Before midnight, the three of us returned to the inn. Van Helsing took Doctor Self and me to his room. I had never seen anyone's room like this before—utterly cluttered, yet somehow perfectly ordered.
Van Helsing sat on the bed, the only place to sit in the room, while Doctor Self and I could only stand and speak with him.
The ship was called the Adonis. Van Helsing had found the captain's journal. The captain had received a strange request: to transport some silver sand and a crate of soil back to Rotterdam. He felt that the silver sand was unimportant to the client. If transporting a single crate of soil had not seemed so strange, the client might have wanted only that crate of earth moved.
The ship had departed from Tekirdağ. Turkish officials boarded, the captain paid a gratuity, and everything went smoothly. They set sail at four in the afternoon. There was some trouble while passing through the Dardanelles: more customs officers and an escort vessel. The officials inspected the ship thoroughly, and the captain had to pay another gratuity before they would let the ship leave quickly. By evening, they had entered the Aegean Sea.
After passing Cape Matapan, unrest broke out aboard the ship. One man had vanished. The sea had been calm, yet the crew became anxious. One sailor ran to the captain's cabin and, trembling, told him that while on watch, he had seen a tall, thin man standing at the stern, someone who did not look like a crewman. When he walked along the deck toward him, the man vanished. Superstition had terrified him. The captain comforted him and, to keep his fear from spreading to the others, promised the sailors a pay raise when they disembarked.
They sailed safely for four