the ballast and cargo shifted so far over that, as he puts it, a hanging necktie would have pointed at that same steep angle. He offers it as one of several real storms he lived through at sea, alongside the mystical vision of the sinking ship-captain, as evidence that he knows storms both actual and symbolic.